When hiking or going through a park you don’t see wild vegetables such as head of lettuce or zucchini? Or potatoes?
Also never hear of survival situations where they find potatoes or veggies that they lived on? (I know you have to eat a lot of vegetables to get some actual nutrients but it has got to be better then nothing)
Edit: thank you for the replies, I’m not an outdoors person, if you couldn’t tell lol. I was viewing the domesticated veggies but now it makes sense. And now I’m afraid of carrots.
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All of those are domesticated versions of plants that were once found in the wild. We bred them to grow for us under certain conditions to yield as much edible parts as possible. You may be able to find certain edible plants slightly resembling their domesticated counterparts parts but it won’t be as big and they arent as wide spread. We are also domesticated and many of us don’t know what to look for. Much like cattle and chickens don’t really thrive in the wild.
You see wild vegetables every time you look outside.
Lettuce is just leaves. Have you ever seen leaves in the wild?
Zucchinis is actually a fruit, and I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of fruits in the wild.
Potatoes are roots. Grab any plant and dig it up. Tada, you’ve found a root vegetable.
The vegetables you eat are not wild, they are domesticated. They have been specially cultivated over thousands of years to look the way they do. You don’t see them in the wild for the same reason you don’t see domesticated cows or chickens in the wild.
Wild garlic, carrots, onions, and chives grow everywhere in my area. There’s also plenty of lettuce-like plants, but most of them don’t really taste as good as domesticated varieties. You might be surprised at how many edible plants are around you.
Most crop plants have lost natural defenses against pests and competition in exchange for boosting production and consistency. If you abandon a garden, it will quickly be picked clean by critters and then be overrun by weeds. Without fertilizer, pest control and irrigation most crop plants are not robust enough to survive in the wild.
On top of that, some vegetables can’t self-propogate. Their seeds might not breed true, or they require a specific condition to germinate that won’t happen at random in a non-native environment.
You can occasionally find old fruit trees from abandoned orchards or other random fruit and berry plants. There are wild tuber and root plants you can eat, but they are wild varieties that are more suited to wild conditions.
1. Because you don’t know what to look for. The yummy parts of plants may be hidden underground or hard to spot among leaves or in dense undergrowth or only growing by rivers. Hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago spent their lives becoming experts at finding yummy things in the wild. Today, people just go to the supermarket. Obviously most of us are now bad at finding food in the wild now.
2. Because they’re not as big. Humans spent hundreds, thousands of years turning small, tough, often bitter or sour plants into delicious fruits and veggies. That big ol’ supermarket zucchini was an inch-long gourd on a vine a thousand years ago. Would you be able to spot that in the woods on a hike?
3. Because of the above reasons, modern untrained people stuck in survival situations have trouble finding wild food. But go back a few ~~hundred years~~ generations (or even just a different part of the world) when people still did go into the woods to gather some of their food, and people could totally feed themselves from the land in an emergency.
Part of it is knowing what to look for. Wild carrots grow all around my yard like weeds. Strawberries also. I also have wild blueberries, raspberries and grapes. I’m sure there are more edible plants that I don’t know about.
The vegetables you are familiar with eating have been selectively bred over thousands of years to be bigger and easier to eat. There are plenty of edible plants in nature (which are, by definition, vegetables)
You can eat acorns, and you’re familiar with wild fruit, I assume.
Wheat is just a type of grass
You won’t find wild potatoes because they are native to Peru, but you sure can find them in Peru.
Dandelions are edible, wild onions can be found all over the place, and mint has a long history of escaping gardens and invading the local ecosystem.
Some fruits and vegetables that we often eat do have wild counterparts, but they may not look similar enough, or you might simply not notice them. That said most of the fruit and vegetables, you eat are not indigenous to wherever you live in the world. It would be difficult for zucchini, tomato, corn, carrot, etc. seeds to make their way that far off farm.
Sure a hiker could step 10 feet off a trail and drop a deuce full of seeds after his raw vegan breakfast. a few of them might still be viable, but you’d have to assume that the soil is right, that the seedlings would get o enough sub, the weather would be right, but it doesn’t get eaten by an animal, etc.
Please understand that almost all fruits and vegetables eaten today look a little to nothing like their wild counterparts before we started domesticating and hybridizing fruits and vegetables. Wild onion is a good example. There is a show called Alone where contestants are stranded in isolated difficult environments, and they have to survive. And at least a few seasons, the contestants are surviving where lots of wild onions grow. The onion bulb is more like a baby carrot while the onions we get at the store are more like the size of a fist.
Maybe because the vegetables that you consider as vegetables are domesticated version? Because in my area, most of the vegetables are found in the wild.
The most common one is Diplazium esculentum, it’s an edible fern that we consider as a vegetable (it’s yummy), bayam (spinach), bamboo shoot, and some leaf vegetables that I don’t know the name in english.
Dandelions! Those weeds you see growing everywhere are edible and can be used to make a salad. The flowers can even make wine.
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