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A review by amandakitz
How to Forage for Wild Foods Without Dying: An Absolute Beginner's Guide to Identifying 40 Edible Wild Plants by Ellen Zachos
adventurous
informative
lighthearted
medium-paced
4.0
As an introduction, this is a fairly solid book. Trying to look at the U.S. as a whole when the flora varies so much regionally is a tall order; that said, there's a decent number of options among those 40 plants and readers should be able to forage something wherever in the country they live. The culinary recommendations are solid as well, and I appreciate some of the tips and tricks.
The star docked is on account of safety. I lost all faith in the author's food safety when she recommended cold leaching acorns in a scrubbed toilet tank because the water would change with every flush. I would advise against any degree of food prep in non-food-safe containers, especially an in-use toilet. Watercress as well, the advice is solid for avoiding liver parasites but for a book for beginners who may not be able to tell drought levels versus normal or flood levels, I would just recommend they always cook it. The cost of that mistake isn't worth fresh watercress.
She also says she is going to avoid poisonous plant look-alikes, and then includes Queen Anne's Lace with a page on telling it apart from Water Hemlock and Poison Hemlock, two of the deadliest plants. There are some things I would not trust beginners with and one of them is differentiating between Queen Anne's Lace and Hemlock; again, the risks of messing up are so much higher than the rewards of getting it right that I would leave plants like that for at least intermediate-level foraging, not a book for absolute beginners.
So, overall a good book if you don't mind reading about other regions and have some safety sense, but I might not recommend it to someone who is brand new to foraging.
The star docked is on account of safety. I lost all faith in the author's food safety when she recommended cold leaching acorns in a scrubbed toilet tank because the water would change with every flush. I would advise against any degree of food prep in non-food-safe containers, especially an in-use toilet. Watercress as well, the advice is solid for avoiding liver parasites but for a book for beginners who may not be able to tell drought levels versus normal or flood levels, I would just recommend they always cook it. The cost of that mistake isn't worth fresh watercress.
She also says she is going to avoid poisonous plant look-alikes, and then includes Queen Anne's Lace with a page on telling it apart from Water Hemlock and Poison Hemlock, two of the deadliest plants. There are some things I would not trust beginners with and one of them is differentiating between Queen Anne's Lace and Hemlock; again, the risks of messing up are so much higher than the rewards of getting it right that I would leave plants like that for at least intermediate-level foraging, not a book for absolute beginners.
So, overall a good book if you don't mind reading about other regions and have some safety sense, but I might not recommend it to someone who is brand new to foraging.