Perfectly Good Food

What's this?

The Kansas Woman held a small canning jar to the light trying to decode the date.

It was from the 1990's, the last digit obscure.

Once opened the indecorous dark jell revealed itself as the bouquet of feral grapes escaped.

The aroma whistled up an image of picking muscadines.

A mother was doing a show and tell with her toddler while the grandma filled her basket with the dark grapes. The kid mimicked his grandmother by picking a grape and popping it in his mouth.

The mother had a fit. She made the kid spit it out and swept out his mouth with her finger.

I hope that is not what he remembers about picking grapes, but it might be.

We have a generation of people who are wary of any food that didn't come from a store.

I watched the early blooms of blackberry canes along the highway, knowing there are so few people who bother that I'll probably have the spot to myself.

Little Miss Phillips took a Passion Flower and turned it into a tiny ballerina. In a few weeks it would have become a passion fruit, the size of a hen egg. Its common name is “maypop.”

In older days the brown and fuzzy maypops would have been consumed in situ while walking to the mail box or along a fence line.

My mother's family made an annual huckleberry picking excursion across Taylor's Ridge before the road was paved. The berries grew in clusters along the banks of the dirt road to Villanow.

Each child had a small bucket which was emptied into a wash tub in the back of the wagon.

While near the top of the mountain, a summer storm came up. The family took shelter under the wagon, but thunder spooked the mule who took off running for home with the wagon bouncing and berries spilling along the way. Everybody got soaked.

In August the kudzu blooms. Known as the “vine that ate the south,” kudzu was imported to stop soil erosion, which it did but also made thousands of acres useless.

All of the kudzu plant is usable. Some people cook the new tender leaves as greens, and the fragrant flower can be used to make jelly.

I'm told the tall cat tail plants growing in ditches and low, wet places are also emergency food. The roots can substitute for potatoes.

There is perfectly good food growing wild, such as dandelion greens, elderberries, hickory nuts and water cress in flowing streams. Queen Anne's Lace grows in fields and roadsides, but our ancestors cultivated and knew it as “wild carrot.”

Sassafras roots make a refreshing hot or cold tea, mushrooms abound in the woods if you are wise enough to know the difference, and yards are full of wild onions.

As usual don't take the word for any man without verifying. Do your research then enjoy.

joenphillips@yahoo.com