The Kansas prairie is full of edible plants. But it's important to know which ones can be eaten and which ones should be avoided. Luckily, a University of Kansas professor has taken out all the guesswork. Commentator Rex Buchanan has been thumbing through the KU professor's revised and expanded book called: Edible Wild Plants of the Prairie.
(Transcript)
One summer when I was growing up out in central Kansas, one of my cousins and I tried sampling some of the foods that we thought were eaten by local Native people.
One unfortunate experiment involved freshwater mussels. We collected them from the silty bottom of a nearby lake. We took the meat out of the shell, then boiled it. The result was tough, chewy, hard to swallow. It tasted like mud. We only ate a few. Given the amount of herbicide runoff in the 1960s, and because mussels are filter feeders, that was probably just as well.
It's too bad we didn’t have a copy of the book Edible Wild Plants of the Prairie by Kelly Kindscher, a KU professor and scientist at the Kansas Biological Survey. Published by the University Press of Kansas, it’s recently been reissued in a second edition. Kelly’s book would have steered us in a more palatable direction.
Toward, for example, wild tomatillo or ground cherry, a plant we called “poppers”, because you could pop the husks between your fingers and out would come a small green fruit, a little smaller than a marble. We thought they were poisonous. Or to prickly pear cactus, which we regarded as undesirable because of its spines. Or buffalo gourds, which, in our world, were only good for throwing at each other. Or lamb’s quarter, which we called pigweed and fed to . . . well, you figure it out.
All of these, and about 200 other plants species from the prairie, are documented in Kindscher’s book. He includes maps that show where each plant is found, and information about how it can be harvested and prepared.
I especially liked the book’s connections between the plants of the prairie and the tribes that harvested and ate those plants. Ground cherries, for example, were made into a sauce by the Omaha, Ponca, Lakota, and Pawnee, or eaten fresh or dried. Several Plains tribes ate the fruits from prickly pear, either raw or dried. Other tribes roasted then ate prickly pear pads.
Kindscher has tried many of these plant foods himself, and reports on his experiences. He says, for example, that the early stalks of yucca can be baked or roasted and the result is sweet and asparagus-like.
Everybody knows the importance of bison in the diet of plains Indians. But Kindscher points out that wild plants complemented that meat diet, and that at least one tribe was “known to determine the route of their summer bison hunt not by where they would find bison but by the locations of . . . prairie turnip, chokecherries, and other wild foods.”
The Kansas prairie gets lots of love these days, partly because it supports the state’s ranching culture, partly because prairie grasses sequester carbon and keep soil in place and out of streams, and partly because of the prairie’s inherent beauty.
Kindscher’s book gives us another reason to appreciate the prairie: the role plants played in the diet of people who were here first. Plants that were part of history, and still worth tasting today. ###
Commentator Rex Buchanan is a writer, author and director emeritus at the Kansas Geological Survey. He lives in Lawrence.
The book, Edible Wild Plants of the Prairie, by KU Professor Kelly Kindscher, is published by University Press of Kansas.