13 ms·

Wanting the Unwanted: Why Eat Weeds

50 points by juanplusjuan 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
douche 12y ago
I know a fair number of old-timers that still eat dandelion greens and fiddleheads and pigweed. Fortunately, New England is a place with few very poisonous things, although it is important to check that you are picking fiddleheads and not wood ferns...
- _delirium 12y ago
  Dandelion greens are a pretty normal "green" in Greece, used in salads roughly the same way that the southern U.S. uses turnip greens or collard greens (i.e. boiled, w/ lemon juice, oil, and/or vinegar). But picking them wild is a different situation than buying them in a marketplace.
vishaldpatel 12y ago
Is there any good information about the nutritional content and popular weeds and what they taste like?
- rootedfood 12y ago
  There's some information about there about nutrition, but not much, which is why we're working on it! Also working on the digital field guide, but for now we have the printed guide with a $15 donation to Berkeley Open Source Food.
pain 12y ago
Rooted words. Appeal-to-marginality is reasonable and sensible enough for locating empathy,when we barely have social systems try to make dots between the lines.
jawngee 12y ago
Pretty interesting, but you do have to be careful with eating a number of "weeds" that grow everywhere. A good friend of mine in high school ended up strapped down to a gurney for a few days after overdosing on jimsonweed. He was never quite right after that.
- rootedfood 12y ago
  Yes, you definitely have to be extremely careful!
ChuckMcM 12y ago
I believe the premise to be false, while it is true that you can eat many different "weeds" I cannot find any methodology or theory where that doing so increases the efficiency of land use. There are some key things like nutrients in == nutrients out and digestibility in humans which is not a given. That said, there were some interesting recipes for what are nominally weeds in the Foxfire[1], and Euell Gibbons books[2] which were certainly edible although nothing I've tried really struck me as exceptional. As Boy Scouts we got a merit badge for creating a meal out of locally harvested plants, that was fun. [1] http://www.foxfire.org/thefoxfirebooks.aspx http://www.foxfire.org/thefoxfirebooks.aspx [2] http://www.amazon.com/Euell-Gibbons-Handbook-Edible-Plants/dp/0915442787 http://www.amazon.com/Euell-Gibbons-Handbook-Edible-Plants/d...
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  What "weeds" does do for you is increase the amount of useful land. Many of our favorite crops require very preferential choice in land.
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    That is a very valid point, it does allow for land not previously used for raising edibles to be put into use for that. It would be interesting to see if you could compute how much more nutritional "product" would be made available in that way.
  - gus_massa 12y ago
    I'm not sure that it makes economical sense once you subtract the labor cost to plant and harvest them (or plant, harvest, classify, clean, transport and sell them). My family is form Jujuy (in the north of Argentina) and we went many times to visit the Quebrada de Humahuaca ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebrada_de_Humahuaca http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebrada_de_Humahuaca ) that is a nice but not very fertile place. In every site that you have a little of horizontal land and some water there is a small farm, and you see there potatoes and maize.
    - rootedfood 12y ago
danhodgins 12y ago
Right place, right time, right plant. Don't eat weeds from places where they may have been sprayed by pesticides or pets. I put dandelion (literally "teeth of the lion" or dans de lion in french) in my smoothies weekly. It's pretty bitter and tastes of the earth, so if you make a smoothie use copious amounts of lemon juice and/or orange juice to make it taste a little bit better. There are all sorts of little-known health benefits to dandelion. They are PACKED with all sorts of nutrients. People even grow them deliberately in gardens in Europe. Some people also make dandelion wine and dandelion coffee. Google this stuff - you might be surprised. In an abstract sense weeds are a bit like startups because they take unwanted resources (heat, light, soil, space) and 'add value' through unique processes e.g. photosynthesis to turn them into something else. In a strange way I find weeds inspiring.
- DanBC 12y ago
  And some weeds are great at removing heavy metals from the ground -- you probably don't want to eat too many of those leaves. I used to have nettle soup and tea and dandelion coffee. Dandelion is also called "piss the bed" because it's a mild diuretic. (Just in case anyone from that website is reading: the page is totally broken on mobile. I would have left a comment over there, but the page was so broken I wasn't able to. http://imgur.com/QyjXRg0 http://imgur.com/QyjXRg0 )
  - vram22 12y ago
    I had read a little earlier about people using nettles and dandelion as food. Did you stop eating them because of the chance of heavy metals or for some other reason?
    - DanBC 12y ago
      I moved from a rural to an urban location. It's quite a lot of work digging dandelion roots; washing them; roasting them. And it's not that tasty. And I'm gently worried about the pollution - I live near roads and I have no idea what the soil is like here. The nettles were a by product from clearing a path to the wood hut. That path had to be cleared so using those nettles was good.
muddyrivers 12y ago
