Legendary forager and wild food advocate Euell Gibbons (wrote “Stalking the Wild Asparagus”) gave very good advice for dealing with unknown plants; Before you eat any, its characteristics should be as clear and familiar to you as the differences between an apple and an orange at the grocery store.
- Apps like Seek are often good at helping to narrow the identity of a plant down to its family or genus, but very often fall short of an actual species ID (I should specify, they fall short of providing a *correct* species ID. Most will be extremely happy to give you a species ID, even though it is patently false). Once the app gets you close, it’s time to crack open a field guide or consult an expert.
- Speaking of field guides; BEWARE OF ANY PUBLISHED POST-AI. I’m serious. Once people figured out they could generate whole books using those bloated chatbots, foraging guides (which had experienced a surge in popularity following the threats of food insecurity during the beginning of the COVID Pandemic) were one of the first genres to be overloaded with ai slop. Look for trusted authors like Samuel Thayer, and publishing dates before 2023.
- A good field guide should offer detailed verbal descriptions of the physical characteristics of various plants, using specific botanical terms, and will often contain a glossary with definitions of those terms. It should also feature maps of the known growing ranges of those plants, and ideally, photographs of the plant during various stages of growth, and at different times of year.
- Start slow. Learn a handful of “easy” plants or fungi that have distinctive characteristics and few toxic lookalikes, and learn them well. Learn the toxic lookalikes as well as you learn the edible species.
- Once you are confident you have a positive ID, try a little bit and see how it agrees with you. Just because it’s “edible” doesn’t mean you aren’t allergic to it.
Learn Your Land and Black Forager are excellent references for foraging information, especially the ecology, ethics, and history of the practice.
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