It's about time I did a post on the other wild plant I think is supremely important as a food source for self-sufficiency and wilderness survival. Cattails, which are the plants in the genus typha, are a moisture loving plant usually found and swamps, on the edges of bodies of water, and in fairly wet ditches. They grow on every continent, and are fairly easy to identify. There are edible parts year round.



I like to think of the cattail harvesting year starting in the spring. As the snows and ice fade away and reveal the earth and water underneath, cattails start sending up their shoots. I think it's best to wait until they grow up so the leaves are at least a foot high, so it's worth it. To harvest, pull aside the two outer leaves, pinch lightly with your index finger and thumb right near the ground or water (if it's deep in the water, you can reach in, but I usually get these ones from a kayak so I don't), and yank upwards. It should separate from the root easily, giving you a whitish shoot from which the leaves come out of. Separate the white shoot from the tough green leaves, which you can save for various crafts like rope, mat, and basket making. The shoot can be eaten raw or cooked; normally I only eat it raw if it came from sandy areas, otherwise I worry a bit about giardia and other pathogens. My favorite recipes are to saute with worcestershire sauce and onions, or to batter and fry them. You can harvest the shoots later in the year, but they tend to not be that good after the spring. When you harvest the shoots, you also often find a mucilaginous substance in between the leaves. This is soothing like aloe, and reportedly a good topical pain-killer.

In the late spring to early summer, the long flower spikes shoot out. These are the most recognizable sign that it is definitely cattails you're dealing with. There are two flowers on a cattail plant, the male and the female. The female is the on that looks like a green or brown sausage, and above that grows the male flower. When the male flower is yellow with pollen, you can gather that pollen by bending it over into a bag and shaking. This probably also helps the cattail pollinate the female flower. The window for this is really small, and I always end up missing it. The female flower can be eaten while it's still green; many people recommend boiling and eating like corn on the cob.

Later on, when the fertilized female flower forms the seeds, the fluffy seed clusters can be used as tinder and for stuffing pillows. I think it makes a way better winter insulation than stuffing your clothes with leaves, which is often uncomfortable. If you can find a cattail head that has been fertilized but doesn't fluff out, you can get it to smolder for a long time to transport your fire from one place to another. It will smolder like a cigar. My brother-in-law recommends that for repelling insects, as it can be made to smoke a lot.

The late fall and all through winter (even into early spring sometimes) are the best times to gather the root because the nutrients go back into the root at those times. You can really gather them any time, though. Cattails spread primarily by root colonies, so when you pull up the roots you often find long roots connecting the large rhizomes. All of this is edible, but you probably want to go for the ones that are white on the inside. You can prepare them like a baked potato (it's stringier, but tastes similar), or separate out the starches from the stringy fibers.

I've heard of the reed being used as survival arrows, but I don't think I buy that. They're too wobbly. Maybe there's a way to dry them hard, but even ones I've dried aren't all that stable.

The cattail plant plays an important role for us humans and lots of animals as food, as material to build with, and also serves the role of filtering out water. I've heard that the sewage treatment in Arcata, CA works on a permaculture design that uses cattail swamps. Because of this quality, don't harvest near roadsides. In terms of productivity, I've heard that cattails produce many times the amount of starch per acre that wheat does. With all those edible parts, I can see how.

Just as you can't truly love another human without knowing them intimately, you can't love your landbase without knowing it intimately.  In other words, you can't be a real environmentalist, or not much of one anyway, if you don't know how the land you live on functions and how to interact with it properly.  You need to know how to live in place to be able to make any real decisions about that place.

Or maybe the term "environmentalist" is more fitting; it's purely caring about your environs, your surroundings. Not the complex interlocking systems and networks of other living beings. Not the play of life and death that maintains the balance, diversity, and abundance of a healthy ecosystem.

I just started digging out some gardens to plant the Three sisters, a traditional triad of plants grown in many places on the North American continent. It's a fantastic technique for growing a survival garden, that is something you can actually feed yourself off of with minimal work and land use. The plants help each other as per the principles of companion planting. The corn stalks grow tall, providing a trellis for the beans to grow up, while the beans add nitrogen to the soil that the corn requires, and the squash and/or pumpkin plants grow vines and large leaves that shelter the soil from the sun to keep water in, and repel pests.

