We hope that
anyone who wants to participate in the upcoming SplashPath 5K and Fun Walk here
at Pathfinder Village at the end of May will send in their registration/waiver
forms to take advantage of our early registration pricing -- $20 for adults;
$10 for youths; $45 for families (3+ members). This will help our staff
order sufficient supplies and ensure correct tee sizes for everyone. This is a
brand new paint run/walk event, a fun and novel offering for the entire family
that will get a little messy and let your true colors shine through! For
information, please visit our webpage at http://pathfindervillage.org/get-involved/splash-path/
.
We also hope
that our friends and neighbors will celebrate May Day with us this Thursday at
Pathfinder Produce, where we offer great prices and the freshest produce.
Our friendly market is open at our Village Commons Building from 2 to 5 p.m.
************
Most of us purchase fresh
produce at our local supermarket or grow a selection of standard fruits and
vegetables to meet our families’ needs. But there is a third route which
harkens back to our pre-agricultural ancestors -- that of gathering natural
foods that are all around us.
As I was perusing my Facebook
the other night, a high school chum had shared a post about edible weeds, which
of course, got me to thinking about the work of author Euell Gibbons
(1911-1975). (Those under 40 will say “Euell who?” Anyone older will
think back to Grape-Nuts commercials.) When I was a kid, he often was
mocked by television comics as an affable eccentric who ate nuts and twigs, but
I believe he was ahead of his time in advocating whole foods.
By the mid-years of the 20th
century, America had largely chosen “the path of prepared foods,” and kids were
raised on Wonder Bread sandwiches, washed them down with Tang or Kool-Aid, and
regularly enjoyed breakfast cereals with “sugar” featured prominently in the
name. Gibbon’s first book, “Stalking the Wild Asparagus” came out in 1962
and became an instant success. I suspect that he had connected to an
undercurrent in our culture: People were starting to question the dietary
effects of industrially produced, highly processed foods.
At that point in time, most
folks knew how and where our foods were produced, but most of us had become
separated from the process as more of us moved into the suburbs and
cities. Through his books and articles, Gibbons helped reawaken our
awareness of the connections we have to the natural world. In his first
book he wrote:
“We
live in a vastly complex society which has been able to provide us with a
multitude of material things, and this is good, but people are beginning to
suspect that we have paid a high spiritual price for our plenty. Each person
would like to feel that he is an entity, a separate individual capable of
independent existence, and this is hard to believe when everything that we eat,
wear, live in, drive, use, or handle has required the cooperative effort of
literally millions of people to produce, process, transport, and, eventually,
distribute to our hands.”
Gibbons learned his considerable knowledge of wild
edibles through his mother and grandmother, and used his skills to forage for
his family during the years of the Great American Dust Bowl. He was not a
survivalist, but rather a teacher who sought to share the forgotten abundance
that nature provides.
Now, I’m not advocating that foraging is for all of us
– it isn’t. And of course, people should never ingest plants, berries or
nuts they can’t identify with 100% certainty, or eat plants or fruit from areas
that may have been sprayed with pesticides. But there are some plants
that are coming in now that are easy to spot and make use of:
- Dandelions: Young dandelion greens were formerly part of our diets as a way to ward off diseases caused by vitamin deficiencies. According to rebeccawood.com, these greens can be sautéed or eaten raw, and have more vitamin A, K, calcium and iron per serving than broccoli
- Broadleaf Plantain (Common Plantain,
Plantago major): Is another common weed that is easy to recognize and is an
early spring green that can be eaten raw or cooked. According to edibleflowers.com,
many people blanch the young leaves in boiling water before using them in
salads in order to make them more tender, and blanched plantain can be frozen
then used later in a sauté, soup or stew.
- Black or red raspberries: Come mid-summer, it’s easy to spot these berries as they grow in stands of brush and along hedgerows. It takes some time to pick a quantity of these fruits, but there’s nothing like them for pies and jellies.
A newer book on the subject, Eating on the Wild
Side, by Jo Robinson points out that many of the wild foods that our
hunter-gatherer ancestors ate were indeed more nutritious than what we eat
today, but they were more-bitter and fibrous. Author Robinson maintains
that as we became more accomplished farmers over 12,000 years, we selectively
bred plants that were more to our liking (higher sugar content, less chewy,
etc.). Her book goes on to explain the best ways to obtain, prepare, and
store common fruits and vegetables to get the greatest nutritional value from
them. More
on this book can be found at NPR.
Until next time, be well.
