|  In modern society, there is a tendency to see no correlation between the struggle for collective black self-recovery and ecological movements that seek to restore balance to the planet by changing our relationship to nature and to natural resources. Unmindful of our history of living harmoniously on the land, many contemporary black folks see no value in supporting ecological movements, or see ecology and the struggle to end racism as competing concerns. Recalling the legacy of our ancestors who knew that the way we regard land and nature will determine the level of our self-regard, black people must reclaim a spiritual legacy where we connect our well-bring to the well-being of the earth. This is a necessary dimension of healing.
bell hooks Lets face it: it is very difficult to survive in the wilderness eating only plants. Think of wild herbivores. They spend almost all of their time eating, because the caloric density of their food is so low. Chris Morasky, Lessons of Stone Age Living, Bulletin of Primitive Technology (No. 21, Spring 2001), 79-82, does the math like this. A one-pound bag of tortilla chips contains 2240 calories. A pound of fresh biscuitroot (Lomatium cous) contains 577 calories, and that is high compared to many other wild plants. On a strenuous survival trip, you can easily burn 7000 calories a day. That means that the amount of plant food necessary per day for survival can reach fifteen pounds or more. That also means that, like an herbivore, you can spend most of the day foraging, and the rest of the day forcing yourself to eat the damn stuff. With that said, there are lots of good reasons to learn to find plant food in the wilderness. First, wild plants often taste good, and can provide a culinary accompaniment to other food, whether packed in or caught in the wild. Euell Gibbons once cooked a meal for Craig Claybourne, the food editor of The New York Times, which consisted of a cocktail made of wild fruit juices, batter-fried fillets of bluegill caught that morning at a nearby lake, sautιed dandelion crowns, buttered wild leeks, wild broccoli, buttered wild Jerusalem artichokes and a persimmon-hickory nut pie. The meal was accompanied by a salad of wild watercress, wild mint, and day lily shoots. Not bad. Second, wild plants are nutritious, and, over the long term, a diet rich in plants is most likely to prevent dietary deficiencies and keep you just generally healthy. Third, although you can, if necessary, go without food for a long time, in a genuine survival situation a knowledge of edible plants can extend the survival time significantly. Fourth, in a survival situation, the ability to procure food from the environment provides a psychological boost, helps structure survival efforts, enhances self-confidence, and thus can increase the overall likelihood of survival. Finally, gathering plant food from the wilderness is another way of getting back to our primal human roots, learning again about our relationship to the earth, and beginning to see once more how we are part of a greater whole.
 Bradford Angier, Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants (Harrisburg PA: Stackpole Books, 1974), ISBN 0-8117-2018-7. Despite the title, this is not a field guide. This is an alphabetical directory of 116 plants, arranged from acorn to yellow water lily. Each entry has a very clear color drawing, and gives the plant's family, other names, description, distribution, and a discussion of its edibility that is, the edible parts, and an occasional hint on preparation. It is thus hard to know just what this book is for. Say you come across a plant in the wilderness, and you want to know whether you can eat it for dinner, or if it will make you curl up into a small ball of intestinal misery for three days. If you do not know its name, then you are reduced to comparing it one by one to the pictures in the book, to try to see if it matches. Of course, a perfectly edible specimen may not resemble the picture in the book if you are looking at it during a different season; and a poisonous plant may resemble the picture of an edible one. If you know its name, the book does have an index of common names but no index of scientific names so you'd better hope that the name you know is one of the names in the index. There is not a clue as to where any of the information in this book comes from, or if it is reliable. What a shame. With a little more effort, this book could have been useful.
 David Arora, All That the Rain Promises, and More: A Hip Pocket Guide to Western Mushrooms (Berkeley CA: Ten Speed Press, 1991), ISBN 0898153883. This book is written by a deranged professional horn player who loves mushrooms, and who here lists two hundred distinctive western mushrooms with full-color natural habitat photographs, accompanied on the same page by concise, easy-to-read lists of their key identifying features, and where to find them. It is filled with stories, cooking tips, brief essays on cultural attitudes, and identification keys that are usable in the field. And it fits in your pocket. Arora is also the author of the 1000-page encyclopedic Mushrooms Demystified: A Comprehensive Guide to the Fleshy Fungi (Berkeley CA: Ten Speed Press, 2nd edition, 1986), ISBN 0898151694.
