Browsing Nature's Aisles: A Year of Foraging for Wild Food in the Suburbs

by Wendy Brown, Eric Brown

When most of us think of self-sufficiency, we think of growing a large garden, and maybe keeping a few chickens for eggs or meat. While this is certainly part of the picture, unless you live on a large acreage or happen to be a permaculture god or goddess, it is unlikely that it will be enough to allow you to completely break free from the corporate food machine. Wild foods are the ideal solution to bridging the gap between what you are able to produce to feed yourself and what your family needs to survive. Browsing Nature's Aisles is the story of one suburban family's adventures in wild foraging. As part of their commitment to self-reliance and resiliency, Wendy and Eric Brown decided to spend a year incorporating wild foods as a regular part of their diet. The experience fundamentally changed their definition of food. Not only did they learn about specific flora and fauna, but they also had to learn how to prepare them in ways that would be both aesthetically appealing and palatable. With information on collecting, preparing, and preserving easily identifiable wild edibles found in most suburban landscapes, this unique and inspiring guide is a must-read for anyone who wants to enhance their family's food security by availing themselves of the cornucopia on their doorstep. Wendy Brown and Eric Brown are suburban homesteaders growing roots (both literally and figuratively) in southern Maine. They have been studying wild edibles for many years. Wendy is also the author of Surviving the Apocalypse in the Suburbs .

Genres: Nonfiction, Gardening, Food, Memoir, Cooking

224 pages, Paperback

First published September 20, 2013

Reviews

[Susan]

An interesting read about one family's journey into foraging wild food. Although more of a memoir than a self-help book, there were still many tips for the newbie. Since it was more of a story than an encyclopedic volume containing all there is to know, I came away without feeling too overwhelmed by it all and instead felt inspired to try foraging myself.

[Felicity Fields]

Interesting read - experiential instead of how-to

I picked this book up because it's about people who forage, not how to forage. The writing is a bit clunky, but I enjoyed the stories of what the authors foraged and why they forage

[Deevena Jemima]

Loved it. Great description about their foraging journey. Learning to identify new edible wild plants, preserving food and growing their own food. Well written.

[Hilary]

This book reminds us that food grows all around us if we just know where to look, and you don't have to be desperate or off-the-grid to make that choice. Anyone who's ever gone berrying is a forager - be proud! The author (and his wife) are not Tom & Barbara from "The Good Life", just normal people trying to eat good, safe food and learn more about their area in the process.

They had simple goals: to harvest one item a week, to learn how to store what they foraged, to track the foraged amount by weight, and to host a party at the end of summer featuring primarily foraged foods, and this book covers what they looked for, why they started, and what they learned along the way.

This is the book to get you started, no matter how small your first step. (And if you want to know more about planning and growing your food, which the authors do not cover, this book is an excellent complement to A Householder's Guide to the Universe.) This is something anyone can do, and it doesn't require strenuous activity, lots of time, expensive tools and seeds.

Aside from the obvious - greens, nuts, berries - it also covers how to boil sap to make syrup from maple or birch trees, the benefits of white pine tea, uses of sunchokes, their adventures into clamming (they're in Maine) and turkey hunting... even maple and spruce beer and mushroom tea! (They recommend using 3 separate sources for fungi identification before harvesting, and this seems like a good rule of thumb.) Another rule - the Forager's Rule of Thirds - helps maintain biodiversity as you refrain from stripping an area, or a plant.

I am already feeling the desire to start actively looking at plants near me and to pay more attention to my surroundings. It's a great family learning activity too, as you learn about plant and animal habitats, botany, chemistry (through food preservation and cooking) and the vagaries of Nature's calendar. They suggest just trying to learn one or two plants a season, and this tiny step makes foraging very accessible.

I do wish they had included more recipes - those I read were very interesting - and I'll want to take a look at the finished product rather than an ARC to take full advantage of the photographs.

Disclaimer: I received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Jennifer Lavoie]

This book was nothing like I thought it would be; it ended up being just as great, though in a different way than I was expecting. When I had first received the book, I was expecting a guide to help me begin my own foraging. This is not the book for that. Instead, the book outlines the Brown family's reasons for foraging, their successes and failures, and what they've done with what they foraged. The book also deals with the rising price of food and how the act of foraging can help supplement the food you already have in your house.

I was both excited and disappointed the book was written by a family in Maine. Disappointed because I live in Connecticut in a city - albeit near land trusts and converted trails - and excited because it IS Maine that they're from, and my family owns property in Maine where I know I can forage when I visit.

I read this book cover to cover and enjoyed it. Though at times it was highly repetitive and I wondered if my e-reader went back to a previous chapter, it really stresses important lessons of foraging, such as not picking something you are not 100% sure of in your travels.

