Reply To: Foraging 14: Light Harvesting

[Bogu]

I am vegan so my food intake is all plants in one form or another (well, I will make an exception for good local and ethically made honey and backyard chicken eggs if I come across them). I think it would not be too difficult to make a forage-only day, if I had access to basics such as pasta/bread/rice/oil/salt&pepper and maybe an additional source of protein like beans, tofu, lentils, peas (don’t think those can be foraged). My foraged menu for a day would probably look like this:
– Oatmeal with hazelnut milk (there’s an abundance of hazelnut trees where I live and nut milks are super easy to make!), a spoon-full of rose-hip/hawthorn or elder jam (that’s the vitamin C requirements met for the day!) and perhaps some foraged fruit/seeds as topping.
– I actually made a wild-garlic pesto the other day and used walnuts instead of pine nuts, I’m pretty sure there are some walnut trees around I could pick a handful of nuts from and then eat the pesto with pasta or bread for lunch. Maybe I would throw a good bunch of nettle leaves in there for extra minerals and iron!
– For dinner I would probably make a big salad with whatever greens and vegetables I could find, perhaps some foraged fruit/flowers on top and some grilled tofu on the side.
I would also probably do a whole bunch of snacking on Lynn’s trail mix while I walk around the city trying to forage all the ingredients.
I think this would be totally doable and wouldn’t actually be as much in volume since some of the plants are very potent and nutrient-dense (like wild garlic or nettle).