Food from My Geographical Area That I Don't Like

The Long & Short Reviews challenge for this week is another easy one: "local" food that I don't like.

That would be the things people started eating, and made "traditional," due to hunger, or to disguise the nastiness of spoiled food...

1. Wine

When fruit juice starts to go bad, the fructose and water in it ferment into alcohol, and it becomes wine. To some people wine smells and tastes good. Better them than me. Most people in my part of the world don't drink wine, but some people, who raise wine grapes, want to expand the market for wine.

2. Vinegar

When fruit juice goes completely bad, the alcohol decays into acid, and it becomes vinegar.  To some people vinegar is at least useful as a preservative. To me food that's been preserved in vinegar smells  and tastes as if it's not been preserved at all. It's nasty. Bury it. But many people of German or French descent seem to feel that they need some vinegar mixed into something with every meal.

3. Cheese

Long ago people discovered that milk in the stomach of a young animal absorbs rennet and curdles into cheese. Some people believe that cheese, being partly digested milk in which the lactose has already started to break down, is easier to digest than milk. My body disagrees with this theory. I can digest a little milk or cream from time to time, but no cheese.

4. Mayonnaise

If you beat enough air into clear oil and vinegar, they form a white substance that looks like cream and tastes like vinegar. Some people want a little of this stuff on every salad and sandwich they eat; some can make a sandwich of bread and mayonnaise alone. They may have every single bit of mine.

5. Salad Dressing

In addition to mayonnaise there are at least a hundred other concoctions made of oil and vinegar that some people like to use to "dress" a salad. I prefer my salad naked. Vegetables are better with neither oil nor vinegar. If you want to add calories from healthy fat, mix nuts or meat into the salad. If you want to coat things with liquid, use juicier vegetables.

6. Potato Salad

People of German descent traditionally cooked potatoes, let them get cold, coated them with oil and vinegar, and mixed them with other vegetables and/or meat to form what they call a potato salad. To me, there are potatoes, which taste best when they're piping hot, and there are salads, which taste best when they're room temperature or chilled, and these two separate things belong in separate dishes.

7. Sauerkraut

People of German descent traditionally preserved cabbage by letting it ferment. When I was a child some people paid debts to my parents, partly, in jars of sauerkraut. The'rents accepted those jars with gratitude, buried the contents, then cleaned and reused the jars. For all of us, cabbage is good when it's fresh and raw, and then you wait till next year to enjoy cabbage again.

8. Pork

Many people in my part of the world would raise a pig, or pigs, until they were about a year old and big enough to be dangerous. Then they'd kill the pig and cook the meat in various ways, supposed to kill all the germs and worms that a pig naturally contains, and eat the preserved pig's body as their primary form of meat all through the next year. It was economical all right, and some parts of a preserved pig don't even taste bad, but I've always thought Moses must have had some very good reason to tell people not to do this. Pigs can share a lot of diseases with people.

9. Buttermilk Biscuits

When fresh milk stands for a few hours, before it starts to go bad, it separates into cream that can be churned into butter, and a defatted, sour-tasting, lumpy milk residue known as buttermilk. (This is real buttermilk. Supermarket buttermilk is fermented with chemicals so that it looks and tastes similar, and you can sour milk with a bit of lemon juice so that it works similarly in baking, but those are not the real thing.) A few people like to drink buttermilk. Most people use it in cooking, to react with baking soda and leaven breads. The simplest form of bread made with baking soda and buttermilk, mixed in with flour, salt, and butter or lard, is known as buttermilk biscuits. It does not look or taste like the biscotti or other sweet cakes European and British people call biscuits. Buttermilk biscuits are like real Southern cornbread, only made with white wheat flour instead of cornmeal. I actually like the taste of buttermilk biscuits but I don't digest them, because wheat, and I was always taught that they're pure junk calories--the nutrition in wheat is in the bran that's been sifted out of that white flour.

10, Blackberries

Blackberries don't taste bad and there's no special reason to avoid them. I don't like to bother with them because, in the orchard, they come in between raspberries, wineberries, cherries, and blueberries, not to mention ground-cherries, and interfere with picking, eating, and preserving these fruits that I like much better. If blackberries only ripened in midwinter, I'd like them. (In late autumn, nut season, I have similar feelings about black walnuts. They're not bad at all, except that, coming at the same time when so  many other nuts are so much better, they're sort of boring.) Generally anything edible that grows fresh out of the ground is acceptable, but some things that grow fresh out of the ground are more delicious than others.

