Eat the Weeds

Foraging wild foods for the dinner table is a fun way to reconnect with the landscape and eat well at the same time. But most people are concerned they might mistakenly eat something inedible or even poisonous.

So try weeds right out your back door. Many common, easy-to-identify weeds—dandelions, purslane, and lambsquarters, to name just a few—are delicious and packed with nutrients. Thriving in abandoned city lots, on lawns, and in backyard nooks and crannies, they’re mostly thought of as a bane to the household gardener.

Consider the pesky dandelion. We spend zillions on nasty herbicides to eradicate it, yet it makes spinach look like junk food and will even inspire kids to eat healthy. My own children beg for dandelion bread and muffins each spring, and they’ll scour the neighborhood for big yellow flowerheads to be used in tempura. They also ask for seconds of my Cream of Stinging Nettle Soup and Chickweed Chimichurri over fish or meat.

These foods can all be made with local weeds. It’s a sustainable way to add spice and nutrition to your diet, and a stepping-stone to other more celebrated (and costly) wild foods, from porcini mushrooms to nori seaweed. It's a simple fact: If we all ate the weeds from time to time, the world would be a better place.

Langdon Cook blogs about food, foraging, and the outdoors on his blog, Fat of the Land, which was named best local foods blog of Seattle in 2009. He has also written a book, Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager.