The Survival Foraging Field Guide

What's inside

• A method before a catalog: name it twice over, two different ways. Never by one feature, one photo or one app.
• Fifty-plus edible plants in color photos, a short list of distinctive, beginner-friendly mushrooms, and wild medicinal herbs presented as traditional use.
• Look-alike spreads that put the dangerous plant next to the edible one, with the detail that tells them apart.
• Organized by the season you'll find them, with a section on foraging the towns and suburbs where most of us live.
• Half the job is finding it. The other half is here too: drying, freezing, fermenting and cellaring what you gather.
• A calorie-honest look at wild food, so you know what will feed a household and what's only greens.
• A seasonal calendar, regional notes, quick keys, a glossary and an index.

Supplement your stored food, don't replace it

Wild food is not going to replace your stored food. Anybody who tells you that you'll "live off the land" is selling something, usually a course. I have fed my family from the wild for more than thirty years, and I have never once lived off the land, and I don't know anyone honest who has. The woods are generous in May and stingy in February. A good patch of nettles is a real pot of greens, and the most nourishing wild plant you'll cook all spring; it still isn't a grocery run.

What wild food does is stretch what you have. It turns ninety days of rice and beans into a hundred and twenty. It puts greens on the table the week the produce aisle is bare and the next truck is two days out. It gives you options in the exact moment options are what you don't have. Think of it as the bottom layer of your food security, under the pantry, under the chest freezer, under the garden. The layer that doesn't need a working supply chain, a paycheck, or a power grid to fill.

From Chapter 1, Why Wild Food, Why Now, The Survival Foraging Field Guide