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A review by felinity
Browsing Nature's Aisles: A Year of Foraging for Wild Food in the Suburbs by Eric Brown
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.