Episode 38: Weeds and Wonder, OR Stalking Euell Gibbons

A wrong attitude about nature is almost an integral part of our culture, and all the crying we're doing about the environment is going to come to nothing as long as such an attitude persists.

                                                               --Euell Gibbons, 1972, qtd. in Smith

I'm channeling my Euell Gibbons tonight. Children of the sixties and seventies knew Euell as the craggy naturalist picking cranberries in the snow to add to his GrapeNuts breakfast cereal. We saw him on popular talk and variety shows. And we laughed at Tim Conway's impersonations of him on the Carol Burnett Show.

If you are a child of a different generation, here is a video of one of this iconic forager's commercials to get you up to speed; his cache in popular culture is not greatly diminished today, forty years after his death.

"Ever eat a pine tree?" Gibbons reportedly asks on one of his GrapeNuts commercials, but thus far I've found no video proving it. (A chapter in one of his books, though, is similarly titled.) I've watched the two commercials referred to above, and neither mentions pine. Another claim with this possible myth is that, later in that ad, Gibbons compares the taste of GrapeNuts to that of wild hickories. However, he does say that in the commercial posted above, and I doubt he'd make the same claim in a second commercial. I suspect the true speaker of that line may have been Tim Conway or some other impersonator spoofing Euell. Gibbons does, however, devote one chapter of Stalking the Healthful Herbs to white pine, which he states was a major food for Native Americans, though his experiments with it, he stated, never eradicated its turpentine-like flavor.

N.B. I was recently scolded by a math professor in my writing group when I insisted that Wikipedia is not a reliable scholarly source. He cited a new academic journal article in which researchers compared the information on the popular free, open-source encyclopedia to more authoritarian sources and claimed Wikipedia is just as accurate as they are. I don't believe it, though I'll often go to the site first to gather information, then verify it with the references given in the text or through my own research. In fact, the pine tree commercial Wikipedia cites is linked to its "source," the video posted above in which cattails are the wild food highlighted. In neither that nor the cranberry commercial is a pine tree mentioned. Ever the librarian and, hopefully, scholar, I maintain that quoting from Wikipedia does not enhance one's credibility whatsoever. That doesn't mean the site is useless; it just doesn't belong in a scholarly bibliography. 

See the end of this article for a list of my sources; those providing unique information are also cited within the text of this "episode."

Episode 35: Weed or Wonder? Early Spring Greens in Appalachia

Weed or Wonder? is a column I wrote for the Appalachian Independent for a couple of years. The online newsletter was developed by a group of concerned citizens--concerned about the journalistic integrity of the local newspaper and wishing for fresh voices and more divergent views via a "Dialogue of Democracy."

My true passion is our natural world, from turtles and newts to tigers and owls. And plants. Particularly beautiful flowers. Particularly wildflowers. Particularly edible and/or culinary plants. Particularly gardening. Particularly foraging. Particularly fungi.

But fungi will have to wait for another episode--especially since my hours of scouring the forest floor today led to the discovery of not one single morel. Still too early, for one thing, and for another: I've never found a morel in my woods. Yet my woods should  produce morels. My woods have a northeastern exposure. My woods are hardwoods, particularly oaks and maples. My woods are moist and filled with secret little woodland plants known to grow where morels do. Morels, where art thou? Have you merely hid beneath the leaf litter each spring, camouflaged from my inexperienced eyes?

This year, if a morel exists on my property, I will find it. Now that I no longer can work, I can certainly spend an hour or two in the woods, even if my butt is glued to a boulder because I don't have enough energy to risk my ankles to the deep spring-and-boulder field on the mountain rising behind my "cottage." And now that fungi have stolen two entire paragraphs--they have a way of sneaking up on us, don't they?--I'll list below the plants I've found thus far this spring, and they are few and far between at the moment--we had snow yesterday, for heaven's sake.

Morels - Fungus Par Excellence