It is a very interesting topic beyond food. When I first came to America, I was surprised and confused by the lack of diversity on vegetables in grocery stores. Around the small Midwest town I lived, there were many weeds that look edible. I had never heard any local Americans eat them, though. I thought it was simply because there were a surplus of food in America. Many many years passed. In our backyard, there are many weeds that look edible. I have tried only two, dandelion and a kind of fern. I hesitate on the others, although some looks similar to what I had eaten before. I am concerned they might cause health issues, from minor stomach discomfort to serious food poisoning. It is not like I had no experience in forage. I regularly foraged for weeds, ferns, mushrooms when I was a child. I love them better than carrots, celeries, cabbages, etc. They simply tasted better. But I hesitate at the weeds and mushrooms in my backyard. Whenever I see some new vegetables in the fantastic Berkeley Bowl, I will get some, google recipes, and try them. Whenever I see these weeds in restaurant menu, I will order to have a try. First, because I love trying new things. Second, I believe it is sustainable, both from where I grow up and from my education. But I still hesitate at the weeds and mushrooms in my backyard. One can explain it from the point of view of evolution. Somehow, I feel it is more than that.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  Avoiding wild mushrooms is generally a good plan without a lot of education and training in mushroom ID. Few weeds will kill you, but quite a large percentage of wild mushrooms are harmful. The ones you find in the supermarket are the exception.
  - jonnathanson 12y ago
    Yup. It's generally a good idea to avoid any wild berries, nuts, seeds, or mushrooms that you aren't 100% certain you recognize. If there's even a sliver of uncertainty, it's not worth the risk.
radicalbyte 12y ago
One of my favorites is rucola/arugula - it's a weed but it's really quite nice in a salad. Very strong nutty flavor. You can buy a cultivated version in in supermarkets here (NL) but it's nowhere near as strong. Peppermint + spearmint are also weeds which are commonly grown for use in cooking or tea.
- gus_massa 12y ago
  Since a few years, rucula is mainstream here in Argentina. Every time you go to a restaurant most people order a rucula salad.
  - bmj 12y ago
    This has been my experience in the U.S. as well (at least where I am). It's a very popular crop at the local farmers' markets because it is easier to grow. My family really enjoys it. Dumping it on pizza is quite good, and you can make a fine pesto from it (instead of basil).
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  Arugula is quite bitter, though, compared to other greens commonly used in salad. It works OK to counterbalance sweet ingredients, such as in a salad that includes fruit and a sweet dressing, but personally I find it quite unpleasant in a more savory salad.
  - kaitai 12y ago
    It is excellent on pizza or when combined with prosciutto and fruit: some sweet and some fat combine with the bitterness in a pleasing way. Mache or lamb's quarters is another plant that is either considered a weed or sold for $4.99 a bunch at Whole Foods in the US. Milder than arugula.
kilolima 12y ago
"Open Source" Food is name only- they demand a $15 donation to see their field guide. Until then, good luck not eating something toxic.
- reitanqild 12y ago
  Nothing inherently wrong with charging money to supply you with open source products. The problem however is sustainability: once a customer gets the source they can give it away/sell it etc.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    We are spoiled; "open source" has come to mean in many people's minds, "free as in speech AND beer"
- viggity 12y ago
  it looks like it is open source and all of the data is available for free on their website. You can get a printed copy by donating $15.
- rootedfood 12y ago
  The cost to design and print the field guides was much more than we expected. We're hoping that the $15 will cover the guide as well as put a few dollars toward other components of our project, such as toxin and nutrition analysis (which are quite expensive). We're working on getting the (free) digital guide up soon and hopefully in the future, we can obtain grant funding to make the printed guides dramatically cheaper/free!
vinchuco 12y ago
Here's a YouTube channel of a guy eating all sorts of foraged weeds and plants. https://youtube.com/user/EatTheWeeds https://youtube.com/user/EatTheWeeds
neonbat 12y ago
When I was a child I ate weeds. It made everyone stop talking to me on the playground. It was pretty great.
gggggggg 12y ago
Something to keep in mind here is that once a viable market is found then the product will be fully commercialised and mass-produced. No longer will poor conditions be good enough when compared to the yield you get from ideal conditions. Then we will start fertilising them, then tweaking the seeds etc etc etc. And before long it will be just like anything else grown on the land.
a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
The premise that weeds are a suitable food for humans is wrong. Most of these plants are loaded with toxins. You can't eat them in any quantity for calories without getting poisoned. Cows and goats and sheep can eat these things, though, because they have more advanced digestive systems. The udder provides an added toxin filtration system. In theory you might be able to design an efficient system to detoxify wild plants such as grass and weeds directly into a high quality human food. At this moment cheese is already an incredibly effective way to use wild forage to make human food.
jMyles 12y ago
A fun little video I made of a foraged brunch I attended last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpvKl11FABk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpvKl11FABk
cbd1984 12y ago
The problem with eating weeds is that people spray them with toxins which aren't meant for things humans are going to eat. Do they wash off? Who knows? They haven't been evaluated for that use-case.

