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Browsing Nature's Aisles: A Year of Foraging for Wild Food in the Suburbs by Eric Brown, Wendy Brown
felinity's review against another edition
4.0
This book reminds us that food grows all around us if we just know where to look, and you don't have to be desperate or off-the-grid to make that choice. Anyone who's ever gone berrying is a forager - be proud! The author (and his wife) are not Tom & Barbara from "The Good Life", just normal people trying to eat good, safe food and learn more about their area in the process.
They had simple goals: to harvest one item a week, to learn how to store what they foraged, to track the foraged amount by weight, and to host a party at the end of summer featuring primarily foraged foods, and this book covers what they looked for, why they started, and what they learned along the way.
This is the book to get you started, no matter how small your first step. (And if you want to know more about planning and growing your food, which the authors do not cover, this book is an excellent complement to A Householder's Guide to the Universe.) This is something anyone can do, and it doesn't require strenuous activity, lots of time, expensive tools and seeds.
Aside from the obvious - greens, nuts, berries - it also covers how to boil sap to make syrup from maple or birch trees, the benefits of white pine tea, uses of sunchokes, their adventures into clamming (they're in Maine) and turkey hunting... even maple and spruce beer and mushroom tea! (They recommend using 3 separate sources for fungi identification before harvesting, and this seems like a good rule of thumb.) Another rule - the Forager's Rule of Thirds - helps maintain biodiversity as you refrain from stripping an area, or a plant.
I am already feeling the desire to start actively looking at plants near me and to pay more attention to my surroundings. It's a great family learning activity too, as you learn about plant and animal habitats, botany, chemistry (through food preservation and cooking) and the vagaries of Nature's calendar. They suggest just trying to learn one or two plants a season, and this tiny step makes foraging very accessible.
I do wish they had included more recipes - those I read were very interesting - and I'll want to take a look at the finished product rather than an ARC to take full advantage of the photographs.
Disclaimer: I received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
They had simple goals: to harvest one item a week, to learn how to store what they foraged, to track the foraged amount by weight, and to host a party at the end of summer featuring primarily foraged foods, and this book covers what they looked for, why they started, and what they learned along the way.
This is the book to get you started, no matter how small your first step. (And if you want to know more about planning and growing your food, which the authors do not cover, this book is an excellent complement to A Householder's Guide to the Universe.) This is something anyone can do, and it doesn't require strenuous activity, lots of time, expensive tools and seeds.
Aside from the obvious - greens, nuts, berries - it also covers how to boil sap to make syrup from maple or birch trees, the benefits of white pine tea, uses of sunchokes, their adventures into clamming (they're in Maine) and turkey hunting... even maple and spruce beer and mushroom tea! (They recommend using 3 separate sources for fungi identification before harvesting, and this seems like a good rule of thumb.) Another rule - the Forager's Rule of Thirds - helps maintain biodiversity as you refrain from stripping an area, or a plant.
I am already feeling the desire to start actively looking at plants near me and to pay more attention to my surroundings. It's a great family learning activity too, as you learn about plant and animal habitats, botany, chemistry (through food preservation and cooking) and the vagaries of Nature's calendar. They suggest just trying to learn one or two plants a season, and this tiny step makes foraging very accessible.
I do wish they had included more recipes - those I read were very interesting - and I'll want to take a look at the finished product rather than an ARC to take full advantage of the photographs.
Disclaimer: I received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
elephant's review
5.0
Well-written, and interesting, this book tells about one family's quest to learn more about foraging and eating wild foods. After many years of research and growing their own foods at home, they spent one year incorporating foraged foods into at least one meal a week. The book is well-researched and explains that if one is going to eat foraged foods, you should check at least three sources to make sure that what you are eating is what you think it is and that it is not poisonous, that you should only take one third of what is edible from an area at any given time, and that it can be good to find a teacher or mentor to show you how to find edible plants in the wild. While the only "foraging" I have done is eating wild blackberries that we found growing when I was a child, I do appreciate the wisdom in this book. Compared to the concept of the doomsday preppers who stockpile massive amounts of canned goods, it seems more useful to know how to identify and eat foods that one can find commonly in the wild and in your suburban neighborhood. I don't think I will be going out foraging any time soon, considering the fact that last week I saw and smelled paint pouring out of a drain into the creek near our house, which would be the closest area for any wild foraging. I did call the city and they sent someone out and when I went back, there was no longer anything coming out of that drain. We are near the start of that creek, and it eventually dumps into a local lake where there is recreation and fishing. I am sure that the paint I saw being dumped from a construction site into the creek is not the only icky stuff that is in the creeks and in our local environment. I did learn that the weed that we cut down, but keeps coming back that we found covered with pretty black and yellow caterpillars one day is most likely milkweed and is edible and the caterpillars will be monarch butterflies, so we will stop chopping it down and leave it for the caterpillars. I think this is an excellent book and I highly recommend it. I received this book free to review from Netgalley.
anastaciaknits's review
4.0
When I first requested this book to read through netgalley, I thought it was going to be more of a how-to guide. Getting into gardening more and more - and canning, and freezing my garden goodies, and preserving, and probably dehydrating as well next spring, I was thrilled at the idea of reading about foraging. I did a little of that this year, digging up and using lots of wild garlic that's been growing on my parents property for as long as I can remember, and hearing stories of my family eating dandalion greens as kids.
This isn't a how to book. It's still good, it's just not what i was expecting.
The book is chatty, like sharing stories with a friend over a cup of coffee, yet interesting and informative and makes you want to get up and see what you can find in the jungles of your own neighborhood, yet it reads like a memoir.
This isn't a how to book. It's still good, it's just not what i was expecting.
The book is chatty, like sharing stories with a friend over a cup of coffee, yet interesting and informative and makes you want to get up and see what you can find in the jungles of your own neighborhood, yet it reads like a memoir.
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