Euell Gibbons: Author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus

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My fascination with foraging has also been a handle to a great deal more than just wild foods. It's been an entry to the study of botany and nature generally. There's even a bit of one-upmanship involved when I crunch into one of nature's treats and know I'm enjoying a taste thrill that some of the wealthiest people in the world have never experienced.

I can tell you some of the things that did not lead me into wild foods. It was not an interest in the survival of lost hunters and soldiers or stupid airplane pilots. I had a friend—a very good guy—who was running the survival school at a Navy airbase in Maine. I worked with him a few times . . . strictly on a volunteer basis because I won't accept any job with the military. I looked over their material, visited a few times. Both of us were critical of the armed forces' manuals on survival and very critical of their teaching methods.

PLOWBOY: What was wrong with them?

GIBBONS: You can't expect someone to remember a plant when you say, "There's something you can eat as an alternative to starvation." How much better that individual will remember if he incorporates a wild fruit or vegetable into his food right now and finds that he actually likes it.

I've found the latter approach very effective with children as a method of arousing a genuine interest in nature, which I think is the greatest value of foraging. A wrong attitude about nature is almost an integral part of our culture, and all the crying we're doing about the environment is going to come to nothing as long as such an attitude persists. We can change this misconception . . . but only by bringing our children into an intimate, creative relationship with nature. Let them see that they're a part of it . . . let them see that plants have meaning for them. I've watched this method work enough times to trust it.

PLOWBOY: I know you've long deplored the fact that many people in our culture consider nature-in-the-wild a menace. I remember when a boy near Philadelphia died from eating horse nettle berries. You sensibly pointed out that horse nettles posed far less threat to our children than the family medicine cabinet. Nevertheless, frightened people demanded that fields be sprayed with poisons, wild areas burned off with flame-throwers and open spaces paved over. Can we really change such irrational fear of nature into a feeling of oneness with it?

GIBBONS: That's what I'm trying to do. That's what I see as the chief value of wild foods. If you take a child out to the berry bush where he can pick and eat the fruit for himself, he can't help but change his attitude. A child has to change if you lead him into seeing how he himself relates to nature.

PLOWBOY: Is it that cut and dried? That simple?

GIBBONS: Not always. Taking kids out in the field for such a lesson sounds easy, but it can be very hard to do in today's world of six-year-olds who're already prejudiced. I took such a boy out to gather wild blackberries and he thought we were going to buy them. He was really turned off when he saw me picking the berries from a bush. It was somehow nasty to him.

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