50 points by juanplusjuan 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

I know a fair number of old-timers that still eat dandelion greens and fiddleheads and pigweed. Fortunately, New England is a place with few very poisonous things, although it is important to check that you are picking fiddleheads and not wood ferns...

_delirium 12y ago
Dandelion greens are a pretty normal "green" in Greece, used in salads roughly the same way that the southern U.S. uses turnip greens or collard greens (i.e. boiled, w/ lemon juice, oil, and/or vinegar). But picking them wild is a different situation than buying them in a marketplace.

vishaldpatel 12y ago

Is there any good information about the nutritional content and popular weeds and what they taste like?

rootedfood 12y ago
There's some information about there about nutrition, but not much, which is why we're working on it! Also working on the digital field guide, but for now we have the printed guide with a $15 donation to Berkeley Open Source Food.

pain 12y ago

Rooted words. Appeal-to-marginality is reasonable and sensible enough for locating empathy,when we barely have social systems try to make dots between the lines.

jawngee 12y ago

Pretty interesting, but you do have to be careful with eating a number of "weeds" that grow everywhere. A good friend of mine in high school ended up strapped down to a gurney for a few days after overdosing on jimsonweed. He was never quite right after that.

rootedfood 12y ago
Yes, you definitely have to be extremely careful!

ChuckMcM 12y ago

I believe the premise to be false, while it is true that you can eat many different "weeds" I cannot find any methodology or theory where that doing so increases the efficiency of land use. There are some key things like nutrients in == nutrients out and digestibility in humans which is not a given. That said, there were some interesting recipes for what are nominally weeds in the Foxfire[1], and Euell Gibbons books[2] which were certainly edible although nothing I've tried really struck me as exceptional. As Boy Scouts we got a merit badge for creating a meal out of locally harvested plants, that was fun. [1] http://www.foxfire.org/thefoxfirebooks.aspx http://www.foxfire.org/thefoxfirebooks.aspx [2] http://www.amazon.com/Euell-Gibbons-Handbook-Edible-Plants/dp/0915442787 http://www.amazon.com/Euell-Gibbons-Handbook-Edible-Plants/d...

