Prickly Lettuce, a weed found in Edmonton gardens.

First: nomenclature. Which words to use?

Wild plants suggests wilderness. Untamed. Possibly dangerous (ie. toxic). But weeds implies a valueless nuisance. An overgrown eyesore.

Alright. We'll go with 'weeds'.

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"So, that thing with sharp edges was 'prickly lettuce'?" my wife asked asked, gingerly touching a finger to her lips. She'd just finished up our lunch salad made of plants unrecognizable to her.

On our kitchen table was the 1995 St. Albert Gazette Homestyle section with my first story on edible weeds. I'd pulled it out for this post because I was trying to calculate how long weeds have been a part of my diet. More than thirteen years, apparently.

Along the mid-rib of a prickly lettuce leaf is a row of spines. I was studying the tiny spikes on a piece of prickly lettuce that was protruding out of my cheese sandwich. They looked vaguely menacing and I wondered why I do this? Do I actually like the taste of prickly lettuce? In a salad or cheese sandwich, all you taste is salad or cheese sandwich. But a leaf of prickly lettuce by itself is bitter-tasting.

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Over 13 years ago, the Toxics Watch Society campaigned for a right-to-know bylaw that would require advanced notice whenever and wherever pesticides were to be applied. ('Pesticides' in a broad sense, including insecticides and herbicides.) The most widely used herbicide is 2,4-D on dandelions, and it doesn't take long to discover the history of the dandelion as a valued plant. The generation of Toxics Watchers at the time decided that a useful part of an anti-pesticides campaign would be a pro-dandelion front and we launched The Lion's Tooth Festival to celebrate some of the uses of dente-de-lion.

My weed-eating, then, began as ideology. But it rapidly became an over-all value activity. It was pretty easy to calculate the value of dandelion-root coffee-extender by price of coffee conserved. Today, my purchases of green produce at the supermarket simply ends the first day that the chickweed comes up. And now that resource inputs like water and fuel are becoming limiting factors on food production and distribution, having foodstuff that require no additional water than rainfall, and no fuel at all, is a valuable thing.

 

(cross posted at suite-mck.livejournal.com)