Timber rattlesnake sunning on a boulder amongst wild grape vines

Note: this piece appeared previously in my column at plant healer magazine 

   Life is too short to cancel trips for inclement weather. It’s been raining for the last three days, really up until the moment I park my car. The first thing that Josh and I notice as we get out is a huge stinking pile of rotten carp and shortnose gar, some dragged here and there by raccoons. The discards of some commercial fisherman from the Mississippi, I suppose. We chuckle that it must be an omen, but of what we don’t know.

     “Good omen. Good omen for sure,” I confidently decide after we walk away holding our breath.

     “What makes you say that?” Josh asks.

     “Not so much  a special understanding of omens, but because I found this spot, and I’ve been here before.”

     Josh smiles.

     We slip into the forest on a gloomy morning of drizzle and dripping leaves, trying not to get our shoes soaked in the wet grass. We follow a deer trail that angles down a steep ravine under bur oaks. At the bottom we hop across a random assortment of  precarious limestone boulders before ascending the other side. We aren’t even close to The Spot yet, but our hearts are already thumping in anticipation of the anticipation when we get there. “Holy crap, what if this really happens?” I say as we pause to rest.

     “I know. It’s hard to believe,” Josh says.

     “What’s harder to believe,” I say, and then lower to a whisper as if it is too good to say out loud “is that I think it is going to happen.”

     Neither of us is an expert in superstition, but we both know that when something too good to be true might be about to happen, saying more would jinx it. So we shut up and walk.

     The woods is choked with garlic mustard and buckthorn, although every here and there a geranium or gray dogwood has managed to survive the competition.

     “Not the kind of habitat you’d expect,” I mutter—not because I’m the observant one, but because I’m the loud one. Josh just looks at me. “Don’t worry, it’ll change,” I add. Of course, he knows that. The woods we are in looks nothing like the bluff we are headed to, which I spotted from far away, years ago. Once its peculiar vegetation caught my eye, I couldn’t forget the place. It beckoned me from one morel season to the next—in my sleep, in my daydreams, and as I pored over the ragged topographical map that guides our adventures. A nagging hunch told me that the boulder-strewn bluff standing a mile ahead of us would be the culmination of a childhood fantasy that had stalked us into adulthood.

     The quest began when we were fourteen. We rode our bicycles five or six hours one way with scant third-rate camping gear strapped to our backs just to look for this place. We camped without enough to eat. We pulled off ticks and scratched chigger bites. We endured the embarrassment of suspicious landowners who turned us away, thinking surely that two boys our age weren’t going to all that trouble just to experience Nature. We must be up to no good, they thought. Actually, we were—but only because they put us up to it. We defied them, slipping through the strands of barbed wire to go trespassing on our mission to find the most beautiful, elusive, awe-inspiring, persecuted, and majestic animal in America.      

     This kind of beauty asks a hefty ransom. In pursuit of it, I rode until I nearly passed out. I huddled overnight in the cold. I fought with my girlfriend. I dehydrated myself and then drank highly questionable water. I got yelled at by turkey hunters. I contracted Lyme disease, lost work days and gas money, tore up clothes, scratched legs, bruised shins. Once I found myself dangling by one hand from a cottonwood sapling that was rooted in a crevice, a thirty foot drop to the rocks below if my grip failed, with my sock soaking up blood running down from a deep gash in my calf.

     Those are some of the best memories of my life.

     When we are about halfway there, one of us spots a morel. We hunker down and put our faces at ground level, each finding a few more mushrooms. We’re not really looking for morels, but we brought bags for this contingency, because we usually find them. Life is too short to do just one thing at a time. What makes foragers different from “sportsmen” is that we are interested in the whole of Nature, not just some single quarry that will bring us social status. We try to do everything all the time. A few years ago, we were looking for this spot, and we found some morels, so we filled a bag. We walked a little further and found some more morels; after that we never stopped finding them, and all we did was pick mushrooms until it was time to go home. When we ran out of bags we took our T-shirts off and cinched the bottoms shut with elm bark strips to make gunnysacks. That doesn’t repeat itself today, though; we just find a half dozen small morels that Josh slips into his pack.

     It rains briefly, so I pack up my camera. After it stops, I offer optimistically, “Maybe that’s the rain at the end of the storm front, and now it’ll clear up. That’d be perfect.” I can’t let go of my confidence that today we will find our Holy Grail.

     As we approach our destination, the hillside gets so steep that it’s hard to stand without one hand on a juniper or buckthorn. The brush is getting ridiculously thick, replete with both poison ivy and prickly ash. No wonder this is a secret spot.

     Just before reaching the clearing, we pause to catch our breath and savor the moment. “I guess it’s time to start being really careful,” I say. And we do, stepping slowly as if stalking deer. The brush has one last hurrah around the clearing’s rim: black raspberries, grape vines, prickly ash, poison ivy, and bittersweet vines tangled so thickly they seem to be wrestling me with purpose, guardians of this little bluff prairie. Only here, I can’t crash through it as if I’m trying to flush a rabbit from the bushes; I have to be exceedingly careful. One deliberate step at a time.

     At last we’re free, in the open prairie. Josh kneels down cautiously to pluck and nibble some leaves of violet wood sorrel, a characteristic plant of these steep, open hillsides. Unlike most other Oxalis, this one is a spring ephemeral, and its flavor and texture are a notch above any other wood sorrel I’ve ever eaten. He grabs a plant that has had its root system exposed by the recent rain washing down the slope and eats the bulb after wiping it on his shirt.

     When you know plants, you can see into the past. Sometimes we find violet wood sorrel in an oak woods—a clear indication that the forest

timber rattlesnakes enjoying the company of violet wood sorrel, and each other

 was an open savannah forty or fifty years ago. This hillside is one of the last vestiges of the prairies that covered most of this region just a few generations ago, and the forest is inexorably swallowing it from all sides. When our children are old enough to come here, the prairie will probably be gone.

     A few more steps in slow motion, our eyes scanning and rescanning the ground in front of us, and I point to a bushy herb with fine compound leaves and purple flowers that give it away as a legume. “That’s one of the plants I wanted to show you. Astragalus crassicarpus, a state-endangered species. There’s only a few populations known. It’s all over this bluff. Really common in parts of the Black Hills. Actually has an edible pod, like a juicy pea pod but the size and shape of a big grape.” We stare at it for a minute or two and look around for more. Then we continue.

     We find a fern that we can’t identify, something unusual and rare. We fondle the little bluestem, the big bluestem, the side-oats grama; the grasses that built the great agricultural soils of this region are today relegated to the roughest, remotest terrain. Like this.

     There is an eight-foot tall limestone ledge with one crevice running vertically and two horizontally. I put my foot in the lower crevice and pull myself to the top. Peering over, I see nothing but . . . wait a second. Gold and black bands wedged between limestone, thirty inches from my face.

     “There’s one.”

     “What?” Josh says. This is not a question, it is an exclamation. He has waited twenty years to hear me say that.

     I jump down. Josh jumps up.

     “Where?”

     “To the left, between those rocks.”

     “Oh my God, I see it,” he says, the first loud words since we got here. I watch his face— awestruck, giddy, nervous, thankful, maybe even a bit sad—as he looks into the eye of the first timber rattlesnake he has ever seen. We have arrived; after all these years, we have chased that dream right back to our boyhoods.

     It’s hard to logically defend an infatuation with rattlesnakes. Why walk for miles through steep, rocky hills teeming with poison ivy and climb treacherously crumbling limestone bluffs for the dim chance of seeing a serpent that could send you to the hospital with one mistaken step? It’s like trying to explain why you should do hard labor in a wapato bed, chest-deep in frigid muddy water for an hour just to get twelve pounds of starchy tubers. You either understand or you don’t. I can’t imagine life without either.

     An hour later, as we sit next to a cracked monolith where at least seven timber rattlesnakes lie coiled, we contemplate the irony of this beast’s relationship to humankind. An animal so feared and loathed that it has been systematically exterminated almost everywhere within its range. Yet so respected that it appeared on Revolutionary American flags as a symbol of our national identity. The snake had become a legend to us, a Sasquatch: an unverifiable presence cryptically watching our every move, we could feel it lurking just out of sight, frightening but inexorably drawing us toward its haunts. Today, at last, the legend became life. In strident rebuttal of our growing fear that this creature was gone from the beloved bluff country where we had sought it for so long, there’s nothing short of a pile of them coiled a few feet away at the mouth of a crevice. One separate rattlesnake rests in a loose figure-eight on top of the stone, basking in the broken sunlight, partially shielded from view by a wild grape vine.

     We sit for long minutes, admiring the snake and basking in the satisfaction of our accomplishment. I take pictures while Josh works up a good thought.

     “This is the calmest animal I’ve ever seen. What other animal would let you do this? Just let you sit here a few feet away and not even care? It’s so dignified. This must be the most docile wild animal there is,” he marvels. “If people didn’t try to kill them every time they see them, they might realize what they’re actually like,” he adds.

     We head up the treacherous slope to the top of the bluff, partly for the incredible view, but also in search of more snakes, and prairie turnip. This plant (Psoralea esculenta) is another rare legume in this area. Its habitat has been almost completely destroyed by agriculture and fire suppression—which allowed the bluffs to fill in with trees. Prairie turnip roots were once a staple starchy food of plains tribes, and it is a remarkably good, hearty vegetable. The tradition of gathering and eating this plant lives on today in some Native American communities further west. I have dug prairie turnips in places where they are common in South Dakota, but here in Wisconsin, where they are just barely eking by, I leave them alone.

Timber rattlesnake coiled beside a prairie turnip

     At the bluff top, we find some prairie turnip growing right next to a pair of enormous timber rattlers that bask, entangled with each other for no apparent reason, in short grass in front of a limestone slab. To me, this juxtaposition is punctuation in an essay that is my life. When I give plant talks, I often feel compelled to explain my love of snakes or birds or skunks to audiences that think I am supposed to be a “plant guy.” Many are shocked to learn that I hunt; and hunters I meet are even more shocked to learn that I take pictures of flowers and collect herbal teas. How un-macho. But to me, there is no separation between any of this. The snake is the prairie, the turnip is the snake, the rabbit is the spiraea. What you do for one you do for the other.  

     On the way back, we find a dozen or so large morels. We graze on greens,  filling a bag with stalks of wood nettle, honewort, and aniseroot—all in perfect season—to bring home and make a soup. We stop to look at shoots of jerusalem artichoke and giant St. John’s wort, and note the location of some hackberry trees, wild asparagus, carrion flower, and pasture thistle.   

     “We never would have dared to imagine it this good,” Josh says. “In our wildest dreams, we would have found nine rattlesnakes. Fourteen? No way.”           

    We’re going back next year.

Early spring growth of lesser stitchwort

Food is the last frontier. I conclude this because it is perhaps the first frontier that the authorities have declared closed.

     When Jared Diamond, in his Pulitzer-Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel stated that people had already “explored virtually all useful wild plants and domesticated all the ones worth domesticating,” nobody flinched. He was simply expressing the accepted opinion in crop science that there are no significant food plants left for humans to discover—or develop significant relationships with.

     Foragers are less likely to fall into that complacency, for every time we do, something like lesser stitchwort is likely to happen. It happened to me only a year ago.  

     I first identified this plant about ten years ago when I was botanizing for fun, toting field guides in a canvas shopping bag down a sand road through a wooded area. I saw this little flower growing atop a dainty stem that threaded its way almost knee-high by leaning on grasses near a ditch. The tough, raspy stem had tiny, thin, pointed leaves arranged in pairs every few inches along its length. I pulled out my Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide, followed the keys, and came up with Stellaria graminea. I checked a few other guides to confirm this, noting the typical array of contrived common names that almost nobody actually uses (common stitchwort, grass-leaved stitchwort).

      “Stellaria. A chickweed, eh?” I thought to myself. “Too bad it’s so tough and tiny, we could use some chickweed around here.” In my neck of the woods, you see, the common chickweed is exceedingly uncommon.

     Many years later I was in my garden in early spring, digging up parsnips that had overwintered, when I spotted a vaguely familiar but mysterious plant. This weed had formed the densest, thickest mat of little prostrate stems I had ever seen, creeping over a couple square feet of wet soil. I kept using it to wipe the mud from my hands as I alternated between digging parsnips and moving my 10-month-old daughter to less muddy locations. When I’d finished digging the roots, I washed up and went back to examine that muddy mat of green, only to discover several more carpets of this weed.

     My gut feeling told me, “That’s a food plant.” It looked like a kind of chickweed, but I knew it wasn’t. It was obviously perennial, and chickweed is annual. I knew chickweeds: mouse-ear chickweed, starry chickweed, common chickweed, giant chickweed. This wasn’t one of them. Another kind of chickweed? I brought the plant home and was relieved to see that I had the volume of Flora of North America covering chickweed. I was much less relieved to notice that between the three chickweed genera Stellaria, Cerastium, and Myosoton, the book covered 57 species. I never would have guessed. Without the flowers, it was hopeless. Nevertheless, I spent a few hours looking through every source I could to see what other kinds of chickweed might be common in my area, but all I could come up with were these stupid stitchworts. I knew what stitchworts were—not this plant, and not food.

     I tried to determine for certain, without the flower, that this was indeed some species of chickweed. I couldn’t—but I was certain that it was nothing too dangerous to taste. I took a little bite. Aha! It was chickweed—that corn-silk flavor is unmistakable. Only this was the best, sweetest, crispest chickweed that had ever touched my tongue. But I reluctantly spit it out and waited until I could identify it to partake.

     My mystery plant was everywhere; my backyard, garden, driveway, beside the lake where I went fishing. I had a plan. I found a few specimens in sunny spots along south slopes and heat-reflecting objects, which I knew would flower first. If I could identify the vanguard flowers, I could then head to north slopes and find a few delayed, tender plants to eat.

     I watched the stems grow day by day. After a week, the dense mats shot out long arms that angled up into the air. It took these only a few days to grow into what seemed like a totally different organism. I recognized it before the flowers even opened: lesser stitchwort. I was so eager to confirm this that I pried open a still-closed flower bud and dissected it with a hand lens, then ran to the north side of my rock pile to get my first mouthful of the new discovery. And that’s how the last chickweed I’d ever eat became my favorite.

