Katrina Blair began studying wild plants in her teens, when she
camped out alone for a summer with the intention of eating
primarily wild foods. She later wrote “The Wild Edible and
Medicinal Plants of the San Juan Mountains” for her senior project
at Colorado College, where she graduated with a biology degree. In
1997, she completed an MA from John F. Kennedy University in
Orinda, CA, in holistic health education. She founded Turtle Lake
Refuge in 1998, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to
celebrate the connections between personal health and wild lands.
She has taught sustainable living practices through John F. Kennedy
University, San Juan College in Farmington, NM, and Fort Lewis
College in Durango, CO. She teaches internationally at retreats,
festivals, and educational and healing events. She is also the
author of a self-published cookbook, Local Wild Life: Turtle Lake
Refuge’s Recipes for Living Deep (2009).
Sandor Ellix Katz is a fermentation revivalist. A self-taught
experimentalist who lives in rural Tennessee, his explorations in
fermentation developed out of his overlapping interests in cooking,
nutrition, and gardening. He is the author of four previous books:
Wild Fermentation, The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, The Art
of Fermentation—which won a James Beard Foundation Award in
2013—and Fermentation as Metaphor. The hundreds of fermentation
workshops he has taught around the world have helped catalyze a
broad revival of the fermentation arts. The New York Times calls
Sandor “one of the unlikely rock stars of the American food scene.”
For more information, check out his website:
www.wildfermentation.com.
Library Journal– "When you encounter a weed, do you pull it, spray
it—or consume it? Blair, a holistic health and sustainable living
educator, recommends the latter. In the first few chapters of this
title, she emphasizes the importance of wild plants as food and
medicine. The remaining chapters profile 13 edible weeds commonly
found worldwide near human habitations: amaranth, chickweed,
clover, dandelion, dock, grass, knotweed, lambsquarter, mallow,
mustard, plantain, purslane, and thistle. Many are frequently
classified as noxious or invasive, but Blair encourages us to see
them not as enemies to be eradicated but as allies to nourish body
and spirit. Each profile includes botanical and common names, a
description, photos, history, edible and medicinal uses, and
recipes. All recipes are vegan and most are raw. Verdict: This
book includes valuable information about identifying and using
common weeds and encourages us to reconsider our relationship with
these usually scorned plants.”
The New York Times- “How do we learn to empathize with other
creatures, to respect the web of life that connects us all? The
answer must lie, at least in part, somewhere in the deeply
pleasurable childhood experiences so many gardeners cherish,
moments of gazing into the depths of a blossom or watching a
tendril unfold — and falling under the spell of a tiny
miracle. … Katrina Blair’s charming and
intelligent The Wild Wisdom of Weeds … delivers just
about the best argument I’ve read for the futility of figuring out
what, exactly, qualifies as a native plant and why ‘invasive’ can
be a flawed concept. …Weeds, she insists, are ‘examples of nature’s
creative edge.’ They’re powerful ambassadors, here to support our
quality of life.”
"For more than a decade, I have been learning about the outstanding
value of common weeds as survival food, as free and natural “live"
foods with nutritive values far exceeding those of store-bought
greens, and as sources of natural medicines to help restore health
to bodies robbed of their vitality by the toxins, stresses, and
poor diets of our modern world. There are thousands of wild edible
plants on our planet, most of which are unpleasant to eat and
difficult to locate or identify. Many of us wonder where and how we
might best begin to learn to find and use these wild edibles.
Katrina Blair's The Wild Wisdom of Weeds is the
perfect handbook for taking this journey back to better health,
vitality, food security, and peace of mind, by learning to collect
and use thirteen common nutritious and delicious wild weeds that
grow pretty much everywhere that people live. It is a fantastic
resource, and I highly recommend it! "--Matthew Stein, author
of When Disaster Strikes and When Technology
Fails
"Required reading for the survival of our species! What can we do
to live more sanely in an increasingly insane world? Katrina Blair
offers a new world of possibilities. The myriad brilliant insights
and pragmatic solutions within The Wild Wisdom of
Weeds are essential and evolutionary.”--Happy Oasis, Adventure
Anthropologist, founder of Bliss U and the Raw Spirit Festival
"The Wild Wisdom of Weeds provides a beautiful and empowering
exploration of wild foods, helping you to identify, prepare and
celebrate edible weeds that you might otherwise overlook with
simple tips on medicinal use, and charming, nutrient-dense recipes.
