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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I think the trick is to know the difference between a plant that’s been cultivated/bred for consumption by humans and domesticated livestock, and the wild versions. Like, a wild onion is not gonna look like those huge bulbs you see in grocery stores. This would probably be a better question for foragers who know how to find edible wild plants.
Wild asparagus and wild lettuce grow where I live. Asparagus looks just like it does at the store but you have to get it when it’s young, it’s too tough when it’s old. So you mark the location when you find it and come back in the spring. Wild lettuce doesn’t grow a head like modern lettuce, you have to recognize it.
All grasses have edible seeds that you can thresh, winnow, and grind into flour. But wild grasses don’t have much gluten, that’s what makes wheat special. So you can make bread but it won’t rise.
Onions have chives have conical, hollow leaves that smell like onions when crushed. Easy to identify.
Grape leaves have a distinctive shape and grow on vines. Not many vines where I’m at.
Squash, beans, and corn were staple crops in the US for a very long time.
That’s not to mention traditional vegetables that aren’t commercialized like Jerusalem artichoke and cattail.
Globalization means that a lot of the foods you see in a grocery store aren’t native to your area, but if you learn more about plants you will be surprised about what is.
Artichokes are thistles. Endives are chicory. These are all over the eastern US. Domestication has distorted their appearance, emphasizing certain features and doing away with others. The same reason why a Chihuahua doesn’t look like a wolf.
If you come to the Pacific Northwest in late summer/early fall, we have blackberries EVERYWHERE. They’re an invasive weed. You can just go to the corner of any lot though and in half an hour you’ll have a gallon of berries and a few scratches.
I went to the east coast and learned that they don’t grow blackberries like we do when I had a hankering for cobbler and it was a sad day.
Nobody else does mom and pop teriyaki either. That was a cultural wake-up call…
Most crops have been selectively bred for us, to make them tastier and yield more. These crops don’t exist much in the wild because we made them and plant them. For example most citrus fruits are hybrids between the pomelo, mandarin and citron, though some of these hybrids were made over a thousand years ago, an example of a pre-modern GMO. In more modern times we even bioengineer in specific genes so that the plants are sterile, they can’t grow more seeds so they’ll never occur outside of intentionally planted fields.
There are vegetables you can find in the wild. Agave, asparagus, onion, garlic and ginger all appear in the wild. Potatoes, tomatoes and peppers grow wild in South America. As for fruits, those are all over. You can find strawberries in the Midwest, cranberries further north, and blackberries in the northwest, hazelnuts in the northeast and of course bananas and coconuts in southeast Asia.
And another thing is that the range of a lot of species is relatively limited. You’re not going to find tropical fruits next to blackberries in the wild, so while many crops grow wild somewhere in the world, there’s a lot of places where there’s no edible plants that would appear in western cuisine. Though they might appear in other cuisines, like many people from Russia to the Americas ate cattails.
Back in the day, Euell Gibbons became a minor celebrity for writing and speaking about how to identify and harvest wild food. Among his books is: Stalking the Wild Asparagus.
You are looking in the wrong places, and you are also looking for something that doesn’t resemble what you see in supermarkets.
The ‘natural’ region for potatoes is up in the mountains in South America. They were first domesticated in the Peru/Bolivia region. So unless you are hiking through the Andes, you won’t see very many wild potatoes…
There are many vegetables you can harvest and eat out in the wild. Just recently, I went out to pick wild fiddleheads.
The curled up tip of the ostrich fern is delicious when cooked properly (You have to boil them, since they are high in tannic acid, and also harbour harmful bacteria). There’s only a one week window to pick them though. They’re even sold in stores (par-boiled to render them safer)
When I go camping, I also harvest things like plantain, (the leafy green, not the starchy banana) Spruce tips (It makes good tea, rich in vitamin C) Morel mushrooms, Cattail roots, rose hips, etc.
See if your local community college has a wild foraging class, or if your local Indigenous people have classes if you want to learn about the sorts of foods you can harvest locally to you.
In a farm where they grow vegetables, farmers would be doing everything to protect those crops from pests and vermin. Think of all the ways they repel animals from eating their crops, like putting netting and tarps around to stop birds, or spraying chemical agents to deter rodents, or straight up killing pests.
If those same vegetables somehow managed to spread into the wild, lets say you accident drop packs of zucchini or carrot seeds in the forest, they don’t have those same protection. Like there’s no way a zucchini would be able to grow to harvestable size out in the wild without being picked apart by birds and insects long before that.
Because vegetables like that don’t grow wild, they’re cultivated. Many are harvested, and only really edible, when they are immature plants.
Lettuce bolts, that is, goes to seed, and if left wild won’t really resemble lettuce.
Also, if you’re in the wild, those vegetables would have to have been planted by someone. Additionally, a lot of the vegetables we like may be able to be grown and cultivated on a farm or in a garden, but wouldn’t be able to reproduce in the wild.
People absolutely do. My grandma who is Chinese would often go out with other grandma friends to pick ”马连头“ 、荠菜、苋菜。
And yes they get judged by local Americans
You might not recognize the wild varieties, but there are wild edible plants. Some of them have mutated cousins that we farm. Also vegetables aren’t low in nutrients, but they aren’t generally protein or calorie rich
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