Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook celebrates and reclaims the lost art of turning locally gathered wild plants into nutritious, delicious meals ? a traditional foodway long practiced by our ancestors but neglected in modern times. The book's beautiful, instructive botanical illustrations and enlightening recipes offer an adventurous and satisfying way to eat locally and seasonally. Readers will be able to identify, harvest, prepare, eat, and savor the wild bounty all around them. We share this project with you out of our long commitment to connecting with nature through food and art. The effort weaves together Dina?s 30 years of passionate investigations into wild-plant identification, foraging, and cooking with Wendy?s deft artistic skills honed over 15 years as a botanical illustrator. The result is an abundance of recipes and illustrations that explore creative ways to bring wild edibles into our lives. Part One of Foraging & Feasting serves as a visual guide, tracking 50 plants through their growing cycle. The images illustrate the culinary uses of wild plants at various seasons. Part Two contains easy-to-use references including Plant Chart Centerfolds and Seasonal Flow Charts. Part Three brings you into the kitchen; here you'll find more than 100 master recipes and countless variations formulated to help you easily turn wild plants into delectable salads, soups, beverages, meat dishes, desserts, and a host of other culinary delights. These recipes are not limited to wild ingredients; they can be used with cultivated ingredients as well, purchased or homegrown. Many of the recipes can be made to accommodate various dietary restrictions: gluten-free, casein-free, dairy-free, grain-free, and sugar-free. Among those who will find the book valuable are the health-conscious members of the Weston A Price Foundation, ever in search of nutrient-dense, traditional whole foods. Slow Food enthusiasts will appreciate how focusing on ancient, seas¬¬unusual edibles.

A New York Times Book Review Summer Reading Selection “Delves into not only what we eat around the world, but what we once ate and what we have lost since then.”—The New York Times Book Review Two centuries ago, nearly half the North American diet was foraged, hunted, or caught in the wild. Today, so-called “wild foods” are becoming expensive luxuries, served to the wealthy in top restaurants. Meanwhile, people who depend on wild foods for survival and sustenance find their lives forever changed as new markets and roads invade the world’s last untamed landscapes. In Feasting Wild, geographer and anthropologist Gina Rae La Cerva embarks on a global culinary adventure to trace our relationship to wild foods. Throughout her travels, La Cerva reflects on how colonialism and the extinction crisis have impacted wild spaces, and reveals what we sacrifice when we domesticate our foods —including biodiversity, Indigenous and women’s knowledge, a vital connection to nature, and delicious flavors. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, La Cerva investigates the violent “bush meat” trade, tracking elicit delicacies from the rainforests of the Congo Basin to the dinner tables of Europe. In a Danish cemetery, she forages for wild onions with the esteemed staff of Noma. In Sweden––after saying goodbye to a man known only as The Hunter––La Cerva smuggles freshly-caught game meat home to New York in her suitcase, for a feast of “heartbreak moose.” Thoughtful, ambitious, and wide-ranging, Feasting Wild challenges us to take a closer look at the way we eat today, and introduces an exciting new voice in food journalism. “A memorable, genre-defying work that blends anthropology and adventure.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, New York Times-bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction “A food book with a truly original take.”—Mark Kurlansky, New York Times bestselling author of Salt: A World History “An intense and illuminating travelogue... offer[ing] a corrective to the patriarchal white gaze promoted by globetrotting eaters like Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern. La Cerva combines environmental history with feminist memoir to craft a narrative that's more in tune with recent works by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Helen Macdonald and Elizabeth Rush.”—The Wall Street Journal

"A dazzling display of humanistic erudition, wit, and practical culinary advice. Ballerini's living herbarium reinitiates modern readers living in the concrete manswarm into the joys of foraging, gathering, and savoring herbs, flowers, and berries. Its wide-ranging historical context, a veritable documentary of poets and chroniclers of past and present, is a learned celebration of nature's bounty. Practical and flavorful recipes for each plant transport the 'weeds' from the field to the palate and enhance a narrative enriched by splendid complementary footnotes."—Albert Sonnenfeld, Series Director, Arts of the Table "Weeds indeed. A guide as witty as he is erudite, Luigi Ballerini has given us a remarkable compendium of the wild greens, along with their flowers and fruits, that people have foraged and eaten for millennia. Once the food of the poor, such ingredients are now in high demand. Gathering greens both familiar—such as mint or borage—and obscure—milk thistle and wallrocket—Ballerini draws upon a diverse cast of authors to attest or dispute their real or alleged medicinal powers. Just as important, he never neglects to suggest how they taste or to present fine recipes so that we can savor them for ourselves."—Carol Field, author of The Italian Baker "The scholar and poet Luigi Ballerini has given us a mouthwatering treasure of inventive Italian recipes for foraged wild plants adapted for the American locavore kitchen (including ten for borage alone, as well as nettle and purslane frittatas, and prickly pear risotto). This elegantly illustrated volume is peppered with humor and tastefully seasoned with a wealth of cultural, historical, and scientific sources and information. A Feast of Weeds is food for both the palate and the mind."—Jean-Claude Carron, University of California, Los Angeles