Foods from My Geographic Area That I Like

Most of the foods from the Point of Virginia that I like best are wild things that grow here naturally. It feels natural to think of them in the order they appear on the calendar.

1. Maple syrup

All maple trees have sweet sap that can be boiled down into syrup. Acer saccharum, the Sugar Maple, which grows best further north, tends to have the most sugary, least "mapley" flavor. It does grow in Virginia, but not so abundantly as Acer rubrum, A. nigrum, A. saccharinum, and the introduced A. platanoides. Syrup fom these trees used to be considered less valuable because it tastes more "mapley." If you like a distinctive maple flavor, this is good news, because your woodlot probably has enough of these maple species that are big enough to be tapped for syrup. (Only tap trees that are considerably wider than your five-gallon bucket.)

The secret to harvesting maple sap south of Vermont is that the sap rises earlier in the year. Sometimes it starts in the January thaw. Often we get a freeze in between maple sap harvests. 

The secret to converting that watery, just faintly sweet, sap into syrup is abundant supplies of cheap fuel and patience. Approximately forty gallons of sap make a pint of syrup. You'll be boiling down sap for days. Indigenous people boiled sap in big pots over open fires, but you can economize a little bit on patience by putting a good wood stove  in a shed. 

2. Rock lettuce

This aquatic plant grows whenever the water is not actually freezing. It tastes cool, fresh, and juicy, like the very best leaf lettuce, only better. It grows only in minimally polluted streams, so most people no longer have it. If you can find it, you're blessed.

3. Morel mushrooms

Like other mushrooms, they grow as a big underground network of fungus roots, popping up their reproductive parts when the weather is warm and damp. Unlike some other mushrooms, morels "bloom" above ground only once a year, usually in April. 

If you have a morel patch in your wood lot, you know it. The question is whether you want to be the first to pounce and devour, or want to share the pleasure with friends. 

Another morel fun fact: Nobody in the Point of Virginia actually says "moh-rell." Every family seems to have its own nickname for these mushrooms. "Sponge mushrooms" seems logical but is not really ideal, because it includes the Great Sponge Mushroom, which is mildly toxic. My elders called them "mullets," which I've been told was typical for Irish families. Many people in town call them "dry land fish." You do soak them in saltwater, roll them in cornmeal, and fry them like fish, and the process gives them a flavor that reminds people of fish--I wonder why? 

Another: If you're one of those European types who like to drink alcohol with meals, you will not enjoy morels. They contain a phytochemical that reacts with alcohol in the stomach to have a purgative effect.

Another: If the land where they grew has been sprayed with glyphosate or even exposed to glyphosate vapor drift, don't eat morels. They absorb and retain the poison and will bring on whatever glyphosate reactions you have. 

Another: Chanterelles are another unmistakable-looking wild mushroom that grow here. Many people rave over their flavor. My family never picked or ate them...so I still wouldn't know!

4. Violets

Picking violets only makes them bloom more exuberantly, so it's nice to know that they're safe and healthy to eat. Some people like to candy violet blossoms in sugar, which at least looks pretty. I like to pick and nibble on up to ten blossoms at a time, out in the not-a-lawn. Depending on when and where they grew violets can be super nutritious, such that overindulgence could even cause an imbalance, so use moderation. 

5. Strawberries

When nature intended strawberries to be eaten, they're red all the way through, and being warmed by the sun brings out their sweetness. You don't need to do another thing to them except wash off any soil that may adhere. 

In May, however, when both "June bearers" and "ever-bearers" produce the greatest number of berries, you may have enough berries to freeze, and after freezing and thawing you will want to do something creative with them. They still make a delicious dessert cut up and served in their own rich red juice (try not to pick or eat strawberries before they're red all the way through) with just a sprinkle of sugar to compensate for what's been lost to time, but people tend to like to play with frozen strawberries. So serve them on shortcakes, or stir them right into the batter of layer cakes, or stir them into gelatin and serve them as pie. (Gluten-free pies can have cornflake or crisp rice crumb crusts, but strawberries go well with crushed nut crusts.)

Not so much fun fact: strawberries have a somewhat spongy structure, with seeds growing right out through the surface and no clearly defined peel, and they soak up glyphosate like little sponges. If they've been exposed to vapor drift, don't eat them.

