Product Description
This illustrated guide to North American wild edibles has been a nature classic for over thirty years. In this new edition, David K. Foster revises Bradford Angier's invaluable foraging handbook, updating the taxonomy and adding more than a dozen species. Scientific information for a general audience and full-color illustrations combine with intriguing accounts of the plants' uses, making this a practical guide for modern-day foragers.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 11 reviews)

Well-packaged but inaccurate

I have long owned the earlier edition and excitedly bought this new one. This book is a good idea but poorly executed. (Let me say right away that I am the author of an edible plant book, so you can accuse me of bashing the competition if you want.) The older edition was one of the books that helped get me interested in this topic, and it is sentimental to me, so I keep trying to like this book but find it difficult.

While it does contain a lot of good information and covers an excellent selection of species, it is also full of inaccuracies - and how can a reader know what to trust? Out of the dozens of edible plant books I have, this is one of the least accurate and I believe is based on comparatively little first-hand experience. The misinformation and omissions are too numerous to list, but here are a few examples:

Jack-in-the-pulpit and skunk cabbage cannot be simply dried to eliminate their calcium oxalate. Believing this would be potentially dangerous, and painful at best. They require prolonged extreme dessication under hot conditions (I have some of both kinds that have been drying for 8 years and still have calcium oxalate a-plenty), or prolonged baking (days or weeks). Also, the book does not even mention that eastern and western skunk cabbage are completely different plants, nor does it specify which one it is talking about. The documentation of their food uses differs.

The drawing of arrowhead tubers looks so dramatically unlike the real thing that you would never know if you found them. The jerusalem artichoke tubers depicted are a cultivated form, which looks and tastes quite different from the typical wild type.

This book is not very good for identification and doesn't even use the scientific names of the plants. The preparation sections are typically 1-3 sentences - not much at all. Much of the text seems like space filler, although it is a good read.

All of the info in this book is easy to find in other books - the author doesn't seem to contribute anything to this field. If you have this book, keep it and refer to it. If you are considering getting into foraging, don't make it a priority. Depending on your location, check out Edible Wild Plants of the Prairie, Steve Brill's wild food book, Abundantly Wild (Midwest), The Euell Gibbons books, or Nancy Turner's books for the Pacific NW. These are all much better. Get a tree, shrub, and wildflower guide to your specific region for ID.

June 02, 2008

A good book for your library

The Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants is a good book to have on your shelf if you are interested in if you want to know what wild plants are edible. The book does discuss many different types of plants that grow out in the wild. The Field Guide does a good job of discussing where to find the plants, how and when to harvest, and a general guide of preparing the food. Where I find this book lacking is that there are no actual pictures of the plants in question. Before I chose to eat something out in the wild I want to be doubley sure I am picking the right plant. So I do feel it is a good guide and filled with information, I wished some time could have been spent on photography for my personal piece of mind.
May 03, 2008

Good book

I owned this before and I remember it seeming more durable but it is well written.
November 17, 2007

A good book

This book first caught my attention in the 70s but over the years I had lost my original copy so I repurchased one. It is still a good book even though the pictures are all rendered as art, which makes me a little nervous on critical IDs. I enjoy the details on preparing the plants, some of which were apparently as the native Americans had done. It is a very good companion book to some of the more recent works out there such as the North American Guide to Edible Wild Plants.
October 28, 2007

Good, Not Great

Other reviewers caution that this text "should not be your only source"... I agree, but I'd guess that's true of any such reference.
November 08, 2005

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

How to Stay Alive in the Woods: A Complete Guide to Food, Shelter and Self-Preservation Anywhere
by Bradford Angier

A Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants: Eastern and central North America (Peterson Field Guides (R))
by Lee Allen Peterson, Lee Allen Peterson, Roger Tory Peterson, Roger Tory Peterson

The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants
by Samuel Thayer

The Illustrated Guide to Edible Wild Plants
by Department of the Army

Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places
by Steve Brill