     Nature never ceases to dazzle me with its complexity. Not only are there 57 chickweeds in North America, but each has its own characteristic flavor, texture, and life history. This one is a perennial of moist fields that changes its form drastically as it flowers; the early spring form, being both short and ephemeral, has hardly been noticed. I did find vague mention of this transformation in one botanical manual, which noted that overwintering shoots have much broader leaf blades—but this only hints at the utterly different appearance of the plant in early spring, and the metamorphosis it undergoes as it matures.

     I wondered how many other secrets the chickweeds hold? There are arctic species, mountain species, bog species—and who has tried them? One species grows swollen buds that are detached and washed away by floods and root elsewhere to propagate the plant. Another has thick, fleshy leaves and only grows in salt marshes of the far north—could this be an unheralded gourmet vegetable of the highest order?  

     Today I brought my daughter, now 22 months old, with me to pick some stinging nettles in a pasture north of our house, near the site of an old caved-in log farmhouse near a spring at the edge of the woods. I knelt down near the four-inch nettle shoots, and noticed that my knees were being cushioned by sprawling mats of stitchwort. I picked a growing tip and held it out; she unhesitantly popped it into her mouth and chewed. “Stitchwort,” I told her. Three seconds later she begged, “More titchwor. More titchwor.” I handed her several. After eating a few of my own I said, “You pick” She inspected the ground, plucked a few stems, and held them up proudly, “Sitchwoot!”

     “Thank God for little sprouts,” was all I could think.

     Sometimes I catch myself thinking I need to go on vacation to Virginia or Idaho just to discover some new wild edibles, but this one was literally in my backyard. It humbled me. As we grazed I thought of an old man I met once who proudly proclaimed, “I already know all the edible plants; I been foraging for fifty years.” I hope I never become that confident. But I know that if I do, stitchwort is going to happen again.

Note: a version of this piece was originally published in my column at planthealermagazine.com

A good test for water-bath canning is to ask yourself it it tastes sour or "fruity" : if so, it can be water-bathed. Japanese knotweed in this case qualifies, like rhubarb.

ripe autumnberries on a typically loaded branch

Elaeagnus umbellata
Elaeagnaceae

– Oleaster Family

It truly baffles me how the autumn-olive remains one of the biggest wild food secrets in North America. Over vast regions of this continent it is our most common wild fruit. I have seen entire pastures overtaken with it, one after another, sometimes forming autumn-olive thickets covering twenty, forty, or even a hundred acres. In much of the country this is a regular sight; in fact, it is considered a noxious invasive weed in many areas and efforts are being made to eradicate it. Oftentimes, a single bush may be so loaded with fruit that several gallons may be picked from it, and this can be harvested with surprising efficiency. I have seen bushes so laden that their limbs rested solidly on the ground under the weight. Recently, I picked eleven quarts from a super-loaded bush—in less than fifteen minutes! The autumn-olive has received some attention for its content of lycopene, a chemical known to promote prostate health. Tomatoes are generally considered the standard source for this nutrient—but autumn-olives contain about eighteen times as much lycopene as tomatoes (Black and Fordham, 2005). But the most incredible fact about autumn-olives is their flavor: almost everybody loves them.

Growing up, I encountered the autumn-olive quite regularly. I was intrigued by the bush’s rugged appearance and by its odd red fruits covered with silvery flakes. Since it is not native, however, this plant was left out of my field guides and ignored by nature writers. Despite the fact that it is an incredible cover and food plant for wildlife, the hunting books and magazines that I read never made mention of it. And although the autumn-olive is a standout among wild fruits, none of my foraging references discussed it. For some years, then, I regularly saw this bush on my excursions but was unable to identify it.

It was Steve Brill’s (1994) wild food guide that finally suggested this fruit to me. After verifying the identification with a botanical key, I got my first taste of autumn-olive. I felt ashamed that I had missed out on such a good thing for so long when it had been right there for the picking. But I will miss out no more; I’m making up for lost time and stocking up on lycopene.

I don’t mean to make it sound like I’m the only one excited about this fruit. In test plots near Beltsville, Maryland, the USDA has achieved productivity of 3,600–12,600 pounds per acre (4,000 to 14,100 kg per hectare)—without using pesticides or fertilizers (Black and Fordham, 2005). These figures lead me to believe that, during bumper crop years, the largest autumn–olive thickets I’ve seen, in Kentucky and Tennessee, produce a whopping half million pounds (227,000 kg) of fruit! Not that I need that many, but it’s fun to drool over the idea. The authors of the above study believe that this fruit needs a name that connotes a fruity flavor to be widely accepted as food in the United States, suggesting the name “autumnberry.”

Description

The autumnberry is somewhere between a hefty shrub and a small, tough, sprawling tree. It usually produces several gnarled and spreading trunks, the largest of which may reach 6 inches (15 cm) in diameter. The topmost limbs of an autumnberry bush rarely reach more than 16 feet (5 m) above the ground. During their first few years, autumnberries are formidably armed with sharp thorns, but older bushes are not nearly so thorny. The autumnberry is typically found in dense, even impenetrable stands. To the trained eye, such thickets can be recognized by this shrub’s growth form: trunks strongly arching and producing arched branches, the tips of which droop heavily and often reach the ground.

Autumnberry’s leaves are also rather distinct. Elliptic or oval in shape, they are rather tough and leathery for a deciduous shrub. The leaves are dark, dull green on top, and distinctly silvery underneath. Borne alternately, they are typically 2–3 inches (3–5 cm) long. The leaf margins are entire and often wavy or slightly curled.

The bark on older autumnberry trunks peels in long, thin, narrow strips, but on smaller trunks and branches it is smooth and grayish green. The twigs and leaves are covered with tiny silvery flakes or scales, a feature that this plant shares with its close relatives the buffaloberries (genus Shepherdia).

In mid to late spring the autumnberry produces copious dull yellow flowers in crowded clusters that hang from the leaf axils. Each flower is about 0.3 inch (8 mm) long and consists of four petals joined at the base to form a tube. The blossoms have a very strong fragrance, and a blooming thicket can produce a cloyingly sweet aroma.

Fertilized flowers produce olive-shaped fruits that are typically a little smaller than a currant or pea. Unripe clusters of autumnberries hang all summer long with little change, remaining light, dull green. In fall they plump up and turn to a bright orange-red but remain coated with silvery flakes. Each ripe autumnberry contains one seed, and these are very distinct in appearance. Soft-shelled and constricted to a point on each end, the yellowish-tan seeds have prominent lines running their length.

Autumnberry is fairly easy to recognize, but it is sometimes confused with several related shrubs. Buffaloberries have leaves with shiny scales like autumn‑olive, but the scales are more brown in color. Although buffaloberry leaves look similar, they grow in pairs rather than alternately like those of autumnberry. One species of buffaloberry (Shepherdia canadensis) is a smaller shrub and lacks thorns, while another (S. argentea) is similar in size to autumnberry and also thorny. The fruit is reddish but ripens earlier and is less elongated. Autumnberry also has a native relative, the wolfberry or silverberry Elaeagnus commutata. This northern shrub inhabits brushy, open areas of the boreal region from Quebec to Alaska. When ripe, the fruit remains green and is covered with silvery scales. The fruit of all three of these related shrubs is edible, so there is no danger in mistaking them for autumnberry.

Another shrub frequently confused with autumnberry is Tartarian honeysuckle (Lonicera tatarica and L. x bella). Like autumnberry, this is a very common invasive shrub of old fields, disturbed ground, and roadsides. People often mistake the two when they are too lazy or careless to look at identifying details—they can only be mistaken at a superficial glance.
I bet you won’t do that.

Yaupon holly Ilex vomitoria, a shrub whose leaves contain caffeine and are used for tea, also has clusters of small red berries that may be confused with autumnberry. Yaupon is native primilary to the Coastal Plain of the Southeast. While the ranges of these shrubs overlap, they are not often found in the same areas. Yaupon’s toxic berries lack the silvery speckles of autumnberry, and each fruit contains four seeds rather than one as in autumnberry. The leaves differ in being evergreen, crenate or toothed, and in that they also lack the silvery flakes of autumnberry.

Russian-olive

The autumn-olive is so named because of its close relationship with another tree, the Russian-olive Elaeagnus angustifolia, which is in turn named for its fruit’s appearance. Neither of these species is closely related to the true olives (genus Olea), and their fruits are not similar to the true olive in flavor, texture, or any other important quality.

People have a strong tendency to confuse autumn-olive and Russian-olive—not because they are hard to tell apart, but primarily because of their names. It is hard to speak of one without being asked about the other. Russian-olive is a well-known, non-native tree found in most of the United States and Canada. Like its ecological twin the Siberian elm, this tree can handle extremely hot summers, bitterly cold winters, and severe drought—making it adaptable to places where few other trees can grow. Russian-olive is abundant on the Great Plains and in semi-arid sections of the West. For many miles on the high plains of Wyoming and Colorado, this is the only tree to be seen, and scrubby forests of it have sprung up around many western cities, such as Salt Lake and Denver. It predominates in fencerows and windbreaks over much of the Great Plains.

The Russian olive has much narrower leaves than the autumnberry; they are willow-like with a silvery sheen on both sides. Russian-olive is a spreading tree, growing much larger than the autumn-olive, occasionally over a foot (30 cm) in diameter and 35 feet (11 m) tall.

The fruit of Russian-olive and autumnberry are quite different. The Russian-olive produces a drab, dry drupe about 0.5 inch (13 mm) long, gray-green when ripe and shaped like a miniature olive. The pulp is mealy and sweet, but also astringent. The flavor reminds me a little of dried figs. The seeds are hard and tough but leathery rather than stone-like; they can be chewed with great effort and will eventually give up the tiny but delicious nut-like kernel they contain. Russian-olives often fruit prodigiously, and I would love to find a practical and enjoyable way to use their crop.

Range and Habitat

The autumnberry is native to Asia, where it is one among many Elaeagnus species used for food. It was introduced to the United States in 1830. Hu (2005) lists eleven Elaeagnus species traditionally used for food in China, and some others are occasionally seen in North America. The autumnberry has been introduced to North America for erosion control, soil improvement, wildlife food and cover, landscaping, and, to a lesser extent, for its edible fruit. Like most exotic invasives, its occurrence is difficult to predict because this depends on both habitat and the happenstance of human introduction. It has not been here long enough for its habitat needs to be thoroughly understood.

The autumn-olive was lauded as a virtual miracle forty years ago; it was intentionally planted by the same government agencies that are now villainizing it and spending millions trying to eradicate it. Latham (1963, p. 19) expressed the prevailing attitude when he said, “These shrubs add beauty to narrow field corners, roadsides, [etc.]—with no evident danger of becoming a pest by spreading onto pastures or well-kept places.” Latham then lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan—around which, today, the autumn-olive is the most prevalent shrub, having choked out most native species. I wonder how many of the current ideas espoused by today’s natural resource managers will be laughed at in a generation. (I can name a few.)

Autumnberry may be found in southern Canada and all but the driest parts of the United States. In some regions it is rampantly abundant, and I will dare to say that this is the most common edible wild fruit in the eastern United States. And it is increasing in the West (Sundberg, 2002)—who knows how common it may be there in a generation or two. It is also a common shrub in parts of Hawaii (Wagner and Sohmer, 1999). Autumnberry is the most prevalent shrub in parts of southern Michigan, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and several other eastern states. Autumnberry is not hardy in the coldest parts of the United States and is therefore absent from the northern Plains and higher mountain areas.

Autumnberry is one of the few non-leguminous plants able, with the help of certain bacteria called Frankia, to fix Nitrogen. This allows it to thrive on impoverished or eroded soils and outcompete other shrubs on such sites. It is precisely for this reason that it was used widely to reclaim and stabilize old mine spoils, eroded hillsides, and newly constructed roadways. Such soil-deprived sites are where it remains most common today, accounting for its abundance in steep, hilly country that has been inappropriately cultivated or overgrazed, and in rocky, sandy, or gravelly areas where the soil is naturally poor.

Autumnberry grows in full sun or light shade. It does not successfully invade mesic hardwood forests but often does well in the sparse shade cast by oaks, hickories, and pines. Autumnberry’s competitive edge is further enhanced by its drought tolerance. Like many other exotic shrubs, it loses its foliage later than most native species, giving it an extended growing season but also making it more susceptible to frost damage.

Given the way that birds and mammals relish the fruit and spread its seeds, expect to see autumnberry become more and more abundant over the coming years.

Harvest and Preparation

Autumnberry has an unusually long season of availability. In 2006, I first picked the fruit on August 25; on November 12, even after several hard frosts, I found entire thickets still loaded. The peak season of harvest is roughly September 15 to October 10. The fruit persists later in seasons of a heavy crop.

When autumnberries first turn red they are rather hard, very tart, and astringent due to their tannin content. They can be eaten at this time but are too tart for most palates, although they do make fine jam or jelly. However, the fully ripe fruit are much better. As they sit on the bush they gradually become softer, sweeter, and less astringent. You can judge their ripeness by how easily they pop off their stems when picked; they do not detach easily when under-ripe. And you should taste-test them, for even when fully ripe their flavor varies substantially from one bush to the next.

This is one of the wild fruits that you can really stock up on. It grows in dense hedges along roadways or fence lines and turns abandoned farmlands into wild orchards. Every year you can find a good supply, and in very good years shameful amounts will rot on the bush. The autumnberry clusters often hang along the branches so densely that there is no space between one and the next, creating an elongated “mega-cluster” along the branch. Just one of these mega-clusters can contain several pounds of fruit, and single bushes can produce twenty to eighty pounds of fruit in bumper crop years.

An effective way to pick autumnberries is to hold the laden branch or mega-cluster over a container and loosen the berries with your fingers so they fall in. Try to do this without crushing too many berries and without loosening too many leaves and stems. You can pick autumnberries very fast this way; typical is one to three gallons per hour, depending mostly on the quality of the bush. The low, spreading form means that the bushes bear most of their fruit within easy reach, and often they are so low that I simply place a bowl on the ground beneath the branch as I pick. You can also pick the fruit by laying down a tarp or cloth and beating on the branches. For this the berries must be fully ripe and ready to detach.