6. Blueberries and Huckleberries

Technically blueberries and huckleberries belong to different species; they don't crossbreed and have different numbers of seeds inside each berry. Who cuts into these tiny fruits to count the berries? An older explanation was that blueberries grow on bushes you bought from the seed company and planted and tended, whereas huckleberries just grow wild on the hills. Except, of course, that some people transplant wild huckleberries into gardens, and sometimes feral blueberry bushes grow on the hills near the sites of houses that burned down or fell in long ago. Anyway they taste good and are good for the eyes. 

7. Cherries

Wild cherries are small and seedy and useful mostly as medicine. When they've been boiled soft and the seeds have been sieved out, wild cherries turn to a thick pulpy syrup that is mixed with honey, poured out on platters, left to firm up between sheets of waxed paper, then cut up in little lozenge shapes and eaten as cough lozenges. 

Cherries that grew on trees someone bought from the seed company are bigger and juicier and can be eaten as fruit, though it's nice to cut them in half and make sure they're not harboring any tiny insect pests. Fresh cherries need no sugar. Split, pit, devour.

Cherries also freeze well, or they can be cooked thick and canned as "preserves," for use in pies later in the year. Cherry pies do need sugar. Our local honey tends to have a strong flavor of its own on which I've never been keen. Cherries have enough flavor authority to stand up to local honey, so you can use honey in a cherry pie I'm likely to pronounce good...at least if none of the flowers the bees visited had been exposed to glyphosate, you could.

8. Wineberries

Wineberries are a lazy picker's ideal for raspberries--bigger, brighter, sweeter, growing on those ferocious-looking brambles that discourage most insects. 

Another fun fact about raspberries: They come in three colors--red, black, and yellow. My favorites are the yellow ones.

9. Tomatoes

Properly grown, vine-ripened tomatoes are too soft to be sold in supermarkets. Like strawberries, they have more flavor (and nutrients) than the kind you can buy in supermarkets. If not exposed to any poison spray vapor drift they don't need to be peeled--if anything the peels may help the fruit pulp cohere--and are best eaten from a bowl, with a spoon. 

"Tomato" may be a name for a shade of red, but tomatoes can also be orange, yellow, pink, or even deep aubergine ("purple") when ripe. They also come in a range of sizes and shapes. People in the Point of Virginia usually plant a mix of familiar and novelty tomatoes, partly to get a mix of resistance to different insects and fungi--if you plant twenty different kinds of tomatoes you should at least get to eat one kind--and partly to have a topic for "small talk." 

Many people have favorite kinds of tomatoes, and although I like any fully ripe,  soft tomato, lightly salted, I should mention that my father's favorite was Yellow Pink Centers. These are wonderfully ugly tomatoes. They grow in a flattened oblong shape with deep wrinkles along slicing lines that will, if followed, yield uneven slices. The predominant color of the rind is yellow, when the fruits are ripe, with a deep pink blush under the skin near the core, but green, orange, and red patches are usually also present. The fruit pulp is extremely delicate. The flavor is sweet; salting these tomatoes is like salting melons, something people do only to emphasize the sweet taste. Vine-ripened red tomatoes are both the predominant flavor and the "dressing" in salads, but Yellow Pink Centers really do seem to need a bowl and spoon all to themselves.

10. Cucumbers

Almost as easy to grow as beans, cucumbers ripen at the same time as tomatoes and work well with tomatoes in salads. You can buy varieties that look and taste similar to the ones sold in supermarkets but it's always worth planting a few "lemon cucumbers," which are short, thick, pale cucumbers--they don't really look like lemons but they invite comparisons--with a special flavor of their own.

We're not even halfway through the growing season yet, but ten favorites ought to be enough.

Survival Food Weekend Part 2: May Be

This is the post about wild plants that may be edible in May, but weren't the most appetizing things growing in my not-a-lawn last weekend, if they were growing at all.

I won't bore you with all the preliminary warnings from Part 1. If you need warnings, read Part 1. But I will respond to a comment from a local lurker about the "spring tonic" effect. During the early twentieth century some of us absorbed a positively fetishistic ideal of "regularity," an idea that everybody should Do Numbers Two and Three exactly once a day between breakfast and going to work, and that, for that reason, workplaces should make it as difficult as possible for anyone to Do Number Three...like putting ten toilets in little compartments, all separated from one sink with an inadequate supply of paper towels. (Naming no local fast-food joints, here.) We as a society need to overcome this. Reality is that humans are not all that "regular," so the places where they work should be designed to minimize the unpleasantness of being in the same room, not maximize it. The whole obsession with "complete elimination immediately after breakfast" has the smell of something popularized by cheapskate factory owners, with a little help from control-freak schoolteachers.

