To be honest, until recently, I have not been that motivated to study wild edibles so I’ve tried to come up with a way to make it interesting for me. Here is what I’ve done. None of my boys really like Texas style chili & beans and shun it whenever they can. Several times we’ve gone on hikes and discovered that the energy expressed along the way and the environment of the wild makes “anything” taste good. So, I’ve tried “starvation” as a learning tool to see if they would eat them. Every time we’ve opened a cans of beans in the wild the boys have all wolfed them down and asked for more. The second thing I’ve done is asked the Lord for desire, that he would give me a mind that “cares” about His garden (Phil. 2:13 LB). And He has done just that. I’ve started with the two easiest wild edibles – dandelions and cats ear. I now see them everywhere and will soon start studying the 90 plus plants found on the Northern Bushcraft website.
I came across this excerpt of the early life of Euell Gibbons the famous wild edible advocate. In the 60’s and 70’s he popularized the use of wild edibles after writing Stalking The Wild Asparagus (1962) and appeared on several variety shows including Johnny Carson and Sony & Cher. Here you see how starvation was Euell’s best teacher and motivator. It was said that later in life he would carry $1,500.00 in cash at all times. It was only then that he felt safe.
I have a couple comments about this story – Euell was only 12 years old and was able to butcher a cow, chickens and rabbits. He knew how to tan a hide and was willing to hike over 8 miles in order to find food for his family. Another point… fathers should never “walk down the road” and leave their family’s behind. Proverbs says, “He who tills his land will have plenty of bread, but he who pursues worthless things lacks sense” Prov. 12:11 (NASB); and, “He who works his land will have abundant food, but the one who chases fantasies will have his fill of poverty” Prov. 28:19 (NIV). Euell’s father had a reputation of chasing the next big dream and dragging his family along the way. Godly men do not do that.
In 1922, his father took the family to the Estancia Valley, in New Mexico, to establish a homestead (17.2 miles south of Moriarty). The state of New Mexico was ten years old, and was having unpromising beginnings, for a four-year drought of appalling severity had discouraged homesteaders in the state, and many of them were giving up and moving away. Euell’s father was a man of such unnerving optimism that he saw the drought as an opportunity. Surely rains were near, and meanwhile departing people were all but giving away their homes and goods. He traded the family car to a defeated homesteader for a cow, a calf, a colt, two mares, a mule colt, twelve hens, farm tools, a set of harness, a wood stove, and an axe.
The family moved into a half dugout, which had a dirt floor and, above ground level, was made of logs. Water was carried from a spring several hundred yards away. Euell’s father found work with a new company that had been established in the valley salt flats to make salt. This, he said, would be his permanent career. Gibbons remembers that his father described as permanent every job he started. The salt of the valley had not been tested, and cattle died wherever the salt was sold. The company collapsed. The drought continued, and since there was no other work for Euell’s father, the mule colt was sold and the money was used to buy food.
Soon his father left the valley, on foot, to search for a job, and the mother and four children in the half dugout had no idea where he was going, how long he would be gone, or whether he would come back. The remaining animals began to starve. Euell’s mother got sick, apparently from malnutrition. A mare died, and Euell’s dog ate the carcass. Wood, out there is the semi-desert, was difficult to find, and Euell, who was twelve years old, began to take posts from an old pole corral a half mile away. The cow, in her hunger, ate yucca and died. Euell skinned the cow and sold the hide in Cedarvale, the nearest town (37.7 miles south of Estancia). The chickens ate the flesh of the cow, and the family, who had been living on lard, pinto beans, flour, and syrup, began to eat the chickens, one by one. When Euell killed the last hen he found an egg inside it, and fro many weeks aft that the egg sat on a shelf because no one would be the one to eat it. It was eventually thrown away.
Meanwhile, pinto beans had become the family’s diet morning, noon, and night. About a mile and a half away, there was a house that stood empty. Its owners were to be gone indefinitely, and Euell went there to see if they had left any food. He found the front door swinging in the wind on one hinge. Sandstorms had blown drifts of sand into the house and had knocked a stovepipe chimney from the roof as well. There was no food inside. A few yards from the house was a dugout shelter (root cellar), and it was locked. Euell thought for a while, then broke in. Inside, he found two hundred pounds of pinto beans.
Outside, his dog began to bark. Euell went out and saw that the dog was concentrating on the stovepipe chimney that had blown off the house. He picked up one end of the chimney and squinted into it. A pair of rabbits was in there, and after he had killed them he began to wonder – for the first time in this strange, dry, and unpromising landscape – about wild food.
Soon after the last of the family’s livestock had died, there had been some rainfall in the Estancia Valley, and, as will happen in desert country, things were suddenly green. On his way home with the rabbits, he found Russian thistles growing along a fence row, and he also found wild garlic, lamb’s-quarters, and wild potatoes. All these ingredients were used that evening in rabbit stew. The next day, Euell put a pack on his back and went to the edge of the valley, were he found puffball mushrooms growing under cedar trees, pinon nuts, and fruits of the yellow prickly pear (the tree line of the Sandi Mountains is about 8 miles to the west of Estancia). He made long daily hikes in search of provisions. He found buffalo berries on the margins of sand hills. He found a way to fish the ground for rabbits – pushing a barbed wire into rabbit holes and rotating the wire so that the barbs would work their way into the rabbits’ fur. His father returned, with money, about a month later. Until then, the family lived on the wild food Euell foraged (italics mine).
John McPhee, A Roomful of Hovings And Other Profiles (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), pp. 87-89.