As you collect autumnberries you will probably find a disturbing number of Japanese beetles going into your container. They love to hide between the fruit in the clusters, and due to their color are hard to spot there. I know of no good solution to this problem; indeed, these little pests are the biggest trouble with picking autumnberries, and sometimes I spend more time removing and avoiding them than I do picking the fruit.

Upon first turning red, the flavor of autumnberries reminds me of raspberries or pomegranates with the pucker of chokecherries. As they ripen the puckering quality fades, the fruit sweetens, and a hint of tomato flavor develops. I love to eat fully ripe autumnberries straight from the bush. I stuff my face with one handful after another for the first twenty minutes of picking. The seedshells are soft and contain a delicious nutty kernel that seems to disappear in your mouth as you chew. Some people swallow everything, but I spit out the masticated seedshells when I am done absorbing all the flavor possible, then reach for another handful.

I have a number of ways to use those autumnberries that actually do make it into my collecting container. They are good in pie, and they are the berry of choice for making fruit leather. In addition, autumnberries make good jam or jelly and have a most delicious juice.

For all the cooked products that I make, I strain out the seeds first. I do not cook or crush the berries before straining; all I do is try to get rid of the sticks, leaves, and beetles. Autumnberries go through my strainer very easily with little waste, although I may have to run them through an extra time or two to get all the pulp.

Straining will produce a beautiful red puree, but the juice and solids will quickly begin to separate. When this happens you will notice that autumnberry juice has an amazing quality: it is clear. Lycopene, the primary coloring agent, is not water soluble and so remains in the pulp. The solids coagulate into a mass, and this mass slowly shrinks as it releases liquid, almost as if repelling it. You can let a container of puree sit in the refrigerator for a few days and then carefully pour off the clear juice, saving the red pulp for fruit leather, jam, or other fun projects. Or you can keep the two together, mixing well before use. This autumnberry puree stores well frozen.

Once you taste the juice of ripe, sweet autumnberries, you may want to maximize your yield of it. If a better drink has passed my lips, I fail to recollect the experience. A glass of autumnberry juice appears deceivingly like slightly used dishwater—but upon careful inspection one will notice the faintest yellow tone, which hardly hints at the flavor swimming in it. Autumnberry juice is pleasantly acidic like orange juice and at least as sweet. However, juice from under-ripe fruit can be extremely tart.

To get as much juice as possible from your autumnberries, place the puree in a cloth suspended in a bucket and let it drip for a few days, keeping the whole apparatus in a cool place. Almost all the liquid should separate from the pulp without any squeezing involved, and then you can dispose of the solids (or use them, if you really want that lycopene). Sometimes the liquid doesn’t separate well—I’m not always sure why—and in these cases I keep the pulp for making other things. Freezing and thawing the puree sometimes seems to facilitate better juice separation.

Besides making a wonderful juice, autumnberry also makes excellent pies, cobblers, and other desserts. If the berries are on the sour side, I mix them with other milder fruits. One problem, however, is that the juice has a tendency to separate from the pulp while cooking and pool in the bottom of your pan. To prevent this, use a little more flour or cornstarch than usual and mix it well into the puree.

The tendency of the juice and pulp to separate affects all autumnberry products. Jam, for example, can get a unique texture and marbled appearance due to the pockets of clear liquid that separate while it sets. You can also make a most interesting tart but nearly colorless jelly from the juice.

If I am going to eat autumnberries out of season, my favorite way is in the form of fruit leather. The finest flavor is achieved using ripe, mild berries. For best results, use puree that has had little or none of its juice removed. Mix or beat it thoroughly just before spreading it on trays to dry. The smooth texture of the puree makes for a very fine-looking fruit leather, and the juiciness allows it to be spread very thinly and uniformly on the tray. However, because of the time of year that the fruit ripens, sun-drying is often impossible. I have also done it in the oven, on a rack near my woodstove, and in an electric food dehydrator. The thin layer of pulp dries relatively quickly, especially in the absence of skins. It produces a beautiful red fruit leather, rich in lycopene, that is coveted, bartered, and begged for on account of its flavor.

If our continent is going to be overrun by exotic invasive plants, I pray that there are more of them like autumnberry.

The very word “nightshade” causes many foragers to shudder with apprehension. It seems that everybody has heard of “deadly nightshade” and written off the entire group as too scary to contend with. How lucky we are that our ancestors were more confident in their botanical skills—for the amazing nightshade family has given us many cultivated fruits and vegetables, including potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, bell peppers, hot peppers, ground cherries, and tomatillos.

Black nightshade is a common weed found on all the inhabited continents. It has a long and well-established history as a food source for numerous cultures around the globe. In fact, it is among the most widely used and well-documented wild foods in the world, rivaled in this respect only by a few other ubiquitous weeds such as lamb’s quarters, amaranth, and stinging nettle. There are probably over two billion people for whom the black nightshade is a regular or occasional item of diet. Yet in the predominantly “white” parts of the world—Europe and North America—the Solanum nigrum complex is widely believed to be extremely poisonous. The contradiction is stark, confusing, and quite amazing.

“The leaves and tender shoots are boiled in the same way as spinach and are eaten in many parts of India . . . The berries, when ripe, are often eaten by children and are sometimes used for preparing pies and preserves.”

—Chopra, Badhwar, and Ghosh, 1965, p. 670.

“Every intelligent child shuns the fruit of this weed . . . the poisonous properties of which are undoubted. Children who have eaten the fruit have died soon after from its effects.”

—“W.W.,”in The Gardener’s Chronicle of London, March 21, 1909.

“Ripe berries . . . are frequently eaten raw as fruits, particularly in parts of Africa. They are also widely used in pies and preserves, and sometimes as a substitute for raisins in plum puddings, particularly in North America. They can also make a delightful jam.”

—Edmonds and Chweya, 1997, pp. 56–57.

“The berries are poisonous, and will produce torpor, insensibility, and death.”

—Brown, 1867, p. 110

“I have eaten pounds of pies, preserves, and fruit sauces made of the ripe berries.”

—Gibbons and Tucker, 1979, p. 251

One can’t help but wonder how such discrepancies can coexist. But before we look at this question in detail, let’s introduce the plant.

Description

Authorities today recognize a number of similar species that used to be lumped together under one name, Solanum nigrum. All of these are called “black nightshade” and exhibit only minor differences. In North America, S. ptychanthum dominates in the East, and S. americanum dominates in the South. The Great Plains is home to S. interius, and S. douglasii is found in the Southwest. S. nigrum is native to the Old World, particularly Europe and the Mediterranean; it is rather rare in North America, where it has been introduced. In most older works, all of these species are called S. nigrum. Today, many authors speak of “the Solanum nigrum complex,” which refers to all of the dozens of black nightshade species around the world formerly called S. nigrum. It is usually impossible to tell from older sources if the plant under discussion would now be classified as S. nigrum or some other species. This account pertains to those members of the S. nigrum complex found in North America. I use the name S. nigrum when referring generally to the black nightshades of this complex. I also use the names originally given in the sources I cite, but readers should be aware of the unique ambiguity of this group.

The black nightshade that abounds in my area, S. ptychanthum, is an annual herb with relatively weak, unarmed, smooth, usually hairless stems that branch widely and freely. Large specimens stand 3 feet (90 cm) high and span 4 feet (120 cm) or more in width, usually with the lower branches resting directly on the ground. However, like most weedy annuals, this plant can be sexually mature at almost any size, sometimes fruiting when no more than 3 inches (8 cm) tall.

The leaves are alternate, dark green, soft, rather thin, and often riddled with bug holes like those of amaranth, which they somewhat resemble. The young leaves may have a coppery or purplish sheen on the underside. The size of the leaves is quite variable, while the shape is moderately so, ranging from ovate to lanceolate to diamond-shaped. The margins may be entire or have sparse, rounded teeth. The leaf surfaces are glabrous or sparsely hairy. Petioles are 1.2–2.5 inches (3–6 cm) long, usually with a faint wing on each side. These wings extend to the branches and main stalk, which often has several short wings or ridges running lengthwise.

The flowers appear as early as June and continue being produced into autumn; they are most prevalent in late summer. Hanging in small clusters from the leaf axils, the blossoms grow on pedicels that are often unequal in length. The inconspicuous five-petaled flowers are whitish and about a half inch across. In form they resemble tomato flowers.

The fruit is almost perfectly spherical, about the size of a pea or a blueberry, green at first but turning purplish black when ripe. They are subtended by a persistent five-parted calyx that is slightly smaller in diameter than the fruit. The skins are somewhat tough, like tomato skins, and encapsulate a soft, juicy interior with numerous seeds.

Our other species of black nightshade are quite similar, although some may be hairier or taller, with fruit that is more or less glossy, or exhibit other minor differences. Readers who wish to separate the individual species will need to refer to more technical botanical manuals, as that is beyond the scope of this book.

There are a number of toxic nightshades that must be avoided. Among these is belladona Atropa belladona, which has been frequently confused with black nightshade (and also shares that common name). Differentiating this plant from black nightshade will be discussed at length later. Bittersweet nightshade Solanum dulcamara, while a member of the same genus as black nightshade, is very easy to tell apart. This species is a semi-woody vine with large, deeply lobed leaves. The striking purple flowers are borne in panicles of about a dozen, ripening later into oblong red berries. Bittersweet nightshade is a common weedy vine of semi-shaded localities and often grows on hedges, fences, and porches. The bright red fruits seem to attract children, but they are somewhat poisonous. Read the above description of black nightshade carefully, as there are a number of other nightshades with toxic fruit.

Range and Habitat

Black nightshade is found just about anywhere in the world where there are weeds. It occupies gardens, yards, agricultural fields, construction sites, and other areas where humans disturb the soil. Natural habitats include river floodplains, steep banks, flooded areas, and storm-damaged woods. It typically persists at a site for only one to three years before being crowded out by perennials, unless the ground is disturbed repeatedly. The seeds can persist viably in the soil for years, waiting for the proper germinating conditions to present themselves. Unlike most weedy species, black nightshade seems to prefer light to moderate shade.

The Mystery of a Myth

Are ripe black nightshade berries toxic?

Let’s take a scientific approach to this question. Two hypotheses have been presented: (1) The ripe berries of black nightshade are edible. (2) The ripe berries of black nightshade are deadly poisonous. (Note that, throughout this discussion, I am referring to the ripe fruit unless otherwise specified.)

Hypothesis 1 is supported by the actions of hundreds of millions of people who have consumed the plant, plus the actions of untold ancestors who have handed the tradition down to them. The literature contains a wealth of information pertaining to the consumption of black nightshade berries. Schilling et al. (1992) report that the berries are eagerly sought and eaten by children in India. They are also eaten in China (Hu, 2005), the Philippines (Siemonsma et al. 1993), Nepal (Manandhar, 2002), Java (Duke, 1987), southern Europe (Couplan, 1998), South Africa (Quin, 1959), New Zealand (Crowe, 2004), and Ethiopia (Guinand and Lemessa, 2001). They were eaten by the Mendocino Indians of California (Chestnut, 1902) as well as the Tubatulabal (Voegelin, 1938). In Turkey, the berries are traditionally used in sweets (Dogan, et al., 2004). Edmonds and Chweya (1997) report the fruit being eaten in Bolivia, Peru, Hawaii, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Namibia, South Africa, and Uganda. Some relatively recent wild food authors report their own consumption of these berries (Gibbons and Tucker, 1979; Nyerges, 1999).

Furthermore, black nightshade has been cultivated for over a hundred years in European and American gardens for its edible fruit, sold under the name of “garden huckleberry,” “sunberry,” or “wonderberry.” The wonderberry, now known to be an African species of black nightshade S. retroflexum (Defelice, 2003; Heiser, 1969), and not the special new hybrid that plant breeder Luther Burbank once claimed, was described in a 1909 seed catalog as “like an enormous rich blueberry. Unsurpassed for eating . . . The greatest garden fruit ever introduced” (from Heiser, 1969, p. 64). Relatively recent authors in the United States and England have recommended this fruit for pies and jam (Fisher, 1977; Simms, 1997). A quick Internet search shows that these black nightshades are still available from some seed companies.

I can add my own experience to this list. I began eating wild black nightshade berries at the age of twelve and have avidly sought them since. I have eaten the berries on many hundreds of occasions—sometimes more than a cup at a time. I eat them because I find them delicious. After introducing my wife to them, she decided that we would encourage the volunteers in our garden. In my wild food workshops and in everyday life, I have fed the plant to a few hundred people, most of whom liked the fruit, and none of whom were harmed by it. I have met a few dozen people who, like me, make the berries regular fare when available. Most of them learned this from books or fellow foraging hobbyists, but a few reported that eating black nightshade berries was a family tradition. The same friend who taught me to eat this fruit started feeding them to his son at two years of age.

The conclusion that black nightshade berries are not toxic is supported by additional evidence. In one German study, no alkaloids could be detected in twenty-two samples of ripe fruit of S. nigrum (solanine, atropine, and other nightshade toxins are alkaloids) (Frohne and Pfander, 2005). Cippolini and Levy (1997) state that S. americanum fruit has “negligible levels” of alkaloids. Voss et al. (1993) studied the toxicity of black nightshade berries (S. ptychanthum) in feeding experiments with rats. Even when fed a mixture of ripe and unripe berries as 25 percent of the diet for several weeks, no mortality was observed.

Since untold millions of people eat black nightshade berries, we should see cases of poisoning in the medical literature quite frequently if hypothesis 2 (that the ripe berries are extremely poisonous) is correct. It seems that there would be legal action against the seed companies that sell the plant, or the authors and publishers of the many books that extol its edibility. Contrarily, I can find no record of such a lawsuit, nor of any documented case of poisoning by ripe black nightshade berries in the last fifty years. The evidence is conclusive that black nightshade berries are edible.

However, we are still left with explaining the origin of such a pervasive myth. Literature from the 1800s contains a few accounts of poisoning by ripe S. nigrum berries. These cases seem to be confined to Europe. Chopra et al. (1965) presume that, because the ripe berries are known to be edible, all such accounts refer to unripe berries. This conclusion at first appears sound, but closer examination renders it untenable, since some of the cases specify that ripe berries were the agent of poisoning. Many modern authors cite the fact that the unripe fruits are toxic as justification for the berries’ reputation as deadly, and suggest that this means that the fruit should be avoided entirely. This is nonsense. Unripe mayapples are very toxic (Turner and Szczawinski, 1991) yet this plant’s ripe fruit is not shrouded in horror. In fact, many common fruits are poisonous when unripe, and this doesn’t seem to worry us at all. While the unripe fruits should probably be avoided (although this, too, is disputed by some), and credible poisonings have been attributed to them (Chopra et al. 1965), this in no way justifies or explains the fear with which the plant is typically treated.

