RELIEF FOR STRESSED OUT BUDGETS

My apologies for all the repetition in the past few blogs. I am doing this, quite frankly, to conveniently save writings that I will want to use for various purposes over the next year or so, in a place where I can find them easily. In each, I present much of the same information, but expressed in different ways. My suggestion to those of you who have been following these writings over the past months is to quickly scan a new blog to see if it says something in a way that catches your attention, or imagination, in a different way than was done before. If you find something particularly good, please let me know in a comment. That will help me decide which wording to choose for the introductory chapter of the new book I am working on. Thanks.

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Here is a press release I prepared this morning for the Edible Wild Plant Workshop we will be conducting on Saturday, August 9 at Lucky Penny Farm in Garrettsville OH. For more information and/or to register for it, contact Abbe Turner at 330 527 0548, or at luckypennyfarm@verizon.net. Last year it attracted over 170 people, of which 50 had to be turned away for lack of space. This year, there will be three two hour sessions starting at 9:00 a.m., so we can hopefully accommodate all who want to participate. To make sure you are one of them, however, please get your reservation in within the next couple of weeks.

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Life goes in cycles. There are years of plenty—plenty of food, plenty of money, low gas prices—and years where all the negatives seem to line up in a row and threaten to crush us, like now. High oil prices help us realize, by all the things in our life that now cost more, how much we depend on oil.

The result of all these increases? More and more people are finding that they don’t have enough income to pay rent AND buy food! Realities we never thought we’d face are now here and changing our priorities. We are beginning to look for help and at least some of the solutions relate to buying our food from local growers to save on transportation costs.

“At least part of the answer for providing food locally lies right outside our back door,” says Dr. Peter Gail, Director of Goosefoot Acres Center for Resourceful Living, in Cleveland OH. “It’s organic, free and there’s absolutely nothing more local than food growing 6 feet from your kitchen door.”

These vegetables grow in cracks between your patio stones, in your flower beds, plant containers, around the corners of your garage or barn, in your vegetable garden and in unsprayed lawns. And they are real vegetables—plants brought here over the last 200 years by our ancestors as food and medicine, and still used by the cultural groups that brought them, both here and in their homeland.

Up until now, we have called these plants “weeds”, and spent lots of time and money trying to kill them. And up till now, attempts to get us to recognize these plants as vegetables have fallen on deaf ears, because we didn’t need them. There were plenty of vegetables and fruits at reasonable prices on grocer’s shelves, and we had plenty of money to buy them.

But that’s not necessarily true any more. Times are getting tighter all over. Unpredictable weather has reduced crop availability below demand for many commodities. Fuel costs and scarcity are driving prices up, and adding to the stress on all of our budgets.

Gail says “The time has come to begin familiarizing ourselves with the foods around us. The problem, however, is which weeds are the true vegetables? How do we recognize them, and what do we do with them to make them really tasty after we know what they are? “

On August 9, at Lucky Penny Farm in Garrettsville, you will have a chance to find out. Gail and his staff will introduce you to eight or ten of the best wild vegetables, give you a chance to taste them raw and cooked into delicious dishes, and send you home with recipes.

Paying the rent AND supplying food in an economic crisis

In the Mormon Church, all members are strongly urged to store at least three months ---and ultimately a full year's supply-- of staples to fortify ourselves against whatever crises might occur in our lives.

Right now, the crisis seems to be that fuel costs so much that people can't pay for the gas to get to work AND for food to feed their family.

Those families that heeded this counsel and planned ahead are at least partially protected from this economic crisis. However, most people, even in the Mormon Church, are unaware that an abundance of food--locally grown, organic and free-- is right under their feet, just waiting to be of service.

From time immemorial, staples people store as food supplies have been white stuff --- flour, sugar, rice, beans, lard (source of fat or oil), milk (used to be the cow, now it is dry milk), oats, wheat, and so on.

Other than the rice and beans, this isn’t dinner—it is foundation! Anyone who lives on just this for any period of time is going to be seriously berift of basic vitamins and many of the minerals, especially the trace ones.

