these fuckin' articles So for the record, my wife actually wrote a workbook on native herbs that's still being used 25 years later. And my daughter started a native plants club and is a counselor-in-training for wilderness camps. We "forage" for blackberries every year (it's pretty easy considering what a domineering, hypercharged weed Luther Burbank created) and there isn't a berry around that they don't have an opinion on. And that opinion? By and large? Is "pass". Whenever you see the word "forage" you can assume with no danger of being incorrect that you're talking about undesirable edibles. Anything "foraged" is "yeah you can eat it but." I grew up in the desert where you could forage for a half-dozen tic-tac-sized strawberries if you knew where to look and if you could find them before the bears did and up here? There's everything. But what people pick? Are Luther Burbank's cursed blackberries. Because they taste good. The British go "ZOMFG medlars" about every five or six years or so, and always have. It's part of their 'pip pip cheerio look what they took from us rule Britannia RETVRN' song'n'dance that happens whenever the NHS is particularly bad or Saturday Night Live makes fun of their teeth. I'm entertained by it because medlars are one of the things that assed out of cultivation the minute they found something (anything) better. As far as "mysterious to greengrocers", fuck off with that shit. One of my games every season of Big Brother was "which houseguests can recognize an artichoke." It was generally under fifty percent. We had one dipshit who was being counseled to bring a cucumber from the pantry, not a zucchini, only to have it revealed that not only did he not know they looked similar, he had no idea what either one was. I have seen people who were flabbergasted by grapefruit. College-educated, grown-ass humans who apparently had never seen so much as a photograph of a grapefruit in skin. And fuck, man, I have never not had to say "that's jicama" to the cashier whenever I buy it. Twice now I have butted in on the exchange ahead of me with "that's a kohlrabi and you will regret it". But kohlrabi continue to be popular in Germany and apparently Medlars continue to be "forageable" on the Caspian. I planted a couple Strawberry Trees when I redid parts of the garden, mostly 'cuz they look fuckin' awesome, partly because their latin name either means "I can't eat only one" or "I eat one only" depending on who you ask, and partly because the most useful thing to do with its fruit is brew moonshine out of it. That's a tree that's been under constant cultivation for a bajillion years but by and large the world has gone "nah" everywhere but the places it's a weed. Pawpaws grow quite readily all over North America; they're native to the Eastern US. Cherimoyas are basically pawpaws but from Peru. Pawpaws will become inedible in three days. Cherimoyas will become inedible in three days. Both need to be shipped like wine if you want them to make it to market. Theoretically? You can eat pawpaw. Practically? I can pay $7 for a cherimoya, when they're in season, if I'm lucky, because cherimoyas are worth eating and pawpaws are not. Every "foraging" video you've ever seen starts out with someone super enthusiastic about something you've ostensibly never heard of, dives into a largely-wrong discussion as to why it was forgotten, proceeds through some awkward montage of picking fruit out where you have no business being and finishes in a kitchen where craptons of sugar are added to feedstock in order to make vaguely unobjectionable dessert toppings while some influencer attempts to mask their disappointment. Our neighbors were stoked when I said they could harvest some magnolia blossoms because some Instagram dipshit made cookies out of them! Seven million views! Basically make sugar syrup, add treeflowers, mix in with basic-ass snickerdoodle dough and serve as if you aren't a crazy person! Know what they tasted like? snickerdoodles with dandelions mixed in. No one wants to admit that we stopped eating some things because either (A) better alternatives appeared or (B) it's such a sensitive crop that it doesn't transport well. (B) is why Meyer lemons cost more than normal lemons but it only took about ten years before agriculture figured out how to ship them. (B) is also why it was nearly impossible to buy rambutans in the US until enough Asian immigrants made their buying power known. Either way, if it's even vaguely worth eating you'll find it as an ingredient in something shelf-stable or you'll find it frozen at Trader Joe's. And if you don't, it's not worth eating anymore.
- Natural History, Pliny the Elder. The biggest problem with Pliny is that he can go from "astute and correct according to modern science" to "Herodotus-grade gossip" three times within a single page. Unless I mixed up my classics, he also described things like the water cycle with remarkable detail only to conclude with "unless the Mars is visible, then everything is wet!" or some such. It's a wild ride. More on topic, a lot of these 'forgotten plants' were hardy enough to survive without refrigeration and just nutritious enough to be tolerated over the lenten months. I had a couple through renfair people, like skirret and salsify, that I could maybe see make a comeback, but a lot of them are an acquired taste to say the least.The flesh of the ground-strawberry1 is very different to that of the arbute-tree,2 which is of a kindred kind: indeed, this is the only instance in which we find a similar fruit growing upon a tree and on the ground. The tree is tufted and bushy; the fruit takes a year to ripen, the blossoms of the young fruit flowering while that of the preceding year is arriving at maturity. Whether it is the male tree or the female that is unproductive, authors are not generally agreed.
