Foraging for Survival: Edible Wild Plants of North America
By Douglas Boudreau and Mykel Hawke
()
About this ebook
As consumerism and a meat-heavy, processed diet become the norm and the world’s population continues to grow at an exponential rate, more and more people are looking toward a more sustainable path for food. Authors Douglas Boudreau and Mykel Hawke believe that the future of food lies in the wild foods of times spanning back to before the mass-agriculture system of today.
People have become distanced from the very systems that provide their food, and younger generations are increasingly unable to identify even the trees in their backyards. In response, Boudreau and Hawke have provided a compendium of wild edible plants in North America. Foraging for Survival is a comprehensive breakdown of different plant species from bearded lichen to taro, and from all over the United States. There are also tips for growing local native plants in the backyard to facilitate learning and enhance table fare at home. Other information you’ll find inside:
- A list of different types of edible wild plants
- Foraging techniques
- Bugs and other grubs that can be consumed
- Warning signs of poisonous plants
- And much more!
Start eating wild today with Foraging for Survival!
Douglas Boudreau
Douglas Boudreau is a self-taught foraging instructor and native Floridian. Poverty forced him to learn about wild food early in life, and he studied edible plant guidebooks while traveling around the country. He is now semiretired and teaches free EDIBLES-4-SURVIVAL classes on local edible wild plants where he lives in Zephyrhills, Florida.
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Foraging for Survival - Douglas Boudreau
1
Special Rules
One of the most important rules of eating plants is proper research. Read all you can in books and online. Learn from experts, others with real, local, learned, tried and tested knowledge. For example, let’s say your grandmother may not know much about farming, but she may have been taught by her grandmother that a certain plant is edible. If she grew up eating it, then she has decades of real experience, and if she demonstrates this to you and then you repeat a few times with no ill effects, then that is real knowledge, regardless of books, science, and experts.
Also, be sure to look at as many photos as possible, especially of the plants in different seasons, soils, and regions. Look at videos if you can and also look at images for all the stages of growth. In short, do your utmost to properly and positively identify any plant before you consume it.
Advice on the Learning Approach
Next, start with plants that are near you and with which you are very familiar—for example, dandelions, wild onions, and clovers. Most folks have seen these all their lives and if they spent any time at all playing outside, have likely nibbled on a few of these. Once you get comfortable with the fact you are now foraging on your own for wild edibles, then slowly expand into other plants.
Always start slow and small. Eat a little nibble and wait a long while. Sometimes, folks have reactions to even normal everyday foods. And there are always unforeseeable factors like soil, animal excrement, pesticides, and allergens that could impact anyone at any time. So, exercise caution and common sense, always.
Thoughts on Medicinal Plants
It is far beyond the scope of this book, or any one book, to even begin on such a weighty topic. Some believe, like I do, that everything on this planet has a purpose and a use, even if we haven’t found it yet. Whether you believe in God, as I do, and that all of these plants are gifts for us to figure out, or whether you’re purely scientific, we find new things every single day in science that we didn’t understand the day before.
As such, with almost 400,000 plants we know of on the planet, we only use about 40,000 of them, or 10 percent. That says a lot, that there’s much we still don’t know and are learning. And when you consider that most of the folks studying plants for medicine are mostly doctors with a decade of school and a decade of practice dedicated just to studying medicinal plants, it’s far too much to mix medicinal with edible plants in any comprehensive way in any one book, especially for laymen.
Therefore we may touch on some of the more common, practical, and safer known herbal remedies, but as a Special Forces medic, paramedic, and medical service officer with a Bachelor of Science degree in pre-med biology, I strongly recommend using modern medicine over herbal medicine, since most modern pharmaceuticals are based on herbal remedies but are more concentrated in labs, making them a better bet for treatment and survival. But do consider learning some basics for emergencies when those run out or if you’re stranded without. The more you know, the more you live!
Thoughts on Poisonous Plants
It is absolutely impossible to learn all the poisonous plants in the world. Even if you dedicated your entire life to this purpose, you would never be able to do it. So, the best thing to focus on learning are general rules that help you determine edible from non-edible plants. When we speak of poison, it’s a generic term to cover anything that isn’t edible for us as humans. Some things may just taste awful, some may cause unpleasant reactions, some may make you sick, and some may actually be so toxic that they kill you.
