AGIS Home Page Foraging Items The Amerindians Did Not Eat by Jim Duke ________________________________________________________________________________________________ Back in 1936, the USDA published Miscellaneous Publication Number 237, which is extremely useful to foragers. The study, by Elias Yanovsky, was entitled Food Plants of the North American Indians. Scanning about 80 years of literature, back to around 1850, Yanovsky listed 1,112 species in 444 genera of plants among 120 families. We are much indebted to our forefathers elsewhere or our forerunners here in North America, for learning which plants are edible, which medicinal, and which poisonous. No doubt there were many painful mistakes along the way. And there are still fatalities among novices, especially those who experiment with the carrot family and mushrooms. With a new breed or generation of foragers, we sometimes encounter outspoken newcomers who enthusiastically advocate their "discoveries" and "inventions" often to the peril of their "disciples." In this age of computers, it's easy to see when one of the new "messiahs" has invented a new plant food or medicine, too often based on "vibrations" rather than science. I know two very convincing new herbalists who believe that the plants themselves revealed such new uses to them. So far, I have not been so lucky as to have my friends, the plants, talk to me. While genuine new uses are still being discovered for old herbs, I know of no documented case of such discoveries stemming from divine inspiration. Yanovsky recorded more than 1,000 Amerindian edible plant species. It's hard to see how he can have missed many. (Remember that most of the world is fed by 19 of the world's twenty most important crops, listed by the FAO in decreasing order of importance: wheat, rice, maize, barley, pearl millet, sorghum, soybean, cotton, oat, phaseolus bean, white potato, groundnut, and rapeseed.) Surely, even a scholar like Yanovsky can have missed a few citations of Amerindian usages; scholars only approach perfection, they never arrive! Readers of COLTSFOOT may be interested in some of the foods showing up in foraging manuals, which foods were not cited in Yanovsky's long list of edibles. We can only speculate about why Yanovsky excluded them: 1. Some are recently arrived plants from overseas which the Indian learned from the immigrants, not adopting their usages. 2. Yanovsky failed to list them because: a. he overlooked citations of their usage b. other scholars failed to publish the fact that the Indians used them c. the Indians did not eat them. Quite frankly, if it is clearly an American species and the Amerindian did not regard it as edible, I'm not sure I should either! However, at the risk of being called racist, I am convinced that there are racial differences in tastes as well as in biochemistry and physiology, just as there are individual differences. Since many people are allergic to such diverse foods as wheat, cheese, milk, chocolate, and peanuts, for example, new foragers should sample any new food, wild or tame, judiciously to make sure that they don't have some idiosyncratic allergy to that new food. I apparently have an idiosyncratic sensitivity to the daylily, Hemerocallis, one of the foraging foods not listed by Yanovsky. Since it is an introduced species, Amerindian usage would have perforce been an acquired taste. But oriental people are fond of the dried flower buds in soups. And when I take my running lunch in June and July, I frequently eat a dozen or so of the fresh flower buds with no apparent ill effects. However, whenever I eat the copious roots in quantity, I get a rather violent diarrhea (not unique to me), just like the diarrhea I get when I take colchicine for an acute attack of gout. I am sensitive to colchicine, having had to take it intermittently since age 49. No one in my foraging classes seems to be sensitive, having not taken the colchicine for gout, and none seem to get the diarrhea. Fortunate for them. Around Maryland, I can find and identify the daylily bulbs in the middle of the winter, and they are a copious food supply for those fortunate enough not to suffer ill effects from eating them. But the daylily is not a native American species, so it is clear why it was not used by native Americans, at least until it was introduced. But what about the native American jewelweed (Impatiens spp.)? Yanovsky does not list it as a food. Some foraging manuals do! It makes a beautiful green potherb, not unpleasant to the taste. and the green seeds, as well as the green capsule containing them, are pleasant enough raw, but I don't think they taste like butternuts as one book suggests. Why didn't the Indians eat them? Maybe they did but it just wasn't recorded. Or maybe they found it to be unpleasant, either taste-wise or physiologically (as a purgative perhaps). Even though I have enjoyed my limited sampling of the jewelweed, I would be cautious about eating it in large quantities. Following are a few other food items that Yanovsky failed to record for one reason or another. He doesn't mention any of the eastern pine species seeds being eaten, but he does mention the edible bark of the white pine. Mentioning many uses of the cattail, he does not list the use of the pollen as a breadstuff. He doesn't mention several of the adventive grasses, e.g., foxtail (Setaria), as cereal sources. Telegraphically, he failed also to mention, for one reason or another: * dayflower (Commelina) as a potherb * berries of the Solomon's seal (Polygonatum) * roots of the false Solomon's seal (Smilicina) * trilliums as a potherb or asparagus substitute * Japanese knotweed (Polygonum cuspidatum) as an asparagus substitute * roots of the evening primrose (Oenothera) * fruits of the pickle weed (Oxalis) * roots of the ginseng or dwarf ginseng (Panax) * honewort (Cryptotaenia) as a potherb * roots of the goatsbeard (Tragopogon) * fruit pulp of the eastern yew (Taxus canadensis) POISONOUS * flowers of the redbud (Cercis canadensis) * chickweed (Stellaria) as a salad or potherb * trailing arbutus (Epigaea) as a nibble ENDANGERED * cleavers (Galium) as a potherb * buds of the basswood (Tilia) * pilewort (Erechtites) as a potherb You will no doubt think of others as you review the excellent paper of Yanovsky's public domain document. If you think this well-indexed 84-page document would be worth $20 in a hard-cover reprint edition, you might share that information with my friend Al Hoch, P.O. Box 156, Lincoln, Massachusetts 01773. He is considering a pocket-sized reprint. Yanovsky conversely mentioned a few incredible edibles, some of which I would fear to eat; hence I list them only by generic name: Baptisia, Celastrus, Cuscuta, Lycopodium, Parthenocissus, Phoradendron, Xanthium, Zephyranthes. Source: Duke, J. 1986. Foraging Items the Amerindians Did Not Eat. Coltsfoot 7(6):4-6. ________________________________________________________________________________________________ Genome Informatics Group / 1 June 1995