 Steve Brill, Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not so Wild) Places (New York NY: Hearst Books, 1994), ISBN 0-688-11425-3. This is a large book, with more than 300 pages, each 8 1/2" x 11", so you will not be tossing it into your backpack. It has more than 260 black-and-white pencil sketches, which are sometimes more artistic than clear. What is most impressive about the book is its organization. The major sections are arranged by season mid-spring, summer, autumn, late fall through early spring, and early spring; and then, within each season, by location meadows, disturbed areas, fields, woodlands, freshwater wetlands, mountains. This is thus clearly a book for foraging. It is summer, you are going into a forest area, and the book tells you what you can bring home for dinner cherries, juneberries, mayapples, mulberries. Each entry has a sketch sometimes several sketches, for different species and a lengthy discussion of what to look for and how to cook it. The discussions are thorough and invariably interesting. This is not really a book for wilderness survival; its intended audience is more those urban- and suburbanites who want to forage in nearby fields, and bring food home to the kitchen. There is an appendix of recipes, and an index of both common and scientific names. The author is clearly in love with what he is doing.
 Thomas Elias, et al., Edible Wild Plants: A North American Field Guide (New York NY: Sterling Publishing, 1990), ISBN 0-8069-7488-5. The first thing you notice about this book are the wonderful color photographs. The plants are arranged by season, with a helpful seasonal key in the front of the book, giving descriptions, range maps, and habitats. Thus, if you are foraging in the autumn, and you find a shrub with yellow flowers and simple leaves, and you are in the Northeast, it might be either the common barberry or the spice bush, depending on where it is growing, and you can check them both out on page 218. There is an index of both common and scientific names. Once you locate the correct entry, the book sets out, briefly, the plant's habitat, identification, harvest, preparation, related edible species, and most helpfully any poisonous look-alikes. The book also provides a helpful section on poisonous plants, and a very useful introduction. The book is a size that can fit into a backpack, although the coated paper, which makes the color photographs so clear, adds significantly to its weight. This is one of the best field guides out there.
 Thomas Elpel, Botany in a Day: Thomas J. Elpel's Herbal Field Guide to Plant Families (Pony MT: HOPS Press, 2001), ISBN 1-89278-407-6. The author, director of the Hollowtop Outdoor Primitive School, has come up with a way to learn about the practical uses of plants. It is not really botany, and it will certainly take more than a day, but the idea is straightforward: the members of plant families share certain common features that make them similarly useful; the most important identification for a plant is of its family and genus, not its species; it is not hard to figure out what family, and often what genus, a plant is in. Most people can readily recognize, say, plants from the mint family, because they have square stalks, opposite leaves, and smell minty; this book generalizes on that principle. You still have to memorize things, such as that members of the gentian family are plants with opposite leaves and tubular flowers with four or five parts, but such a formula covers seventy genera and 1100 species many of which contain bitter principles that stimulate the digestive system. Similarly, once you recognize that a plant with squarish stalks, opposite leaves, no petals, and often stinging hairs belongs to the stinging nettle family, you also know there is a reasonable chance the plant is edible and has strong fibers for making cordage. This is far from a field guide, but it is a very helpful way of organizing botanical knowledge for practical use in the field.
 David Fischer, et al., Edible Wild Mushroom of North America (Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 1992), ISBN 0-292-75126-5. This is a beautiful book, a little too big for the backpack, but illustrated with striking color photographs of more than a hundred species of the best-tasting North American mushrooms. The mushrooms are organized by type chanterelles, gilled mushrooms, boletes, tooth mushrooms, coral-shaped, club-shaped, and cauliflower-shaped mushrooms, shelflike mushrooms, puffballs, morels, and jelly fungi. Each entry gives the mushroom's key identifying characteristics, description, fruiting, similar species, and edibility. There are separate chapters on poisonous mushrooms and mushroom poisoning, and seventy gourmet recipes. The recipes for example, for curried cashew chicken and grayling salad are not likely to be helpful in a survival situation, but they give a good idea of the range of uses to which edible mushrooms can be put, even in the wilderness. There is a helpful introduction on mushroom collecting, how to examine a mushroom, and how to make a spore print. The book is correctly and modestly subtitled A Field-to-Kitchen Guide, rather than a field guide; used in conjunction with a good field guide, this is an excellent approach to correct identification and preparation.