One intrepid cook's exploration of her urban terrain In this groundbreaking collection of nearly 500 wild food recipes, celebrated New York City forager, cook, kitchen gardener, and writer Marie Viljoen incorporates wild ingredients into everyday and special occasion fare. Motivated by a hunger for new flavors and working with thirty-six versatile wild plants--some increasingly found in farmers markets--she offers deliciously compelling recipes for everything from cocktails and snacks to appetizers, entr es, and desserts, as well as bakes, breads, preserves, sauces, syrups, ferments, spices, and salts. From underexplored native flavors like bayberry and spicebush to accessible ecological threats like Japanese knotweed and mugwort, Viljoen presents hundreds of recipes unprecedented in scope. They range from simple quickweed griddle cakes with American burnweed butter to sophisticated dishes like a souffl ed tomato roulade stuffed with garlic mustard, or scallops seared with sweet white clover, cattail pollen, and sweetfern butter. Viljoen makes unfamiliar ingredients familiar by treating each to a thorough culinary examination, allowing readers to grasp every plant's character and inflection. Forage, Harvest, Feast--featuring hundreds of color photographs as well as cultivation tips for plants easily grown at home--is destined to become a standard reference for any cook wanting to transform wildcrafted ingredients into exceptional dishes, spices, and drinks. Eating wild food, Viljoen reminds us, is a radical act of remembering and honoring our shared heritage. Led by a quest for exceptional flavor and ecologically sound harvesting, she tames the feral kitchen, making it recognizable and welcoming to regular cooks.

Within a single week in 2009, food journalist Robin Mather found herself on the threshold of a divorce and laid off from her job at the Chicago Tribune. Forced into a radical life change, she returned to her native rural Michigan. There she learned to live on a limited budget while remaining true to her culinary principles of eating well and as locally as possible. In The Feast Nearby, Mather chronicles her year-long project: preparing and consuming three home-cooked, totally seasonal, and local meals a day--all on forty dollars a week. With insight and humor, Mather explores the confusion and needful compromises in eating locally. She examines why local often trumps organic, and wonders why the USDA recommends white bread, powdered milk, and instant orange drinks as part of its “low-cost” food budget program. Through local eating, Mather forges connections with the farmers, vendors, and growers who provide her with sustenance. She becomes more closely attuned to the nuances of each season, inhabiting her little corner of the world more fully, and building a life richer than she imagined it could be. The Feast Nearby celebrates small pleasures: home-roasted coffee, a pantry stocked with home-canned green beans and homemade preserves, and the contented clucking of laying hens in the backyard. Mather also draws on her rich culinary knowledge to present nearly one hundred seasonal recipes that are inspiring, enticing, and economical--cooking goals that don’t always overlap--such as Pickled Asparagus with Lemon, Tarragon, and Garlic; Cider-Braised Pork Loin with Apples and Onions; and Cardamom-Coffee Toffee Bars. Mather’s poignant, reflective narrative shares encouraging advice for aspiring locavores everywhere, and combines the virtues of kitchen thrift with the pleasures of cooking--and eating--well.

Food makes the world go around, according to this absorbing account of how the search for food has shaped human nature. It is more important than love or sex for the simple reason that food is harder to find than a mate. Think of it this way, says Allport, who draws on the research of anthropologists and biologists in presenting her fascinating and provocative theories: Mates are often willing accomplices in the act of mating; food is never a willing accomplice in the act of eating.

The founder of Wild Food Adventures presents the definitive, fully illustrated guide to foraging and preparing wild edible greens. Beyond the confines of our well-tended vegetable gardens, there is a wide variety of fresh foods growing in our yards, neighborhoods, or local woods. All that’s needed to take advantage of this wild bounty is a little knowledge and a sense of adventure. In Edible Wild Plants, wild foods expert John Kallas covers easy-to-identify plants commonly found across North America. The extensive information on each plant includes a full pictorial guide, recipes, and more. This volume covers four types of wild greens: Foundation Greens: wild spinach, chickweed, mallow, and purslane Tart Greens: curlydock, sheep sorrel, and wood sorrel Pungent Greens: wild mustard, wintercress, garlic mustard, and shepherd’s purse Bitter Greens: dandelion, cat’s ear, sow thistle, and nipplewort