Where to Start in Developing Foraging Skills

Sam Thayer is a highly knowledgeable and accomplished forager and is very comfortable living on the provisions nature provides. His book Forager's Harvest was a classic as soon as it was published. But Sam, who is very forceful in expressing himself, occasionally has some opinions not always shared by everyone else. Here is some of what he has recently said, most of which I agree with:

"You can always fish with the wrong lures or bait, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and complain about how hard it is. Some hunters almost never get a deer. Some do easily. Efficiency in foraging is about having skills and knowledge and experience, not about trying things a few times as a novice and then making premature conclusions about things we are only slightly familiar with. Certainly there are a lot of people with ridiculous notions about learning 3 green vegetables and then going into the wilderness and living off of them. Those fantasies have no bearing on reality, though. There is a lot more than greens out there, even if people don't know about it."
_____________
I bristle at the suggestion that living for a time primarily off of three green vegetables is a "ridiculous notion". It is a place to start, and I know of many people who have at least started that way, especially in and after the Great Depression. My family and I lived on a diet primarily made of lambsquarters for six months back in the late '40's, and a friend supplemented the meagre rations of a German concentration camp by grazing on dandelion leaves for two years during WWII.

I always go back to the reality that no matter how much people contend that living off the land is difficult, the world is filled with native peoples who have lived since the beginning on nothing but what the land provides, and they are still here. They have developed the knowledge and skill to make do with what they have been given, and their bodies are adapted to the reality that sometimes they may have to go hungry for a while.

Most of us who teach survival skills don't live that way day-by-day, and certainly not a year at a time, or a whole lifetime, knowing nothing else, like these native peoples do.

The longest I have gone at one stretch was two months one summer while doing research for my doctoral dissertation, and I had little trouble doing it for that long. There was plenty of plant foods and fish available to keep me fed and healthy, and my base camp, with all the implements and shelters and furniture I had made, stayed in one place, so I didn't have to keep remaking them in new locations. Flint and steel worked just fine for starting fires when I ran out of matches. I never had to do anything with a fire piston or bow drill, and still haven't mastered either of them, although I have friends that have.

But I had arrived at that place after providing for myself off the land for varying periods of time in various habitats for 16 or 17 years prior to it, and it was just part of my life.

People have to realize that there are really no shortcuts to learning the skills for living off the land. It takes time and comes step-by-step.

But that raises the question about what the FIRST step is. The first step, quite frankly, my friend Sam, is to get people started, and to do that you teach them a few common plants that are easily identified and abundant in their area, and motivate them to begin using them regularly in their diet. Once that has become a habit, you introduce them to a few more. Somewhere along the way, they get excited by their new discoveries, and that jump-starts them to begin exploring on their own until, finally, their facility with this new-found way of living begins to develop.

So, my friend, you START with green vegetables, usually the dark green, nutrient-dense invasive types like dandelions, plantain, stinging nettle and lambsquarters. This is not the "be all and end all" of "survival training". But for many people, if that is all they have, and the plants are abundant in their urban or suburban surroundings, they CAN get enough nutrients to keep going for extended periods of times if supplemented by small quantities of less nutritious, but calorie rich, domestic foods such as tubers and familiar nuts and fruits. Knowing something is better than not knowing anything.

I, too, find interesting how hard most people think it is to do such things as separate dandelion florets from the involucral bracts and receptacle, and how amazed they are when shown how easy it is, and how fast you can generate a cup of florets to include in a recipe. The truth is that in every profession, it takes a long time to develop skills to the level that you can do the job fast enough to make a living at it. I have an Amish friend who wanted to be an upholsterer, but had to wait until his son was old enough to work and help support the family before he could devote enough time to developing the skills to end up upholstering enough furniture each day to make enough to support his family on his own. Same with cabinet making, electrical and plumbing work-- anything.

As you so often emphasize yourself, there are no shortcuts. Becoming knowledgeable and skilled in anything is a slow, plodding process, often involving years in college, or as an apprentice, or in some other training program. You have spent a lifetime developing your skills, and you are very good at what you do. You can teach one skill to someone very quickly, such as how to identify and use bitternut hickory, and if they are surrounded by them, they can live on that one plant for as long as it lasts, but that knowledge wouldn't do them any good if they were on a survival trip in spring or summer, unless they had stored enough for use then.

Hence, the inability to pass on a lifetime of skills in a two-hour class session. It is better to pass on enough knowledge about a few long-season plants to start people on their journey and get excited about it, and then let them develop from there.

Having said that, I'm not about to challenge you in a wild rice gathering contest. But come on down and we'll see who can peel dandelion flowers the fastest!! Gotta get the rhythm...........

Peter