It is important to remember that the pioneers loading their wagons with bags of this stuff, and the settlers planting their roots in the West, didn’t intend this to be their only food. It was the bread, the pie crusts, the starches, the proteins, the fats, into which they would sandwich the berries, greens, meats and fish that they would harvest along the way and grow in their gardens and forage from the wild lands around them once they got settled.

Today’s society has largely drifted –no, better to say “hastened” or “rapidly run” ---away from a lifestyle that forages, hunts and grows their own, and then cooks from scratch. From the time women went to work in the early 1950's and got out of the kitchen (and garden), the door has been opened for processed and fast food purveyors to enter, so that now, in 2008, those in the under-50 crowd who know how, and actually enjoy, cooking are becoming rarer and rarer. It is easier to open a box, add water, heat and serve.

This crowd is in for a rude awakening, and it seems to be coming sooner rather than later.

I was listening to NPR as I woke up to birds singing and the sun rising at my grandson’s scout camp in Central Ohio recently. The newscaster, who was probably no more than 30 or 35 herself, was reporting that, with the increase in fuel prices cutting deeply into everyone’s pocketbook, many families are having to choose between paying the rent and buying food for their families. There just isn’t enough money to do both. And, so many are in this situation that Hunger Centers and Food Pantries are unable to keep up with the demand, and are having to send families home hungry.

Now, back in my childhood days, this is where the Superhero—Batman, Superman, Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman and the rest—would swoop in, eradicate the bad guys who were creating the problem, and return the system to the status quo.

So where are the superheros now? Frankly, we don’t need them. In Christian scripture, Matthew 6:24-34, Christ asks (paraphrased) “Why worry about what you will eat. Don’t I feed the sparrows and aren’t you more important than them. Seek first the Kingdom of God, and I will feed you”

So, if God is going to feed us, where is He hiding all that free food?

The answer is as simple as opening our eyes and looking around to see what has been invisible up to now. More specifically, stand on a proper untreated lawn—one that hasn't been treated with chemicals and still has all the plants in it —and look down at the ground beneath your feet. For, right there, in most cases, you will find between 4 and 6 vegetables that are tastier when prepared properly and more nutritious than anything you can buy in the store. During the Great Depression and World War II, when food was rationed or unavailable, many mothers fed their families very successfully on these plants.

Where did these vegetables come from? In most cases, they were brought to America by our ancestors, mostly at the behest of the emigration companies sponsoring them who would tell them to bring seeds of all the plants they valued for food and medicine with them, because who knew whether they would find them in this new land.

So dandelions, plantain, lambsquarters, red root pigweed, purslane and many other plants came with every shipload of immigrants. Plantain was so valuable that it traveled with them to every early English and Scottish settlement. Before they arrived, there had been no plantain. After, they were so common that the Natives called the plant “White Man’s Foot”.

The bottom line is that 80% of the plants we call weeds and pay millions for chemicals to eradicate each year are really the vegetables and medicines our ancestors made great sacrifices to bring here for us to have. Each group had different ones, however, and as the seeds escaped from their gardens, they entered other gardens in which the inhabitants didn’t know their value, and so to them they were a nuisance, and had to be eliminated.

Today, people walk by veritable patches of delicious produce and DON'T EVEN SEE THEM. They are totally invisible, just a mass of green. To test this recently, I found a patch containing jewelweed, plantain, violets, dandelions, oxalis and poke mingled together and asked a bunch of scouts and their leaders to look at the patch and tell me what they saw. Many couldn't even distinguish differences-- they all looked the same to them--- and none had any idea that any of them were actually food. (After all, none of them were wrapped in plastic!) What a surprise they had when they tasted the sour grass (Oxalis) and found out how good it was.

This is the sad situation we are currently in—not only don’t we know how to grow gardens or to cook from scratch and preserve foods for winter anymore, we don’t even know what is food and what isn’t!! Seems we have a lot of work in front of us.

The first thing we need to do is identify in our community all the old folks, especially the ethnics, for whom wild plants were important in their early years, and who still remember some or all of them. This isn’t hard to do. Just hop on a bus of seniors on a tour and ask ”How many of you have ever eaten dandelions?” Half the hands will go up. There you are—at least half of those will remember how to prepare them so they are tasty.

