Foragery
Let me ask you a question. How many wild, non-cultivated plants can you identify?
Your ability to identify these plants is called foraging. Most people barely know what a forager is.
According to the dictionary, A forager is someone who searches widely for food or provisions in
the wild. This subject I feel is widely ignored.
Perhaps you may have thought of this subject before, but it never turns into more than a thought
for most people that think of it. It is important, even though you don't really hear it often.
I believe in a future where foraging is a regular thing to learn in a public school or even just a
side club for children who are interested in this subject. It’s important to me to be able to classify
and identify plants you can consume and shouldn’t consume. Not many people pay attention to
where it’s due to herbs. Herbs and other medicinal plants hold so many vitamins we more
commonly need to add to our diets. Let’s use basil as our example. You may or may not know a
bit about basil already. Basil in an adequate amount is an Anti-inflammatory, helps fight
depression and anxiety and even helps manage blood sugar in diabetics. Herbs aren’t a largely
used plant though, so why is that? There are so many plants we could use for medicine but we
don’t use them!
In fact, there are 20,000 edible herbs species but 90% of the plant’s aren’t used in our food
today. And there are 50,000 medicinal plants today that are so ignored, it’s ridiculous.
Sure, there’s basil, thyme, bay leaves and sage as a seasoning for food, but not much more
than that is used today. Doesn’t it seem weird to you that we don’t use that much?
The point I would like to make here is that I feel people are becoming more and more distant
from our roots. Our ancestors can forage more than our average population,and we are much
more intelligent today than we were then! I believe that we should teach our current generation
about foraging so we can pass our wisdom down to the next generations for situations we can’t
predict now.
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