Survival and Repair

Wildcrafting is ancient practice coined in a relatively young term and it has literally fed human existence since time immemorial. An early notion of wildcrafting (1924) is described as “skill in or knowledge of matters relating to survival in a wilderness environment”. Indeed, this broad skill base dates back to when most of the human population were hunters and gatherers. Much of this craft has been lost with the novelty of agriculture: “By focusing on domesticated cultivars the collective skills needed to identify and prepare wild foods has declined precipitously. Since species that contained energy and micronutrients became peripheral or were abandoned, humans sometimes have starved in the midst of ‘wild food plenty’ ”. 

We have seen this with the great potato famine when the potato blight struck the main food source for people in Ireland and throughout Europe in the 1840s. Though many people have lost their foraging skills and traditions, during times of drought and famine, survival and subsistence was (and still is for many people) a very real motivation for farmers and other rural peoples to supplement their diets with wild plants to keep themselves healthy and alive.  

Euell Gibbons, who is deemed the “father of modern wild foods,” started a resurgence of yearning for our ancient survival skills and provided inspiration for a whole generation of back-to-the-landers in the 1970s who were not taught how to use wild plant foods by elders in their families. Learning about wild foods originally from his mother and then acquiring a vast store of wild food knowledge from his curiosity about Native American uses of wild plants, it is said that Euell kept his family alive for a month on foraged puffball mushrooms, pinon nuts, and yellow prickly pears in New Mexico during the Dust-Bowl era.