The other day I went out, wanting to forage, but not knowing if there was anything near me that would even make this possible. I went letterboxing instead on a trail. Stupidly I had not eaten and I was starving about halfway through the trail. So, like the writer's of the book suggest, I started really looking at my surroundings. Lo and behold, I stumbled across a wonderful find of blueberry and raspberry bushes! Granted, they are not yet ripe, but now that I know where they are, I will be able to start foraging. As for identification, having grown up picking these every summer, I was able to immediately recognize what I was looking at. I also found an abundance of thistle.

This book has encouraged me not just to forage for myself to try new things, but to actually look around when I'm in nature. It's amazing how just three miles from my apartment in the middle of a city I was able to find such a great bounty where it seems very few people visit (the trail, while visible, was seriously overgrown).

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is wondering what foraging is like and wants a few starter tips for themselves. This book does include a few recipes as well, though it is mainly one family documenting their story.

[Dana]

Well-written, and interesting, this book tells about one family's quest to learn more about foraging and eating wild foods. After many years of research and growing their own foods at home, they spent one year incorporating foraged foods into at least one meal a week. The book is well-researched and explains that if one is going to eat foraged foods, you should check at least three sources to make sure that what you are eating is what you think it is and that it is not poisonous, that you should only take one third of what is edible from an area at any given time, and that it can be good to find a teacher or mentor to show you how to find edible plants in the wild. While the only "foraging" I have done is eating wild blackberries that we found growing when I was a child, I do appreciate the wisdom in this book. Compared to the concept of the doomsday preppers who stockpile massive amounts of canned goods, it seems more useful to know how to identify and eat foods that one can find commonly in the wild and in your suburban neighborhood. I don't think I will be going out foraging any time soon, considering the fact that last week I saw and smelled paint pouring out of a drain into the creek near our house, which would be the closest area for any wild foraging. I did call the city and they sent someone out and when I went back, there was no longer anything coming out of that drain. We are near the start of that creek, and it eventually dumps into a local lake where there is recreation and fishing. I am sure that the paint I saw being dumped from a construction site into the creek is not the only icky stuff that is in the creeks and in our local environment. I did learn that the weed that we cut down, but keeps coming back that we found covered with pretty black and yellow caterpillars one day is most likely milkweed and is edible and the caterpillars will be monarch butterflies, so we will stop chopping it down and leave it for the caterpillars. I think this is an excellent book and I highly recommend it. I received this book free to review from Netgalley.

[Rosanita]

Wendy and Eric Brown decided to forage for food. They didn't do it as some type of fad, but because of health reports of our food system and their daughter's fear of being hurt by the modified foods and their containers in the grocery store. When I first read the premise of their true story, I was a little skeptical. What kind of crazy person goes foraging, right? Were they some type of survivalist nut jobs? Turns out they weren't so crazy after all.

While reading this, I started thinking back to when I was a kid. We would eat from our garden. They just used a bigger garden. I think the journey of a family that goes from microwave to learning about various berries and nuts is pretty interesting. After all, they thought an eggplant was exotic before they started their journey.

In fact, they turn out to be cool parents. I mean, how do you not like people who create a garden for their children based on the popular app, "Plants vs Zombies"? I did, however, disagree that there's no reason for the average person to go hungry. The average person is not a homeowner with the time and means to travel into the forest to go foraging for food. For many, in order to work, they live in urban areas with nary a forest around, not even a strawberry patch.

I have to admit, there's a bit of confusion for me because of the talk of their daughter and then talk of the granddaughter. I think the daughter got the into growing their own food, but I'm not quite sure. That's one of the very few inconsistencies I found in the book. Personally, I don't have the desire to live off the land 100%, but there are some good tips in the book and a few things I'd like to try out.

The recipes are pretty nice and the book reads as though they're telling a story, instead of a mechanical nonfiction work. While I received a copy of this book for free, you should definitely read it if you're interested in homesteading or foraging.

[Anastaciaknits]

When I first requested this book to read through netgalley, I thought it was going to be more of a how-to guide. Getting into gardening more and more - and canning, and freezing my garden goodies, and preserving, and probably dehydrating as well next spring, I was thrilled at the idea of reading about foraging. I did a little of that this year, digging up and using lots of wild garlic that's been growing on my parents property for as long as I can remember, and hearing stories of my family eating dandalion greens as kids.

This isn't a how to book. It's still good, it's just not what i was expecting.

The book is chatty, like sharing stories with a friend over a cup of coffee, yet interesting and informative and makes you want to get up and see what you can find in the jungles of your own neighborhood, yet it reads like a memoir.

[Larae]

Ingesting subject but it needed some much stronger editing!

[Sarah]

Interesting and with some good tips on foraging, but I found the shifting tenses annoying and didn't like that this book promotes the myth of natural food purity. I also didn't like the authors attitude about hunting and eating meat . The idea of "thanking the animal for its sacrifice" is so immature and self serving, as if the animal gave itself up to be killed. This book was all about connecting with the source of your food, and if you can't accept the reality of predation then maybe you shouldn't be eating meat.