Penny Waters
Rettendon Common, Essex, UK
I wondered what replies would come from the back-to-front question about processing weeds into tasty and edible food (27 August), as this is my field (yes, a pun!) and has been since I began observing and comparing plant leaves on the lawn at 4 years of age.
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Before shops, everyone ate 鈥渨eeds鈥� or native plants. Wild plants can be both food and medicine. The most comprehensive book on this topic is Eating on the Wild Side by Nina Etkin. It is the best book to open the mind regarding ethnobotany and how we obtained knowledge about plants.
It appears that wherever people moved around the world, they partook of the plants around them. Hunters weren鈥檛 always successful, but plants can鈥檛 get away, so many plants have been used by people ever since, although much plant knowledge gets lost with the movement out of the countryside.
One of your previous correspondents, Charles Merfield, discussed how sow thistle is considered a weed by some farmers in New Zealand. This grows in my garden in Essex and the young leaves are very yummy. English hogweed is tasty too and sometimes tastes of coconut.
The most delicious cherry in the UK is the wild one. Wild peas are native here too, and they are more delicious than any hybrid.
Nettles are a wonderful example of the deficiency of vegetables bought from the shops. For example, the highest calcium content in bought veg is in curly kale at 150 micrograms per 100 grams (cooked), , compared with 481mg/100g in cooked stinging nettles. Nettles also have high amounts of other minerals, so are an excellent food for bones.
I published my phytotherapy dissertation some years ago on the potential for wild food and herbal medicine from a plot in Essex, based on knowledge of the plants on this land on a north-facing slope that had never been touched by farm machinery. I had been eating from the self-sown wild plants there and this opened my mind to the wonder of plants and our ignorance of them.
Wild plants grow when and where they want and hold secrets that only they can tell you 鈥� about them and the place where they are growing.
To answer this question 鈥� or ask a new one 鈥� email lastword@newscientist.com.
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