Welcome to Edible Plants!
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Welcome to Edible Plants
The main purpose of this site is to bring to attention the positive benefits of the many edible plants, available for our use, including the lesser consumed wild and unusual plants. The health benefits of eating common fruits and veg are widely recognised. Lately there has been a drive in the UK to consume '5 a day', and there have been many articles talking about the importance of 'superfoods'.
There is also much potential in wild and unusual plants which could not only give us all a richer and more varied diet but could also contain many more healthy properties.
Richard Mabey in Food For Free writes about this saying, "It is also easy to forget as one stands in the aisles of a supermarket, that every single one of the worlds vegetable foods was once a wild plant. What we buy and eat today is nothing more than the results of generations of plant breeding experiments. Most of these were directed towards improving size and yield..." (and more recently transportability.)
Richard Mabey also writes that - "Recently issues of food quality and concerns for the environment have brought into question many modern farming methods, such as reliance on pesticide use and heavy agricultural machinery which burn large amounts of fossil fuels. The way we currently produce our food is damaging both to ourselves and our planet."
The permaculture and agroforestry movements have attempted to tackle these challenges. Plants for a Future is one such organization that has been exploring this in detail.
I found this passage from the overview of Ken Fearn's, Plants for a Future book "There is a need to create gardens, woodlands and farms which are in harmony with nature. Natural ecosystems are good models, but many of the plants they contain are not necessarily edible. What we need is to discover and grow a wide variety of easily grown perennial and self-seeding annuals which provide delicious and healthy food, or are useful in other ways."
So growing and eating plants can be beneficial to both us and the environment.
I found a few more quotes that relate to this
According to Emerson a weed is "a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered"
Peter Gail (ethnobotanist at Goosefoot Acres, Inc) has said, "A weed is a plant for which we once knew the use but we've forgotten it."
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