A significant observation is that, in the late 1800’s, cases of reported poisoning from ripe black nightshade berries almost completely cease; to the best of my knowledge, the last documented case in the English language occurred in Ireland in 1952 (Towers, 1953). What happened? Certainly, the plant didn’t transform from deadly to delicious over a few generations. And Europeans continue to be affected by other poisonous plants.

The discrepancy in the literature is commonly explained away by the proposition that individual plants vary widely in the toxicity of their berries. This makes no sense; it cannot account for the cessation of reported poisonings, nor can it explain why the poisonings are reported in a limited geographical area. If chemical variability of individual plants accounted for the differing reports of edibility, then we would see poisonings occurring most often where the berries are eaten most often. Instead, the converse is true; the reported poisonings are concentrated in Europe, one of the few places on Earth where the berries are not regularly consumed.

It has also been argued that the toxicity varies on a larger scale, with some populations, species, or subspecies being deadly, while others are edible. Although highly unlikely (there is no known case of plants this closely related having fruit that varies by such extremes), this explanation is conceivable. But again, if this is true, why would the poisonings in Europe have ceased? Why would analysis of European berries show them nontoxic (Bruneton, 1999)? Why would Gerarde and Dioscorides, both Europeans, call them harmless (Defelice, 2003)? Why would Couplan (1998) claim that the ripe berries are eaten raw or cooked in parts of southern Europe? Where are the documented cases of poisoning?

Even in Europe, the toxicity of S. nigrum berries has always been disputed. The famous botanist Michel-Felix Dunal (1813) of Montpellier, France, ate the berries on several occasions and claimed them harmless. This made quite an impression on his contemporaries, and he was much quoted by incredulous Nineteenth-century authors. Balfour (1873, p. 462) stated of S. nigrum, “It contains a small amount of solanine in the juice of the stem and berries, but it may be eaten as food, as in France.” François Couplan, Europe’s leading authority on edible wild plants, tells me that he eats these berries often and loves their addictive taste. He adds that, while people in Europe generally believe them poisonous, there is “no toxicity whatsoever” in the ripe fruit (pers. comm., 2009).

Fortunately, there is a perfectly good explanation for all of this. In Europe there is another plant sometimes known as black nightshade: Atropa belladonna, a well-known poisonous plant that has been used for centuries in medicine and murder. The primary toxic (and medicinal) constituent of Atropa belladonna is atropine, which causes a whole suite of neurological and physiological effects. Common names for this plant include “belladonna” and “deadly nightshade”; unfortunately, due to its black berries, it is also occasionally called “black nightshade.” The shared common name makes confusion likely, and the physical similarities of the plants only exacerbate the problem. Elizabeth Daly’s 1963 novel Deadly Nightshade, the plot of which revolves around a case of poisoning by nightshade berries, demonstrates how false conclusions are an easy task for the lazy or uninformed. At one point, Daly’s detective says, “Solanum nigrum Linnaeus. Also ‘Black, Deadly, or Garden Nightshade. Also Atropa belladonna.’ That’s the poison.”

Daly’s mistake has been made again and again; it inundates the older literature, and is still made with frightful regularity today. I am convinced that this confusion accounts for the reputation of ripe S. nigrum berries as toxic. I am not the first to conclude this; Dunal (1813) made exactly the same argument 200 years ago in France. Displaying the fear-mongering suspension of logic that often accompanies the discussion of black nightshade berries (and wild foods in general), one of Dunal’s critics made a strident but worthless effort to discredit him by pointing out that the raw leaves have caused poisonings, stating that this “places beyond doubt the often contested toxic properties” of S. nigrum (Tardieu and Roussin, 1875, p. 925, translation mine). Of course, this has nothing to do with the berries. Interestingly, in French, S. nigrum and Atropa belladonna also share common names, and the idea that S. nigrum berries are extremely toxic is still deeply entrenched in France today. As in the English sources, older accounts of black nightshade poisonings in France are highly suspect, such as a case reported by Dufeillay (1838), in which the poisoned children described the berries as red.

The confusion between Atropa belladonna and Solanum nigrum is a problem that has long been recognized in the English-speaking countries as well. In a medical treatise on treating cases of poisoning, Murrell (1884, p. 111) says that S. nigrum is often mistaken for belladonna, adding, “Medical witnesses and coroners often wrong on this point.” In A Manual of Toxicology, John James Reese (1874, p. 450) states that

“There is great discrepancy among authorities about the poisonous properties of the above two species of Solanum [dulcamara and nigrum]. . . . Some have supposed that the cases of poisoning that have been ascribed to the two species were, in reality, to be accredited to the Deadly Nightshade (belladonna), which had been mistaken for the others.”

The following anecdote shows that the confusion has gone both ways:

“Solanum Nigrum has often been mistaken for Belladonna. A physician in Ohio confidently said to me, that Belladonna grew plentifully in every part of his county, and upon my questioning the accuracy of his statement, he produced a very fine specimen of Solanum Nigrum, saying, ‘If that is not Belladonna, what is it?’”

—Hoyt, 1874, p. 374

Indeed, the poisoning symptoms described in the old accounts usually suggest atropine poisoning rather than that of solanine. The fact that this myth originated in Europe, the primary natural range of belladonna, and has persisted most tenaciously there, lends further support to this conclusion. In contradistinction to the case with S. nigrum, the medical literature contains hundreds of cases of poisoning by Atropa belladonna berries. These cases are easily found and consistent in their described symptoms, and many of them occur quite recently. When you consider that S. nigrum is a far more common and widespread plant, eaten regularly around the world, there should be millions of such cases if it were equally poisonous. This is perhaps an appropriate place to point out another obvious fact: myths of toxicity are commonplace (in fact, I’d argue that they are a universal feature of human culture) while myths of edibility are exceedingly rare, since they are soon discredited.

People have an amazing ability to make our observations coincide with a preconceived belief (see Don’t Make it Fit, p. 33). In 1978, a red panda escaped from a zoo in Holland. Local newspapers informed the public, in hopes that the animal could be recaptured, but by this time, the panda had already been found dead near the zoo. Yet over a hundred sightings of the panda were reported, all of which occurred after the animal was dead (Feder, 1996). These people weren’t reporting the panda because they had seen it; they were seeing the panda because it had been reported. Similarly, it seems that reports of poisoning from black nightshade berries occurred because the plant was believed to be toxic, rather than the converse.

The black nightshade is not the only European plant to be subject to a toxicity myth of such stark contrast to reality. As surprising as it sounds, the parsnip Pastinaca sativa, the very same plant that is available in markets and grocery stores all across the northern hemisphere, which has been grown for thousands of years for its esculent roots, is widely reported in wildflower books to be deadly poisonous. This myth, like the black nightshade myth, probably arose as a way of keeping people from collecting the plant in the wild and confusing it with toxic relatives.

By the late 1800s, at least in the United States, some authorities began to cautiously challenge the myth. Behr (1889, p. 201) says, “It is not poisonous in California, at least under ordinary circumstances. The same species is common in Europe, where it is considered poisonous.” In 1905, Botany professor Charles Bessey wrote a letter to American Botanist regarding this inversion of thought:

“[This] reminds me of an incident which occurred in my class in Botany nearly thirty five years ago. I was lecturing on the properties of the plants constituting the Solanaceae, and, as a matter of course, said that the berries of the black nightshade (Solanum nigrum) were poisonous. A young fellow from Fort Dodge, Iowa, spoke up and said that the people in his neighborhood made them into pies, preserves, etc. and ate freely of them. I answered him, as became a professor of botany, by saying that as it was well known that black nightshade berries are poisonous, the student must have been mistaken. . . . After a while, however, I learned that the people in central and western Iowa actually did eat black nightshade berries, and they were not poisoned either. Later, I learned the same thing in Nebraska for this species.”

Since then, the obvious fact that black nightshade berries are not deadly poisonous has been slowly and reluctantly accepted. This is often expressed with guarded language and reservation, but at other times it is stated plainly that the berries are edible and delicious. Most scholarly works since about 1960 agree that the ripe berries of the S. nigrum group are edible or at least nontoxic.

Interestingly, despite the fact that enormous numbers of ethnographic sources describe the berries being used as food, and despite the fact that legions of people willingly, gladly, and repeatedly eat them, the wild food literature has become one of the loudest voices contributing to the fear that surrounds this plant. Peterson’s field guide (1977) lists it as “poisonous,” accompanied by a skull and crossbones. Elias and Dykeman (1982) lump it with other nightshades as poisonous. Henderson (2000, p. 189) nebulously suggests an unspecified danger: “Although some nightshades actually bear edible fruit, none of them are worth the risk.” Tull (1987, p. 186) says, “ I consider the whole plant potentially deadly and leave it alone.” (Here she misleadingly cites Heiser [1969], but in that source Heiser’s discussion of black nightshade’s toxicity is poorly constructed, conjectural, and flippant—and he tells us that he made and ate a black nightshade pie!) Many other wild food books take the very reasonable position of not discussing the matter. However, I am proud to align myself with the significant minority of authors (Gibbons and Tucker, 1979; Nyerges, 1999; Couplan, 1998; Van Wyk, 2005) who unabashedly proclaim the ripe fruit edible.

Still, I wondered if, very rarely, ripe black nightshade berries contain an abnormally and dangerously high concentration of solanine. It seems possible. Put into perspective, this fact shouldn’t even be particularly alarming; virtually all edible plants contain toxic compounds. There are numerous documented poisonings from potatoes Solanum tuberosum, several of which have resulted in death (McMillan and Thompson, 1979; Bruneton, 1999; Hansen, 1925). Curly dock Rumex crispus remains a popular wild edible, despite the fact that, rather recently, a man apparently overindulged on the leaves and killed himself (Xirgu et al., 1989). Does this happen with black nightshade? With this question in mind, I sought the last reported case of poisoning (nonlethal, incidentally) by ripe black nightshade berries, which occurred in Ireland and was recorded in an article entitled, “A Case of Poisoning by Solanum nigrum” (Towers, 1953).

Here, again, is a case of name misapplication. Throughout the article, there is conclusive evidence that the plant that was actually responsible for this poisoning was Atropa belladonna. The victim’s description of the plant and its berries strongly suggests belladonna, and is scarcely compatible with the characteristics of S. nigrum. The symptoms described clearly fit those associated with atropine (the primary toxin in belladonna) rather than solanine (the toxin found in unripe black nightshade berries). I was prepared to carefully advance this argument, but fortunately our good Dr. Towers does this himself—unwittingly testifying convincingly against his own conclusions. He attests (p. 79), “Having thus reviewed the pharmacology of atropine, it is possible to see that this case under discussion shows most of the classical features associated with the drug.” However, atropine is not found in S. nigrum; it is commercially extracted from Atropa belladonna, from which its name is derived. Towers apparently was unaware of this. He clearly writes under the assumption that what is true of one of these nightshade is also applicable to the other. The prevalence of this irresponsible attitude makes careless investigation of this plant no surprise. Indeed, the two-page commentary following the clinical notes mentions S. nigrum only once, in the first sentence. Amazingly, thereafter, the text refers only to belladonna and atropine. Towers concludes (p. 80) by stating that the victim’s symptoms “fit in with the classical features of poisoning by atropine caused by eating berries of the deadly nightshade type.” The name “deadly nightshade” is properly applied to belladonna, not S. nigrum (although it is often mistakenly applied), and of the two species, only belladonna contains atropine. By this point, his article has quietly transformed into “a case of poisoning by Atropa belladonna”—which should have been its title.

Through an extensive search of literary sources and correspondence with experts (including Jennifer Edmonds, probably the world’s leading authority on black nightshades), I have been unable to locate a single credible, documented case of poisoning from the ripe berries of any member of the S. nigrum complex. There is simply no basis for the contention that they are toxic.

The Second Myth: Black Nightshade Greens

As well documented as black nightshade berries are as a food source, the greens are even better documented. In fact, they are perhaps the most commonly eaten wild greens in the world. Black nightshade greens are regularly consumed in virtually every tropical and subtropical country on Earth, as well as occasionally in the temperate zones. Again, European and North American literature often calls these greens poisonous or deadly, but authors from the tropics hold a completely different attitude. Consider this:

“The tender shoots, young leaves and unripe green fruits are eaten as a vegetable, raw, cooked or steamed (for 5–10 minutes), alone or in combination with other vegetables. . . . S. americanum is used as a green vegetable throughout South-East Asia and the green fruits can be bought in the local markets. It is common in the vegetable assortment of large supermarkets. . . . Being a common crop of home gardens and a common weed of cultivation, its importance is considerable.”

—Siemonsma and Pilvek, 1993, p. 253

These authors conclude their account by suggesting that black nightshade should receive more research attention as a food crop. Nowhere in their rather lengthy treatment of this plant do they even mention any concern over toxicity. And note their repeated mentioning of the green fruits as food. (Be aware, however, that analyses have clearly shown the green fruit of at least some species to contain high levels of solanine. I advise against eating them.)

Chopra et al. (1965, p. 670) tell us, “The leaves and tender shoots are boiled in the same way as spinach and are eaten in many parts of India.” The young greens are eaten in Vietnam (Tanaka and Ke, 2007), Nepal (Manandhar, 2002), and China (Hu, 2005). Couplan (1998) says that black nightshade greens are the most popular vegetable in Madagascar; he says (pers. comm., 2009) that they are eaten at “almost every meal.” In three villages in Tanzania, Fleuret (1979) found black nightshade to be the second most commonly eaten wild green—only amaranth was eaten more. The greens were also sold in local markets. Purseglove (1968, p. 65) says that S. nigrum “is extensively used as a pot-herb in Africa and Asia, in spite of the fact that it is reputed to be poisonous in Europe.” Heiser (1969) found the greens regularly for sale in vegetable markets in Guatemala. Edmonds and Chweya (1997, p. 56) summarize, “Leaves and tender shoots are widely used as vegetables throughout the world . . . All the species [of black nightshade] are used as pot-herbs or leaf/stem vegetables more or less throughout their respective ranges in Africa, Asia, Malesia and the Americas.” They record the greens being consumed in Guatemala, Mauritius, Hawaii, Papua New Guinea, the Seychelles, Australia, Greece, and fourteen African countries. Black nightshade greens are eaten so frequently and widely that documenting it in this way is as superfluous as documenting the edibility of onions.