And I’ll guarantee you that most of those will jump at the chance to teach what they know if given an appreciative audience.

On August 9, 2008 at the Lucky Penny Farm in Garrettsville OH, we will be introducing people to this delicious produce. If you want to be one of the beneficiaries of this experience, call Abbe Turner at 330 527-0548 or email her at luckypennyfarm@verizon.net.

Organic, Locally Grown, and Free for the Harvesting:

Holden Arboretum scheduled me to teach a workshop in September, and have been hounding me for the description and a bio. I was in hospital this past weekend receiving a new stent so my blood will flow better, got out on Saturday afternoon, and, by God, the blood IS flowing better! When that happens, watch out. All kinds of ideas flow into my head. So from 12:30 a.m. to 2:15 a.m. , I reflected on what it is that I really stand for-- that I really feel strongly about-- and how it differs from what other edible wild plant educators do.

John Glass and I had begun this reflection as we returned from a lecture I gave for the 50th Anniversary of the Five County Home Economist Association in North Central Ohio about a month ago. John is a student of just about all of us that do this as our profession, and remarked that I am absolutely the best in the world at what I do, which is focus my instruction solely on the plants that were brought here by immigrants as food and medicine, and which we as humans can rely on being underfoot when and if our world collapses around us and we have to make do with the resources surrounding us. And, because I do that, I am providing my students with more actually useful information and skills than most of the rest of them. That is because they provide too much information about too many plants, many of which aren't those occurring abundantly and, in general, over a long useful season of availability. People come away from my classes knowing well only 8 or 10 wild edibles, but they are those that will be there for them if they are needed.

Well, this morning, with all that fresh blood flowing to my brain, I pulled it all together into what I suppose will be the first draft of my thesis statement, and present it in the form of a class description, accompanied by my biography. Here, for whatever it is worth, it is:

"Eighty percent of the “weeds” we kill each spring aren’t weeds at all– they are vegetables and medicinals immigrants brought with them to America because they didn’t want to live here without them. Most were well known until the late1940's, when the American lifestyle underwent a drastic change into a buying economy.

Today we complain about the prices of fruits and vegetables while walking over ones that are more nutrient-dense and tasty, every time we go out into the yard. Emerson said “Weeds are plants for which we have not yet discovered a use.” The truth is that “Weeds are plants for which we have forgotten their uses, and because of this, they have become invisible to us.”

Nowdays, it is only in certain places around the United States that you can find locals celebrating the coming of spring with Poke, Ramp and Dandelion Festivals, Germans cooking up Dandelion dinners for 300 people on a Saturday and German mothers serving Dandelion Gravies at their dinner table. Or Greek mothers cooking up Horta, Egyptian mothers stirring a big pot of Melokhia Mallow Soup, Mexican mothers sauteeing a pot of Verdolago con queso, or an Eastern European mixing up a pot of Sorrel Soup with Sour Cream. These are but a few of the many delicious ethnic dishes based around a common plant we have come to call a "weed" ( or, in some cases, " weeds") as the basic ingredient.

With food prices climbing sky-high, and some food becoming largely inaccessible, the time has come to re-familiarize ourselves with this organic, locally grown produce that nature provides us “free for nothin’” except the labor to harvest it.

On September 27, from 1-3 p.m. Dr. Peter Gail, USA Today’s “King of Dandelions”and Good Morning America’s ‘Wizard of Weeds,” will, through Powerpoint presentation and field experiences, reconnect you to these foods, with samples of dishes made from many of them for you to try. His books containing recipes for them all will be available for sale.

