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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There are wild versions of almost every fruit and vegetable, but most of them you wouldn’t recognize.
We’ve spent in some cases thousands of years altering crops for our own purposes. Breeding them to be larger, grow faster, have more nutrients, and in some cases seedless.
Wild Carrots are purple and so bitter they are hard to eat
Wild Bananas are smaller and full of seeds
Wild corn looks somewhat like wheat, it’s so different that they didn’t even know what the original corn plant looked like until recently due to genetic testing.
Cauliflower, Broccoli, Cabbage, and Brussels Sprouts are actually the same plant.
Wild Potatoes are super tiny
Lemons and limes don’t exist in nature at all, they are hybrids of different citrus plants.
Because there’s fairly few wild vegetables out there. Most vegetables that you see are the result of centuries of humans meddling. Example eggplant used to look like an egg, small and white, then we started messing with it now its several times larger and purple. You can still find onions and other root vegetables out there in abundance though depending on where you are.
Wild Cabbage/lettuce/other brassica cultivars: native to Western Europe. Looks like a typical broad-leafed flower.
Wild Potatoes: native to the southern USA/northern Mexico. Literally just a species of nightshade.
Wild Pumpkin/zucchini/squash: native to Mexico. Unremarkable appearance.
Onions: native to central or eastern Asia. Literally just a species of allium.
Tomatoes: native to Ecuador and Peru. They do look like tomatoes, so if you’re in Peru when they’re fruiting you might even recognise them.
We do “find” them – it’s just hard to recognise them, many of them are barely edible, and (mainly) they are native to completely different parts of the globe.
You know an example of a wild vegetable that is common? The dandelion.
There are plenty of survival shows including the survival island series with bear gryll where people find tubers (usually yuca).
Most of the time it’s because people don’t know what a potato plant looks like, same with sweet potatoes and yams. Or their flowers. Did you know they have beautiful purple or white flowers that are a visual cross between puppies and orchids.
Check out subs like r/foraging and r/foragers where people literally post every day during hikes and stuff vegetables that they have found.
It’s also location dependent. If you are in a rural area that has been turned into agriculture, a lot of the native species are killed off. If you are in an area that has a lot of native tribes at some point and there are still a lot of forests (Appalachian mountains) you can find Ramps, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, sweet peas and so on)
A ton of domesticated vegetables are just generically modified mustard.
Broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kohlrabi, kale.
All are just generically modified wild mustard. So you won’t really find them in nature, but you might find mustard.
You find wild edible plants anywhere. The thing is as a lay person you don’t recognize it because it looks nothing like its modern domesticated equivalent. For example it’s widely believed that teosinte is the wild plant that was domesticated into corn. It’s a small grass with small seeds that look like small pebbles in a hard husk.
[Brassica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica_oleracea) which is one of the most common family of leafy greens we eat such as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens. The wild plant looks more like a big-leafed weed.
Wild onion and wild garlic are common in forests in North America. The problem is varieties of deathcamas look very similar and eating can have significant health risks as the name implies.
At the right time of year, mid to late spring, early summer you can often find wild berries. In the pacific northwest you can find huckleberry patches.
Lots of US cities didn’t want homeless people so they planted male plants only and killed the female ones.
1. Lots of vegetables originate from one specific area where it was wild then domesticated. Example: potato, you are only ever going to find wild potato in South America.
2. Vegetables through domestication have been improved in size and taste. If you do find a wild one it will be much smaller and look different
3. Many plants that produce fruits and vegetables have a life cycle where for the vast majority of the year the part we eat isn’t present. So 11 months out of the year even if you knew what a wild version of vegetable X looked like it wouldn’t be present even if the plant was
4. Animals. Animals eat a lot of berries, fruits, pods, seeds, stems, and often eat them before they are properly ripe – so while the plant is there the vegetable part or fruit is not.
5. Hidden. If you have ever picked from a garden you often have to look hard for the items. They are often low to the ground and behind leaves, or sometimes underground. If I planted a domestic pea plant right next to a path with other leafy plants (and somehow kept animals from eating them) I’m betting no human walking by would even notice the pods when they developed. Would you even think to look underground like in the case of potatoes, turnips, and the like!
I saw a broccoli plant growing wild when I was doing work experience with Big Mals Limited one time doing one of the scheduled mowing/trimming jobs at the Halls Farm suburb in Silverdale,Auckland,New Zealand about three years ago.
It’s mostly because whatever you are looking for is not native to your area. For example potatoes are native to the Americas, you will not see them elsewhere.
Also you might not even recognize many of these wild varieties, because they just look all too different.
For example there is no such thing as a wild zucchini, all squashes that you know are human made, the ancestor plant looks something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucurbita_foetidissima .
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