sliverstorm 12y ago
What "weeds" does do for you is increase the amount of useful land. Many of our favorite crops require very preferential choice in land.
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  That is a very valid point, it does allow for land not previously used for raising edibles to be put into use for that. It would be interesting to see if you could compute how much more nutritional "product" would be made available in that way.
- gus_massa 12y ago
  I'm not sure that it makes economical sense once you subtract the labor cost to plant and harvest them (or plant, harvest, classify, clean, transport and sell them). My family is form Jujuy (in the north of Argentina) and we went many times to visit the Quebrada de Humahuaca ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebrada_de_Humahuaca http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebrada_de_Humahuaca ) that is a nice but not very fertile place. In every site that you have a little of horizontal land and some water there is a small farm, and you see there potatoes and maize.
  - rootedfood 12y ago

danhodgins 12y ago

Right place, right time, right plant. Don't eat weeds from places where they may have been sprayed by pesticides or pets. I put dandelion (literally "teeth of the lion" or dans de lion in french) in my smoothies weekly. It's pretty bitter and tastes of the earth, so if you make a smoothie use copious amounts of lemon juice and/or orange juice to make it taste a little bit better. There are all sorts of little-known health benefits to dandelion. They are PACKED with all sorts of nutrients. People even grow them deliberately in gardens in Europe. Some people also make dandelion wine and dandelion coffee. Google this stuff - you might be surprised. In an abstract sense weeds are a bit like startups because they take unwanted resources (heat, light, soil, space) and 'add value' through unique processes e.g. photosynthesis to turn them into something else. In a strange way I find weeds inspiring.

DanBC 12y ago
And some weeds are great at removing heavy metals from the ground -- you probably don't want to eat too many of those leaves. I used to have nettle soup and tea and dandelion coffee. Dandelion is also called "piss the bed" because it's a mild diuretic. (Just in case anyone from that website is reading: the page is totally broken on mobile. I would have left a comment over there, but the page was so broken I wasn't able to. http://imgur.com/QyjXRg0 http://imgur.com/QyjXRg0 )
- vram22 12y ago
  I had read a little earlier about people using nettles and dandelion as food. Did you stop eating them because of the chance of heavy metals or for some other reason?
  - DanBC 12y ago
    I moved from a rural to an urban location. It's quite a lot of work digging dandelion roots; washing them; roasting them. And it's not that tasty. And I'm gently worried about the pollution - I live near roads and I have no idea what the soil is like here. The nettles were a by product from clearing a path to the wood hut. That path had to be cleared so using those nettles was good.

muddyrivers 12y ago

It is a very interesting topic beyond food. When I first came to America, I was surprised and confused by the lack of diversity on vegetables in grocery stores. Around the small Midwest town I lived, there were many weeds that look edible. I had never heard any local Americans eat them, though. I thought it was simply because there were a surplus of food in America. Many many years passed. In our backyard, there are many weeds that look edible. I have tried only two, dandelion and a kind of fern. I hesitate on the others, although some looks similar to what I had eaten before. I am concerned they might cause health issues, from minor stomach discomfort to serious food poisoning. It is not like I had no experience in forage. I regularly foraged for weeds, ferns, mushrooms when I was a child. I love them better than carrots, celeries, cabbages, etc. They simply tasted better. But I hesitate at the weeds and mushrooms in my backyard. Whenever I see some new vegetables in the fantastic Berkeley Bowl, I will get some, google recipes, and try them. Whenever I see these weeds in restaurant menu, I will order to have a try. First, because I love trying new things. Second, I believe it is sustainable, both from where I grow up and from my education. But I still hesitate at the weeds and mushrooms in my backyard. One can explain it from the point of view of evolution. Somehow, I feel it is more than that.