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Dr. Peter Gail is Director of Goosefoot Acres Center for Resourceful Living in Cleveland Ohio. He earned his Ph.D. in Botany from Rutgers University, and has spent the last 47 years studying how various cultures use backyard weeds as food and medicine. He is the author of numerous articles and eight books on edible wild plants, including The Goosefoot Acres Volunteer Vegetable Sampler: Recipes for Backyard Weeds, The Dandelion Celebration: A Guide to Unexpected Cuisine, The Great Dandelion Cookbook: Recipes from the National Dandelion Cookoffs and Then Some, The Delightful Delicious Daylily: Recipes and More, Violets in Your Kitchen, and Those Messy Mulberries. . He has shared his delight with wild vegetables on ABC-TV's “Good Morning America,” Lifetime TV's "The Home Show", and on the Food Television Network, as well as being Cleveland TV-5's The Morning Exchange's "Wizard of Weeds" for five years. He founded and, for 10 years, conducted, the National Dandelion Cookoff, which is held in Dover Ohio the first weekend in May each year, and draws up to 14,000 people a year to learn more about dandelions. USA Today called him the "King of Dandelions.” Good Morning America dubbed him “The Wizard of Weeds.” California State Polytechnic University’s School of Science named him its Distinguished Alumnus of the Year in 1979, and he was inducted into the National Wild Food Hall of Fame in 2000 for his work in popularizing the eating of wild plants throughout the United States.

He lives with his wife, Wilma, in Cleveland Heights, OH. They have three children and five grandchildren. "

That about sums it up. Now to get out there and harvest, process and cook up these ethnic dishes and make some converts.

What's Missing in Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable and Miracle?

This week I got into Barbara Kingsolver’s "Animal Vegetable and Miracle", a book about , among other things, feeding yourself from locally produced goods, using just what is in season or that you have preserved for overwintering to get you to the next productive season.

Haven’t read very far yet– just through Waiting for Asparagus but already the red "Uh,oh" flags are flying, and I’ve got to speak up.

Toward the end of that chapter, the family of four decides to embark on their year of eating locally produced foods, and sit around near the end of April making a shopping list. Lamenting at the skimpy choices they anticipate they will have, they then go to the local farmer’s market to put together their ingredient list out of which they will make their breakfast, lunches and dinners for that week.

Surprisingly, they do pretty well - turkey sausages, baby lettuces, hulled walnuts, honey, even down to fresh rhubarb stalks to substitute for fruit early in the season. In return for all this, they part with a significant amount of money.. For you see, they are equating feeding themselves with buying stuff.

The problem is that they are starting later than they have to, and are overlooking a wealth of vegetables that are locally grown, organic and free. They tickle with the edges of it by watching for the wild asparagus, as well as that growing in their own garden, but in combing the greenery for asparagus stalks, they are passing by a ton of equally delicious and nutrient-dense vegetables that are growing voluntarily right under foot.

In SW Virginia, by early March there will be still root crops such as dandelion, burdock, yellow dock and cattail, as well as duck potato and daylily tubers. By later in March to early April, we’re looking at young dandelion greens (which sometimes are available at the farmers markets) wild onions and garlic, chickweed, ground ivy, young garlic mustard, young violets, daylily shoots, and a range of young wild lettuces and other composites that go great in salads. These not only provide fresh greens, but are so rich nutritionally that they both drive out the toxins built up over winter as well as replenish stored nutrients depleted through the winter months.

This is a great failing of Slow Food USA, and to a lesser extent SFI. They give lip service to foraging, and provide a forum for discussing it that are well attended at Terra Madre conferences, especially by the First Nation delegates , and some of the elitist chef’s who subscribe to SF principles forage or buy wild ingredients for their menus, but it is treated as an afterthought, not a mainstream topic for consideration. There is far too much emphasis on things you have to plant and grow, and then buy from farmers, and far too little on things that grow in everybody’s yard voluntarily that you just have to stoop down and harvest.

This will be a year to move these elements to the forefront, along with the practitioners of the culinary wild food arts who teach it around the world. Watch for more.

Edibleweeds.com is in Transition

Greetings, everyone

The company hosting my edibleweeds.com site discontinued service, and created a need for me to finally update the site, which I hadn't worked on since 2004. All things happen for a purpose, right?

I have redirected you, at least temporarily, to my blog site which contains much that you might find interesting. Here you will find

• essays written on the current state of edible wild plant research and teaching
• reviews of books on edible and medicinal plants
• answers to questions asked by people on Forage Ahead, WildForager2, Herbbusiness and other listservs of which I am part
• random musings on events happening in my life and with my family that I wanted to record in my journal.
• press releases on events I am involved with

I know, it is sort of random, and I am long winded, but if you browse through the offerings, I suspect you might find things that are useful to you.

