The goal of Phytosophy is to present the topic of urban foraging in a digestible manner to an audience totally unfamiliar with the concept while also being a source of information useful for anyone interested in foraging. The goal isn’t to convince every person to go out and start looking for edible plants, it’s to expose people to the idea of wild food and hopefully inspire a few to pursue it further.
Since the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago humans have inadvertently stripped their food of nutrients in favor of flavor, size, color, and longevity. It was an understandable thing to do—why wouldn’t we want better tasting and more attractive produce? Thousands of years ago humans didn’t know the phytochemicals that made green vegetables bitter or fruit sour are also those that are best for your health. Each season when a farmer would grow their crops from the seeds of their sweetest or starchiest plants the previous season, a little bit more antioxidants and minerals were lost. This happened over and over, for all produce. While having higher starch produce was tastier and beneficial when society required physical labor from most, it’s an unhealthy balance for our now generally sedentary way of living. The wild plants that our modern day cultivars are derived from are generally smaller and always more nutrient dense. Take wild strawberries (Fragaria virginiana, not the mock strawberry Duchesnea indica), for example: these small fruits are packed with vitamin C and contain more pelargonidin (the antioxidant that makes it red) by the cup than cultivated strawberries despite being significantly smaller in size.
To quote Hippocrates, “Let food be thy medicine and let medicine be thy food.” While this is a concept that our culture has entirely left, it is still a general concurrence amongst health professionals: eat your veggies and your fruit. But the nutrient content of those fruits and vegetables entirely depends on the variety, how long it’s been since harvest, and the flavor profile. While choosing heirloom tomatoes over the perfectly round bright red ones might seem like an unnecessarily bougie thing to do, there is no argument that the former, less cultivated option is better for your health. The longer produce sits around or is in travel, the more its phytochemical composition degrades; additionally, produce from the grocery store is bred to have longer shelf life and to be firmer in order to reduce damage during transportation. Something you bought from the store might last in your fridge for maybe a week while lamb’s quarters (wild spinach) would continue to be fresh well over a month after harvest. The flavor profile of produce also matters: the sweeter it is, the more glucose and less phytonutrients there are. Take corn, for example—after years of corn having already lost significant nutrient content from being bred to be white instead of yellow because it was somehow more aesthetically pleasing, in 1959, a geneticist accidently mutated corn to be up to ten times sweeter than the original corn. He became a farmer overnight and the rest is history; the modern day corn we find in stores today is pretty much entirely sweet and can contain up to 40% glucose. At this point the only way to have corn that is truly good for you is to seek out rainbow varieties originally grown by North American natives, which are generally only sold for decoration.
In addition to having less nutrients than what vegetables and fruit should have, modern day produce products from big agriculture have been genetically engineered for herbicide tolerability and pest resistance. While GMOs have been shown to not have negative effects on humans in the short term, no one can know for sure what consuming fruit capable of killing insects throughout a lifetime does to the body. Not only this, but the fact that herbicide tolerability (not getting chemically burnt by herbicides) is a trait they seek shows the levels that they employ. Escaping genetically modified food is impossible unless one only buys organic or local produce, which is something that most do not have the resources for.
Each vegetable and fruit we eat today has a history similar to corn. None of this is to say that breeding for specific traits or agriculture is a bad thing. It’s a necessity for civilization, without produce made to be mass grown there simply wouldn’t be enough food. But beyond simple supply and demand, corporations have cut corners in order to make more profit despite being aware of the effects. As a society we’ve lost connection to what we’re putting into our bodies which is exactly what the thousands of food corporations want because the less we question, the more likely we are to buy.
The solution? Self cultivation, buying local, and foraging. Not everyone has the space or resources to start a garden but anyone is capable of learning what a certain plant looks like and searching or simply keeping an eye out for it. While basing your entire diet on self cultivated and foraged food is unrealistic unless you live on a homestead and have a lot of time, introducing any wild food into your diet is beneficial even if it’s an occasional effort. Buying produce from a farmer’s market or stand will ensure high quality while you support local businesses. Winter is a hard time of year to continue eating wild or local food unless it was preserved by pickling or lacto-fermentation when in season. Very few foragers, if any, are able to fully sustain themselves over the colder months without the assistance of a grocery store. This is all to say that in order to be a forager, every meal you eat doesn’t need to include something you personally harvested. For example, considering it’s now winter and I’m a college student, I generally have one meal with a foraged component on a weekly (but soon monthly) basis. Being a forager is simply a state of mind of always looking.
Sources:
https://ensia.com/articles/wild-greens/
https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/07/19/loss-of-genetic-diversity-in-u-s-food-crops/
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/09/health-benefit-eating-weeds/