sliverstorm 12y ago
Avoiding wild mushrooms is generally a good plan without a lot of education and training in mushroom ID. Few weeds will kill you, but quite a large percentage of wild mushrooms are harmful. The ones you find in the supermarket are the exception.
- jonnathanson 12y ago
  Yup. It's generally a good idea to avoid any wild berries, nuts, seeds, or mushrooms that you aren't 100% certain you recognize. If there's even a sliver of uncertainty, it's not worth the risk.

radicalbyte 12y ago

One of my favorites is rucola/arugula - it's a weed but it's really quite nice in a salad. Very strong nutty flavor. You can buy a cultivated version in in supermarkets here (NL) but it's nowhere near as strong. Peppermint + spearmint are also weeds which are commonly grown for use in cooking or tea.

gus_massa 12y ago
Since a few years, rucula is mainstream here in Argentina. Every time you go to a restaurant most people order a rucula salad.
- bmj 12y ago
  This has been my experience in the U.S. as well (at least where I am). It's a very popular crop at the local farmers' markets because it is easier to grow. My family really enjoys it. Dumping it on pizza is quite good, and you can make a fine pesto from it (instead of basil).
JoshTriplett 12y ago
Arugula is quite bitter, though, compared to other greens commonly used in salad. It works OK to counterbalance sweet ingredients, such as in a salad that includes fruit and a sweet dressing, but personally I find it quite unpleasant in a more savory salad.
- kaitai 12y ago
  It is excellent on pizza or when combined with prosciutto and fruit: some sweet and some fat combine with the bitterness in a pleasing way. Mache or lamb's quarters is another plant that is either considered a weed or sold for $4.99 a bunch at Whole Foods in the US. Milder than arugula.

kilolima 12y ago

"Open Source" Food is name only- they demand a $15 donation to see their field guide. Until then, good luck not eating something toxic.

reitanqild 12y ago
Nothing inherently wrong with charging money to supply you with open source products. The problem however is sustainability: once a customer gets the source they can give it away/sell it etc.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  We are spoiled; "open source" has come to mean in many people's minds, "free as in speech AND beer"
viggity 12y ago
it looks like it is open source and all of the data is available for free on their website. You can get a printed copy by donating $15.
rootedfood 12y ago
The cost to design and print the field guides was much more than we expected. We're hoping that the $15 will cover the guide as well as put a few dollars toward other components of our project, such as toxin and nutrition analysis (which are quite expensive). We're working on getting the (free) digital guide up soon and hopefully in the future, we can obtain grant funding to make the printed guides dramatically cheaper/free!

vinchuco 12y ago

Here's a YouTube channel of a guy eating all sorts of foraged weeds and plants. https://youtube.com/user/EatTheWeeds https://youtube.com/user/EatTheWeeds

neonbat 12y ago

When I was a child I ate weeds. It made everyone stop talking to me on the playground. It was pretty great.

gggggggg 12y ago

Something to keep in mind here is that once a viable market is found then the product will be fully commercialised and mass-produced. No longer will poor conditions be good enough when compared to the yield you get from ideal conditions. Then we will start fertilising them, then tweaking the seeds etc etc etc. And before long it will be just like anything else grown on the land.

a8da6b0c91d 12y ago

The premise that weeds are a suitable food for humans is wrong. Most of these plants are loaded with toxins. You can't eat them in any quantity for calories without getting poisoned. Cows and goats and sheep can eat these things, though, because they have more advanced digestive systems. The udder provides an added toxin filtration system. In theory you might be able to design an efficient system to detoxify wild plants such as grass and weeds directly into a high quality human food. At this moment cheese is already an incredibly effective way to use wild forage to make human food.

jMyles 12y ago

A fun little video I made of a foraged brunch I attended last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpvKl11FABk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpvKl11FABk

cbd1984 12y ago

The problem with eating weeds is that people spray them with toxins which aren't meant for things humans are going to eat. Do they wash off? Who knows? They haven't been evaluated for that use-case.