Posted on 10/01/2012 10:00:59 PM PDT by djf
I wanna try the yellow skunk cabbage!! :)
Here’s another wild edibles Youtube channel called, “Eat The Weeds” with 130+ videos, each one focusing on a single plant or wild edible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x97jebTQisU&feature=plcp
The presenter, Green Deane, also has a website and forum for those interested.
awesome!
This is excellent. Thank you both.
I taken a few *foraging* courses offered by *experts* from the local agricultural colleges. In all cases, the experts who had years and years of experience say...at the end of the course....be *very, very careful* ..if you’re not sure... don’t eat it.
I’m not very confident of what little I know to keep me alive.
You are wise. There is a lot of stuff out there that can be easily confused with deadly consequence. Wild carrot is one . It can be confused with wild hemlock, a real nasty one.
I do not have many wild carrots around here. But there is quite a bit of hemlock.
It is easily identifiable by it’s strong herbal smell, very aromatic.
A young gal in Tacoma died last year from putting it in her salad. It takes a fairly small amount to kill an adult.
So be careful!!
Could be useful ping?
Thanks!!
Another great resource!
Anybody know of a reliable way to capture Youtube vids? There are quite a few I’d like to grab and burn to DVD if the Interverse blows up or gets shut down...
I ate them as a kid. Inside the seed is pure white meat that taste much like pecan. Contain lots of seed. But small. Very good tasting.
Still don't like the plant, hoed too much of it as a kid. Cut some huge plants recently from our turn row, put it on the burn pile in the pasture. They will not be propagated by me.
Thanks though! I'll be saving the video - excellent for research on the subject.
Christopher McCandless’ body was found in his sleeping bag inside the bus by Butch Killian, a local hunter, on September 6, 1992.[6] McCandless had been dead for more than two weeks and weighed an estimated 67 pounds (30 kg). His official, undisputed cause of death was starvation. Krakauer suggests two factors may have contributed to McCandless’s death. First, he was running the risk of a phenomenon known as “rabbit starvation” due to increased activity, compared with the leanness of the game he was hunting.[7] Krakauer also speculates that McCandless might have ingested toxic seeds (Hedysarum alpinum or Hedisarum mackenzii) or a mold that grows on them (Rhizoctonia leguminicola produces the toxic alkaloid swainsonine).
However, an article in Men’s Journal stated that extensive laboratory testing showed there was no toxin present in McCandless’s food supplies. Dr. Thomas Clausen, the chair of the chemistry and biochemistry department at UAF said “I tore that plant apart. There were no toxins. No alkaloids. I’d eat it myself.”[8] Analysis of the wild sweet peas, given as the cause of Chriss death in Sean Penn’s film, turned up no toxic compounds and there is not a single account in modern medical literature of anyone being poisoned by this species of plant.[4] As one journalist put it: “He didn’t find a way out of the bush, couldn’t catch enough food to survive, and simply starved to death.”[8] However, the possibility of death through the consumption of the mold, which grew on the seeds in the damp bags which McCandless stored them in, was considered a suitable explanation by Krakauer.[2]
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McCandless died of starvation. Talk to native Alaskans and many who subsistence live, will say he died of stupidity.
If you use Firefox, there is an addon called Bytubed, I use it myself and have had good results.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bytubed/
Once you get the hang of it, saving youtube video is easy. If your system won’t play some of the formats youtube uses for their videos, there’s a freeware video player which I also use called videoLAN that can handle most every video format without needing them converted.
As for keeping you alive, exclusively foraging is under the best of circumstances a caloric "break even" proposition, hunter-gatherers were hunters first, because plant nutrition foraged in the wild is a very energy intensive operation usually burning more than it provides in calories to gather the foodstuffs. If you are considering a situation where you might find yourself completely depending on food you can gather by hand, you really have to learn how to hunt, trap and snare both game and fish to supplement your foraging and not be squeamish about where your protein and fats come from.
What I learned from this exchange was....if they can't be *sure* or agree...what chance do I have? Yikes!
Mushrooms are the one area that I avoid completely. I’m sure there are edible ones I could learn to identify, but there are entirely too many chances for a mistake being lethal that it’s not worth the risk.
Your “Doctors” were probably both right, depending on which book they were coming from. The same item in two different books can be listed as both edible and toxic depending on the time of year it was sampled, how sensitive one is to the “toxin” and whether an upset stomach completely unrelated to the plant was thought to have been the result of poisoning.
The common pokeweed is both edible and poisonous depending on what part and what time of year you harvest it. I’ve eaten the young shoots for years and never had so much as heartburn, but there some who would avoid it out of an abundance of caution.
As they say, Your Mileage May Vary.
***** “I wanna try the yellow skunk cabbage!! :)” *****
It was a common thing when I was a kid... (it’s actually pretty good eats, collecting it wasn’t bad (I was a kid)... pretty much anything outdoors was fun for me.
TT
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