Soon, I will restructure this blog, and probably restructure and republish the edibleweeds.com website with a different host to include not only appropriate blog entries, but information about my schedule as well. Keep visiting to read my latest. When it is restructured, you will know. One day you will visit and everything will be changed. Until then, I hope you have fun here.

For information, and to order our products and books, visit www.dandyblend.com . Go to the bottom of the home page (or the page on 'Dandelion Information" if your computer runs over the bottom copy on the home page), click on "Browse Catalog" and that will take you to the Dandy Blend products and Peter Gail's books on dandelions and edible wild plants in general. That site is also undergoing upheavals, and within a month or so will be completely redesigned, so come along on the adventure with us.

Peter Gail, Ph.D.

INTEREST WILL SOON INCREASE IN FORAGING

For the last week or so we have been responding to a posting on the ForageAhead listserv about friends who consider foraging a useless pursuit. The sentence below from one of the posts pretty well summarizes the issue members have been responding to.

"I must say I have meet some that think that wild edible plants is a pointless study. After all, we have modern technology to get processed food to depend on."

I finally put my oar in. My response follows:
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At first, I thought this thread about clueless people was rather pointless itself, but the more it continues, the more I realize that it is simply a matter of American short-sightedness, especially among people under 60 who have never really been through bad times, like wars or depressions that have actually inconvenienced them in any way. They can't imagine a worse-case scenario that would cause them to go hungry, and have never read any of the stories, or journal entries, of those who had gone from wealthy to having nothing during the Great Depression, and having to find and use ALL the resources the good Lord has placed here for us simply to stay alive. That was when dandelions, lambsquarters, purslane, plantain, burdock and all the wild fruits were abruptly brought to their attention, because that was all they had.

In many cases, it was one person in the community, or at least just a few, who would let people who were hungry know that "You can eat lambsquarters, and they will keep you full until times get better" like a friend told my mother after my father died in 1948. We had avoided the ravages of rationing by my father having the foresight to plant vegetables and soft fruit plants, and buy chickens and a cow back in 1940, so we had enough of most things for ourselves, and a few extra to sell to neighbors. But we were in Southern California, and didn't have the Midwestern drought problems.

Today, younger people can't begin to imagine why they would ever want to, or even have to, forage. I sense they will soon, and then, since Americans, while hugely short-sighted, are generally resourceful, their interest will turn toward learning what to forage for, how to forage, and how to prepare it. You will be amazed at how fast people who were totally disinterested a week or a month ago suddenly can think of nothing else, and suddenly view what you have to teach them as being incredibly useful and valuable.

It is already beginning to happen. I am finding far more interest in my workshops now than has been the case since 1998 and 1999, when people were responding to the Y2K scare, and were coming out in droves for my classes. People respond to stimuli, and when the stimuli aren't there, their priorities are elsewhere-- they don't waste time on what they don't actually need in the immediate future, unless it is some new electronic gadget, which they actually don't need AT ALL!

So get ready. Flour has gone from $9.00/50 lbs to $32.00/50 lbs in the last year, and is being rationed by Sam's Club and Costco, and people are just now becoming aware of how this might threaten their future. It won't be long before foraging will no longer be "obtuse." It isn't just journalists who look for different "angles" for a story, or politicians who are concerned with what "spin" to put on an issue, or a position. Mainstream America very easily shifts their perspective on an issue when a persuasive enough stimulus-- one that suggests some potential future disruption or discomfort in their life-- threatens to upset their status quo. and conveniently completely forget that, to them, less than a week ago, foraging was strongly perceived as being "pointless."