The main thing to know is this: Either it’s edible or not edible, and if you’re not sure, then it’s not edible, and that makes it poisonous. A good general guideline is to make sure you err on the side of going hungry before getting dead.
There are a few key things I teach as a global survivalist that differ from my Florida specialist brother Boudreau. I teach that there are a few plants which are found all over America and are plentiful, so they make for good eats, and as such, would be a shame to waste. However, they do have poisonous look-alike plants. For those, you absolutely must know your rules to differentiate the edible from the poisonous plants. That is a choice you must make, a study you must commit to, and attributes you must memorize. For most folks, this is fine when doing it for practice. But when you’re sick, tired, hurt, hungry, and surviving, you may not remember correctly. So, back to the basic rule: only eat what you know.
90/10 vs 10/90 Rule
I made this up as a general guide for my survival students, to help put things in perspective and to help them remember when they are tired, sick, hungry, and surviving. Most of the animals on the planet are edible. There are a very few that are poisonous to eat if they’re not prepared properly. Most plants are not edible.
So, use the 90/10 rule. We can eat 90 percent of the animals on the planet and only 10 percent of the plants. The purpose of this book is to help you learn how to identify as many of those edible plants as possible. The good news is that with animals and plants added together you get 100 percent. I find this comforting. Add to that the bit of bug info we provide and that bugs by themselves are a 100 percent nutritious food source, then you’re well on your way to ensuring you have the best chance of surviving. One key thing I have emphasized in all my years of survival teaching is that hope is the most important human factor to espouse. Keep your faith strong and your hope alive; when all else fails, those could make or break you.
General Berry Guides
I’ll cover these in detail later in the book, but since many folks like to think of berries as the most obvious form of edibles next to roots, it’s good to have an easy guide to help you in your learning. This very simple rhyme can help.
Black through blue are good for you.
Yellow and white, it isn’t right.
Rules for Red are 50/50—could be good, could be dead.
I’ll elaborate more in later sections. For now, let that bounce around your brain a spell.
Universal Edibility Guides
There are a handful of these tests out there meant to help you when you have to resort to the guessing game The military has had its own version of the Universal Edibility Test (UET) for decades, but I debunked that myth with my large survival manual a decade ago. In short, it simply took too long and was impractical.
I came up with my own, which I’ll cover later in the book. Doug also addresses the same issue and comes to a similar conclusion. His suggestion is similar to mine and based on tried-and-true trial and tribulation. Simply, if it doesn’t look right or smell right, then it isn’t right. If it does look right and you touch it or taste it and it burns or is bitter, it’s a quitter. Get rid of it.
The only time to even consider using a taste test is when you find yourself staring at a large supply source of something and you know, if you can determine its edibility, that you could survive for a good while off it. For example, you’re lost in a swamp and you find this swamp apple tree. You’ve never seen it or eaten its fruit. But it’s a tree in season, with hundreds of potential meals. Then it might be worth the inherent risk of putting it to the taste test.
There are some trees, like the manchineel, that are deadly poisonous. They do look different to a trained eye, but to a novice they might look similar. So, there is always a potentially fatal risk inherent with eating anything unknown to you.
Make sure the risk is worth it if it pays off. Going through the risk of eating something poisonous when there is only one or a few of them doesn’t pass the common sense test. Make sure there is P
for plenty to eat before taking any chances.
My guidelines for learning any plants that you intend to eat for survival are:
Available. Make sure they are found all over to increase chances of finding it.
Identifiable. Make sure they have some absolute features to 100 percent identification. Also know that they have no poisonous look-alikes.
Plentiful. Choose plants that, when you find them, provide abundance.
Seasonal Considerations
One thing I found to be disappointing and difficult when I began foraging was finding food in the off seasons. Most of the country goes through four seasons that have a heavy impact on plant life cycles. In my home state of Florida, we almost have two springs, with warm weather and plentiful rain and sunshine. For the rest of the country, we must adapt to nature’s cycles and learn how to forage successfully even in the dead of winter. That is extremely important when you consider that winter is when it’s hardest to get any food, whether it is plant or animal, and survival can be the hardest, too.