For celiacs, any self-cleansing, flushing effects we notice feel like a wonderful relief from the toxins eroding our insides. The first time I did a low-fat, low-carb, mostly-veg diet (in the city, with supermarket vegetables including white rice) I remember it, and people who worked with me may still remember it, as a six-week "high" during which I felt like leaping out of bed at 6 a.m. to sprint a mile before breakfast. Well, I was only half grown at the time. Adults are usually calmer, although we can still feel "high" on relief from sluggishness.

The "mild diarrhea" of the flushing effect may be inconvenient; it's not the sickening, even life-threatening, kind of diarrhea produced by food poisoning or Norwalk Flu. If you nibble mindfully and stop when the flavors of wild plants stop tasting deliciously different to you, you may not even make an extra trip to the bathroom, and if you do, it won't feel any worse than you normally feel after breakfast. At worst you'll feel thirsty...many people are living with the dragging effects of chronic dehydration anyway. "Regularity" will return in a few days whether you continue eating lots of juicy fibre-rich vegetables or not.

But for those people--all the ones I know are White, and currently at least forty years old--who "don't like that feeling" of needing to use the bathroom two or three times in one day, I'd say, most of the discomfort is in your minds. Those of you who are baby-boomers, though not necessarily even one year older than I am, tend to be the ones of our generation whom others point out as "that old" rather than "that blond/e" or "that one in the...", and certainly not "that friend of yours, you do know s/he is older than s/he looks don't you?" If you want to side-step cardiovascular disease and other things that your elders blamed on "aging," and look, feel, and work as if you were ten years younger...talk to your doctor, but a naturopathic physician, like our e-doctor John McDougall or GBP's real-world Dr. Cote in Tennessee, will probably tell you just to work through it once. The "high" of more efficient digestion, usually higher metabolic rate, that baseline cheerful mood that annoys people who don't enjoy it themselves, improved resistance to infections, and the youthening benefits of a face lift without having to pay for one, will (typically) last if you continue eating juicy fibre-rich unsprayed veg. There can be medical reasons why people can't do this, which are none of my business...I'm only glad that, most of the time, it works for me.

Now, on to the plants...

1. Cress. This is another name for two different plants that actually peaked in March, or even February; by now field cress is dormant and watercress, if not cut back, has gone to seed. In the February thaw, when the leaves are fresh and juicy, the peppery kale-like taste of cress is a delight. Watercress can be eaten raw if you're sure sheep or cattle have not been grazing upstream. Field cress is best cooked. Recipes usually recommend using watercress, and often recommend cutting off the stems--both plants' stems can become tough, like parsley stems.

Field cress is what my elders called "creasy greens." I have found it, and bought it, canned in supermarkets like spinach. It pops up in ploughed fields, often starting during the January thaw, reaching its prime in February or March, then going to seed and dying down before ploughing time around the first of May. If it doesn't pop up in your field, Amazon is currently offering seeds:



Watercress is sold in upscale supermarkets for outrageous prices, or picked out of local spring branches during thaws in winter. Since most of the plant is underwater, each time a freeze kills the top leaves, the plant sprouts fresh new leaves. A person who really liked watercress and didn't live downstream from any cattle raisers could keep watercress sprouting new leaves in a spring branch most, if not all, of the year.

2. Plantain. There's another species (narrow or Lance-leaf Plantain, Plantago lanceolata) that's also edible, but Broadleaf Plantain (P. major) is more useful in some ways. Leaves are juicy but fairly tough; they can be cooked and eaten if you're hungry, but don't have much flavor. Dried seeds can be crushed and used like flour or meal, and will stretch flour or meal out if you need more bread, but nobody raves over them either. (The writer known as George Orwell did mention their being nibbled as a snack in the 1890s and revived as survival food in the 1940s.)

Photo donated to Wikipedia By Rasbak - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=210595

I prefer to save plantain for its medicinal uses. It can be either crushed and rubbed on irritated skin, or stewed and the water used to wash irritated skin, for soothing, cooling relief. For insect stings, the best treatment is of course to learn to get along with insects; this is not always possible, so if you are bitten or stung, washing with plantain cooking liquid is the best treatment I've found.

