• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Helping Students Go Feral: A University Course on Wild Edible and Medicinal Plants

Posted on: Monday, 4 October 2004, 06:00 CDT

Through identifying and using wild plants as food, students acquire not only botanical theory but also hands-on experience in securing their own free nutrition and health care

FOR ALL THE current emphasis on teaching about the natural environment, it is amazing that we have failed to educate the public about gathering wild plants - the most prevalent natural objects around us - for their food and medicine. Surprisingly, the United States, reputedly the home of pragmatism, has singularly failed in this respect.

Left: Cattails are the "supermarket of the wild, " the most important plant for wilderness survival. The early shoots can be eaten raw, cooked as a green, or, best of all, canned as a winter pickle. The pollen on the topmost spikes can be added to flour to make golden pancakes. The seeds can be extracted from the brown "cigar" on the autumn cattail and the remaining fluff used as tinder or bedding. Right: The flowers and fresh leaves of goldenrod can be added to soups and stews. The dried leaves make a tasty and hearty winter tea.

Many reasons can be adduced for the failure. First, the sociological dictum that macro structures influence local processes suggests that civilization itself is prejudiced against wild plants. Since the inception of agriculture, humans have deluded themselves with the anthropocentric notion that they are above nature and hence do not need the wild. They believe they control nature (and ignore the fact that nature controls them) and hence mass-produce their own food and medicine from farm and factory. Thus, wild foraging is disparaged as primitive, while spending hard-earned money on nutritionally and medically dubious products is lauded as civilized.

second, western civilization seems to have a special animus against the wild. From the unfortunate association between a wild apple and the moral collapse of humanity, to the demonization of herbalism by its association with witchcraft, western culture has hardly been sympathetic to wild vegetation. Yet, whatever the moral value of wild herbs, their ingredients, biochemically speaking, still offer nutrition and healing.

Third, the current political economy of civilization - capitalism - ignores and disparages things that make no profit, especially free nutrition and healing from the wild. Every language is a theory: products from supermarket and pharmacy are labeled "food" and "medicine," while their wild botanical counterparts that nourish and heal more safely, cheaply, and effectively are labeled "weeds" and the humans who consume them "poor." Who wants to be called a poor weed-eater? Yet if education is supposed to empower students to provide for their basic needs, and not make them dependent on remote institutions, then we must take wild edibles and medicinals more seriously. Strangely, we teach the young to negotiate supermarket and pharmacy, but not their own backyard, which is chock-full of food and medicine. Certainly the owners of food and drug companies prefer it that way, but is that way serving our students?

Finally, the public fears that "Johnny will be poisoned." Yet upon just a little reflection, the anxiety is untenable. While occasionally we hear about hospital admissions of children who have eaten wild plants and gotten sick, it is clear that Johnny poisoned himself not because he was educated about wild plants but because he was not. Indeed, you will find many more toxic plants, profitably sold, down the street in commercial outlets than in the wild (e.g., daffodils). The simple fact is this: If Johnny is going to poison himself, he will most likely do it in and around his own house with store-bought plants, not wild ones.

Top: The first-year leaves of mullein can be dried and steeped for a tea or smoked like tobacco. The plant is an excellent bronchodilator used to treat respiratory ailments. It is also a rubefacient. Quaker girls long ago would rub the leaves briskly on their cheeks to make them rosy; hence the folkloric name "Quaker rouge. " The leaves have additional practical uses: as potholders, oil-lamp wicks, and emergency TP! Bottom: The second-year flowers atop the mullein stalk are used to make an oil to treat earache. The dried stalk can be soaked in wax and lit fora torch.

The utility of a wild plant course

To redress this failing, I taught a course called Wild Edible and Medicinal Plants at my university in the fall of 1997 and again in the spring of 1999. The rationale, which I shared with my students, was as follows.

* Familiarity with wild plants can save lives. It is, first of all, a survival skill, removing a major latent anxiety: if I am stranded in the wild, can I feed and heal myself?

* We value what we use. By not using the wild's bounty, we have little reason to preserve it. In contrast, hunter-gatherers used almost all of the plants in their environment, and so had reason to cherish them. In fact, they left them for us in perfect condition. It is modern hominids, not primilive ones, who are destroying plant species at an unprecedented rate.

* For almost all of their evolution, hominids lived as hunter- gatherers. Hence our hominid bodies are adapted to the nutritional and medicinal properties of wild plants. Contrary to modernist myth, Hippocrates was not the father of medicine - this distinction goes to the first medicine-people of hunter-gatherer communities.