For that reason, I encourage folks to start slowly, and focus on ten big plants for the region they live in. Start with three, but make sure you master ten plants. Know those plants inside and out, especially in all four seasons. Some plants have vines that have a unique shape, and while the leaves, flowers, and fruit of them may all be hidden in the dead of winter, knowing the shape of the vine can lead to the tuber or root, that can be dug up and eaten, providing a solid meal of life-sustaining starch. So learn to identify your core plants in all four seasons and your chances of survival are increased greatly.
Mushrooms
Doug and I agree on mushrooms: they can be tasty, and they can be plentiful, but they have so very many variations that even the experts make mistakes and die from eating the wrong mushrooms.
Some of the special problems that mushrooms present is that many of the spores and toxins that are poisonous to humans are not killed by fire, heat, or boiling. These heat-resistant spores can still kill once consumed.
Another problem unique to mushrooms is that once they’re consumed, there is no way to stop the process. You can’t vomit it out or take a neutralizing agent or take any form of antidote. Once they have entered the body, the toxins begin doing the damage and death, usually due to liver damage, is unavoidable. There are only a couple of deaths each year, and not all mushrooms have this absolute finality, but the risk is simply too high for any amateur forager to risk.
That said, I have done a lot of study and practice with mushrooms and, as such, I teach a handful that are very easy to identify and have no poisonous look-alikes that we know of. Science does have limits and life evolves, adapts, and mutates, so there are no absolutes, which is critical to keep in mind, especially with mushrooms. I only teach these special mushrooms to my advanced students, and not for a book, as it would be a shame to go hungry with such a safe prospect. But again, it is always a real risk of death, and until recently there weren’t a lot of known nutritional value in mushrooms, according to the FDA. However, science has advanced, and there are now sources that state that mushrooms have a lot of nutritional value. So, if you want to make mushrooms a part of your foraging experience, you need to consider that a specialty skill and make it a special study.
A note on science, plants, and change. When I first became a Special Forces medic, I had an unusual experience in Korea with ginseng. I was quite amazed by the effects, as I had absolutely no belief in its claimed beneficial properties. After all, according to western medicine it was primarily placebo and an old wives tales. However, the plant has been revered around the world for millennia, including at home in America by the natives, and it didn’t seem to make sense that is was not legitimately beneficial in some way. Fast forward two decades and with advances in scientific methods to analyze micro-nutrients of ginseng, it now is considered to have well over a dozen potentially beneficial medically useful components.
Warnings
Finally, we have to stress that eating wild edibles can be dangerous, and that death is a very real possibility when eating unknown things. We, as humans, are simultaneously incredibly strong and resilient, but also very fragile and delicate. A small piece of paper can cut us. A small dose of poison can kill us. So be smart, use caution in all you do when it comes to foraging for wild edibles.
I encourage folks to find things around them and then try those things at home where you have access to a phone and can get medical care fast if necessary. Hopefully, applying all the guidance we give, using common and known plants that are easy to identify, and which have no poisonous look-alikes, you’ll have only good, safe experiences and your knowledge and confidence will grow with your experience.
But it’s important to understand that anytime you eat something unknown, you take your life into your own hands. No one but you puts that plant into your mouth, and in that moment you assume all responsibility for your action. Mostly, you should be fine; we don’t want to scare anyone, but the warnings must be said. Now, they have been. So, be safe, be smart, and have fun.
Last Tip from Your Uncle Myke: Bleach
While we left out a lot about poisonous plants as there are just too many to cover, I feel it would be a very useful thing to pass on this old country doctor’s remedy for poison oak, ivy, and sumac.
Before you go foraging, be sure you’re familiar with whichever of these you have in your area. I won’t dwell on what they look like, how they work and how skin reacts to them. That’s a chapter all by itself. What I will share is a small anecdote about how I came to learn this cure.
I was on a Special Forces patrol in California. I was new to the region, and wasn’t familiar with poison sumac. We were on a night patrol breaking through serious brush all night long. By daylight, we saw we had been wading through a sea of poison sumac. And I learned I was highly allergic and my arms swelled up like Popeye. The Military Doctors game me shots, pills, creams, and all to no good effect. I had towels wrapped around my arms to absorb the ooze. I suffered like this for about a week and then ran into a country doctor. He told me to use bleach. I scoffed at him as a Special Forces Medic—if that worked, I would have been taught it! He smiled and said, suit yourself. That night, at 3 a.m. in total misery, I tried it. I’ll be darned—it was cleared up right then and there. I did it once more the next day and I was cured. Ever since then, I have used it dozens of times and taught and treated hundreds of folks, always with 100 percent success and no ill effects.