To grow these great plants in this fashion, you need to first dig up a garden like usual. Alternatively, you could sheet mulch in the late summer or fall, and do minimal digging. Form circular mounds a few inches high and 12-18 inches across, and make sure to give at least a foot and a half space between them. Around this time of year, start planting three or four corn seeds (use heirloom!) near the center. Some people say to make a circle with them. A couple weeks later, plant the beans, about 6 per mound. If it's a larger sized mound, plant them between the center and the edge; plant at the lip of the mound if it's smaller. Either at that time or a week or two later, plant the squash as well, planting between 6 and 12 seeds. If you planted the beans halfway between the center and rim, the squash can go on the rim. Otherwise, plant the seeds around the base of the mound. Some people also plant the squash in their own mounds between the corn/bean mounds.

Done correctly, these plants will help each other, and therefore you will have to do less work to maintain them. Traditionally, something that attracts pollinators is planted nearby, sort of like the estranged fourth sister. I'm growing sunflowers for this, which is fairly traditional for a lot of the northeast.

Growing these plants is one of the most space and work efficient ways to grow your own food. Although the mounds require quite a bit of space between them, growing several plants per mound means more plants overall. The lower space in between often acts as swales or berms in which the water collects and soaks into the ground. I'm growing them in a hex pattern this year, in an attempt to fit as many mounds into my small garden as possible. We'll see how it works.

After reading Sean's great piece about reasons for eating meat, it occurred to me that in many places, hunting isn't just an environmentally sound way to get meat, it's a social and environmental responsibility.

In many places certain species are so over-populated that they are an environmental blight themselves. In some parts of Connecticut, for example, I've heard that there are around 65 white tail deer per square mile. That's immense. Without moderate predation, species like deer can explode in population, and an animal as large as deer can defoliate quite a bit of brush and forest. The massive population, when faced with the effects of the defoliation, tends to develop diseases and experience mass starvation. The only responsible thing to do is respectful and conscious hunting of deer.

There are also the considerations of feeding hungry mouths. Not only does wild meat prove to be a highly nutritious way to feed people of all socio-economic backgrounds, and one that can be procured with minimal cost (as most rural poor have known for a long time), but eating from one's landbase means less dependence on and contribution to multinational corporations. It means less demand for monocropping, and more resources being preserved for those living in the Third World.

Now, this doesn't address the root cause of the overpopulation, at least not entirely. I wouldn't claim that it does. Issues of natural balance and environmental degradation also need to be addressed. But it still needs to be done to preserve the forests now, just as much as wild and feral polycrops need to be cultivated. Indeed, one can simply see this hunting as an extension of polycrops.

It would probably be more accurate to say that environmentalists need to be involved in hunting somehow. We can be involved in other ways than killing, encouraging respectful hunting culture in our communities. We don't all need to actually hunt, but can help in the preparation, butchering, etc.

The same goes for fishing. How about those invasive carp everyone is worried will make it to the Great Lakes? I hear they're not very good eating, but when the health of your entire ecosystem depends on killing them, kill them you will (I hope). I'd say we also need to catch as many rainbow trout as possible to help the brook trout, but the damned DEM people keep putting more in (idiots).

As always, observation and keeping of balance is what is needed, not dogmatic consumer lifestylism or purist moralities. Listen to what your landbase needs. Mine needs me to go hunting.

This is a beautiful post from Sean Donahue at Green Man Ramblings, reproduced here because I think it's important, and have touched on similar things with a piece some months ago.

I was a vegetarian for seventeen years. And in the end, it was reflecting on the same questions that led me to stop eating meat that made me start eating it again.

Throughout my years as a vegetarian, I subscribed to the idea that a plant-based diet required less use of water, fossil fuels, and other "resources" than a diet that included meat.

But that's not necessarily true.

Here in New England, the soils are rocky and the growing season is short. A vegetable-based diet requires the importation of protein and fat from distant places, using tremendous amounts of fossil fuels. But the land here is great for grazing sheep and cattle. Eating the flesh of a grass-fed steer who lived out its life on a farm a few miles down the road costs the life of one animal, eating soy trucked across a continent costs the lives of many.

In many parts of the world, agriculture is a large scale operation that destroys habitat. Here in rural New England, small scale animal-based agriculture is an essential part of preserving land that would otherwise be more intensively developed.

The answers to questions about the most sustainable diet is vary widely from place to place depending on soils, climate, population density, and the history of land use.

Some may argue that its not sustainable or realistic for everyone everywhere to eat a diet that relies on sustainably and humanely raised or hunted meat. But I am not necessarily making the argument that it is. Sustainability is not a simple equation. There is not one diet that is appropriate for everyone everywhere. (Though from a health standpoint there are some pretty good indicators of what our bodies did and didn't evolve to eat -- see http://www.toddcaldecott.com/index.php/food/diet/146-diet-a-short-history.)

Every food choice we make has its costs in plant and animal lives.