* Wild vegetables offer far more nutrients than their commercial counterparts, and wild medicines rarely have the lethal side effects of some pharmaceuticals. Indeed local native plants that thrive while subject to the same environmental stresses as we are tailor- made by evolution for our well being in our bioregion.

* Anyone who prefers to pay for food and medicine instead of taking it from the earth for free might want to consider a course in remedial math.

* Providing our own food and medicine empowers us by making us independent of institutions over which we have little control.

* Foraging connects us to the wild in the deepest way possible - ingestion - thereby enhancing our appreciation of nature, and, if you are religious, of the Creator.

* Learning wild healing is part of a broader current trend toward alternative medicine. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine, Americans are turning to alternative therapies at dramatically rising rates.1 Wildcrafting means going back to the future.

My debt-ridden students seemed to find the "free stuff argument most compelling. Yet they considered the other points, especially about survival and empowerment, to be intriguing.

The course, first offered for two credit hours in the autumn, proved so popular that 1 taught it again two years later as a special four-hour summer school offering in May. The autumn provided an amazing bounty (and spectacular foliage), while the spring offered much needed fresh air after the long winter months. The course attracted students from environmental studies, biology, art and design, and the social sciences.

I required three field guides as texts: Peter Dykeman and Thomas Elias' Edible Wild Plants,2 James Duke and Steven Foster's Eastern/ Central Medicinal Plants? and Doug Elliott's Wild Roots.4 Each provides information on identification, toxicity, uses, and ethnobotanical lore, in addition to drawings and photographs of each plant. I also required a high-quality stainless steel trowel for digging roots. These items were to be brought to each class in a field pack. I also recommended scissors, pocket-knife, and paper bags for harvesting. For safety and comfort, students were strongly advised during weed walks to cover their entire bodies to guard against sunburn, insects, and dermatitis, and to pack appropriate rain gear. In addition, I recommended purchasing items for preparing food and medicine: colander, mortar and pestle, glass cookware, vinegar, vegetable glycerin, vodka and brandy, beeswax, olive oil, cheesecloth, and amber bottles with stoppers and sprayers. I provided information on nearby herbal companies from which the less widely available items could be obtained inexpensively and quickly.

The final grade was determined according to a written exam on plant toxicity (10 percent of the total grade); two sets of field cards - one on toxic plants and the other on edibles and medicinals (5 percent each); and two written exams and two field tests (20 percent each). Students had to receive at least a 90 percent on the toxicity exam in order to stay in the course. While this may seem demanding, students seemed to appreciate the concern for their safety. The requirement also underscored the bald fact that they could damage themselves by ingesting the wrong plants. Only one student (who joined the class a little late) failed the 90 percent requirement, receiving an 86 percent. I allowed him to retake the exam (while keeping his original grade in fairness to the other students), which he then passed. The field tests consisted of students' "teaching me" as many plants as possible, describing for each plant the species, its useful and dangerous parts, and its nutritional and medicinal uses. The written exams consisted of conventional fill-in-the-blank, multiple-choice and similar questions, as well as identificati\on from slides.

Students examining ground cherries, also known as "husk tomatoes" and "Chinese-lantern plant. "

Course content

Before the first weed walk, I taught students how to harvest for optimal stewardship, comfort, utility, and palatability. First, since wildcrafting has become increasingly popular, foragers must pay special attention to environmental caretaking. I asked students to walk only on grass and other common plants for minimal damage; as herbalists say, plants grow by the inch but die by the foot. I also showed them slides of the most endangered species in the area (e.g., trillium). In addition, I taught them eco-friendly techniques of harvesting (e.g., gathering as low on a hill as possible so the "mother plants" above can reseed the area). second, students learned to maximize comfort by harvesting in the early morning, after the dew but before the bugs. Third, they learned to maximize nutrition by such practices as not harvesting after heavy rain. Finally, they discovered how to foster palatability by picking certain parts of a plant only at certain times (e.g., the center leaves from rosettes on spring mornings).

1 pointed out that the course would cover only a single North American region -the northeastern woodlands -and that afterwards students might research plants indigenous to mountains, deserts, and other habitats. Even so, 1 made a special effort to include species occurring throughout the continent (e.g., plantain, milkweed).

I held class outside as often as possible to maximize hands-on experience. Weed walks usually took place around the university, while local and state parks, as well as my own feral yard, offered additional species. I encouraged students to use multi-sensory awareness to learn the plants (e.g., to crush and sniff), emphasizing that senses other than the visual are important for identification and appreciation of certain species (e.g., wild leeks).

