Interestingly, P. virginica is in the Araceae family which also contains taro (as well as the arum lily, breadfruit, elephant foot yam, and many more)
Can I ask more about your curiosity about native foods? It's been a big interest of mine as well ever since I found out about NUS[0] and the general realization that edible plants exist everywhere if you have enough knowledge about your environment
Thanks for that article, that's an entry point I hadn't seen before! It reminds me of this database of famine foods from Purdue University: https://www.purdue.edu/hla/sites/famine-foods/
I got into it by wandering around the SF Bay Area and looking up plants with fruits on them to see if they were edible. That was how I ended up cracking open hollyleaf cherry pits and leaching the cyanide out of them, and roasting and grinding bay nuts to add them to chocolate cake.
There are indeed a lot of interesting native and introduced edible plants. It causes me to pay a lot more attention to the nature around me and to learn a lot of new things. I've thankfully avoided a visit to the hospital so far :)
This database looks really promising, thanks for sharing! I'll definitely try to get ahold of it
Our stories are not actually all that different haha. I started the same way, mostly from getting into iNaturalist. I'm in SoCal right now and the landscapers seem obsessed with planting Natal Plums everywhere. I get some weird looks by people seeing me pick these big bright red juicy fruit next to their parking lots but they've become one of my favorite fruits, haha
If you're interested in this type of data, I've also been collecting resources like this. One of my favorites is the FAO's EcoPort[0] which has some of the most bizarre web design I've come across, but has really rich data. There's also the NAEB DB[1] which is the most complete collection of documented edible, medicinal, and other plant uses by Native American groups that I've come across. And since you linked PracticalPlants I'm guessing you're already aware of PFAF and related projects haha
Aside: the first random fruit I tried was Arbutus Unedo (strawberry tree), which is not native around here but is planted very commonly as a landscaping tree. Tastes kinda like a bland peach.
Neat. A friend of mine heard that skunk cabbage, in the same family and also bearing calcium oxalate, was an indigenous staple and foolishly tried a mature leaf and ended up in the hospital. It's great that people are into learning about edible plants, but it's just as important to learn how they were prepared...
Yeah exactly. Cycads for example are a very poisonous plant. Yet there's an entire island in Japan where people use cycads for everything from flour to alcoholic beverages
Maize is another good example of this. When white people took corn with them and forced parts of Africa to grow it from them, they didn't take along with them the knowledge of the complex process of nixtamalization. That's the way native peoples prepared corn to make it edible. It removes aflotoxins and makes nutrients in the maize more accessible.
In areas in Africa where maize replaced what they'd been growing, famines skyrocketed because they didn't know how to eat/process the corn
To be clear, corn is not toxic when untreated, unless it's infected with some fungus. Regular yellow cornmeal isn't nixtamalized and is safe to eat. It just leaves you with vitamin deficiency if you don't have another appropriate source of vitamin B3.
Can I ask more about your curiosity about native foods? It's been a big interest of mine as well ever since I found out about NUS[0] and the general realization that edible plants exist everywhere if you have enough knowledge about your environment
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neglected_and_underutilized_cr...