 Euell Gibbons, Stalking the Wild Asparagus (Chambersburg PA: Alan C. Hood, 1987), ISBN 0-911469-03-6. Euell Gibbons is, first and foremost, a cook who enjoys making delicious food salads, casseroles, breads, cakes, muffins, pies, jellies, jams, teas, juices, wines. The fact that you can get the ingredients for free, in the wild, is a bonus. This book, probably his most famous, is a series of literate essays on wild foods, arranged alphabetically from acorns to winter cress, and along the way discussing blackberries, burdock, elderberries, milkweed, pigweed, sassafras, walnuts, and a lot more. Each essay discusses the plant's history, description, and, above all, preparation, lovingly detailed. This is not a survival manual; the book assumes that, once you have gathered the plants, you will have something like a kitchen to cook them in, along with appropriate seasonings. You can make a wild mushroom salad in the wilderness, but you are unlikely to have the garlic, sweet red pepper, scallions, olive oil, and vinegar the author recommends. Still, the book is full of ideas, and, if nothing else, can reassure you that you can not only eat but eat well in the wilderness.
 Wendy C. Hodgson, Food Plants of the Sonoran Desert (Tucson AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2000), ISBN 0816520607. The author, a research botanist and herbarium curator at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona, presents information on nearly 540 edible plants used by people of more than fifty traditional cultures of the Sonoran Desert and peripheral areas. Remarkably, fully a fifth of the plants found in the desert are edible, and have numerous practical uses. The book includes discussion of gourds, legumes, palms, lilies, and cattails; each species entry lists recorded names and describes indigenous uses: the agave, for example, is cited for its use as food, alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages, syrup, fiber, cordage, clothing, sandals, nets, blankets, lances, fire hearths, musical instruments, hedgerows, soap, and medicine, and for ceremonial purposes. The agave entry also includes information on harvesting, roasting, and consumption and on distinguishing between edible and inedible varieties. This is a book directly relevant to survival situations in any desert environment.
 Kelly Kindscher, Edible Wild Plants of the Prairie: An Ethnobotanical Guide (Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas, 1988), ISBN 0-70060-325-5. Based on historical and archaeological evidence, interviews, personal experience in preparing and eating these foods, and an eighty-day walk across Kansas and eastern Colorado, this book discusses in detail how 122 plant species were used as food by the indigenous and immigrant residents of the North American prairie bioregion, including chokecherries, soapweed, lambsquarter, ground cherry, prairie turnip, and prickly pear. The ethnobotanical account of food use includes information on the parts of the plants used, harvesting, propagation, preparation, and taste of the plants. Each entry includes a line drawing and botanical description of the plant; its common, American Indian, and scientific names; its distribution and habitat; and a discussion of food uses and cultivation. This is not a field guide and not intended to be; but the historical and ethnobotanical information it gives is invaluable.
 Christopher Nyerges, Guide to Wild Foods and Useful Plants (Chicago IL: Chicago Review Press, 1999), ISBN 1-55652-344-0 The author is a well-known survival instructor and writer, who has appeared, with his wife, on the cover of Mother Earth News the survival equivalent of being on the cover of Rolling Stone. This book is an alphabetical listing of 71 plants, from agave to yucca, including chickweed, chicory, dandelion, fennel, grass, milkweed, nasturtium, prickly pear, thistle, and yarrow. Each entry has a black-and-white outline drawing, which unfortunately is sometimes short on usable detail; there are photographs throughout showing Nyerges, his friends, and his students engaged in various outdoor activities. Some of the photographs are of plants. Each entry discusses the plant's most prominent characteristics, including overall shape and size, stalks, leaves, flowers, and fruit; where it is found, and its growing cycle; the plant's beneficial properties, including edibility, medicinality, and practicality; and the plant's detrimental properties. This is a very practical way of describing the plant. There is an index of common and scientific names, a helpful illustrated glossary of plant terms, and a series of keys to leaf shapes, fruits, and seeds, which at least gives you a start at identifying the plant you are deciding whether or not to eat. The most important thing about this book is its very practical down-to-earth orientation; it is clearly a book for living and surviving in the wild, not gourmet cooking.
