Anyone know what this is, and can you eat it?
Edible?
Ted Rall
http://rall.comTed Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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11 Comments.
Is this a new recurring feature? 😀
Nope. Just curious.
Looks like it might be false grape. If so, it’s not toxic but nobody eats it.
If you are getting interested in foraging you should really get some field guides. Otherwise one of these days you’ll post a photo of water hemlock and some fool will tell you it’s wild celery.
Why does nobody eat false grape?
🙁
I can’t tell if times have gotten so tight you are foraging in downtown Boston to keep alive, or if you are preparing for complete social collapse in the next year or so and figuring out what edibles you will have to steel away in the night before the rest of the starving populous comes to seek such things.
Either way, I am getting paid next week and will make an even more generous donation then my usual one because any and all such possibilities to describe this apparently recurring feature are truly heart breaking for me to contemplate.
“Why does nobody eat false grape?”
I wouldn’t know but I speculate it is one of two things:
1) possibly tastes bad
2) pretension based solely on its name: who wants to eat “false” grape? “Are you so plebeian and poor that you can’t afford real grapes?”
We eat wild grapes in the South. My granddaddy made wine from them. Not sure if this is they, see “scuppernong” at Wikipedia.
p.s. if it is scuppernong, you don’t eat the skin, which is thick and bitter, you hold it up to your mouth and squeeze the juicy pulp into your mouth. It’s good.
“False” grape actually is a member of the grape family. The fruits are tiny and have no pulp, thus not worth eating.
Those are not scuppernongs, which have a large fruit. I grow them. Any nursery in the South will have the plants in Spring, it takes a few years before you get many grapes. I eat them skin and all. My wife tried to make wine by her old family recipe but only got mold.
Many kinds of grapes are found “wild”, most are escaped cultivated varieties.
Interesting, thanks!
If you are looking for an exciting New England scavenging “treat” find yourself some pokeweed ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytolacca ) It grows like, well a weed, in most of New England including the more rural bits of the greater Boston area. It has delicious looking dark purple berries, leaves that look like delectable overgrown spinach, and roots that look like tasty carrots – all of which are really toxic. However, there are old recipes to prepare all of its bits such that they won’t kill you.
It is like the New England vegetable version of Fugu, an exciting “treat” indeed.