Weeds: Real Nutrition, for Free

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When our grandparents were told, “eat your veggies,” that was good advice. But nowadays there are veggies, and then there are other veggies. In terms of nutrition, they’re not all created equal.  

Imagine a graph that measures nutrition. At the bottom there is relatively little, and at the top there’s lots.

On this graph, I'd place supermarket vegetables at the bottom, heirloom varieties of vegetables and herbs from home gardens, community gardens, and small, diverse farms in the middle, and wild/undomesticated edibles (many of them known as “weeds") at the top.

Supermarket veggies - where did the variety and nutrition go?

The food plants we see in the supermarket represent a tiny sliver of all the food plants there are. 

Besides being a very narrow selection of the plant foods available to us, supermarket vegetables are the least nutritious veggies you could be eating. They almost ( through no fault of their own) shouldn't be called by the same name/ 

One of the reasons for this is that they’re bred for appearance and shelf life rather than nutrition or vigor. Another is that they’re usually grown in mono-cultures using synthetic, petroleum-based inputs, in impoverished soil that has nothing to offer them in the way of real nutrition. 

But hey, so long as there’s a pharmacy next door to the supermarket we should be right – we can make up with pills for what’s lacking in the veggies…

Heirloom veggies from gardens and small, diverse farms – a big step in the right direction

Just in case you dislike pills as much as I do, let’s explore some more options.

Heirloom food plants grown in home and community gardens or on small farms that focus on diversity, nutrition, and soil health, are a big step in the right direction.

These veggies would never cut it on a supermarket shelf, because this is "real food." Real food means that:

• you get to enjoy odd shapes, sizes, colors, and quirkiness – these veggies weren’t bred for consistent appearance;
  
• you have to eat it or put it in a jar quickly – these veggies weren’t bred for keeping ability;
  
• before you eat it or process it you might want to pick out the caterpillars and shake off the spiders – these veggies come from an environment that’s wriggling, kicking, and teeming with life.
  

You'll get far more nutrition out of these veggies because they grew in a nourished and nourishing environment.

A real food diet

Eating veggies grown in home and community gardens and on small farms might also help you sleep a little easier, knowing that these veggies help you answer "yes" to questions like these:

"Am I making food choices that directly support the communities and ecosystems that  are feeding me?"

"Does whoever is selling this food care about its impact; are they behaving like a responsible citizen?"

"Was it grown nearby and will I be eating it in it's natural season?"

Answering yes to as many of these kinds of questions as you can moves you closer to what I call a real food diet. That is, a diet based on choices that nourish not only you and your family, but also food-growing families and communities and our living planet.

Wild plants take it up another notch

Wild plants--wild edibles or "weeds"--take nutrition up another notch again, because they have a few attributes that domestic plant foods don't have.

Wild plants still have all their wild vigor -- something a bit like what we call the "hybrid vigor" that occurs in cross-bred animals. They can thrive in much more challenging conditions than the plants we've bred selectively for appearance and shelf life, and they pass on some of that vitality and vigor to us when we eat them.

The picture above is of narrow leafed plantain (Plantago lanceolata) persisting in a pavement crack.

Just a weed, right?

Well.

The plantains (there's the narrow leafed and also a broad leafed variety - Plantago major) can be used as first aide for bee stings and minor wounds, they also benefit gut health and skin health, and you can put the young leaves in a salad and the older leaves and the seeds in any veggie dish, soup, or stew.

Not too shabby for a weed in a pavement crack. 

Obviously the one in the pic is looking a bit crushed and you'd want to look around for a happier one if you needed food or medicine, but I chose that picture to make a point: wild plants are tough. They can handle adversity. They take advantage of opportunities and they have ways of hanging on through hard times, ready to burst forth with new life again when the conditions improve. 

A match made in nature, a very long time ago

Archeologists loosely agree that humans began to domesticate first animals and then plants about 10 to 12,000 years ago. In contrast, we were eating wild plants for about 2 million years before that.

Some of the plants we’ve relied on for all of the time we've been human were here before us. Dandelions, for example, are thought to have evolved over 30 million years ago¹.  And archeological evidence suggests that at least 45,000 to 80,000 years ago, our ancestors were eating edible and medicinal herbs such as yarrow and camomile².

In other words, our fore-mothers were relying for nourishment and health care  on the same wild edibles that we now call weeds a long, long time before we began to domesticate the plants we find in supermarkets today.

The wild plants most useful to humans consistently follow people around. (Think of dandelions in lawns, plantain along the roadsides, and amaranth in gateways.)

Wild edibles--called "weeds" whenever they grow where they haven't been explicitly invited to grow--follow us around, colonizing and stabilizing the soil where-ever we've exposed, compressed, or depleted it. And while they're holding and healing our soils they're offering free nutrition to us too, if we choose to gather and use them. 

Weeds can help us redevelop the strengths we gradually lost as we made the shift from wild plants to supermarket veggies

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, dandelions are still going strong. They’re still popping up through cracks in the pavement, laughing at the chemicals people spray on their lawns, brightening our days with their sunny flowers, and offering their gifts of food, medicine, and perspective.

The wild, edible plants that insist on following us around, with all their vigor and tenacity, are full of bio-available nutrients that our bodies can easily assimilate. If we're willing to relearn how to recognize and gather them, and reacquaint our domesticated pallets with their bitter, tart, or astringent tastes, they're a concentrated source of real nutrition, abundantly full of synergistic vitamins, minerals, and healing compounds. And they’re readily available, for free.

This picture is of dandelions and chickweed in one of our veggie garden areas. I found a study (scroll down to find tables 7 and 8, here) that showed that chickweed, dandelion, and other wild greens collected in urban and industrial areas outranked kale for nutrition.

(A note on smoothies, since I know that smoothies are one way people like to make use of edible greens. I know this won't endear me to the raw foodies 😉 but here it is: blending up raw plants doesn't break open the plants' cell wall -- meaning that the nourishment therein is unavailable to the human digestive tract. To get the full benefit from eating plant foods you need to cook, ferment, freeze, or dry them first. More on this in the third article in this series.)

Is there a catch to eating weeds? If there is, it's not too onerous. It's that we will have to develop and use some initiative and persistence -- just as the weeds do. (Perhaps they're showing us how.) By paying attention to them and learning to use them again, we can be better nourished and we'll also be redeveloping some of the strengths we gradually lost as we made the shift from wild plants to supermarket veggies.

Related posts 

What's Happened to Your Mineral Intake?

Easy, Natural Ways to Increase the Available Minerals in Your Diet

Bitter Greens: a Cascade of Health Benefits

Weeds - Deep, Wild Nutrition and Medicine