 Beverly Ortiz, It Will Live Forever: Traditional Yosemite Indian Acorn Preparation (Berkeley CA: Heyday Books, 1991), ISBN 0-93058-845-2. Acorns are everywhere, they are nutritious, but especially in the mountain west they can be so bitter as to be inedible. But California Native Americans used acorn as a staple food, and still revere it. For over twenty years visitors to Yosemite National Park have watched with fascination as Julia Parker demonstrated the Yosemite Miwok-Paiute skill of preparing acorns. This beautifully photographed book describes every step of this intricate process, using the traditional Native American tools of granite mortar and sand pit and the modern way with a blender and kitchen sink. Just as important, the book is a testament to Parker, and her rediscovery, after years of government-sponsored Indian Schools, the life skills and spirituality of her people. One must create a relationship with the tree, she says; one must understand the ground which cherishes the fruit so lovingly. The book not only discusses how to make acorns so that you can actually eat and enjoy them; it places the process of food preparation into its cultural, social, and spiritual context.
 Lee Peterson, A Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants of Eastern and Central North America (New York NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), ISBN 0-395-31870-X. Now this is a field guide. It is small enough to toss in a backpack. It has an index of common and scientific names. It gives lists of plants according to where they are found seashores, running water, still water, swamps, disturbed ground, spruce-fir woods, alpine tundra, moist woods, thickets. Most important, it organizes the plants by visual impressions. Flowering plants are organized according to flower color and subdivided according to such features as number of petals, arrangement of flowers, and shape and position of leaves; woody plants are organized according to their leaf types (needlelike, daggerlike, opposite compound, opposite simple, and so on) and subdivided according to such features as the size and habit of the mature plant, shape of leaves, and type of fruit. Each plant entry has clear black-and-white outline drawings showing all significant features flowers, leaves, roots, stems, berries - and a text entry giving names, description, where found, flowers, fruits, and use. The use section is very brief, with no recipes, but very helpful; specific directions for making cereals, fritters, jams, teas, flour, and other uses are given in a separate chapter. There are 78 color photographs in addition to the more than 400 drawings. The only drawback is the geographic limitation to eastern and central North America. If you can get used to the key system, this is definitely the book to take with you into the wilderness.
 Nancy Turner, Food Plants of Coastal First Peoples (Seattle WA: University of Washington Press, 1995), ISBN 0-77480-533-1. This book describes more than a hundred plants, including seaweeds and ferns, used for food by the native peoples of coastal British Columbia. Each description includes a color photograph and botanical details, as well as information on the plant's habitat, coastal distribution, and how it was used. The information is based on historical records and contemporary interviews. This is not a field guide, but rather the very best sort of ethnobotany detailed, well informed, and sympathetic. The author has also written a companion volume, Food Plants of Interior First Peoples (Seattle WA: University of Washington Press, 1997), ISBN 0-77480-606-0, discussed below, and a text on plant technology, Plant Technology of First Peoples in British Columbia (Vancouver BC: University of British Columbia, 1999), ISBN 0-774-80687-7.
 Nancy J. Turner, Food Plants of Interior First Peoples (Seattle WA: University of Washington Press, 1997), ISBN 0-77480-606-0. This revised edition describes and illustrates 150 food plants used by the peoples indigenous to the interior of British Columbia and northern Washington, including the Stl'atl'imx (Lillooet), Secwepemc (Sushwap), Nlaka'pamux (Thompson), Okanagan, Ktunaxa (Kootenay), Tsimshian and Athapaskan groups. Each entry includes a color photograph of the plant, its common and scientific names, a botanical description, a description of its preferred habitat and common geographic distribution, and how native peoples harvested, prepared, and preserved the roots, leaves, fruits and other parts of the wild plants. The book also discusses the use of nonnative food plants and species considered poisonous or inedible. The book also includes information on how to prepare the food in traditional ways for example, it explains in detail how to make flour from the inner bark of the western hemlock as well as stories related to particular plants. The author has also written a companion volume, Food Plants of Coastal First Peoples (Seattle WA: University of Washington Press, 1995), ISBN 0-77480-533-1, discussed above, and a text on plant technology, Plant Technology of First Peoples in British Columbia (Vancouver BC: University of British Columbia, 1999), ISBN 0-774-80687-7.
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