10 Delicious Edible Wild Plants

You don’t have to take many steps outside your home to find potentially edible wild plants. The usual thing is that to provide ourselves with vegetables with which fill our pantry and our fridge let’s go to the greengrocer, the supermarket or the farmer who sells his own harvest. We can’t think of another option because it’s what we’re used to, but it hasn’t always been like that.

In the past, especially in rural environments, going out into the fields to try to harvest edible plants or fruits was not a rarity. The problem is that our urban lifestyle, not only in the cities, has distanced us from direct contact with nature and has erased from our collective memory the knowledge of the culinary and medicinal possibilities that wild plants can offer us

Responsible harvest of wild plants

Today it is difficult to find people familiar with these plants and with the different uses that can be made of them. However, there are numerous initiatives that try to promote the return to origins and responsible harvesting of wild plants edibles as an alternative to the consumption of industrial horticultural products, at least in part.

An example is the annual Eixarcolant edible plant fair, which is held every spring with great success in attendance in the Catalan town of Igualada. Marc Talavera, one of the organizing members of Eixarcolant, is a biologist and has dedicated his doctoral thesis to studying the recovery of some forgotten plants and what their uses could be in our day-to-day lives. And it is that the wild plants they are everywhere even in the bleakest urban environments; all we need is to familiarize ourselves with them to be in a position to know if they are suitable or not for consumption.

The most common edible plants

Obviously not all environments are the same. It is not the same to live in a strict urban environment than in a peri-urban or rural one. It is clear that between one and the other there will be very marked differences. But there are some very common wild plants, some of them even ubiquitous, that could be within the reach of a very important part of the population residing in Mediterranean Europe.

Many of these plants are totally unfairly labeled “weeds”, but in reality they are excellent because they are full of nutrients and lend themselves to making delicious dishes, such as a nettle omelette, a collejas salad or a wild caterpillar sauce.