For a long time only the animal lives matter to me -- for the same reason that for many people only human lives matter, and for others only the lives of humans of the same ethnic background matter -- because we most easily see ourselves mirrored in the lives of beings who closely resemble us and whose sentience is expressed in ways similar to our own.

But when I came to know plants more intimately I came to realize that they too are sentient beings with a desire to live.

Many vegetarian have misinterpreted this as a mockery of their beliefs. (Which oddly echoes the arguments I heard in my years of advocating for animal rights that talking about animal suffering somehow made a mockery of human suffering.) But the emerging field of plant neurobiology is demonstrating that plants have complex neural networks and recognize the difference between self and other. And as an herbalist when I write about talking about the plants, I am not speaking metaphorically --- I have conversations and relationships with Skunk Cabbage and Ghost Pipe as deep and meaningful as my human and animal relationships.

There is no choice of not killing. Our lives depend on the deaths of others. Just as the lives of cattle and bison and salmon and turnips and kale and redwoods do. To truly follow the philosophy of deep ecology and view ourselves as "plain members of the biological community" we need to recognize that we are as much a part of that web of life and death, eating and being eaten as any other species.

There is a sacredness in that. For me I have found that as an omnivore I am more conscious of the ethical and ecological choices I make about food than I was as a vegetarian. When I look back at myself as a vegetarian I see someone who was concerned primarily about what kind of organisms were represented directly on my plate. (And I know this is not true of all vegetarians.) As an omnivore, I am concerned about the web of relationships represented by the food on my plate, and the questions I ask about my impact on that web don't have simple answers.

Eating for me is a sacred act. And I give thanks for all who died to give me life, and honor them as best I can by living a life of working for love, justice, healing, and holy pleasure.

I was asked on my Facebook recently if I had something about how to process acorns on this blog, and realized I hadn't. Seems like a kind of important post to have, considering the name of the blog and its meaning. Different people have slightly different ways to process them, dependent on the tools used, environmental conditions, and of course the types of acorns. So I'll post a method here.

What I've done in the past is to roast the freshly gathered acorns in the oven for a bit to kill off any moth eggs in the shells before they hatch, since they'd then start consuming the nutmeats. This doesn't actually make the nutmeats inedible, it's just kind of gross. The larvae are probably even healthier than the acorns themselves, rich in protein and fat. Roast at around 300 degrees, or put on low broil away from the flame, until they're golden brown. Roast them for a bit, and if you're going to store them at this stage or are using a hand cranked nutcracker like I have, dehydrate them fully. This can be done by leaving them in the oven on bake for a long time, or by putting them in a sunny place. I'm building a solar dehydrator right now for this. If you leave them in the sun on a tarp, you risk squirrels coming in to steal them. This is a good way to lure squirrels, so I say just sit around with a .22, or perhaps set some traps around. I think I might try this sometime, if I can find a sunny spot I feel safe firing a .22.

Before I got the nut cracker, which I haven't even used much yet by the way, I would crack them using pliers. After a while this hurts my hands, and gets really boring without other people.

When they're cracked they need leaching, which in the past I've done by boiling in many changes of water, but this year I'm going to try leaving them in a bag in a river. Most sources say a day, some say up to a week. I'm going to try a couple days, particularly since I've been gathering mostly black oak acorns, which have more tannins. Some people say to grind them before leaching, which I've never done, but it supposedly makes it go faster. Because I'm using a mesh laundry bag, I think I'll leave them in halves.

After they've leached to the point that they taste good, dehydrate them. They're now ready for eating! You can grind them into meal or flour, or just leave them in halves or wholes for whatever recipes you can think of.

My partner Kris has been saying that I should post one of my recipes that always goes over well: venison adobo. I've made it for Rewild New England gatherings, as well as in general from time to time. The last time I brought it to a gathering, a friend of mine who hadn't eaten red meat for ten years chowed down, remarking that it was the right way to eat red meat. I also quickly became the best friend of his canine companion.

As most of you know, I've been making efforts to get closer to the Filipino side of my family, since the rich heritage of the islands is something I didn't get much exposure to growing up. The name adobo might easily be recognized as also being used to describe Mexican dishes. This reflects the common history of colonization by the Spanish, and in fact the Philippines were governed under the same colonial government centered in Mexico. The term adobo I've heard means 'sauce', so it was easily applied to a common dish which has as it's means of cooking simmering ingredients in a broth/sauce.

The following recipe is part of my synthesis of traditional Filipino cooking, wild cooking experimentation, and my own style. It's one of my favorite ways to prepare meat, because it's easy and it makes the meat very tender. You can put any meat in substitute for the venison, and maybe even some vegetables/fruits. I once tried making eggplant adobo, but messed up the recipe.