3. Morels. Mycologists have reconsidered the species names for these mushrooms...(Warning, before you scroll down to the picture: one of their many nicknames is "the ugly ones")...so let's just say there are about a half dozen different species, some of which appear in the same woods at the same times, and the biggest, latest-blooming kinds sometimes do pop up in May. Some years, but not this year. In this year's unusual weather, I may have looked at the wrong time, but I didn't find a single morel.



This is one of the two kinds I've found in May, always in Maryland. They may be the commonest kind overall; they don't grow near the Cat Sanctuary. Our most numerous species are narrower, and grayish rather than brownish, and they appear in April or sometimes even March. However, for those who want to try starting their own mushroom patch, a company in West Virginia is offering "starter kits" of spores and sawdust you can at least try to start anywhere.

The kind I've found close to home in May are even bigger than the one in the photo, with wrinkly heads two or three inches long on a stalk that can be equally long. The biggest of all the morels, they have a distinct cone shape and blackish-gray color, especially at the top of the cone. From the cone shape one of their nicknames is "Christmas Trees." Some years they do pop up in the not-a-lawn, nourished by the chestnut logs at the foundation of the oldest part of my home. Not this year.

Two blog posts from years when I did find these mushrooms:

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2017/03/march-23-links-with-cat-sanctuary.html

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2013/04/phenology-flowers-butterflies-mushrooms.html

One year I had morels to sell and nobody bought them. This year three people asked to be on the list for morels, and I didn't have them.

4. Chickweed. Because of its small size, people who aren't very hungry have tended to leave this early spring green for the chickens. It sprouts right up after frost and has a nice mild leaf-lettuce-like flavor. By May, if it's not subsided it's gone to seed. It is one of the early greens our ancestors nibbled to stave off scurvy, though, and is especially welcome during the January thaw.

5. Ground-ivy. For a mint this first flower of spring is remarkably dry and dull. It's noticed for its pretty little flowers rather than its smell or taste. Euell Gibbons reported that English people had tried using it to flavor fermented drinks, perhaps many times if the number of cute nicknames they gave it is any indication, but it never really took off. He gave some recipes in which he used it, but raved more about how the Renaissance English would probably have called a man who bothered with "Gill-over-the-ground" something like "Euell-pick-by-the-hedgerows."

In Europe, where at least ground-ivy can't be called invasive, varieties with rounder, greener leaves are commonly used as greens in salads drowned in dressing. Presumably those varieties are juicier than the soft, dry, triangular leaves of the ground-ivy I've always in lawns and ex-lawns. It's safe for human consumption if not poisoned, but is reasonably considered a weed in pastures, since cows and horses can't digest it.

Though colonies like this one are accused of choking out native wildflowers, Virginia wildflowers usually seem to out-compete ground-ivy. The freshest leaves at the top are purplish as shown, and the flowers range from pinkish to bluish lavender. Photo donated to Wikipedia By Rasbak - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10128264

If I were going to eat ground-ivy I'd eat it in March. By last weekend, the few surviving stalks were relatively tall (some over six inches), gone to seed, and either turning yellow or showing mold spots from old age--a most unappetizing wild crop. In late March and early April it was fresh and pretty.

6. Honeysuckle (japonica). The super-sweet nectar, when this nuisance vine blooms (typically in June), is a moral lesson for children. The one little drop in each blossom offers all the sweetness your mouth could possibly want. If you gathered a pint of blossoms and squeezed out a spoonful of nectar, it would taste disgusting.

Photo By Aftabbanoori - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32297970

In May, honeysuckle consists of stringy vines, which can be used to make ropes or baskets, and leathery leaves, for which I've never found a use. Some cows and goats will eat them, though.

The main excuse for Lonicera japonica in North America is that helps check soil erosion on a steep bank, and, although it will spread to orchards and woodlots, where it's a nuisance that can pull down trees, it's not as bad as kudzu or cinnamon vine. Many people enjoy the sight and smell of honeysuckle. If you're one of them, please be neighborly and keep your honeysuckle in its place.

7. Strawberries. The old orchard still has a few feral strawberries--not enough to sell, but enough for a delicious snack. Some years the fruits appear in the first week of May. Not this year. The leaves are edible too, but in May, when tastier leaves are abundant and berries aren't far away, who'd eat them?