Looking to uphold the Western notion that this plant is deadly poisonous, some suggest that the edibility of tropical forms differs from ours. There is nothing to support this idea. The most widespread black nightshade of the Old and New World tropics is S. americanum (Edmonds and Chweya, 1997), but this species is also widespread in the United States. Black nightshade was said to be “the most relished potherb” of the Cherokee (Witthoft, 1947). Couplan (1998) reports it being eaten in southern Europe. In Wisconsin, Minnesota, and surely elsewhere in the United States, black nightshade greens are actively sought and regularly eaten by Hmong immigrants.

But some Americans desperately want us to disbelieve this plant’s edibility. Based on her interpretation of one anecdotal account, Fackelmann (1993) conjectures that people who eat black nightshade greens must first undergo a lengthy process of building up a tolerance to solanine—otherwise they will be poisoned. Although she provides no scientific evidence to support this specious and ridiculous claim, it has been widely accepted as fact. Fackelmann makes it sound as if only a few obscure, impoverished cultures eat this vegetable, when in fact it is a common food for hundreds of millions of people in dozens of countries, sold in grocery stores and produce markets. The tone of her article is condescending and ethnocentric. I know several Americans, including myself, who have eaten these greens safely without building up a tolerance. This doesn’t mean that black nightshade greens can be used without caution; they sometimes contain the toxin solanine (Frohne and Pfander, 2005). For guidelines on their safe use, see the preparation section on pages 390–392.

Harvest and Preparation

Berries: Black nightshade berries are delicious, abundant, widespread, and easy to harvest. Only eat the ripe berries, which turn juicy and dark purple-black. (A few species, such as S. villosum, have berries that ripen to yellow or orange, but these are not commonly found in North America.) Do not eat partially ripe berries that still contain green lines, and do not eat ripe berries if they taste bitter or unpleasant to you. As always, eat small portions your first
few times.

Don’t imagine that black nightshade berries are a substitute for blueberries or any other familiar fruit. Their flavor is most like that of ground-cherries (genus Physalis)—like fruity tomatoes. Generally, I eat the berries raw. Whenever I happen upon a plant bearing ripe fruit, I eat as many as time or the supply allows. They are excellent in salad—although being perfectly round they tend to roll off your fork, and they’re usually too small to spear with a tine. Alas, the conundrums of a forager. I also like them in tacos or burritos, where they aren’t so mobile. They are good in certain soups or pasta dishes.

Black nightshade berries are also used to make uniquely delicious fruit sauces and jams. They remind me of ground-cherries, blueberries, and tomatoes, but their tiny seeds are slightly hot, especially when cooked. (To get in the right mood for this chapter, I savored some nightshade jam from our refrigerator.) The flavor and texture can be altered by straining out the skins and seeds. They make good pies, and a few can be added to applesauce to enhance the color.

Black nightshade berries begin ripening in midsummer and continue late into the fall, often past light frosts. It is not uncommon to find flowers, unripe fruit, and ripe fruit on the plant at the same time. I have no special tricks for picking them, which I typically do while sitting comfortably beside a prolific plant. The branches droop and the fruit is often borne near the ground; in this case, wash the berries carefully. From the best plants you might get over a quart of fruit, but it will go as slowly as picking blueberries.

I was once exploring an acquaintance’s garden with him. When I found a black nightshade plant loaded with fruit and began eating them, he said, “Nightshade? My grandmother used to make nightshade sauce when I was little, but I never knew what nightshade she used.” He tasted a handful, smiled at the flavor, then confirmed, “Oh yeah, this was definitely it.” We talked a little of the sweet nightshade sauce that his grandmother in South Dakota made, which the family relished on pancakes and ice cream. He remembered this sauce fondly, saying that as a child he “wanted all he could get.”

Greens: The young, tender leafy shoots of black nightshade, before the plants have flowered, make an excellent potherb—in my opinion equal in quality to amaranth and lamb’s quarters. Gather thick, juicy shoots that stand upright, snap easily when bent, and do not need to be cut. You will find these mostly in early or mid summer. They should be boiled before being eaten. Their rich, mild flavor and soft texture leave no question as to why they are a popular vegetable in much of the world. The older growth, however, is bitter and should be avoided.

Although the greens are the most commonly eaten part of black nightshade worldwide, they contain varying amounts of the bitter toxin solanine. (Solanine is also found in tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, bell peppers, and even cherries.) As with the ripe berries, I have been unable to find any documented cases of poisoning from eating the properly cooked young greens. Although Edmonds and Chweya (1997) report that toxic alkaloids are not present in the vegetative parts of the plant, others have reported solanine in some leaf samples (Frohne and Pfander, 2005).

The youngest, tenderest shoots are generally not bitter. As the plants age, the bitterness (and presumably, the solanine content) increases—sometimes substantially. I reiterate here that the older growth, or any greens that are distastefully bitter, should not be eaten. Marshall (2001) interviewed villagers in Kenya and found that, while black nightshade was the most favored and most commonly eaten green, they recognized and avoided those with certain subtle characteristics that denoted bitterness (older, tougher, drier stems with full-grown leaves, especially stems that spread horizontally). Marshall reported that her informants preferred it because, unlike amaranth, it could be eaten every day without making one feel sick.

The bitter quality of black nightshade greens has been overemphasized by Western authors whose attitude about the plant is irrationally negative. After all, many of our more popular greens are bitter (dandelion, chicory, escarole), toxic when raw (marsh marigold), or toxic when too old (pokeweed).  When collected  at the correct stage and prepared properly, black nightshade greens are not only safe to eat, but are a palatable, nutritious, and wholesome food.

When collecting black nightshade greens, follow these guidelines to avoid ingesting excessive solanine: (1) harvest only the young, tender growth, generally before the plants flower. (2) Boil them in a full pot of water for ten to fifteen minutes, drain the water, and repeat this process if any bitterness remains. (3) Do not eat oversized portions. (4) Do not eat them if you find the bitterness strong or distasteful. (5) Stick to those species which have a well-established traditional use as food. (Among North American species, this means S. americanum and S. ptychanthum.)

Some Western authors, attempting to explain away the obvious edibility of a plant that their culture erroneously believes to be poisonous, suggest that black nightshade greens are eaten regularly by hundreds of millions of people only because of their medicinal properties. It is true that this plant is traditionally considered a health tonic by many cultures, as well as a remedy for numerous ailments, including malaria, dysentery, and schistosomiasis (Gbile and Adesina, 1988). Studies have also demonstrated that these greens have antiviral, anticancer, and antiparasitic properties (Gbile and Adesina, 1988; Bose and Ghosh, 1980). However, these are secondary benefits; most people who eat these greens clearly do so because they like them and are hungry. Black nightshade greens are also extremely nutritious, providing a much appreciated rich source of proteins, amino acids, minerals, and vitamins (Edmonds and Chweya, 1997).

Some who remain afraid to try black nightshade act as if those of us who eat it are foolish and irresponsible. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of people eat it anyway. I counter that it is irresponsible, and a bit ethnocentric, to insist on perpetuating this myth in the absence of any supporting evidence. After all, both the tomato and potato were once considered poisonous in Europe.

I paused, in a mild state of shock, before responding, “That’s not really true. Some plants might . . . .”

“It is true,” he interrupted. “Books tell people they can eat these plants, but they don’t tell them that there’s deadly poisonous plants that look exactly the same. It’s like playing Russian roulette.”

Of course, it isn’t true, but the fear of wild plants runs very deep in Western civilization. While it certainly is true that people can poison themselves with wild vegetation, the fear that we attribute to plants is monstrously out of proportion with the actual danger they pose. Like many profound and unexamined fears, this one breeds irrationality, causing many people to suspend all logic and refuse to participate in rational discourse.

Such was the time when some friends and I stood at a beach, stuffing our faces with serviceberries, and two children, a brother and sister, took interest. As they were about to partake, their father intervened. From his lawn chair fifty feet away, he warned them that they’d poison themselves and die if they ate “those berries.” His son piped in, “But Dad, I already ate some and they’re really good!”

His father didn’t budge. A little later, the children passed by again and surreptitiously asked, “Are they really poisonous?”

As I shoveled in another handful, I smiled and asked, “What do you think?” They giggled back, recognizing the absurdity of their father’s logic: “These people are eating something they enjoy very much; it must be deadly poisonous.”

Our culture is spellbound and beguiled by the story of someone mistaking a poisonous plant for an edible one and dying from the error. It is a magnetic motif with a suite of admonitions that we find economically and socially useful: don’t stray too far from the beaten path; what civilization has given you is better than you realize; Nature cannot be trusted; be normal and live a predictable life of routine. These messages are compelling when a torturous death is presented as the cost of disregarding them.

Every culture builds its own propaganda to promote stability. An important aspect of this propaganda is fables—stories made up to teach particular lessons. Since we have trouble finding sufficient examples of wild plant poisonings, we fabricate the story again and again.

The Poison Plant Fable assumes many forms. When the world-famous forager Euell Gibbons died of a ruptured aortic aneurysm (which had absolutely nothing to do with wild plants or mushrooms), the public immediately began fabricating stories about his death, claiming that, in one way or another, he was killed by a “toxic diet.” These falsehoods are more widely believed than the truth and are still commonly circulated today, even by the media. I am frequently confronted by people who, believing this Euell Gibbons fable, present it as “proof” that foraging is stupid and dangerous. Several foraging-death urban legends are commonly told, even among foragers. In her Encyclopedia of Country Living (1994), Carla Emery uses this same tactic in an attempt to terrify her readers away from foraging:

Even Euell Gibbons, who wrote a whole series of books extolling the glories of wild food foraging, finally goofed and tried the wrong wild leaf in his lunch. That’s how he died. (Emery, 1994, p. 401)

The Poisonous Plant Fable is accorded more power when perpetuated by highly respected individuals. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond tells of his reaction when some of his native New Guinean friends collect some mushrooms to eat:

I patiently explained to my Foré companions that I had read about some mushrooms’ being poisonous, that I had heard of even expert American mushroom collectors’ dying because of the difficulty of distinguishing safe from dangerous mushrooms, and that although we were all hungry, it just wasn’t worth the risk. (Diamond, 1997, p. 144)

To members of the Foré tribe, this probably sounded about as absurd as “let’s not eat these bananas; perhaps they are deadly false bananas” would sound to us. Most Americans, having been indoctrinated with the Poison Plant Fable, would have given Diamond’s warning serious consideration, but the Foré were properly offended and would have none of it. In Diamond’s words, they “got angry and told me to shut up and listen while they explained some things to me.” That is exactly how I often feel.

The people who repeat this garbage have become tools in the perpetuation of a fable they have internalized. Their ignorant fear-mongering dissuades many from a safe and rewarding hobby. It is a disservice to everybody.

Into The Wild: Another Poisonous Plant Fable?

At nearly every workshop or presentation that I have given over the last ten years, I have been asked my opinion about Jon Krakauer’s book Into The Wild. “You should read it!” I was advised, dozens of times. Many people outlined the story for me, dwelling especially on the “cause” of Christopher McCandless’ death. The ending sounded disturbingly like another rendition of the Poison Plant Fable to me, but many very intelligent people, convinced by Krakauer’s skillful prose, would argue, “No, it’s really true!” I eventually realized that reading this book and researching Chris’s death were requirements of my job.

Into The Wild is about an emotionally embattled young man named Chris McCandless who left his affluent upbringings behind, renamed himself Alex, and wandered the West searching for purpose and identity. His decaying body was found by a moose hunter in Alaska on September 6, 1992.

Through an autopsy, medical examiners determined that McCandless had starved to death, and all evidence pointed clearly and unambiguously to that conclusion. But the Poison Plant Fable proved irresistible to Krakauer, who first wrote about the tragedy in “Death of an Innocent,” (a January 1993 article in Outside magazine). He conjectured that Chris had died by poisoning when he mistook the wild sweet pea Hedysarum mackenziei for the “wild potato” Hedysarum alpinum. But since Chris had clearly starved to death, Krakauer had to reach further, positing that McCandless was “laid low” by the poisoning, and thus unable to feed himself. Since we have all internalized the Poison Plant Fable, this unlikely and scientifically unsupported explanation for Chris’s death was immediately and widely accepted as fact.

But there is no evidence that Chris McCandless ever ate even a single seed of H. mackenziei. Krakauer doesn’t even try to provide such evidence; he simply tells us that the two plants grow beside each other and are “very difficult to distinguish.” Provided with these facts, most people immediately and unquestioningly conclude that McCandless mistook wild sweet pea for wild potato. Like Krakauer, they don’t need any evidence because the Poison Plant Fable says that it happens this way. But how plausible is this?

An important component of the Poison Plant Fable is the insistence that “even experts” have trouble identifying edible plants. In Into The Wild, Krakauer writes, “Wild sweet pea looks so much like wild potato that even expert botanists sometimes have trouble telling the species apart” (p. 191).

Of course, if they are both unfamiliar, any two related plants may be confusing to an “expert botanist.” This is a meaningless and irrelevant point. Hedysarum alpinum and H. mackenziei, like any other two plants, can be consistently, reliably, and easily told apart by any person who has become familiar with them. Despite Krakauer’s misinformed insistence that the veins on the underside of the leaflets are the only reliable characteristic distinguishing them, there are actually numerous features of the two plants that are notably different. In fact, experienced foragers can readily distinguish these plants by their roots alone (Schofield, 1989).