A must-have for any beginning or serious forager.”--Jennifer
McGruther, author of The Nourished Kitchen
"This may be the most important book you will ever read. Far more
than just a book about foraging; it offers, with comforting
clarity, hope for the future of feeding the world when before there
seemed to be none.”--Nomi Shannon, RawGourmet.com
"This is the kind of information that should precede gardening and
farming. Katrina Blair expertly shows that before picking up a hoe
or spreading a single seed, we can turn to our yards, fields and
forests for so many of the foods and medicines we need to live
well. The Wild Wisdom of Weeds is a gem, and will
be foundational reading for anyone wanting to live close to the
goodness of this Earth.”--Ben Falk, author of The Resilient Farm
and Homestead
“Katrina Blair keeps it really simple and approachable..her recipes
have inspired me to experiment with new ingredients in my
ferments.”--Sandor Ellix Katz, author of The Art of Fermentation,
from the foreword
"Common weeds can be even more nutritious and medicinal than our
favorite vegetables. Three cheers to Katrina Blair for sharing the
depths of such friends as lambsquarter and purslane! Release
your inner goat and go graze. Use these fantastic recipes to become
an inspired gourmet of wild things. This book radiates with
thorough research and first-hand knowledge of plants that
matter.”--Michael and Nancy Phillips, authors of The Herbalist’s
Way and The Holistic Orchard
“The Wild Wisdom of Weeds is one of those rare and important books
that has the capacity to radically alter your view of a world you
thought you knew well. You'll never look at weeds the same
again!”--Ben Hewitt, author of The Nourishing Homestead and
The Town that Food Saved
"Covering a small number of the most common edible/medicinal plants
in depth, The Wild Wisdom of Weeds offers information on these
species and their close relatives from multiple perspectives. From
identification, harvesting and uses, through personal experiences
and philosophy, to science and mysticism, this book has it all.
Wherever in the world you live, whether you're a beginner or
experienced forager, you'll have lots of fun reading and using this
book.”--"Wildman" Steve Brill, naturalist, and author of the
foraging app Wild Edibles
"Weeds used to be something you kill, eradicate, make war on, get
rid of. But weeds are the plants that thrive, and The Wild
Wisdom of Weeds is a much needed guide to understanding the
virtues these plants possess and the wisdom of knowing them, using
them, and keeping them around. Weeds are clearly more important
than we have imagined."--Deborah Madison, author of Vegetable
Literacy
"Katrina Blair has written a comprehensive guide to 13 foraged food
plants that we can find anywhere in the temperate world,
diversifying our diet whilst giving sensible guidelines to ensure
we leave our wild plant colonies healthy. She encourages us to grow
the weeds we love to eat, so we can literally forage on our
doorsteps, and teaches us their medicinal properties, making food
our medicine too. This is an engagingly written manual
of radical self-responsibility, full of recipes and
information, that belongs on every bookshelf."--Maddy Harland,
editor and co-founder of Permaculture magazine
"I don't know anyone more qualified to write this book than Katrina
Blair. I've seen her go into the woods to harvest wild plants and
"weeds", and then transform them into gourmet meals later that day
that rivaled the best from any fancy restaurant. She definitely
knows her stuff and I am proud she wrote The Wild Wisdom of
Weeds."--Markus Rothkranz, author of Free Food and Medicine
"Katrina Blair’s great celebration of thirteen wild weedy plants
that have followed human civilizations is a lively and passionate
argument to change our attitude to weeds, to admire their
resilience and high nutritional value, and to embrace them as a
valuable resource – at the same time improving our mental and
physical health by becoming closer to the natural world. A fun and
enjoyable read.”--Martin Crawford, author of Creating a Forest
Garden
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