So, the chances are, you’re going to bump into some in your foraging. When you get home, get naked, in the shower, take a white wash cloth, pour bleach all over and wipe yourself down. Let it set one minute, then rinse and shower like normal. Problem solved. I now do it after each trip and never got it again. It seems to help with ticks and chiggers, too.
2
Wild Food History and Weeds
Long before the human inhabitants of North America purchased practically all of their food through the market economy of commerce, they subsisted almost exclusively on what they could grow themselves and forage from their environments. Even today, people look forward to the seasons that produce the favored wild food of their regions. In New England, they look to the spring for the unfurled ferns they call fiddleheads,
which are edible in most of those northern species after cooking, and then look forward to the autumn for delicious wild blueberries. In West Virginia, it’s a wild member of the Allium genus—the group that includes onions, garlics, and leeks that the locals call ramps
or wild leeks.
Here in Florida there once was a prized wild food that comes from the native Sabal palmetto, or sabal palm, swamp cabbage, and cabbage palm—the heart of the palm—which is now supposedly protected by law, a state statute, and very difficult to harvest anyway without much of a caloric pay-off.
Most modern Americans have been taught that the Native Americans, inappropriately called Indians and appropriately called First Peoples and First Nations, lived strictly off of animal flesh while raising corn, squash, and beans. However, that could not be further from the truth. They were very much dependent upon a plant-based diet of wild food. For example, they anxiously awaited the beginning of the spring in all climates for the spring greens of wild edible plants that pop up after a winter of eating mostly roots, breads, preserved meat, and other food, with the occasional fresh-killed meat. As settlers came here from around the world, they brought with them a wide variety of other wild edibles.
Many of the spring greens are leafy, like a wild lettuce, spinach, and mustards. Other plants can provide edible roots—starchy and loaded with carbohydrates—or combinations of edible greens and roots. Some of the plants are edible from the ground up—all aboveground parts are edible one way or another. Many edible plants, particularly from grassy plants and edible greens, also produce seeds that can be used as a grain for a gruel, meal, or flour. Many wild food recipes consist of specific parts of specific wild plants that can be used together with conventional foodstuffs as well as with parts of other wild plants.
I call a survival stew any soup or stew that can be put together with wild plants (even with edible insects), with or without conventional ingredients added. There are many kinds of edible wild berries—some absolutely delicious—in practically every region of the North American continent and beyond.
Most of the edible wild plants that grow in your area can be raised easily in your garden or scattered around your property. When you turn over and loosen the soil as you would to begin a garden, you can produce wild edible plants by either scattering seeds collected and dried from other locations or simply by not planting anything after tilling the soil and waiting to see what comes up. Seeds from past plants can lay dormant for centuries. There is no need to fertilize—although a little might help—and there is no need to pull any weeds, because most of the plants that are the most common wild edibles actually are those weeds. This wild food garden requires little to no tending and no mowing at all.
Many of these plants followed populations of natives, pioneers, and homesteaders around the country. Even today, when I see a new construction project where there were woods, fields, or crops, I know that the soil will be disturbed, chewed up, loosened, and packed before something new is built there. As soon as the work is nearly done, new plant growth appears in bare spots. Up through the new sod, almost like magic, spring plant types that may or may not have been there before the construction began. Many of those plants are considered invasive weeds, yet most are useful to humans in one way or another.
Natives, early pioneers, and immigrants knew how to use their favorite plants (mostly herbaceous)—many of which were brought here as seeds from around the world—to cultivate and manipulate for optimal growth and to influence the fertility of through hybridization. It created specialized varieties that could spread and grow quickly. And the abundant seeds got attached to birds, animals, horses, buggies, trains, cars, trucks, cycles, ATVs, pedestrians, and hikers and quickly spread to other areas. Over the last few centuries, many of these plants were brought here from around the world. Some were useful for food and medicine, but are now considered noxious and unwanted, and so are being sprayed with poisons that will ultimately harm all living things to some extent.