This is a fruit held in no esteem, in proof of which it has gained its name of "unedo,"3 [3 He suggests that it is so called from "unum edo," "I eat but one;" a rather fanciful etymology, it would seem.] people being generally content with eating but one. The Greeks, however, have found for it two names—"comaron" and "memecylon," from which it would appear4 that there are two varieties. It has also with us another name besides that of "unedo," being known also as the "arbutus." Juba states that in Arabia this tree attains the height of fifty cubits.
I think the Greeks understood that the truth is what you write down and I get the sense they looked around and went "psshh like the Romans are gonna contradict us" and YOLO'd into whatever the fuck facts they felt like fabricating. "I mean yeah the Spartans lost at Thermopylae but that's because there were eleven million Persians and also they were minimum seven feet tall" works just fine until you invent archaeology. As far as salsify and its ilk, let's call it "the sunchoke problem" - yeah you can grow it, yeah you can eat it, yeah you can cook with it, but when its competition includes Uber Eats it bloody better be worth it and we live in a society that went "ZOMFG RED DELICIOUS APPLES MUST DYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" because they weren't as flavorful as Fujis.
There's a lot of it in Greek writing, though it's also clear that they were pretty self-aware in that style. Iliad is chock-full of exaggeration-by-convention, Thucydides stresses at key places basically going "no, guys, I'm not saying this for effect like other writers usually do, it happened like that" and counts on reader not being gullible in that regard, and Aristotle disses on authors overusing these modes as immature and lacking. IIRC dissing on Aristophanes', since that was his thing. Plutarch often juxtaposes contemporary hearsay with plausible causes/effects, emphasizing a couple of times how the style of other (sometimes lost) authors muddled the events. It's kinda like how 'silver age' of Latin gets the rep of no substance and all-style, but that's because imperial absolute ruler changed the purpose of rhetorics from discourse to entertainment. They were aware what's being said when nothing is being told -- which Seneca corroborates in his writing while under banishment -- we're just left guessing what those nothings are about exactly. We typically read Greek tall-tales and think they were swallowing it whole, which I doubt they took too literally themselves. I don't know, sometimes the novelty of it is enough? Then again, I do admit to having rather plain palette, willing to favour texture to flavour."the sunchoke problem"
Yeah the issue with the Greeks and their fish tales is the Dark Ages. If it was written it was true. I've read a few accounts of the "transcription errors" in illuminated manuscripts that were basically performed to align the holy writ with the dogma of the time but the transmitted texts were God's own truth nonetheless. That whole "you should regard this as a rap battle not a Nature article" aspect of the ancient writers also has not trickled down to nearly enough popular science writers. Jane McGonigal quotes Heroditus a half-dozen times in Reality is Broken as if the dude was Walter Cronkite. As far as "novelty is enough" I mean... sort of? Depending on the context? There's this mythical idea that wasabi only grows on the southern slopes of Mt. Fuji and then only when watered by geisha tears under the watchful eye of Amaterasu. Then there's the reality that it'll grow like a goddamn weed from Northern California to Southern British Columbia. Then there's this mythical idea that you can grow rich by growing wasabi (check out that illustration!). Then there's the reality that everyone who cares enough to eat real wasabi can grow their own wasabi and pretty much everyone else is totally cool with 99 cents a pound dyed horseradish. Guaranteed, my neighbors wouldn't have made magnolia cookies if they hadn't seen it on Instagram. And guaranteed, anyone who attempted to market magnolia cookies would go bankrupt.
Any tips on strawberry cultivars? I’ve had great luck with tri-star but now it can’t get in bare root and everything I have is way less productive and drought tolerant. As for other excellent berries. Currants are great, black is quite good but window is short. Mini kiwis are great but I can’t get them to produce. Only had the store ones. The triple crown thornless blackberry is amazing if you can get some. Grows like huge marionberry but tastes good. Avoid thornless raspberries, they grow great but taste off. Boysen berry are good too but the thorns are worse than blackberry and the season is a week or 2. And figs they grow great if you plant desert king drought tolerant and taste nothing like what you can buy because they don’t transport. Lots of gear tasting exotic fruit out there that just don’t transport well and taste awful under ripe.
loldude I grew up in the goddamn desert. I'd see these cows wandering around eating cactus and sagebrush and go "clearly that's where beef jerky comes from." My grandfather had an acre so every year he would plant an acre. An acre of beans. An acre of peas. An acre of corn. He did an acre of wheat one year because he got a great deal on a combine, and then we had a combine rusting away behind the shed (it's still there 60 years later). they'd try strawberries every two or three years - had a tower and everything. Nothing ever grew. Again, New Mexico. My wife is exceptional at planting a bunch of stuff because her dad bullies her into it and then completely neglecting it the minute May hits. Her dad grows tomatoes and cucumbers but also kohlrabi and they bring it over and put it in a bowl with salt and appear to legitimately enjoy it and fuck everything about that. I think gardening is more micro-climatey than people are willing to admit. I knew a guy with enough basil that he considered it a weed and no matter how it was cultivated it refused to grow next door.