Krakauer’s hypothesis requires that, after more than a month of collecting H. alpinum safely, McCandless suddenly couldn’t recognize the plant and accidentally ate a significant volume of H. mackenziei seeds. This explanation displays a gross misunderstanding of how pattern recognition works in the human brain. Once a person becomes thoroughly familiar with two plants, they appear distinct. Thus, every household cook can easily differentiate a head of green cabbage from one of iceberg lettuce, even though they look identical to the uninitiated. The same cook would not be able to point out a single readily visible diagnostic feature that she uses to distinguish these plants. After weeks of collecting wild potato and successfully distinguishing it from wild sweet pea, Chris would have developed an excellent search image for both plants. Misidentification at this point would be about as likely as a man making love to the wrong woman and not noticing. In a foraging culture, such an absurd proposition would be immediately ridiculed and discarded. The fact that our society swallowed this hypothesis and regurgitated it as fact demonstrates a systemic gullibility based on profound ignorance.

The second fatal flaw in Krakauer’s poisoning hypothesis is the fact that H. mackenziei, the plant that supposedly poisoned Chris McCandless, is not poisonous. Although Tanaina Plantlore, the field guide that Chris was using, says that the plant is “reported to be poisonous,” the author does not actually call it “poisonous.” Although “reported to be poisonous” may sound alarming, it is actually rather insignificant. I can find printed references reporting about two-thirds of all wild edibles to be poisonous. The familiar garden parsnip, Pastinaca sativa, is listed as poisonous in dozens of wildflower books, some written by reputed botanists. I even have one book that calls it “exceedingly lethal.” Indeed, some plants called poisonous or inedible in Tanaina Plantlore were regular food items for other Native American tribes.

Krakauer calls H. mackenziei “poisonous” in his Outside article. When he elaborates in Into The Wild, he admits that “accounts of individuals being poisoned from eating H. mackenziei are nonexistent in modern medical literature” (p.191). He goes on to counter that, “the aboriginal inhabitants of the North have apparently known for millennia that the wild sweet pea is toxic,” but he does not tell us what makes this assumption “apparent”. Krakauer finds one account of a poisoning “attributable” to wild sweet pea, but this report, from 1848, is highly questionable (a point also argued by Treadwell and Clausen, 2008).

In the wake of the Chris McCandless case, extensive laboratory analyses have been conducted, attempting to verify the toxicity of H. mackenziei. Roots, seeds, flowers, leaves, and stems were all analyzed. These tests have turned up no alkaloids or toxins of any kind (Treadwell and Clausen, 2008). The authors of this study also state that there is no credible chemical, historical, or ethnobotanical basis for the anecdotal belief that H. mackenziei is toxic. They believe that the wild sweet pea is nontoxic and has not been traditionally used simply because of the smaller size of its roots.

The hypothesis that Chris McCandless died from eating H. mackenziei seeds is supported by no evidence whatsoever, has absolutely no factual basis, and in fact relies on disproven assumptions. It should be discarded.

Krakauer’s Second Hypothesis

Krakauer himself recognized the preposterousness of advancing misidentification as Chris’ cause of death. When he elaborates on the story in the book Into The Wild, he writes, “For three weeks beginning on June 24, McCandless had dug and safely eaten dozens of wild potato roots without mistaking H. mackenzii (sic) for H. alpinum; why, on July 14, when he started gathering seeds instead of roots, would he suddenly have confused the two species?” (p. 192). After discarding his original explanation for McCandless’ death, Krakauer proposes a new one: that Chris was poisoned by the seeds of H. alpinum—the plant that he thought he was eating. If the Poison Plant Fable didn’t work, he would try the next best thing. Now, the story went, Chris hadn’t eaten the wrong plant, he had eaten the wrong part of a plant, and this caused him to starve to death. Krakauer’s eloquent and captivating rendition of the Poison Plant Fable has inculcated millions with its insidious message.

We know from McCandless’ journals and photos that he actually had eaten H. alpinum seeds. However, evidence for toxicity of these seeds is entirely nonexistent. Krakauer himself points out that “the seeds of H. alpinum have never been described as toxic in any published text: an extensive search of the medical and botanical literature yielded not a single indication that any part of H. alpinum is poisonous” (p. 191).

Yet Krakauer’s second hypothesis doesn’t just require wild potato seeds to be poisonous; it requires them to be poisonous in a very specific, rare, and unusual way: by promoting starvation through inhibiting digestion and metabolism. Chris McCandless clearly starved to death, and Krakauer has never denied this—he just argues that eating a wild plant made him starve to death. At face value, this is a very odd proposition. Last time I checked, starvation was caused by not eating things. Krakauer is breaking new ground; not just arguing that McCandless died this way, but indeed, introducing the very idea that people can die this way at all—something that the medical and toxicological community has never confirmed. Krakauer identified a chemical called swainsonine as a hypothetical culprit—although he was apparently, like me, unable to find a single reported case of swainsonine poisoning in humans.

Krakauer doesn’t test the implications of this exceedingly improbable hypothesis to determine if it is valid. Instead, he carefully crafts a series of specious arguments and illogical conclusions, by which the readers of Into The Wild are misled to believe that this hypothesis has somehow been verified. First, Krakauer tells us that the plant family Leguminosae, to which H. alpinum belongs, “is rife with species that contain alkaloids” (p. 193). (Krakauer is factually wrong here; Deshpande and Deshpande [1991, p. 247] state that “although widely distributed in the plant kingdom, alkaloids are not common in legumes.”) As soon as this is incorrectly suggested, wild potato is treated as if it is known to contain alkaloids. As soon as it is implied that alkaloids may be toxic, they are treated as toxins. We are told that alkaloids may be localized in one part of the plant, and that the seeds are the most likely site for this localization. When we are then told that “preliminary testing” indicated that the seeds contain “traces of an alkaloid,” we are beguiled into the totally unsupported conclusion that wild potato seeds contain toxic alkaloids despite their roots’ edibility. (Thorough later testing contradicted these irreproducible preliminary results; but Krakauer didn’t change his story until the media exposed this fact more than ten years after Into The Wild was published.)

We are then told that there is “a strong likelihood” that the (non-existent) alkaloid is swainsonine. Krakauer never explains why he thinks the likelihood is “strong”—since there are many thousands of known alkaloids, and swainsonine is not known from the species in question, any reasonable assessment would place the likelihood as “very small.” In fact, the proposition that Hedysarum alpinum or H. mackenziei contains swainsonine is rather absurd. These are common, widespread range plants that are considered good forage for livestock (Larson and Johnson, 2007). If they contained swainsonine, this would almost certainly be well known, since virtually everything we know about this chemical is due to its toxic effect on grazing livestock, and a great deal of research has gone into identifying which legumes contain it. After all this, Krakauer tells us that wild potato seeds may contain swainsonine (they do not). Then he proceeds to treat them as if they do contain this alkaloid, and discusses the physiological effects of swainsonine poisoning in livestock.

The above is not an explanation; it is a meaningless string of unverified assumptions. It is not a theory; it is an untested progression toward a predetermined conclusion. It does not withstand even cursory examination under the scientific method. Yet it fulfills the Poison Plant Fable.

If Krakauer is correct in assuming that swainsonine poisoning in humans would be accompanied by symptoms comparable to those in animals, then it should be easy for him to conclude that Chris McCandless was not suffering from it. Chris only exhibited one swainsonine symptom, emaciation, and this was observed well before the alleged poisoning by H. alpinum seeds, and can clearly be attributed to the caloric deprivation that he was suffering. Krakauer ignores the fact that Chris was not exhibiting the widely known classic symptoms of swainsonine poisoning, which appear before weight loss: uncoordination, hypersensitivity, depression, blank-staring eyes, loss of awareness, and similar neurological symptoms (Harries et al., 1972). It is for these symptoms that Astragalus plants containing swainsonine are known as “locoweeds”—loco is Spanish for “crazy.” When you read Chris’s journal and see the photos he took of himself just before death, along with his final note, it seems obvious that he was not suffering swainsonine poisoning.

Dr. Thomas Clausen, a biochemist at the University of Alaska, extensively tested H. alpinum for toxins and concluded that no part of it is poisonous. No traces of swainsonine or any other alkaloid were found in any part of the plant. Dr. Clausen admits that he wanted Krakauer’s tale to be true, since it made a nice story, but laments that this view has been found untenable. Indeed, he states of H. alpinum seeds, “I’d eat them myself” (Lamothe, 2007).

Just to lend a firsthand anecdote, I cooked and ate a small portion of H. alpinum seeds. Quite frankly, they were delicious—much like black locust seeds, but far better. No wonder Chris ate them for two weeks.

The Moldy Seed Hypothesis

In September 2007, Matthew Power wrote an exposé, “The Cult of Chris McCandless,” in Men’s Journal, in which he made the point that Krakauer’s explanation of Chris’ death in Into The Wild was effectively refuted, since chemists had tested these seeds for toxins and found none. Power’s article received significant media attention, and at about this time, a new printing of Into The Wild hit the bookstore shelves across the country—in which Krakauer presents yet a third explanation for McCandless’ death—which, of course, still blames it on eating a wild plant.

This third, the “moldy seed” hypothesis, is the most fanciful, forced, and inane of all. It states that, although the seeds of H. alpinum are not poisonous and do not contain swainsonine, they might become infected with a certain mold, Rhizoctonia leguminicola, which could produce swainsonine. If you ignore the fact that Rhizoctonia leguminicola is not known to infect H. alpinum, and the fact that Chris’ symptoms appear incompatible with Rhizoctonia poisoning (a hyper-salivating condition known as “slobbers”), you are still left with the problem that there is no evidence that Chris actually ate any moldy seeds—much less the “enormous quantities” that Krakauer proposes (and which would be required to cause poisoning). The only evidence that Krakauer gives to support this hypo-hypothesis is that McCandless collected some seeds during a rainy period and put some of them in a Ziploc bag. That’s it? Yup, that’s it.

The moldy seed explanation is patently ridiculous. By this time, one begins to wonder if Krakauer will just continue to change his hypotheses ad infinitum as each one is logically and scientifically refuted. This capriciousness is the hallmark of “science” with a predetermined conclusion. Clearly, Krakauer’s predetermined conclusion is that Chris McCandless died from a wild plant that he ate. Leaving the first and second hypotheses intact, though refuted, in his book, lends credibility to his latest story by making it seem like the author is searching earnestly for the truth, rather than grasping desperately for tenuous explanations to defend his fundamental belief in the Poison Plant Fable. It also adds to the feeling of peril associated with eating wild plants: “Behold all of these potential causes of death-by-plant that were almost true.”

It doesn’t upset me that Krakauer was wrong; it bothers me that he was wrong-headed. These explanations of Chris’ death should have been recognized as deficient, if not the moment they were conceived, then certainly after minimal investigation. Yet Krakauer has labored and belabored for fifteen years to perpetuate them. Rather than make a genuine effort to gather facts and draw sensible conclusions, he drew extravagant conclusions first; then facts were conjured, contorted, or ignored to support them. Journalism should be an exercise in finding and communicating the truth, not in obfuscating the obvious explanations in favor of sexier ones that find no factual support. Krakauer’s presentation of the matter seems stubbornly defiant at best. If his reasoning is not obstinately perverse, his arguments are disingenuous.

There is a reason that his entire book, save for this one part, is thoughtful and masterfully crafted: the deep, irrational, unexamined prejudice about foraging that prevails in our society. Edible wild plants remains one of the few topics about which such journalistic irresponsibility is still tolerated. Such conjectural nonsense about most topics would never pass the editors. But in reference to wild food, logic and scrutiny are totally suspended. The result is a best-selling book, and now a movie, together constituting the single largest message about wild food that the media has ever given our society, perpetuating the Poison Plant Fable.

Sean Penn’s Deliberate Deception About McCandless’s Death

In the movie version of Into The Wild, Sean Penn chose to portray McCandless poisoning himself according to Krakauer’s first hypothesis—mistaking wild sweet pea for wild potato. Although this scenario is irreconcilable with the facts and had long ago been abandoned by Krakauer himself, it produced the strongest drama and the scariest anti-foraging message. This motif is integral to the film’s plot and development. It is introduced almost immediately, as Chris writes to Wayne Westerberg about his “new book on the local flora and fauna.” Soon after Chris arrives in the Arizona desert, there is a close-up of the cover of his copy of Outdoor Life’s Field Guide to North American Edible Wild Plants. In another early scene, Jan Burres, who he met on the road, says to him, “That book of yours is really cool and all, but you can’t depend entirely on leaves and berries.”

Later, after Chris is starving and trapped by the high waters of the Teklanika River, the film shows him having an epiphany after reading the words “to call each thing by its right name” in Doctor Zhivago. After this, he takes the field guide Tanaina Plantlore and goes on a plant identification spree. Among the plants he identifies is Hedysarum alpinum. (In reality, Chris had already been collecting and eating this plant for several weeks by this time.) After eating this plant’s seeds, McCandless becomes very ill. Upon a second look at his book he realizes that he has mistakenly eaten H. mackenziei, the wild sweet pea. Further reading reveals that he is bound to die a slow, agonizing death. He throws the book down in rage, screaming, “Fuck it all!”

To the viewer who may admire Chris or hold some of his ideals, it is a powerful scene: the wilderness sojourner and independent seeker of wisdom from Nature, brought to his knees and murdered for an innocent mistake by the treachery of a poisonous plant, now finally able to throw away all of his foolish ideas—but it is too late. Just before Chris expires, so that nobody forgets how he perished, the movie hauntingly repeats the words, “To call each thing by its right name. By its right name.”

The message is clear: Eating wild plants will kill you.

But it’s a lie.

Although it is understood that some details of a story will be changed to make it more friendly to the motion picture format, most viewers assume that a film “based on a true story” depicts things that at least remotely approximate the truth—especially when it comes to the most significant event in the entire story. The deception in this fictitious scene is careful, extensive, integral, exceptional, and inexcusable.

There is no reason to believe that Chris ever ate even one wild sweet pea seed, and these seeds are not poisonous anyways. But the film’s most egregious deception occurs when Chris opens up Tanaina Plantlore (Kari, 1987). The book’s actual cover is shown, but when Chris flips to page 128 to read about H. mackenziei, the movie shows a counterfeit page that the producers have forged and inserted. The excerpt from the book that McCandless reads in the film goes like this (Yes, it really does go like this; the apparent errors and omissions are original.):

The lateral veins, nearly invisible on leaflets of wild sweet pea the plants poisonous seedlings. If ingested symptoms include partial motor paralysis, inhibition of digestion, and nausea. If untreated leads to starvation and death. Another way to distinguish is that the stem of the wild sweet pea is mostly unbranched.

