nic-mharta:

nightshade-victorian:

radical-agriculture:

screambirdscreaming:

So I just learned something that pisses me off.
Y’know quinoa? The ~magical~ health food that has become so popular in the US that a centuries-long tradition of local, sustainable, multi-crop farming is being uprooted to mass-produce it for the global market? Potentially affecting food stability and definitely effecting environmental stability across the region?

Ok, cool.

Y’know Lamb’s Quarter? A common weed throughout the continental US, tolerant of a wide variety of soil conditions including the nutrient-poor and compacted soils common in cities, to the point where it thrives in empty lots?

These plants are close relatives, and produce extremely similar seeds. Lamb’s quarter could easily be grown across the US, in people’s backyard and community gardens, as a low-cost and local alternative to quinoa with no sketchy geopolitical impacts. You literally don’t have to nurture it at all, it’s a goddamn weed, it’ll be fine. Put it where your lawn was, it’ll probably grow better than the grass did. AND you can eat the leaves – they taste almost exactly like spinach. 

This just… drives home, again, that a huge part of the appeal of “superfoods” is the sense of the exotic. For whatever nutritional benefits quinoa does have, the marketing strategy is still driven by an undercurrent of orientalism. You too could eat this food, grown laboriously by farmers in the remote Andes mountains! You too could grow strong on the staple crop that has sustained them for centuries! And, y’know, destroy that stable food system in the process. Or you could eat this near-identical plant you found in your backyard. 

so true – another example is acai berry, which is just about the same for you as any other berry. +lots of plants we deem weeds or invasives are incredibly hardy and nutritious! look out for dandelion, wood sorrel, and Japanese knotweed

Dandelion is delicious and can be used in many different ways from salads to drinks. All you need for good foraging with a identification book and a bag.

Lambs’ Quarters DO grow across North America in peoples’ back yard and community gardens. And, some of us were taught by our seanchaidhean, our tradition-bearers, not to pull them up but to let them grow. Their leaves are richer in protein than spinach, but they grow over four feet high: virtual spinach “trees” where you can go harvest the leaves for salad or cooked veg over and over again. Grown as a companion-plant with beans or squash they provide stakes that the vines can be trained up (in place of corn, which in my area is vulnerable to local wild herbivores. Lambs’ Quarters will grow up through a thick mat of pine needles, will grow in drought conditions and in the hard-packed dust on the edge of roadways.

And unlike dandelion, which is non-native and is crowding native plants out of their ecological niche, Lambs’ Quarters are a native plant that belongs here. Public service request for responsible gardeners who appreciate and nurture dandelion: please gather the flower heads before they go to seed. Do the same with chamomile, chinese lanterns, blue bells and any other “vigourous free-seeding” non-native that grows on your land.