8. Sassafras. This fragrant native tree has two main uses. (Most often seen as a small shrub, it can, with time, care, and good luck, grow into a full-size tree.) Roots perfume the house (whether or not you brew them into tea, which my parents did, some years, but I've never done). Juicy, sweetly bland leaves contain a thickening agent, which remains effective when the leaves are dried and crushed, known as filé. I often pick a leaf or two if I walk past the young trees that grow on some of the private roads near the Cat Sanctuary, usually to eat raw. I did not happen to walk those roads last weekend.

For those who don't know, a choice collection of sassafras images and fun facts is at https://www.augustaga.gov/1630/Sassafras . I thought of copying their image of three of the more common shapes of leaves typically found on one tree, then thought "But why deprive readers of all those other good pictures? They should see the whole collection."

9. Smilax. Also known as "green briar" for obvious reasons, and "blaspheme vine" for reasons that become obvious if you get tangled in it, this native nuisance plant grows near but not at the Cat Sanctuary. (While some plants in the genus Smilax are luxuriously leafy, our native species is most easily identified by lots of bare, prickly stalk with visible prickles in between its little green leaves.) I didn't walk through the woods where it grows, either. It used to grow in the orchard, though...I can now smile, remembering how Dad gave it the axe.

Euell Gibbons ate smilax, whose nicknames include both "cheeses" and "bread-and-butter," and reported that it didn't taste like either of those things. It didn't taste like any favorite food. It's edible, though, if you're hungry or just want to get rid of it. As with most wild plants, eat the young tender parts and avoid eating too much. One wild food blogger reports that eating "a lot of raw ones gave me a stomach ache."

10. The Brambles. This is the English name for a large group of plants in the genus Rubus, which have thorny stems and pretty five-petalled flowers like roses, but fruits, unlike roses, consisting of several soft seeds wrapped in sweet juicy flesh that grow in clumps. Some of the dozens of species botanists recognize are called raspberries, blackberries, boysenberries, dewberries, and wineberries. Several varieties grow at the orchard, where some invaded and some were deliberately planted. When I pick them, I pick whatever fruits are ripe for the picking that day. Friends usually get an assortment of blackish-purple, bright red, and yellow berries, of which the biggest and reddest started their life inside papery husks and are technically wineberries not raspberries. Sometimes I've found a berry by the end of May but basically the brambles at the Cat Sanctuary bear fruit in June.

Brambles generally have a three-year cycle. The first year you see just the thorny stem and leaves, often in the way while you're picking berries. The second year that stem bears fruit, while the stem that bore fruit the previous year may or may not put out leaves. Third-year stems grow down into the ground, put down new roots, and send up next year's new stems. The plants can travel a great distance over the years, and the challenge is to keep yours in your own orchard, as they may not be welcome in the neighbors' field. However, I've welcomed the ones that have made their way to me.

Wineberries have a ferocious look. I was alarmed, too, to find them sprouting among my raspberries! But the fruit is completely safe to eat, and the stalks are no harder to handle than raspberries. Their stiff hairs are there to discourage insects; they're harmless to humans.

If you buy these plants from Amazon (https://amzn.to/2VolJHn), please keep them in your own garden or orchard. Those stalks scare nervous people unnecessarily. They're not native, and can seem like an Invasive Nuisance to people who are too timid or ignorant to appreciate the berries.

One year a neighbor listened to the guys down at the garage, who knew nothing, and had a computer in the shop mind you, but didn't want to admit their lack of information and look it up. They opined that the plant and berries were deadly poisonous. Little my fainthearted neighbor knew, when he sprayed poison on his wineberry bush, that he'd eaten wineberries and liked them. "Roundup," or whatever else he might have sprayed, even vinegar, is much more toxic than wineberries are.

It's possible to eat the leaves of these brambles--but why? The leaves have been cooked and eaten, or dried and infused into tea, by people who were desperate, usually further north. Some people hoped, based probably on rumors that were based on someone's experience of dehydration or dietary deficiency, that raspberry and blackberry leaves would have medicinal value. They seem to have little if any. In the North, in winter, raspberry-leaf tea may have been the best source of warmth, water, and astringent mild tannins, some people could get. In Virginia even bears can find food in the woods on all but the very worst days of winter, so nobody needs to eat the bushes that produce those delicious berries.