Beyond "Good plant, bad plant"

Before allowing students to touch any plant, however, I instructed for several hours about toxicity. I stressed that there is no such thing as a "poisonous plant," still less any "plant that poisons you" - plants do not lie in wait to hurt us. There are only those plants with which humans, because of their ignorance, sloppiness, and arrogance, hurt themselves. This approach instilled some useful notions. First, it shifted the burden of responsibility to the students themselves, and disallowed the "out" of blaming the plants. Again, I wanted to stress empowerment, namely taking charge of one's own well-being. second, when humans blame a plant for being dangerous, they are more likely to eradicate it, as well as its edible and medicinal look-alikes and neighboring plants. Hence, the notion has environmental utility. I emphasized instead that the misnamed "poisonous plants" are in fact useful in many ways. They are certainly not poisonous to some other animals and indeed are food for many (some species of birds find poison ivy berries delectable). Many are useful to humans in some form as medicine (e.g., foxglove as a heart remedy) or food (nettles as a potherb). Many are simply beautiful (e.g., monkshood). All, at the very least, give us oxygen. With this approach, I felt, students would abandon the Manichean "good plant, bad plant" judgmentalism and appreciate even the "poisonous" ones, thereby replacing fear with respect. I pointed out that most of the potentially lethal plants with which modern humans damage themselves actually come from the store and not the wild (e.g., poinsettias). I suggested that humans might first "clean up their own domestic act" before disparaging wild vegetation.

I taught several procedures for safe harvesting and preparation, and noted those humans most at risk (children, pregnant women, and asthmatics). Students also learned the myths about poisoning (e.g., "This part of the plant is edible so the other parts must be too"). I also provided some useful warning signals: color (white); odor (almonds); groups of species (umbollalcs, mushrooms); edible look- alikes (Queen Anne's Lace versus poison hemlock); and poisoning symptoms and treatment. At the same time, I pointed out that, since few wild plants have been researched in the laboratory, there are many species around which controversy about toxicity continues to swirl (e.g., sassafras, bracken fern). I offered my personal experience with respect to these controversies: Native American practice has proven correct 100 percent of the time.

I urged students to carry the phone numbers and addresses of the nearest poison control center and hospital emergency room with them at all times. They were also advised, as beginning foragers, to ingest plants only at home and not in the field, and only during the daytime, on weekdays, when a ear and another adult with a driver's license were available. I advised them to have an emetic (e.g., Ipecac) and powdered charcoal at hand, and to save an entire specimen of each plant they ingested for emergency identification if necessary. I recommended they have at home a field guide on plant toxicity, e.g., Venomous Animals and Poisonous Plants (Caras and Foster),3 Know Your Poisonous Plants (Wilma Roberts James),6 and Common Poisonous Plants and Mushrooms of North America (Turner and Szczawinski).7

If the teacher relics on only a single method for instructing about toxicity, then the risk of misidentification may be unacceptably high. Therefore, I took care to offer several sources of hands-on, multi-sensory learning:

* the sections on toxicity in each of the texts, including the required species cards with drawings and descriptions

* field guides on toxicity

* videos (Dining on the Wilds by Darnell-Kramer and Goude,8 and Healing Plants, Poison Plants by the World Survival Institute9)

* field identification during weed walks

* blackboard drawings during lectures

* illustrated playing cards for a "Name that Plant" game10

* photographic slides

* samples of plants in plastic

Roses are highly underrated as a wild edible. The petals can be added to salads and the dried leaves steeped for tea. Rosehips contain an enormous amount of vitamin C; in fact, the British used them commercially during World War Two when supplies of fruit were curtailed. Try them stewed as a compote, or soaked and added as fruit to dry cereal.

Presumably because of this intense immersion, only one student ever received lower than the required 90 percent grade on the toxicity exam. Still, following this exam, 1 discussed all the mistakes in class to ensure they would not be repeated.

Food as medicine

Although field guides usually distinguish between the nutritional and medicinal uses of wild plants, I urged students to "think nutraceuticals," i.e., to make their food their medicine. After ingesting a number of plants, students seemed to agree, noting that their bodies felt especially at home with the wild plants. This realization allowed me to introduce the notion of plant energetics.11 Some students, usually females, commented that the plants "moved" and "connected" with them in a deep way. They appreciated the profound effects of their wild relations and got in touch with their bodies' nutritional dynamics (which are usually ignored because of fast-food diets). Although most students were probably more impressed by the botanies of the plants than by "plant- spirit medicine,"12 they seemed intrigued by the idea that each plant is a special energy system (as quantum physics seems to indicate), which operates in a unique way on the human energy system. This perspective also provided a shorthand way to learn the wild pharmacopoeia: knowing that the energetic of wild strawberry, for example, is constricting enables us to predict its use as both an anti-diarrheal and styptic. Students then realized how medicine people of hunter-gatherer communities are able to remember the uses of thousands of plants.13

