Foraging – it’s not just for preppers
“The average kid can recognize 50 corporate logos and only knows two plants, if one of them is a banana.”
Merriwether Vorderbruggen from ForagingTexas.com has spent 20 years trying to fix that, one foraging class at a time. Merriwether joins me to share about foraging.
The prepper world treats foraging like an emergency skill you pull out when things go bad. Meriwether treats it as a way of seeing. Reconnecting people to the world right outside their door.
We’ve been told to love, respect, and protect nature but not to interact with her. Eating wild plants is one of the most intimate ways to change that. Foraging forces you to actually observe – matching the structural features of a plant before you eat it.
This is a Tier 1 skill using pattern recognition and observation, and it’s a challenge, like a puzzle.
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Take a hands-on class where you walk the field or buy a book. You will be learning how to really see what’s around you, not just walk past it. And this knowledge compounds the more you practice it and the longer you stay in one place. Soon you will start to see food around you!
“My parents were children of the Great Depression. They quickly figured out the only way they were gonna survive us is if they took us out into the woods every day. And when we got hungry, they said, ‘Well, go eat that, go eat that.”
You don’t have to go deep into the woods.
One of the biggest misconceptions about foraging is that you need wilderness. The best foraging is at borders – where field meets woods, where water meets field, where your suburban lawn meets the neighbor’s. That’s where the plant diversity is (the permaculture edge effect). Deep in the woods there is actually less variety because everything is shaded and protected. Most people look at the outdoors and see a sea of green. You have food right outside your door, even in the suburbs.
“Just this thrill that, ‘Oh my gosh, I can eat this? I have this in my yard. I see this all over the place.’ Hearing that several dozen times during the class… it warms my heart.”
The Weeks of Want are still real.
We just came out of what historically would have been the Weeks of Want – when your stored food ran out and your garden wasn’t ready yet. Foraging would have been the thing that tied you over. That craving for fresh greens, vitamin C, and nutrients you cannot get from dried meat drove people to the earliest spring plants. Wild mustards like shepherd’s purse and field pennycress taste like horseradish – Merriwether blends them into a paste and puts them on jerky. Chanterelle mushrooms are coming in. And mulberry leaves, and tender shoots of many plants are all good eating.
How did our ancestors know to eat these things?
We discuss how our ancestors learned to eat plants of they are poisonous or killed the person who first ate it (like pokeweed). Merriwether shares about the Doctrine of Signatures, and how our ancestors made a best guess based on how it looked and what it seemed like it needed.
Caveman Health – Fighting the mismatch.
Our bodies didn’t evolve for the world we built. We sit instead of move. We walk on flat surfaces when our brains are designed for uneven, rocky, stumbly terrain that keeps the core engaged and the brain constantly adjusting. We weren’t made for processed food. Merriwether talks about his Caveman Health principle: Do more of what we used to do thousands of years ago. Meriwether calls it “cavemanosity” and he preaches it.
Your Next Steps
Learn 10 edible plants in your area before you need them. Don’t wait for a crisis to figure out what’s around you. Meriwether’s book covers many plants across all of North America with a regional calendar showing when to look for each plant depending on where you live, because “spring” in Texas is not “spring” in Minnesota.
Look at borders, not deep woods. The edge where your lawn meets the neighbor’s, where field meets tree line, where water meets land – that’s where the diversity is. You don’t need a forest to start foraging. You probably have edible plants growing within walking distance of your front door.
Match the structural features before eating anything wild. Leaf arrangement (opposite or alternating), edge pattern (toothed or smooth), vein pattern, flower and fruit location, root type, scent. Not just “it looks like the picture.” If you’ve matched eight features, you’ve separated it from the lookalikes. This is the kind of observation skill that makes you better at everything else too.
Where to Find Meriwether
- YouTube: Foraging Texas
- Or just go out in the woods and yell, “Hey, Meriwether, can I eat this?”
Merriwether’s book: Foraging: Explore Nature’s Bounty and Turn Your Foraged Finds Into Flavorful Feasts
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The Meadow Creature broadfork is my go-to garden tool, a must for my clay soil. I use it for creating new in-ground garden beds – I just turn over the sod, add some compost, seeds, and cover it with woodchips.
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