From a crass commercial standpoint (that "indelicate" issue we have been addressing also about what to charge for lessons), those of us who teach edible wild plants can begin to capitalize upon the uneasiness the media is creating with stories about rationing and the increase in grain prices because of the shift to growing more corn instead of wheat because it is more profitable to sell corn for the making of ethanol. What we have to offer will also progressively become increasingly valuable as "processed" food becomes progressively more scarce and they have to drop back to old ways of doing things-- planting a garden, harvesting, canning, cooking from scratch with basic staples like flour, salt, rice, oats, powdered milk, vegetable oil and others, supplemented with greens, berries, fish and meat they can find in the area surrounding them.

Offer and publicize the classes. People will come-- a few at first, and then in increasing numbers. "Obtuse" will soon be a thing of the past.

Peter Gail


Peter A. Gail, Ph.D.President/DirectorGoosefoot Acres Center for Resourceful Living3283 E. Fairfax Road, Cleveland OH 44118 http://www.dandyblend.com/ 216-932-2145 Orders: 800-697-4858

Dandelions, Chocolate and a "Sweet Movie"

Dandelions, chocolate, and a movie. What in the world do these three have in common?

Properly roasted dandelion roots taste just like coffee, but lack caffeine, bitterness and acidity. They are, however, loaded with trace minerals and other nutrients, making them very healthy. Dr. Peter Gail, internationally renown ethno-botanist whom USA Today calls the "King of Dandelions," says "Dandelions are the perfect complement for chocolate when you use the right part and prepare it the right way. The part is the long tap root. The preparation is to roast it gently until it is a deep, dark brown and, when the oven door is cracked open, smells like sweet hot chocolate and coffee combined ."

Gail manufactures and distributes the only instant coffee substitute in the United States containing roasted dandelion root, which he calls Dandy Blend. Several years ago, it captured the interest of Dr. Andrea Levinson (Stern), a former holistic health practitioner in Russell Township, Geauga County, OH and an ardent advocate of the medicinal value of dandelions.

Levinson is author and executive producer of the alternately witty and introspective new independent feature film "Death, Taxes and Chocolates," in which a holistic doctor and five Babyboomer friends float out to sea and on into eternity on Doc’s elegant yacht, surrounded by obscene quantities of their favorite chocolates and chocolaty concoctions. Her lead character, a holistic doctor (mostly autobiographical of Levinson,) grows dandelions in any available space, and calls them "little sunshine gifts from God." Her classic line in the movie script: "Hey, if you men knew how fantastic dandelions are for your SEX ORGAN, AND THEY'RE FREE! NO ONE should ever spray their lawns to get rid of them! They're loaded with nutrients... great for diabetics!"

That explains the dandelions and the movie, but where do the chocolates come in?

Dr. Levinson says that Dandy Blend is a great way to combine the health-promoting benefits of dandelion and chocolate at the same time." I recommend Dandy Blend to most of my patients. You can take the packets with you, and simply pour them into hot or cold water or milk and stir. It is particularly delicious mixed into chocolate, making an exquisite mocha latte or cappuchino." As we all know, coffee mixed with chocolate makes Mocha. If you want a HEALTHY mocha, simply substitute roasted dandelion root for the coffee. Dandy Blend makes this incredibly easy to do.

"Death, Taxes and Chocolates" was recently selected for the prestigious New York Independent Film Festival, with screenings in New York and Los Angeles later this year. It will be premiered in Cleveland on May 8 at the Cedar-Lee Theater, and will be showcased at the 1st annual Northeastern Ohio Chocolate Festival on Saturday and Sunday May 10 and 11 at the Cleveland Heights Community Center Pavilion. Showings at the Cedar-Lee Theater (2163 Lee Rd, Cleveland Heights, OH) will be at 6:30 and 8:20 p.m. Each will be followed by a reception at Jimmy O’Neill’s, 2195 Lee Rd. The movie will also be shown at various times throughout the Chocolate Festival. Dandy Mocha –delicious combinations of Dandy Blend and chocolate– will be available for sampling and purchase at the receptions and the Festival.

For more information about the Festival and the movie, and for advance sale tickets, visit http://www.neochocolatefestival.com or call Adrienne Roth at 216-321 5253.

Dandy Blend is available at many health and natural food stores in Ohio, and at Zagara’s Marketplace in Cleveland Heights. You may also visit www.dandyblend.com or call 800-697-4858.