This book is a practical forager’s guide for everyday use. It includes identification tips, details of traditional usage, nutritional benefits and health and safety warnings.
On a global level, the number of plants that have been used at some time as human food is impressive: over 7000 species are known. And yet, 80% of our global dietary energy requirement is provided now by just 12 plants - eight grasses (barley, maize, millet, rice, rye, sorghum, sugarcane and wheat) and just four tubers (cassava, potato, sweet potato and yam) - and over 50% of humanity’s protein and energy requirements are now reliant on just three of these: wheat, maize and rice.
This unprecedented contraction in food sources has brought with it a reduction in our intake of micronutrients, for the vitamin and dietary mineral content of wild edible plants is understood to be generally superior to that of cultivated vegetables. In other words, humans are becoming increasingly reliant on very few plants, overlooking the significant potential of wild plants to help address deficiencies in the 40 or so vitamins and minerals that are considered essential for physical and mental development, the immune system and metabolic processes. This handbook is intended as a kind of antidote - a guide to health, history, food security and self-sufficiency.
The primary aim of this book [Edible Weeds Handbook], then, is to distil from this global exercise any findings that are locally relevant to Aotearoa New Zealand and present them in a practical forager’s field guide. Based on over 750 ethnobotanical studies from around the world, more than 1000 plants have been identified that currently grow wild in New Zealand and have a traditional history of being used as food. For simplicity, plants that are fairly rare or are less practicable sources of food have been either left out or relegated to an appendix, leaving the remainder to be arranged under 160 or so main entries.
My own interest in edible wild plants was triggered shortly after reaching Aotearoa from England in the early 1970s, when I got lost in the bush - initially by accident and then several times deliberately to test my survival skills. This led to my first field guide (A Field Guide to the Native Edible Plants of New Zealand, 1981), a book that focused on plants indigenous to the country. Its aim was twofold: one, to provide a portable guide to emergency survival along the coast, in native forest and above the treeline; and two, to celebrate the considerable survival skills and ingenuity of pre-European Māori.
I was equally interested at that time in the country’s introduced edible wild plants, but quickly realised that a field guide that did justice to both topics would become too unwieldy - for both the writer and the reader. I had no idea that this larger project would keep on growing to the point that my original database of local edible wild plants would run to over 1000 species.
The ingenuity of Māori following their discovery of Aotearoa is one thing, but with the arrival of Europeans there came a whole new suite of wild plants - some welcome, some not. With the loss of much native forest, a more practical source of everyday foraging would soon be provided by the country’s introduced wild plants. These are the kind of edible plant that might come in handy nowadays when making a meal at home, for example, or when travelling - plants that are good to use in salads, as cooked greens, for making flour, fruit salads or garnishing. Knowledge of this kind might be particularly relevant in times of economic hardship or disrupted supply of more familiar, or more conventional, foods.
However, this field guide is not just about hard times; it concerns a sense of fulfilment that can come from taking the trouble to engage more fully with the natural world. This is nothing new. Around the globe, there are many places where edible wild plants such as those catalogued in this book continue to be gathered on a daily basis, not just through necessity, but to be taken and offered for sale in local markets. Many have the potential to offer new tastes, new crops and new products.
The aim of this field guide, then, is to help readers (and the writer) to safely harvest from the wild; to provide an accessible resource for those who prefer to live a life of voluntary simplicity - one step removed from the world of packaging and the temples of trade. Or for those who simply need to find some fresh food while they get their home vege patch established.