When I walk into a patch of woods along well-used hiking trails and dirt roads, I see many of those plants at the trailhead and then see fewer of them the deeper into the woods I go. It is evidence that many edible wild plants follow us wherever we go as if they were purposely designed to do so. Most of those plants that we call weeds were once food and medicine that our ancestors designed to grow that way—invasive and widespread.
And that’s not all. All of the plant-based food that you eat every day was once wild before people started cultivating, breeding, and manipulating them for our benefit. In the future, when food shortages, economic collapse, and political upheavals occur, the best emergency food will be those weeds that you allow to grow in clean, wholesome soil—assuming there is wholesome soil left.
Over a century ago when people had to forage and farm exclusively to survive, the kind of food that they lacked and needed the most was the kind that they craved and wanted the most; the fats, sweets, and salts. We now have these in abundance and yet we still crave them the most because of our past. The result of that is the adverse health effects of having too many fats, sweets, and salts in our present diets.
At the onset of a survival situation, your first impulse may be to trap, snare, or hunt an animal for food. Second impulse might be to find grubs and insect larvae. What you may not realize is that many edible plants provide protein, carbohydrates, and fats in small but easily obtainable amounts. And by easy, I mean you don’t have to snare, trap, hunt, or dig for them, they’re right out in the open. They will not put up much of a fight to live or to protect their leaves, seeds, tubers, and flowers. However, making a positive identification is virtually imperative. Never assume something is edible unless you know absolutely positively that it is. Here in central Florida, I have documented edible subtropical and temperate zone plants as comprehensively (but not perfectly) as I could.
Some survival guidebooks attempt to instruct you on wild edibles with generalizations. They might say that most roots, bulbs, and tubers are safe and that blue and black berries are usually safe to eat and then present just a short list of certain plants that are found in specific places around the world. They might even say to watch the animals to see what they eat. All of those generalizations are dangerous. To be prepared for a survival/doomsday/famine situation someday in your region of the world—wherever that may be—just do your homework ahead of time: study, study, study, and study some more.
As I started learning about edible plants long ago, I became much more observant of the plant life around me. As you become more familiar with them, you’ll find yourself looking for them practically everywhere you go. Learning this subject suddenly instills in you a self-sufficiency of which you couldn’t imagine before. We know that survival requires four priorities: shelter, water, fire, and food. Shelter can be provided in a variety of ways. Water can be a challenge, but ultimately, a water source and purification of it is not impossible to find in most temperate regions of the world. Fire can be needed basically for warmth, light, purifying water, and cooking. Trees, coal, some plants, mosses, sunlight (solar-cooking, reflective material), and other sources can be obtained for the benefits that fire provides. Then, what about food? Once you have a wide-ranging knowledge of wild edibles, from plants to animals to insects, then you have all the knowledge necessary to be completely self-sufficient if you have to be. For a life-form as fragile and vulnerable as we are, that is a huge advantage over others and a great confidence builder.
However, most people will refuse to learn about wild edibles. They refuse to consider a plant that is not cultivated in mass quantity for commercial sale in their own country as potential food. Even though insects are food for people all over the world, many Americans refuse to even consider it. They will refuse to eat the weeds no matter how much information you can provide them on their edibility and palatability. It is ridiculous that so many Americans weed their gardens and spray poisons around their dwellings to kill perfectly good food. Most popular landscape plants are poisonous or simply toxic. Commonly used landscape grasses are not edible either. It figures that the hated crabgrass has edible uses. The seeds can be harvested as a grain.
Today’s lawn-care methods include chemicals that can make us sick or at least increase the risk of cancers. So, people kill all potential food-sources around them and spray poisons that contaminate the soil itself, making it unfit to forage from for virtually years.
I began to study all the aspects of survival skills and decided to focus my energy on foraging. If survival essentials are shelter, water, fire, and food, the forager is much more prepared for a survival scenario, however it happens, than most. Even the average well-armed doomsday prepper is not as prepared and self-sufficient as the forager. Especially when you can’t eat bullets and when you consider that many people would refuse to eat a weed unless their lives depended on it. However, if their lives actually did depend on it, and they don’t know what they can safely eat, they’re dead. This subject fascinated me so much that I obsessed over sharing it with people who might be interested. Unfortunately, most people aren’t very interested because they just assume that their food will always be there for them—even in emergencies—picked, preserved, packed, and paid for.