That’s strange, because when I open to page 128 in my copy, it only says this in the same place:

The lateral veins of the leaflets of wild sweet pea are hidden, while those of the wild potato are conspicuous. Another way to distinguish between the two plants is that the stem of the wild sweet pea is mostly unbranched, while that of the wild potato is definitely branched.

In real life, the book has no mention whatsoever of “partial motor paralysis, inhibition of digestion, and nausea,” nor of “starvation and death.” The movie paused on a fragment of text representing each of the primary components of the Poison Plant Fable: “poisonous,” “and death,” and “the plants resemble each other.” The focus on “lateral veins” corresponds to the “even experts” component of the fable, as does the subtly changed wording from “hidden” to “nearly invisible.” The film also focuses on the words “starvation” and “digestion” so that we remember the imaginary effects of the plant that the filmmakers are pretending is poisonous.

This bogus text—displaying poor grammar, worse compositional skill, and profound ignorance of botany—is an insult to the actual author of the book. The movie’s fictitious death scene is an insult to the viewers. But more than anything, it is an insult to Christopher McCandless.

If this movie was made “in memory of Christopher Johnson McCandless,” as it claims, then why was a fraudulent, insulting scene fabricated for his death? Chris’s life story has been usurped by the very same propaganda machine that he so vehemently rejected, twisted into a fable for the purpose of casting fear and doubt into those who would seek what he sought. The greatest lessons that could be learned from his life are now buried under lies.

So how did Chris McCandless die?

There has never been debate about this: Chris starved to death. His autopsy, performed by the crime lab in Anchorage, confirmed this. When Chris’s body was found, it weighed 67 pounds; it was estimated that his weight at death was 83 pounds, with a body mass index of 13.3 (Lamothe, 2007). Death from starvation usually occurs when body mass index falls to about 13 (Shils et al., 1994; Henry, 1990). The proportion of weight that Chris lost was comparable to that normally associated with victims of concentration camps, severe famine, anorexia nervosa, and death by starvation (Keys et al., 1950). Even Chris’ own journal, nineteen days before his death, says, “Starving. Great Jeopardy.”

Keys et al. (1950), in their famous and fascinating study of human starvation, point out that starving people become exceedingly preoccupied with food, writing and talking of little else. Krakauer and others were struck by this very feature of Chris’s journal: Andrew Liske, who accompanied Krakauer to the bus after Chris’s death, noted after reading the journal, “He wrote about hardly anything except food” (p. 183). Chris displayed this obsession for the entire stay, because he was starving through all of it. The journal entries clearly show that he was not getting nearly enough calories. He took pictures of himself that document his steadily decreasing body mass throughout his stay in Alaska. He appears dangerously malnourished weeks before ingesting the seeds that Krakauer claims killed him. The medical examiners who performed Chris’ autopsy noted telltale signs of starvation: severe deterioration of his muscles and a lack of subcutaneous fat. No other individual who has investigated the matter finds Krakauer’s explanations necessary or even credible.

The only reasonable conclusion is that Chris died of starvation—the regular kind of starvation, which results from not eating enough food over a prolonged period—not from some farfetched and imaginary sort of starvation.

Then why does Jon Krakauer insist that Chris McCandless died from eating a wild plant?

When the story of Chris McCandless’ death hit the media, it produced a strong negative reaction among some people, particularly many Alaskans. McCandless was publicly ridiculed and lambasted. Krakauer saw through the shallowness, insensitivity, and irrationality of much of this criticism and wanted to provide a counterpoint.

I don’t disagree with him. Although Chris made serious and egregious mistakes, this is not a sensible reason to become furious at him or about what he did. The impulsive disparagement levied toward Chris displays the insecurities of a kind of redneck found in every rural district—one who feels deeply threatened by those who do things that he would not dream of trying and can’t understand. Only on the surface is this criticism about his fatal mistakes. Chris’s death verifies his critics’ self-image as rugged frontierspeople, and renders him a defenseless target.

Shortly after the story broke, the Alaskan hunters who found McCandless’s body ridiculed him, saying that he had killed a caribou and mistaken it for a moose. In the words of Gordon Samel, “When I read in the paper that he’d thought he’d shot a moose, that told me right there he wasn’t no Alaskan. There’s a big difference between a moose and a caribou. A real big difference. You’d have to be pretty stupid not to be able to tell them apart,” (p. 177). But there is no doubt that Chris did, in fact, kill a moose; his photos clearly show it. These Alaskans not only couldn’t identify the animal’s remains, but they derided Chris for getting it right.

This is a microcosm for much of the criticism Chris has received. When people say that Chris’s adventure was pitiful and insignificant, and imply that “Alaskans do that kind of stuff all the time,” they are kidding themselves. What they actually mean is that Alaskans go into the bush with snowmobiles or ATVs, lots of gear, and ample food supplies; why couldn’t Chris just do the same? This is as irrelevant and hollow as mocking a marathon runner because you can get to the finish line faster in your car. There is nothing inherently moronic about what Chris tried to do; he just failed. No person who has the ability to successfully do what Chris attempted would detest him for trying.

I understand Krakauer’s desire to defend McCandless from such crude and childish attacks. Having Chris die from a poisonous plant that could even fool “experts” makes him seem less foolish and overconfident than if he died by simple starvation. Krakauer’s incongruous interpretation of the evidence seems to be based on this desire to preserve a more positive image of McCandless—both for the readers and for himself. But his beliefs rest on two demonstrably false assumptions: first, that starvation alone is inadequate to explain Chris’s death; and second, that Chris’s journal entry from July 30 somehow indicates that a plant eaten on that day is what killed him almost three weeks later.

Krakauer is in obstinate denial about Chris’s state of health during his stay in the bush, and this is reflected in a strange dismissive attitude. Krakauer says that Chris “feasted regularly” from mid-May to late June, when in fact he was only eating sufficiently perhaps once or twice a week. He points out “a bounty of wild meat” in early June—the only stretch of his 113-day stay when Chris might have been consuming sufficient calories. Krakauer speaks of an “apparent munificence” and claims that “the country was a fecund riot of plant and animal life, and his food supply was adequate” (p. 188). Meanwhile, Chris’s journal and photos clearly document his own starvation.

Krakauer also shares that “game seems to have been plentiful: In the last three weeks of July, he killed thirty-five squirrels, four spruce grouse, five jays and woodpeckers, and two frogs” (p. 188). Perhaps he never did the math, but this is a striking shortage of game. And this was a period of relative abundance in comparison with much of the trip. An examination of Chris’s journal shows that he went without food on many days and almost always had an extreme caloric deficit. His starvation clearly began on April 28, not July 30 as Krakauer proposes.

When Chris tried to leave the wilderness in early July, he probably did so because he realized that starvation was a real threat. He took a picture of himself at that time, about which Krakauer says, “He looks healthy but alarmingly gaunt. Already his cheeks are sunken. The tendons in his neck stand out like taut cables” (p. 169). How does Krakauer deduce “healthy” from that description? This photo was taken almost seven weeks before McCandless died, and four weeks before he ate wild potato seeds and felt ill. Clearly, he was gravely malnourished and on a trajectory toward death long before the alleged “poisoning” even occurred. But Krakauer still maintains the fallacy that Chris was doing fine. Only one page after the above description, he states that Chris had “been fending for himself quite nicely in the country” (p. 171).

Krakauer is trying to squeeze blood from a turnip, so to speak, because he rejects the obvious. This denial helps explain his bizarre juxtaposition of incompatible statements: “His meager diet had pared his body down to a feral scrawn of gristle and bone, but he seemed to be in reasonably good health” (pp 189). Krakauer argues that starvation alone can’t explain Chris’s death because, before July 30, there was “nothing to suggest that McCandless was in dire circumstances.” If a hundred days of drastic food shortage doesn’t sound dire, what does? There is, in fact, overwhelming evidence that Chris had been starving before this date; the photos he took of himself show visual proof. Chris’s own journal says “Starving” on July 30. Starvation doesn’t happen suddenly.

Nothing about the journal entry “Extremly weak. Fault of pot seed. Much trouble just to stand up. Starving. Great Jeopardy” indicates that H. alpinum seeds killed Chris, or that Chris feeling ill that day caused his death nineteen days later. There is no plausible theory connecting these events. Most likely, this entry simply reflects that he overindulged on wild potato seeds and felt ill. Almost any fruit or vegetable will do this when eaten in immoderate quantity. Considering Chris’s nutritional state, he seems a likely candidate for overindulgence.

As a child, I once became extremely ill from eating way too many green peppers. Another time, as an adult, I seriously pigged out on bearberries and developed terrible stomach pains that doubled me over for an hour. In neither case did I die of starvation three weeks later.

Lamothe (2007) modeled Chris’s food intake versus requirement, based on World Health Organization guidelines, and showed that his caloric deficit alone was sufficient to cause death. This supports the conclusion that Chris McCandless died of starvation—just like the medical examiner had said, and still contends. This also explains the “mystery” of why Chris didn’t do more to save himself: the advanced stages of starvation are characterized by an extreme listlessness, weakness, and depression (Keys et al., 1950), all of which were probably aggravated by low-level lead toxicity from the game he was eating (ND Dept. of Health, 2008).

I can sympathize with Krakauer’s desire to portray McCandless in a positive light, but there comes a time when you must let go of extravagant, unsupported guesses. There is simply no reason to believe that Chris McCandless was killed by a plant.

What lessons about wilderness survival and wild food can be drawn from the story of Chris McCandless?

Whatever you think of Chris as a person, it is hard to deny that he overestimated his skills and underestimated how much knowledge—and food—he would need. Despite some vocal anti-McCandless opinions, he was not ill-equipped or under-equipped; he was unskilled and unprepared. He didn’t need a better map or a high-powered rifle. There are many knowledgeable and skillful people who have returned from similar adventures in good health, and who would have thrived with the same gear and in the same circumstances under which he starved to death.

In a short-term survival situation, food is of minor importance. However, in long-term survival or “living off the land,” it is of paramount importance.

Chris grossly underestimated the amount of food that he needed. Before his trip to Alaska he had spent periods on a negative calorie budget and lost a great deal of weight. At one point his journal (oddly written in third person) said, “Malnutrition and the road have taken their toll on his body. Over 25 pounds lost” (p. 37). Yet he was always able to access food after these excursions and restore his body mass. During such a replenishment period, after a time of living on wild plants, Jan Burres described him as “big-time hungry. Hungry, hungry, hungry” (p. 30). It is OK to lose twenty pounds over three weeks, but continuing that same negative calorie budget over several months is deadly.

We get food so easily and automatically that we hardly consider the quantities that we require, or its calorie content. Most Americans are profoundly out of touch with these things. What Chris did is common for wilderness survivalists today, who typically “survive” on negative calorie budgets, steadily losing weight. The only difference is that their excursions are normally of less than a month’s duration, and they simply gain back the lost weight after returning to civilization. (An excellent description of this process of survivalist starvation followed by binge eating can be found in The Last American Man [Gilbert, 2002], pp. 52–63.) I believe that this is exactly what Chris intended to do, just as he had done before; but his attempt to leave was thwarted by a collusion of unforeseen conditions, weakness, and injury.

Maintaining one’s weight and health over the long term is an entirely different proposition. It doesn’t help that many survival books and instructors teach that only very small amounts of food are needed in the bush. McCandless’s experience should serve as a lesson to any survivalist who entertains these caloric delusions. Making believe that Chris died by poisoning robs us of this important and potentially life-saving lesson, and instead imbues us with an unrealistic and unfounded fear that only makes us more likely to perish in the wilderness.

I like to measure my food in calorie-days—the number of days of my full caloric requirement that the food represents. I calculated Chris’s calorie requirement as 3,300 per day based on his age, gender, a body weight of 145 pounds, and heavy physical activity, using guidelines from Grodner et al. (1996). This estimate is rough, and the true figure would depend on many unknowable variables. Still, my point is easily demonstrated: McCandless didn’t have nearly enough food. He began his journey on April 28 with a ten pound bag of rice—which constituted less than five calorie-days. By May 9, he had only killed one grouse and had written “4^th day famine” in his journal. The rice was already long gone.

When Krakauer insists that McCandless had sufficient food in the Alaska bush, it makes me suspect that he has never lived on red squirrels. I eat three in one meal, and that’s with wild rice and vegetables.

The squirrels that McCandless was eating (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) typically weigh five to nine ounces (Whitaker, 1996). Using seven ounces as an average, and realizing that after subtracting the skin, tail, head, bones, feet, and entrails, the edible flesh would constitute about 40 percent of that weight, or 2.8 ounces of meat per squirrel. This means that he would have needed to eat about twenty-five squirrels per day to meet his caloric requirement. If he carefully removed and ate the liver, kidneys, kidney fat, heart, lungs, and brain of each squirrel, he would have about doubled the calories that he received from each animal. Since he probably did this to some extent, I estimate that he needed roughly sixteen squirrels to equal a calorie-day.

I can find no estimate of the caloric value of H. alpinum roots. I use figures for parsnips in these calculations, since they seem like the most physically similar cultivated vegetable. (Note that, despite the common name “wild potato,” H. alpinum is not closely related to potatoes, nor similar in form.) If parsnips have similar energy content, Chris would have needed about nine pounds of wild potato roots to equal one calorie-day.

Since we don’t know exactly which berries Chris was eating and in which proportions, I calculated with the caloric value of blueberries (which is actually higher than that of some of the berries he was eating). It would have taken about thirteen pounds of blueberries to equal one of Chris’s calorie-days.

A hypothetical day’s food for Chris might consist of half squirrel meat, and a quarter each of berries and wild potato roots. In this case he would have needed eight squirrels, 2 ¼ pounds of roots, and 3 ¼ pounds of berries each day. I don’t propose that he ever ate exactly this complement of food—that detail is insignificant. What matters is that his food journal clearly shows him getting only a small fraction of the calories he needed. (Note: the calorie content of various foods used in this section are derived from Grodner et al., 1996, except for dry rice, which is from Van Wyk, 2005.)

If this seems like a high volume of food, that’s because it is. We have sought, developed, cultivated, and become accustomed to calorie-dense foods for so long that most of us have never been without them. We’ve never had to eat food in volumes like this. When you realize that a stick of butter has as many calories as two and a half quarts of blueberries or seven pounds of broccoli, you can see why the innate human desire for calorie-rich, low-fiber food developed.

