Euell Gibbons: Author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus

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PLOWBOY: Has your experience given you any rules of thumb that a novice forager can use to protect himself from being poisoned?

GIBBONS: The only rule of thumb I have is that you know the plant before you eat it. The novice simply cannot expect to start out and immediately gather all the wild plants in his area . . . but it only takes about one minute to learn to identify one plant. If you learn the winter cress today, you can pick all the winter cress you want. After you've found and eaten it a few times, you won't feel any different about foraging a particular plant than you feel about selecting a head of cabbage at a supermarket or picking lettuce from your garden.

You can start gathering wild food with very little learning and, as you accumulate more knowledge, you'll harvest both more fun and more food. If you have no one to point out edible plants to you, the Alaska Sleeping Bag Company in Portland, Oregon publishes a beautiful set of wild plant identification cards. They're really grand because they have good, helpful photographs on one side and an explanation on the other. The Western States set is $4.50 for 54 cards and 37 of them work just as well in the East as in the West. I've suggested that they expand the pack to 100 cards that would be extremely valuable anywhere in the country.

There really are no hard and fast rules of thumb. The armed forces' manuals always try to give such guides, though, and that's one of the things I have against them. For instance, such handbooks tell you to avoid plants with milky juice. Well, milkweed and dandelion are two of the most available and wholesome wild foods and they both have milky juices. Of course, some poisonous plants—like the dogbane—do have milky juices . . . and other plants are just as poisonous but have no milky juice at all. I'd say the rule means nothing.

Another worthless general rule would have you steer clear of any wild green that is extremely bitter . . . when practically all wild greens are at least a little bitter. I can imagine some poor guy tasting foraged plants and trying to decide at what point something was just not quite bitter enough to hurt him or just enough to hurt him or just a little too bitter to be safe.

In my mind, the guides that say to avoid bitterness and milky juices eliminate just about every wild plant from consideration. It's an approach that goes at the problem the wrong way 'round. I'd say that you don't have to know the poisonous plants in order to gather the edible ones . . . you just have to learn the plants you're eating.

PLOWBOY: What about mushrooms?

GIBBONS: It's the same as with other plants: you only have to know one mushroom to start. As soon as you know two, you can gather two. I'm no expert on them but I'm up to about three dozen that I can hunt . . . and I know I'm missing a tremendous number of good mushrooms that I still don't know. I add to my knowledge each year.

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