Did you know that you can eat bark? Make a foam from the common mallow weed? Use dandelion as a hops substitute in beer? Our topic this week is foraging and our guest is Leda Meredith. Leda has a certificate in Ethnobotany from the New York Botanical Garden, where she is also an instructor. She is also the author of five books including Northeast Foraging: 120 Wild and Flavorful Edibles from Beach Plums to Wineberries. Her new book is The Forager’s Feast: How to Identify, Gather, and Prepare Wild Edibles. During the podcast we discuss:
- The ethics of foraging in city parks
- Eating invasives
- Is foraging sustainable?
- Mallow foam
- Vegan mallow mayonnaise
- Dandelion beer
- Foraging in Israel
- Foraging in the winter
- Eating bark
- . . . and, of course, prickly pear
Leda’s website is ledameredith.com and her Youtube channel is here.
If you want to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to [email protected]. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTunes store and on Stitcher. The theme music is by Dr. Frankenstein. A downloadable version of this podcast is here.
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You totally sound like those old Grape Nuts commercials with Euell Gibbons! ‘did you know you can eat a pine tree?’
Hello, i’m from France and can tell you most pharmacists aren’table to tell you about mushrooms. There is only a ridiculously small number of hours dedicated in their training. Out of ignorance or over-cautiousness, they are much more prone to tell you the mushrooms are inedible than to try to actually identify them.
I’ve once (because I gave up soon thereafter) seen the pharmacist pull out a very basic identification book to try to figure out what I’d brought. It was something like “The 50 most common mushrooms of Western Europe” with line drawings. Needless to ay I thanked him and never went back.
Some people, and some of them pharmacists, hold a deep interest in mycology, but the overwhelming majority of pharmacists could barely tell a chanterelle from a fly amanita.
Thank you! I’ve always suspected that story was too good to be true….but I wanted to believe it, because somehow it would make perfect sense if the French government insisted all pharmacists went through advanced mycology training