Ingredients:
-Venison, cut into chunks of about 2"
-Water or broth
-Vinegar
-Garlic
-Fish Sauce
-Ginger(optional)
-Black Pepper(optional)
-Coconut milk(optional)
-Hot peppers(optional)

Most recipes say to use water and vinegar for the broth to simmer it in. I prefer replacing the water with a homemade bone broth, particularly deer bone broth simmered for over 24 hours. Put your venison into the pot or crock pot, start cooking it, and put just enough of the broth (I usually go for about 2/3 bone broth and 1/3 vinegar) to cover the meat. Add a couple splashes of fish sauce, about 1/2 cup (I use the Filipino patis fish sauce, which can be found at most Asian markets. Some are more concentrated and only require a few shakes). Crush several cloves of garlic into the broth; for a couple pounds of meat 6-10 cloves of garlic is usually good, though I like a lot of garlic. Add the optional ingredients if you want for variety. Simmer this for at least 20 minutes, though my preference is to simmer it for over an hour. In the crock pot I often let it go overnight. I generally prefer to rapidly boil down the broth into a sauce at the end.

Traditionally adobo is served with rice, though I often serve it with veggies.

My partner has been suggesting that I do some posts about more physical things, such as step-by-step tutorials and updates about my own projects and activities. After all, telling people why they need to live sustainably and in free feral groups just doesn't cut it if you can't at least give hints on how to do so. Granted, there are a lot of other places to get that information, and I'm glad to link to them as well.

So I'm finally taking her advice, since I decided to take it upon myself to see if I'm up to the challenge of eating nothing but wild and locally grown/raised foods. I had been talking about transitioning to such a diet for awhile now (actually since forever, but moreso recently, given all the stories about GMO crops causing organ damage and food contamination, not to mention rising food costs), but what pushed me to do start it was the fortuitous boon of two deer split between myself and a friend/co-worker. Given that one of the deer was huge, we each have a huge stock of wild meat as a buffer, in case our hunting, fishing, gardening, and gathering come up short. I'd also been inspired a bit by an acquaintance of mine out west who had seen if she could go a week on wild foods (see her blog here), and who gave me some great advice on my Facebook.

As a practical skill set, this is probably one of the biggest things on peoples' minds. Food keeps us alive, and growing up going to the grocery store leaves a lot of us doubting that adequate food can be procured through hunting, fishing, trapping, foraging, and gardening. It seems silly given the multitude of methods I just said, even being as broad as that. Simply knowing that another person is doing this is probably inspiring for some people, so I hope I can last awhile!


These are the rules I set out on my Facebook:

All food and drink is wild or locally grown/raised. The exception is coffee with cream (but no sugar; gross!), since I'm far too addicted to drop that cold turkey.

All of it needs to be found, given, grown, or traded. No buying. This aspect is partially a test of how functional our gift economies are.

Spices and flavorings are allowed, but only if they are non-caloric additions to the diet, since part of the goal is to see if I can meet my nutritional needs. So for example, things like sea salt, fish sauce, vinegar, and cayenne pepper are okay, but things like onions need to be found wild or from the garden.

I'll need to make some changes to my general lifestyle and the way I plan my days. I don't yet hunt, but I intend to by the end of the month. Otherwise, I once again wasted money on a permit and tags. I also need to set aside more/better time for fishing, and get around to finally processing the five gallons of acorns I have sitting around (though I'm partially scared to find out just how many of them went moldy). I should likely also get my trapping permit and do some of that, as well.

Today is the second day of this challenge, and so far I'm going strong. I started off yesterday with venison liver, thinly sliced and cooked in a bit of lard. Lunch was peppered venison steak with a wild green salad (mostly me munching on dandelion leaves, plantain leaves, and a bit of sourgrass), and a dinner of more wild greens. I passed out early so I wasn't all that hungry. As I write this I'm sitting down to my lunch of a wild green curry with thin slices of venison. The greens are cattail shoots, wild mustard leaves and flowers, and the shoots and leaves of young milkweed. It's pretty awesome, and the leftover will probably be my lunch tomorrow as well.

Now I think I'll go find myself a nice patch of wintergreen, because I've been craving fruit. Maybe it's seeing all those wild blueberry bushes in bloom, knowing that those many white and pink flowers mean many many blueberries this summer.

After work Sunday night I managed to make it to a great party hosted by my friends Elizabeth, Marco (of the blog "Politics of the Cerebral", linked on the right), and Christina. The party was in celebration of Black History month, and featured a clothing drive to send to Haiti. As always happens when these particular friends are involved, the night was full of fantastic intellectual discussion, and I met a lot of great, intelligent people.

