With most plants denuded, resting and not so edible right now (rotting brown "green" salad, anyone?), I approach my Wild Edible habit philosophically: Why? After all, the stores are filled with food, both local and well-traveled, that is ready for buying and eating. So why go through all the work to learn, identify, collect and prepare marginally tasty wild foods?
Consider survival. Knowing how to survive in raw nature, without all of this civilized gadgetry, is elemental. Ironically, independence is prized in our culture, a culture highly dependant on things like oil and globally transported food, and global communication systems. What if all that we depend upon collapses? What if major governments and/or corporations collapse? Is Monsanto too big to fail? As I navigate the never ending phone tree trying to understand why my cell phone isn't working, this idea thrills me. Collapse? Yes! And take that damn phone tree with you!
Knowing something about the Real world, the world that was here before us and will be here after we are gone, is security in a way that Prudential just doesn't understand and cant' provide. Granted, I have no illusions that I could actually survive long term on eating a few plants that happened to grow between the sidewalk cracks. Real survival would probably involve killing animals which is beyond the scope of this girl's knowledge, ability, and stomach.
But wait! Wild Edibles are so much more than mere survival supplement. They are connection, imagination, and that most essential element, surprise.
Wild Edibles connect us to the source. I go out into the elements and I find something to eat. That generous gifts as blackberries and dandelions are snubbed by so many saddens me and the Earth too, I imagine. But we find that even after all the abuse and neglect, our Mother is still offering. After all the hours and days my back is turned on her as I tend to a computer, job, bill or book, she is still there, offering her goodies.
Looking for Wild Edibles, I get down on my knees and I sift through the dirt and the weeds like a supplicant in prayer: seek and ye shall find. And I do. It's there, beneath my feet. When I seek and find Wild Edibles, I find my connection to the sacred, to the ancient, to my origins, to my ancestors. I'm on the line with the earth: This is a phone tree, people! And, in an act of communion ancient and powerful, I take this leaf or that berry, and I put it into my mouth, and I eat it. This is communion with the earth. This is connection to all. This is connection with the place that birthed me, birthed my kind, sustains me, sustains my kind, and takes us back into her when our lives are done: the beginning and the end.
One might get this same thrill from apple juice at preschool or wine in church. But on farms of apples, grapes and everything else, plants grow where the farmer intended: in convenient, straight rows. The thing about Wild Edibles is that they are Wild. They grow wherever they want, untouched by Euclidian geometry and the needs of machines and human minds. In my love of mystery, I hope that by imbibing these wilds, I too might be a little less tame, a little less in line, a little less likely to lay down in a neat row like the dead. I'm hoping I am what I eat and that I am a little more wild and a little more free because of it.
Wild Edibles are food for my imagination too. When I gather Wild Edibles, I think about ancient people for whom every edible was Wild. I love to imagine what their lives and minds were like, knowing the Real World more intimately than I. How many hours a day were they collecting food? When could they trust their kids with Wild Edibles? Who would I have been if I had lived with them?
I'll conclude on a practical note: I'm broke and not so good at gardening so I take what what's freely offered.
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