So, if you take this subject seriously, you can become as self-sufficient as one can be.
3
Warning Signs
Here are a few warning signs to know when foraging for edible wild plants. I would state here, right off the bat, that making a mistake on a wild plant can either cause no harm, be mildly unpleasant, make you sick, or can kill you. The photo at right shows a very toxic butterweed (Senecio glabellus) that could be mistaken for a wild mustard or wild lettuce species. Be sure of what you forage!
There are many varieties of Lattuca and Sonchus plants that are similar and edible—especially after cooking. You may be 90 percent sure that you have identified a Sonchus genus and take the chance of boiling the leaves for greens (if you must) and you’ll probably be okay. Or you could mistake a very toxic butter-weed for a Sonchus or Lattuca. The possible symptoms of butterweed poisoning are abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, enlarged liver, bloody vomiting, ascites, followed by death.
(Julia F. Morton, Plants Poisonous to People in Florida.)
Highly-toxic butterweed.
In Florida, the poisonous butterweed comes up in January and goes away by May, about the same time of year as our Sonchus. It can also fool people into thinking it is a wild mustard species, many of which grow in the Southeast at the same time and are edible. One of the best indicators of a toxic plant is a burning, hot sensation in the mouth as soon as you bite into it. That’s right, a spicy-hotness sensation in the wild is not a good sign. Another warning sign is extreme bitterness or rank flavor that makes you want to spit it out. My advice, no matter how hungry you are, is that if something is so bitter or rank flavored that you feel the impulse to spit it out immediately, then spit it out immediately. As you can see from the effects of butterweed, it’s better to be safe than sick—or dead. That’s not the only plant in Florida that can kill. There are plenty.
As you learn about edible wild plants, you’ll realize that most of them taste very good or acceptable when all the precautions and prescribed methods of preparation are met.
I read where a survival expert
says to study the woodland critters’ food sources to tell whether a plant is edible to people. It is a huge mistake to assume that we can eat something that an animal can eat. The fact is that many things are edible to certain animals that are not edible to us and vice-versa.
Know your plants. Learn how to identify them, and know what times of year they grow. Know the environment where you’re likely to find them, and always be sure that you know the proper method of preparation for each plant—whether you can eat it raw, or if it must be boiled. Some plants need to be soaked in water or wood-ash for several hours or days. A plant can have tiny hairs on the leaves and/or stems that might be filled with formic acid, which can sting you like a bee when you touch it, as in stinging nettles and spurge nettles. The effects can be similar to ant bites or bee stings. Wild plants with pole-bean-type seedpods are more often toxic than edible. Don’t assume that something is edible just because it might look like a familiar fruit or vegetable or something you have learned is edible. Be positive that it is edible before consuming!
Another warning sign is a soapy scent or flavor. A toxic substance in some plants, such as in the roots of the Yucca filamentosa and other yucca species, is called saponin. It is not just a soapy taste; it can be used like a soap to produce suds for cleaning. Do not mistake the root vegetable at your store that is called yucca for the ones that actually grow in Florida. They are not the same. When you shave or scrape off tiny pieces of the root of our local yucca species into water and agitate the water, you can produce soapy suds for cleaning anything that might need cleaning. It will not disinfect anything but will break up oil, dirt, and dead-skin particles for extracting in water. This substance is toxic if consumed in large amounts or high concentrations. Sometimes a plant can have a tiny amount in it that is edible but not the roots of our local yucca species.
A milky, white sap or white, liquid substance from plants is sometimes a warning sign to indicate that something is not edible, but not always. Sometimes, for specific plants, they just need to be boiled. It is called a latex, and is either a sign to steer clear—as in any cactus—or a sign that something should be boiled if it is of a green-vegetable type. Dandelions, Sonchus, milkweed, milkweed vine, and groundnut come to mind as being wild edibles with a white sap that is usually too bitter to eat raw (some are toxic raw), but mellows down or eliminates the toxicity and bitterness after boiling. The edible parts of the northern common milkweed, Asclepias syriaca and A. speciosa (not included in this book) must be boiled to be edible (some people can eat the young tops raw without harm). There are no edible species of milkweed