On weed walks we gathered edibles for a wild gourmet banquet at the end of the semester. Before the meal, however, I mentioned two caveats. First, students should abandon their "sugar junkie" tastes and learn to appreciate less sweet, especially bitter, foods. I pointed out that not only can a taste for bitters be cultivated, but bitters aid digestion. The students, unconvinced at this point, I was sure, were then given strategies to minimize the bitter principle, such as gathering leaves in the shade instead of the sun, boiling in changes of water, mixing with spicy herbs and so on. Armed with these techniques, they became, I believe, a little less skeptical.

Second, I warned that beginners usually overeat wild foods for a variety of reasons. The novelty of delicious tastes encourages eating, just as, conversely, eating a delicious food every day reduces appetite for it. Further, our hunter-gatherer bodies are starved for the wild nutrients that are missing from agricultural fare, and thus become voracious when such nutrients are available. Finally, wild edibles are so nutritionally packed that the body quickly feels full after consuming only about one-half the volume of agricultural food. Still, after our meal of wild apple leather, pickled leeks, shagbark hickory nuts, salad of scdum and mallows and violets (with nickel-per-serving "French dressing" of ketchup, salad dressing, and paprika), burdock stir-fry, highbush cranberry sauce, and honey-sweetened sweetflag candy, they all reported feeling "stuffed."

I also encouraged gathering for winter storage, demonstrating several ways of preservation (e.g., drying, pickling). 1 then offered samples from my own stores (e.g., elderberry raisins).

Students also gathered plants for medicine. Beforehand, however, I felt it only fair to give them the medical establishment's take on wild herbs: "Do not self-medicate." Then I gave them heralism's take: "Be thy own physician - heal thyself." I suggested that self- medication based on knowledgenot only enabled hominids to survive for millions of years, but today offers a way to democratize health care and empower ourselves. I also pointed out that the medicalindustrial complex is based on profit and a professional ethos that has no interest in free medicine. Additionally, I noted what all herbalists soon discover: wild plant medicine, made using the entire plant whenever appropriate, contains its own natural buffers, which are missing from pharmaceutical products having only "active ingredients" and frequently horrendous side effects. Thus, ounce-for-ounce, wild plant medicines are far safer than conventional drugs. At the same time, I emphasized that knowledge of one's own body and the plants must first be mastered, lest adverse reactions occur. For example, anorexies should stay away from that anti-obesity herb, the noble dandelion. Here, again, the notion of plant energetics proved useful; there is no substitute for attending to how the plant's energy affects our own. Further, I warned about possible adverse interactions with any commercial pharmaceuticals they might be taking. Hence, I advised them to research their ailments, the plants, and current medicines thoroughly, and then if questions arose to seek out a physician sympathetic to herbalism.

The insect-plant connection goes way beyond nutrition for the bugs and pollination for the plants. The fresh galls of goldenrod can be eaten raw, or frozen and used in the winter as a cooked vegetable with other greens.

Students selected a single plant to gather for their most common malady, such as headaches or menstrual cramps. I stressed the notion of "simples," i.e., a single plant for treatment of an ailment. Were students to make a multi-plant medicine and happen to have an adverse reaction, they would not know which plant caused it and therefore treatment would be complicated, and they would be unable to use any of those plants again despite their probable innocence. After gathering the plants, students made vodka tinctures for their maladies. They were then given hands-on training in other ways of preparing wild medicine, namely teas, poultices, steams, and salves.

Smokers also gathered herbs for homemade tobaccos. I am sure that some were less interested in taste and sacred Native American usage than in experimentation for something else. Yet I could hardly object, given that one of my texts listed marijuana as a medicinal herb.14

Student response

I have taught dozens of courses, but this one proved far and away the most popular. At the end of the 1997 semester, I handed out the university's student evaluation form for the course, the confidential results from which were given to me only in the following semester. The numbers were impressive; average scores on a 0-100 scale for selected items were:

Students felt the pace to be a little fast, perhaps because of the large number of species covered. I was amazed to find that we had considered no fewer than 70 plants, and not just superficially, judging from the final grades, which were somewhat higher than for equivalent courses I had taught. Male students most enjoyed the survival and food aspects of the course; females, plant energetics and medicine. All liked the weed walks and field trips, which allowed for coverage of less commonly seen species and for breaks from classroom routine. They also felt empowered by the knowledge, enjoying especially the hands-on experience of making their own food and medicine from the plants they themselves had researched and gathered.

