The plants that grow on the paths are also eaten!

A good part of the plants that humanity feeds on today derive from a few species that grew naturally in an arc of land of barely 3,000 km, between Palestine, Syria and the Persian Gulf, with a central knot in the plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. was the call Fertile Crescentwhere the cultivation of wheat, barley, flax, chickpea, peas or lentils comes from.

However, nature offers us an overwhelming amount of edible plants and many of them grow in our environment, but we ignore them, we mistrust them or we perceive them as banal or dirty.

Despite the fact that human populations have tended to feed on an increasingly limited proportion of plant species from which they have obtained mass productionsthe truth is that in some small communities, especially in isolated populations or during periods of famine, other much less explored plants have been used to obtain all the nutrients they needed.

Wild plants are the treasure of a sustainable diet

The consumption of these plants is currently claimed by groups that promote the advantages of sustainable diet compared to that which obeys above all private economic interests.

He responsible consumption of wild species, which grow naturally in the countryside, is part of a necessary return to origins, which flees from monocultures and the use of pesticides, and which also nutritionally enriches the diet.

We refer to “wild plants” to differentiate them from “cultivated plants”. They are those, therefore, that grow spontaneously in our natural environmentwhich are generally species native to the region, although some «subspontaneous» ones, derived from ancient cultures, are also included.

discover wild plants

They tend to appear more or less abundant everywhere and they go completely unnoticed by anyone who is not the least bit sensitive or fond of botany.

Country people have resorted to them only in difficult periods, when crops have failed, to avoid starvation or as circumstantial support. But the truth is that these species contain many of the essential nutrients what do we need.

They are not “weeds”

A good number of them belong to recognized and esteemed botanical families which include superfoods, such as cruciferous (broccoli is one of its most recognized members), umbelliferous (such as carrots, celery and fennel) and rosaceae (such as apple, peach or almond, among many others). .

At an academic and gastronomic level we are experiencing a certain awakening of the ethnobotanythe science that studies the traditional use of wild plants, and work is underway to recover historical knowledge about these plants.

Meetings proliferate and wild plant fairs edible and medicinal products with great popular participation, such as the Day of Forgotten Plants held in Igualada (Barcelona), promoted by the Eixarcolant association.

“Eixarcolar” is a traditional Catalan term that defines the hard work of removing the so-called “weeds” from crops and their surroundings. But it is precisely these weeds that interest us now and those that can be claimed.

How to use wild plants in your kitchen

Wild plants can give a lot of gameas shown by the fact that chefs frequently incorporate them into their gastronomic experiments.

In some cases, even hire botanical experts so that they harvest those wild plants in the field that they incorporate into vinaigrettes, sauces and juices, or raw in imaginative salads, boiled as vegetables or sprinkled as condiments.

One of the best restaurants in the world, Noma, in Copenhagen, stands out in this sense, and Ferran Adrià introduced one of his dishes nasturtium flowers, For example. Bitter or acrid notes may abound, but it’s just a matter of accommodating the palate to enjoy them.

Some of the more classic wild herbs are known to allbut perhaps we have not dared to try them yet.

One of them is the nettle: use it in soups or omelettes, borage in vegetables and salads, watercress in salads and soups, poppy seeds in cookies and other pastries, dandelion in salads and vegetables, marigold flowers, mauve or violet to decorate different dishes, bay leaves and rosemary tops to flavor your stews, etc.

Some wild plants, like the purslaneprovide alpha-linolenic acid, a vegetable precursor of omega-3, and are richer in antioxidant vitamins C and E than cultivated plants.

There are also those that are very digestive thanks to the mucilages or containing outstanding proportions of essential oils with antiseptic and antioxidant effects.

Other interesting wild plants to look for and try are sweet radicchio (chondrilla junce), the cenizo or bledo (Chenopodium album), the thistle (Scolymus hispanicus), plantain (plantago coronopus), the draba (Lepidium draba) or wild radish (Raphanus raphanistrum), among many others…

The entire pantry of Mother Nature at your fingertips!