You can’t just eat whatever is edible; you must eat food in appropriate proportions.

This is a big shocker to modern folks, who get to pick and choose their dietary proportions from an almost endless variety of easily acquired food. Most of us have never really faced this challenge. The survivalist often imagines that she can find an edible plant and just eat it until she is full, but this is simply not so.

Chris had access to a lot of lingonberries. If he didn’t get any meat, couldn’t he just eat more lingonberries and get all his calories that way? Absolutely not. He would have needed to eat almost three gallons of lingonberries per day. He’d probably be vomiting before finishing the second quart. No matter how many lingonberries were available to him, his body would have only accepted them for a small portion of his caloric requirement. This doesn’t make lingonberries “poisonous”; the same is true of virtually every food, although the appropriate proportions vary. Toxicologists do not consider an illness from overindulgence to be a poisoning (Kingsbury, 1965). When Chris wrote, “Extremly weak. Fault pot seed,” it was not because H. alpinum seeds are poisonous, but simply because he had eaten too much, and his body rejected them.

The concept that foods can be eaten only in appropriate quantities is taken so much for granted that, to my knowledge, it has never been given a name in the medical literature. I call it the maximum caloric proportion (MCP). Some foods have a very high MCP, such as milk, meat, and potatoes. They are easily digested and contain few antinutrients or toxins, thus they are suitable as dietary staples. Others, such as cabbage, rhubarb, and raspberries, cannot serve as staple foods and are only suitable to supply small portions of the diet. As one travels north, there tends to be fewer plants with a high MCP; this is why hunter-gatherers from northern latitudes ate meat for the great majority of their calories.

Don’t underestimate the skills and knowledge that living off the land requires.

Chris was neither a good hunter nor a good gatherer. He either didn’t realize these facts, or didn’t think they mattered. Identification represents perhaps one percent of a seasoned gatherer’s knowledge about a particular plant. The rest is learned from experience, not books. Each plant is a complex skill, which often takes much time to master, but many neophyte foragers don’t appreciate this fact. An experienced harvester might locate a plant in half the time of a novice and select better specimens, harvest them six times as fast, then process and prepare them in only a quarter of the time. Even with a skill as deceptively simple as berry picking, skilled collectors typically acquire two to four times as much as inexperienced pickers beside them. Such disparities add up enormously and can be the difference between life and death in a survival situation.

McCandless was also a complete novice when it came to hunting. Skilled hunters kill many times more game than the inexperienced. Porcupines, red squirrels, and spruce grouse are notoriously easy to kill. Of course, he should have eaten easy prey, but mention of the more elusive game is mostly lacking. Snowshoe hares, for example, are found in the same area and provide about six times the meat of a squirrel, but they also require more skill to hunt. It takes years to become a proficient hunter, and Chris sorely lacked such experience. This callowness is all the more egregious when you consider that Chris was attempting to survive in a landscape where high-calorie plant foods do not exist, and hunter-gatherers subsisted largely on meat.

In a very real sense, Chris was killed by the ignorance he displayed when he killed the moose. It took him two days to finish removing the internal organs, which should have been done within an hour or two. He didn’t even commence with smoking the meat until four days after the kill. In June! Beyond this, it is honestly quite hard for me to imagine the naivety that would be required to not know that meat should be preserved by cutting it into thin strips and drying. Sure, plenty of people don’t know this—but they aren’t going into the wilderness alone without provisions. Chris was attempting to live off the land. If he had all this time to read Tolstoy, why didn’t he have time to read about what he was doing? There is an abundance of literature on this topic, and he could have easily done a little research and discovered that this was the standard way to store meat before freezers, almost everywhere in the world. Even a small moose would have provided at least sixty calorie-days, virtually ensuring his survival if he had only known a few basic facts.

Everything he needed was amply supplied, except for knowledge and resourcefulness. He just failed to take advantage of it.

If you are going to live off the land, food needs to be a priority, not an afterthought.

In a long-term subsistence situation, food is the priority. In former times, the native people of the Far North planned each move according to food availability. McCandless largely ignored this consideration, planning his entire wilderness experience based on aesthetic and philosophical considerations.

Moreover, the entire trip was ill-conceived from this standpoint. If Chris was really planning on feeding himself from the wild, he should have gone to a place with a lot of wild food. Instead, he chose what is arguably one of the most difficult places in the country to feed oneself. This is a mistake that I often encounter. People want to go to a remote, wild area to live off the land. Ironically, these areas are remote and wild precisely because of their limited biological production (i.e., hardly any food).

Chris did not seem to think food mattered very much. One wonders how much this had to do with the influence of Tolstoy and Thoreau. Shortly after his terrible experience wasting the moose, he highlighted his passage from Walden:

I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind.

This was not a vacation to Chris; it was a vision quest. I believe that, in the early part of his stay, he saw his caloric deprivation as some kind spiritual necessity and moral statement. By the time he changed his mind, it was too late, and his inexperience caught up with him.

Survival or “Earth living” entails more work than many people claim.

There is a prevalent myth that living by hunting and gathering requires only “two hours of work per day.” Many authors and teachers of wilderness survival preach this, but it is groundless. The idea is based on the work of a few anthropologists (Richard Lee, Irvin DeVore, James Woodburn, and McCarthy and McArthur), popularized by Marshall Sahlins (1972). If you take the findings of these anthropologists out of context, they may seem to support this claim, but careful reading of the original studies brings to light a few things worth pointing out. First, two hours per day was the lowest estimate made in any of these studies. Second, the subjects were life-long professional hunter-gatherers who had been familiar with their respective areas all their lives. Third, most of these estimates did not include the time required for food preparation and other tasks such as building shelters or crafting tools. Further, the estimates are for groups of people, and so represent the many advantages that collaboration and division of labor provide. And finally, the observations come from tropical cultures which invested little to no labor in shelter, clothing, long-term food storage, or containers. Two hours of work per day might feed you—if all of these conditions apply to your “survival” situation.

Many survivalists have been confused and rattled by this myth, thinking that things are so hard for them either because they are inept, or because they just can’t find the hamburger tree. Today we are fed with such ease that, when thrust into a subsistence or survival situation, most people find it remarkably difficult to muster the diligence and effort necessary to acquire sufficient calories. When this frustration is compounded by inexperience, some people are shocked into near paralysis. I suspect that, at least to some degree, this happened to Chris McCandless.

In this essay, I do not wish to pass any judgment on Chris McCandless. He made incredible mistakes, overestimated himself, and underestimated “The Wild,” but that does not make me scornful of him. In fact, I admire his courage despite his fatal hubris. I also admire his search for truth and meaning in a world that is often disgusting in its shallowness and materialism. The fact that he died in this search in no way diminishes the lasting truth of the answers he found. To that end, I hope he would appreciate what I have written here.

For Free Shipping and a book signed by Sam, order directly from Forager's Harvest

The Guide Features

• 512 color photos, demonstrating each edible part in the proper stage of harvest, plus showing important identifying features
• Super-strong sewn binding
• Step-by-step tutorial to positive plant identification
• Photos and text comparing potentially confusing plants
• Thorough discussion on how to gather and use the plants
• Detailed information on harvest, preparation, and storage techniques
• A foraging calendar showing harvest times for wild foods
• A glossary of botanical terms illustrated with line drawings
• Bibliography and recommended reading list
• Index
• Durable, Smyth-sewn binding
• 512 6" x 9" pages

Ordering Information

Nature’s Garden – $24.95 - free shipping within U.S.
[Download Printable Order Form] [Purchase Online]

Nature’s Garden follows the same award-winning format of Samuel Thayer’s first book, with in-depth chapters covering 41 new wild edibles. In this volume you will find the most authoritative accounts of several important food plants, such as hackberry and American lotus, available anywhere. You will find mouth-watering photography of cranberries, blueberries, huckleberries, strawberries, wild plums, and more. You’ll hear of new methods for using dandelions. You’ll finally be able to make sense of the tricky wild lettuce / sow thistle group. You’ll discover that wild carrot and poison hemlock can be reliably told apart, thanks to a detailed chart accompanied by 19 photographs. You’ll read about vegetables with a rich tradition of use around the world that are largely ignored in the wild food literature, such as cow parsnip, patience dock, and honewort. You can read more exciting myth-busting about poisonous plant fables and the maligned black nightshade, plus anecdotes about purple children and the hazards of eating cacti. Yet perhaps the best part of all is the book within a book about acorns: 51 pages of the details that turn these nuts into food.

Advance Reviews by Leading Experts

Sam’s done it again! Okay. Here’s a book that will grab you and hold you fascinated and amazed to the very last page. It’s not a spy novel, but in a way, it yields just as much intrigue and enigma solving as any thriller. It takes edible wild plants to a whole new level.

Sam Thayer is a born storyteller and a born naturalist. He brings to life the places he describes, the tastes, scents and colors of the woods, marshes and glades that he calls “Nature’s Garden”. Reading his books are a delight, because he brings you along with him, tasting and browsing, deliberating on this and that flavor, or on this and that method of preparing some delectable wild vegetable or succulent berry, or debating on how rumors of poisoning by wild plants can grow and spread to the point of ridiculousness. But there are real dangers too, and these are seriously and carefully outlined along with the delights of the edible plants and parts.

This is not just an ordinary guide to identifying and processing wild edible plants. It is a compellingly personal book, a rich compendium of dedicated research and first-hand experience of forty-one of “the best” of the wild food plants, their history, how to find them, how to prepare them, and all the little tricks and techniques you need to know to convert an immense array of wild plants into delectable meals. In this book you can discover the yin and yang of black nightshade, how to extract chicory crowns, how to sort and leach acorns and identify the duds (“The acorn is among the most misunderstood and misrepresented of our wild foods”), how to de-husk hazelnuts and de-spine prickly pear pads, and how to flail and winnow amaranth seeds. All of these details are illustrated with spectacular photographs, including close-ups of key features and many, especially of the fruits, that are truly mouth-watering. I learned so much from this book and was introduced to “foodworthy” plants I have never encountered, for example, sand cherry, chokeberry – yes that’s chokeBBBBerry – and autumnberry.

This is a work of art and passion and dedication and sheer delight. Sam writes from a deep philosophical perspective from a life lived close to the earth. He actually lives the new paradigm he talks about: “one of attachment and participation.” And, if ever there was anyone in North America who “tells it like it is,” it’s Sam Thayer. He doesn’t mince his words when it comes to confronting the many mistakes and misconceptions around wild foods. Yet, the book is painstakingly researched and scientifically accurate, supported by a huge array of references. The richness of the information, the beauty and significance of the photographs, and the fierce and spirited defense of wild foods and wild places all combine to make this my number one choice of edible wild plants books.

Nancy J. Turner, PhD, CM, OBC, FLS, FRSC
Distinguished Professor of Ethnobiology, University of Victoria, BC

Teeming with hints and details that you won’t find anywhere else and, most importantly, it has the virtue of making you think. . . this book is alive ! Read it. -Francois Couplan, PhD, world-renown wild food expert, author of more than 40 books on the topic.

Once again, Samuel Thayer has produced a supremely authoritative guide which draws on yet more of his vast experience as a practising forager and first-class field botanist. He writes with refreshing candour, disarming informality, and without any trace of pretence. As with Forager’s Harvest, Nature’s Garden is brim-full with original insights and will become essential reading for all of us who forage in the temperate zone – not just in North America, but right around the northern hemisphere. His total mastery of the subject rings loud and clear from every page, and, together, his two books undoubtedly now set the ‘gold standard’ for the world of foraging literature.

Gordon Hillman
Visiting Professor of Archaeobotany, University College London, UK,
Co-author with Ray Mears of Wild Food [of the British Isles]

Sam Thayer has produced a beautifully illustrated work which anyone interested in wild plants will love. There is the depth that you'd expect in an academic work, but it is written so that anyone can enjoy and learn from it. . . . An excellent addition to your library! -Christopher Nyerges, Author of "Guide to Wild Foods and Editor of Wilderness Way Magazine”

when I recently received a pre-publication copy of Samuel Thayer’s new book, Nature’s Garden, I was quite surprised and delighted. As always when I get something for free I am very skeptical but after opening the cover and browsing through it I realized that this is a keeper. I have over 100 books just on wild plants in my library but this one will get a lot of use and not just take up shelf space as most of the others do.

After several days of reading through different chapters I would say that this probably the best book on foraging for wild plants that I have ever seen. It is the most thorough, comprehensive study of wild foods that I have ever had the pleasure of reading. Everything is written in a clear and concise manner. He goes into great detail on the plants, explains where to find them, how to harvest then how to prepare them for food. He also shows comparisons of poisonous look-alikes. The photography in the book is fantastic. I don’t know how anyone could spend that much time or have that much energy and ambition to put into writing such a book. He definitely loves what he is writing about and knows what he is talking about.

This book will be on the top of my list for all of my students.

Marty Simon, Wilderness Learning Center

This is an opportunity for readers to ask thoughtful or thought-provoking questions or leave comments and share experiences about edible wild plants and related topics. It is intended as a forum to explore these topics more deeply than they are already covered in readily accessible sources in print.

I cannot guarantee that every question or comment will be posted. Actually, I guarantee that many of them won’t be. I will limit the postings to those that I think will benefit other readers and are on-topic.

If you submitted a question or comment that has not yet been posted, it may be that I have not had time to research or write a response, or it may be that I have not deemed it appropriate. Also note that some questions posted were submitted to me in forms other than this online form.

Here are some kinds of submissions that will definitely not be posted:

1. Lazy questions such as “How do you eat dandelions?” There are thousands of pages already written on that topic. Go read them if you want to know.
2. Questions that are already clearly addressed and painstakingly discussed in an article or book that I have written.
3. Comments or questions that do not add substantially to discussion, such as “Me too.”
4. Sharing of questionable information that is unverifiable, lacks cited sources, or is patently false.
5. Fear-mongering: This is a forum for people interested in wild food, not for people afraid of wild food who want to bring others down to their level.
6. Questions of plant identification. Most of these go like this: “I saw a plant, it was green and had leaves. What was it?”

As you might notice, these excluded submissions comprise the vast majority of postings on most internet wild food discussion groups.

Submission Form