Edible Wild Plants, Vol. 2: Wild Foods from Foraging to Feasting

This new volume 2, like the first, is a user-friendly, pictorially based guide providing all you need to know to start genuinely enjoying wild foods. It helps readers successfully identify plants, develop gathering strategies, and learn preparation and cooking techniques. The unparalleled photographs and depth of understanding will knock your socks off.

All books in this series are designed to teach you things you can actually apply, help you identify edible plants at any stage of growth, give you close up full color photographs of the edible parts at the optimal stages of growth, and show you fun and tasty things to do with them. It lays a foundation and covers plants you are likely to come across on a daily basis no matter where you are in North America or Europe. It covers those plants in the kind of detail that you need to genuinely know and understand them. It clarifies and explains concepts poorly understood and commonly mis-represented in the wild food literature. Once you receive it, compare its coverage of any plant side-by-side to that same plant in any other book ever written. That comparison will reveal the value of this book, and represents what I will continue to do in future books.

Following volume 1’s success, volume 2 continues to help you understand the value and potential of wild foods. This book has 460 photographs and illustrations, fun and authoritative text, focused attention on plant details, nutrient tables, range maps, recipes, and a plethora of additional preparation and cooking tips. In this substantial 416 page book, author John Kallas gives you the knowledge and confidence needed to enjoy edible wild plants as a part of your regular diet.

This second volume of Edible Wild Plants adds 18 additional plants, their relatives, and look-a-likes, in 15 plant chapters, to the overall collection of plants covered between the two volumes in The Wild Food Adventure Series. This book makes it delightfully exciting to learn about and experiment with known wild foods that will be useful to all, from beginners to advanced foragers.

This book features plants in five flavor categories?foundation, tart, pungent or peppery, bitter, and distinctive & sweet. Organizing this way helps readers use the plants in pleasing and predictable ways. Imagine frequently including cattail, nettles, pokeweed, marsh mallow, daylily, wild radish, and everlasting pea in your meal planning knowing that you acquired these plants from your own foraging adventures. There is also a section devoted to identifying and knowing poison hemlock, often confused with wild carrot in certain stages of development. John Kallas and his Wild Food Adventure book series are here to help you learn quickly, process intelligently, and genuinely enjoy what you are eating.

John Kallas is one of the foremost authorities on North American edible wild plants and other foragables. He’s learned about wild foods through formal academic training and over 45 years of hands-on field research. John has a doctorate in nutrition, a master’s in education, and degrees in biology and zoology. He’s a trained botanist, nature photographer, writer, researcher, and teacher. In 1993 he founded the Institute for the Study of Edible Wild Plants and Other Foragables along with its educational branch, Wild Food Adventures. John’s company is based in Portland, Oregon, where he offers regional workshops, and multi-day intensives on wild foods. For more information, see wildfoodadventures.com.