It was during one of these great intellectual discussions that the topic of similarities in foods between "former" colonies of different colonial powers. For instance, Senegalese food includes spring rolls similar in style to those in Vietnamese cuisine. Both were conquered at one time by the French, who apparently used Senegalese soldiers to enforce their rule in Vietnam. Likewise, the Filipino food that I cook includes foods with names identical to many Mexican dishes; both are former Spanish colonies.

The discussion moved on to the blending of cultures subjected to colonialism in this way, even when the colonial powers officially back off (and then only enforce economic control through neo-colonial techniques, which I'm sure I'll write about another time). Despite the horrors of colonialism and even continued economic exploitation, oppressed people live on and create/maintain cultures different from their past ones, but still entirely distinct.

This is how I see those of us who rewild forming our new cultures. In our efforts to create sustainable, sane ways of living, we're coming together and blending bits of our own histories and cultures with that of other peoples', all of us subjected to the colonialism of civilization. In a very real sense, we're building cultures that will (hopefully) survive after civilization is dead and gone, and in the mean time be a remedy to its disease. And maybe, just maybe, this will mean delicious delicious lumpia and adobo.

"All major decisions should be decided over a meal." - Marco Antonio McWilliams

I've been criticized in the past (by people who don't bother to actually converse with me) for advocating and teaching skills such as foraging, gardening, hunting, fishing, and permaculture as a means to create social change. "How is eating acorns going to help the poor, stop women from being raped, stop corporations from blasting the tops off of mountains?". The primary misunderstanding that people have (showing quite clearly that these people aren't interested in listening or conversing, but merely preaching) is that this is ALL I'm doing, which is patently false. Rather, as my comrade Marco was talking about in his speech in reference to hip hop some months ago, my goal (and the goal of those who rewild) is to build something new, specifically sustainable neo-indigenous cultures, and subsistence activities merely provide the base or foundation for these new cultures by using old blueprints, and the "tools" of the people who've been able to maintain such cultures in the past.

A culture's relationship with the land and how the people in a culture make their living (i.e. find subsistence) are directly related to how that culture treats human and non-human people. In essence, sustainability is essential to any truly meaningful efforts for human rights and social justice. It isn't merely a huge coincidence that, for instance, non-agricultural peoples do not take part in slavery of any sort. Communities that live in such a way as to maintain and even improve their surroundings can find subsistence in those surroundings with sufficient ease that slavery would make no sense, even if the idea of enslaving another creature were acceptable to these communities. Agriculture, on the other hand, is both unsustainable and backbreaking, therefore requiring at the onset coercion to get people to spend all their time planting and tending, and after the land is degraded and dead it requires importation of resources. In reference to that, Derrick Jensen further elaborates:

Two things happen once you require the importation of resources. One is that you can never be sustainable, which means that we can all become the best little natural capitalists in the world, and it doesn't matter so long as there's this fundamental system in place, it's not sustainable.

The other thing it means is that your way of life must be based on violence, because if you require the importation of resources trade will never be sufficiently reliable. If you require the importation of resources, and the people in the next watershed over aren't going to trade you for it, you're going to take it. We could all become junior Bodhisattvas, and it wouldn't matter; the U.S. military would still have to be huge, because how else are they going to get access to our oil that just happens to be under somebody else's land? If they require that oil, they're going to take it.

So essentially, empire is rooted in unsustainable, exploitative/extractive economic systems which require exploitation and enslavement of people. If the goal is to create something new, a way of life in which humans and non-humans are not exploited, in which salmon and pines and bears and deer aren't viewed simply as resources, in which women are viewed as individuals instead of as stereotypes or orifices, in which all creatures are allowed decent lives... what sense does it make to base it on a foundation that requires exploitation and violence? None. It also makes no sense to practice a form of subsistence that produces less food per acre with a monocrop than complex polycultures do, considering the number of starving poor in the world, but we can talk more about that later.

Using this foundation, the foundation of food subsistence activities like the preparation of acorns I shared with some of my friends on Saturday, we can build a healthy, sustainable, egalitarian culture. Even in the small group of people who gathered at Lincoln Woods one weekend in September 2009, we had sparks of cultural activities and intellectualism happen alongside the discussion of subsistence strategies, such as my brother Chris playing guitar, or my friend Katrina (a dedicated feminist) discussing feminism and its relation to healthy cultures with my partner and I. As we're building our foundation, we're laying the beginnings of the building on top of it, setting out the pattern to build up when our foundation is finally stable.