In the MyKawartha Farm to Table blog, I explore the idea of foraging, and offer up a great pasta dish to boot!
Click here for the full blog entry and recipe.
” Of course, the foodie-come-latelies are just the most recent of a long line of folks to forage for sustenance. And our foraging is minor in comparison to those who came before us. In fact, for tens of thousands of years, all human beings were full-time foraging creatures. Back in the day, you know, there weren’t supermarkets, big box stores or fast food restaurants. Heck, for most of human history, there weren’t even farms.
“No, for most of our existence we were a hunting and gathering peoples. We ate what we found. Sure, we eventually learned how to farm, but the period since we mastered agriculture is only a brief moment in the development of humanity. Heck, in some parts of the world, hunting and gathering still make up large parts of the diet.
“In North America, we’ve kept the hunting/gathering tradition for a long time, despite our long held reliance on farms. First Nations people traditionally survived on what they could pick seasonally – even those cultures that had domesticated and cultivated crops depended on gathered fruits and plants. Early settlers couldn’t possibly have survived without foraging for food. And there are no shortage of modern-day farmers and rural communities today that continue to augment their daily diet with found foods.”