Minneapolis Star Tribune — Just minutes into the first class at the recent Midwest Wild Harvest Festival, Sam Thayer is already eating the foliage.
He lunges up a hillside and returns with a giant lobed leaf he identifies as red mulberry. Then he strips the top off a sapling branch and stuffs the young leaves in his mouth.
“Much tastier than white mulberry,” he says.
Over his two-hour plant identification walk, Thayer darts into the underbrush several more times, offering students samples of bladdernut, peeling slippery elm to show the medicinal bark, and munching on cut-leaf coneflower shoots, a green known as sochan in the South.
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Nearby, Bill Cook leads a class on preserving wild foods. His dense, dark acorn bread was a hit at the wild foods potluck the previous night.
The St. Cloud State assistant professor of biology grew up picking blueberries and knew the names of scores of wild plants from his research on plant succession in abandoned farm fields. But he never knew many of them were edible.