I was surprised at how engrossed students became in the sprinkling of ethnobotanical lore I offered, e.g., how pioneer girls rubbed mullein leaves on their cheeks as a rubefacient before seeing young gentlemen - hence the name "Quaker rouge." They greatly enjoyed the often hilarious stories in the Elliott text, as well as the Native American and pioneer lore in the other volumes (which may help explain the high ratings they gave the books). More than a few noted the mnemonic value of the lore. I also suspect that the stories enabled them to connect with their ancestral roots, so to speak, and deepened their relationship to the earth, making them feel less alien in their own land. The students strongly urged me to offer more stories in future classes.

So, in this spirit of botanical ethnography, I offer a final story. Toward the end of the first course, I realized there would be insufficient time to cover all the topics I had promised. The students became agitated and strongly urged me to offer additional sessions to cover the material. I acceded and we held four extra one- hour sessions. This was the first time any class ever asked me to do such a thing. While certainly I do not expect these students to change into loincloths and let their lawns go feral, I was assured that they learned a lot and enjoyed doing so.

Once the sap from the milkweed plant is boiled away, the stems, flower buds, and seedpods can be cooked and eaten as wild vegetables.

Strangely, we teach the young to negotiate supermarket and pharmacy, but not their own backyard, which is chock-full of food and medicine.

After our meal of wild apple leather, pickled leeks, shagbark hickory nuts, salad ofsedum and mallows and violets, burdock stir- fry, highbush cranberry sauce, and honey-sweetened sweetflag candy, they all reported feeling "stuffed."

Notes

1 David Eisenberg, Ronald Kessler, Cindy Foster, Frances Norlick, David Calkins, and Thomas Delbanco, "Unconventional Medicine in the U.S," New England Journal of Medicine 328:4 (January 28, 1993), pp. 246-252; and David Eisenberg, Roger Davis, Susan Ettner, Scott Appel, Sonja Wilhey, Maria van Rompag, and Ronald Kessler, "Trends in Alternative Medicine Use in the U.S.: 1990-1997," Journal of the American Medical Association 280:19 (November 11, 1998), pp. 1569- 1575.

2 Peter Dykeman and Thomas Elias, Edible Wild Plants: A North American Field Guide (New York: Sterling, 1990).

3 James Duke and Stcvcn Foster, Eastern/Central Medicinal Plants (Boston: I loiighton-Mifflin, 1990). A Peterson field guide.

4 Doug Elliolt, WtId Roots (Rochester, VT: Healing Arts, 1995).

5 Roger Caras and Steven Foster, Venomous Animals and Poisonous Plants (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1994). A Peterson field guide.

6 Wilma Roberts James, Know Your Poisonous Plants (Happy Camp, CA: Naturegraph. 1993).

7 Nancy Turner and Adam Szczawinski, Common Poisonous Plants and Mushrooms of North America (Portland, OR: Timber Press, 1991).

8 Miriam Darnall-Kramer and John Goude, Dining on the Wilds, six 60-minute videos with manual (Loma Linda, CA: Outdoor Eduquip, ).

9 World Survival Institute. Healing Plants, Poison Plants, 60- minutc video (World Survival Institute, PO Box 394, Tok, AK 99780, ).

10 We used Edible Wild Food Cards by Linda Runyon (Stamford, CT: U.S. Games Systems, ).

11 Peter Holmes, "Energetics ? ["Herbs," workshop presented at the International Herbal Symposium, Whcaton College, Norton, MA, 1998).

12 David Winston, "Talking Leaves: The Cherokec Language of Plants," workshop presented at the Green Nations Gathering, Pathwork Center, Phoenicia, NY, 1998.

13 Stephen Buhncr, Sacred Plant Medicine (Boulder, CO: Roberts Rinehart, 1996).

14 James Duke and Steven Foster, Kastern/ Central Medicinal Plants (Boston: FIoughton-Mifflin 1990). A Pelcrson field guide.

David Kowalewski is Professor of Environmental Studies at Alfred University and recently a Fulbright scholar in Kenya. His articles have appeared in Environmental Politics, Social Science Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is the author of Deep Power: The Political Ecology of Wilderness and Civilization (Nova Science, 2000).

Reprinted with permission from Educational Research Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 2, December 2002. For subscription information about the Educational Research Quarterly, contact a subscription service such as Ebsco, Swets, Blackwell, etc.

Copyright Green Teacher Fall 2004

More News in this Category