UNIQUENESS
The Wild Food Adventure Series, Volume 2
By John Kallas
The purpose of this page is to provide the reader with a clear understanding of the books value, how it is unique, and why it should be a part of every foragers personal wild food library. View this page along with the Features page.
—416 pages
—466 sharp full color photographs & illustrations
—50 different plants are shown in comparisons, as part of finished dishes, or to illustrate something.
—15 plant chapters cover 18 plants in greater detail than any book ever published.
—Two conceptual sections surround the plant chapters providing meaning, definition, context, practical guidance, and information to further research.
—This is Volume 2 of the Wild Food Adventure Series. More volumes to come.
—Plants covered are found throughout North America, Europe, and most places Europeans have traveled to over the last 500 years.
—Easily Found and Gathered: Plants included are traditional plants native to humans and therefore found within a short distance of you, wherever you are.
The layout is designed to suit and engage the reader; White space, columns, photos adjacent to the text they inform; everything is well labeled crisp and bright. To get a look inside showcasing its features, go HERE. This is the first wild food book to consider whole chapter layout an important feature.
This is a user friendly, pictorially-based user guide based on experience, not a field guide, plant catalog, or remembrance. It is designed to help a user find early and continued success in their experiences. The design of this book series and the concentration of content have never been done before. This book, along with volume 1, can transform the reader from armchair enthusiast to a practicing wild food aficionado.
This is a user friendly feature that makes sense to readers who might begin with flavors they like and progress on to more adventurous ones; improving their first experiences. Knowing what to expect results in better management and less rejection of new foods. Plants are grouped by these flavor categories: Foundational, Sour, Pungent or Peppery, Bitter, Distinctive & Sweet. The new non-edible category is Poisonous. This flavor-based approach to the edibles has never been done before.
This is a personal book taking on the voice and experience of its author. All the best wild food books are in the author’s voice. This approach leads to credibility, trust, and accountability. When the author talks in the first person, the reader knows the author has real experience with the plants and is not just repeating what others have said. Lack of experience leads to the perpetuation of misinformation.
The book is designed to suit beginners learning needs and has copious amounts of materials and resources to appeal to advanced users, scientists and researchers. Because the book is so easy to read and use, many think it is a beginners’ book, and it is. But it is also a serious scientific reference book. In addition, the foundational information throughout is useful to wild food instructors who now have a set of standard principles, definitions, and explanations they can pass on to their students This is the first wild food book series to successfully appeal to all levels of interest.
This book is packed with the kind of important practical experience-based detail and guidance that promotes success in identification, gathering, processing, preparing and actually enjoying the flavors of the wild foods covered. Myths are debunked, new edible parts of plants are revealed on plants that have been poorly covered in past years. This is supported by reviews of readers at Amazon.
A pictorial chronology of the natural history of each plant is shown with multiple sharp close up photographs from seedling to seed production. This is important because plants look different at different stages of growth AND because there are multiple edible parts to recognize at different stages. It pays to know what each of those parts look like. No books have ever shown plants at all stages from seedling to seed production. This is the first wild food book series to do this.
This book series has the best quality and most appropriate photographs of any natural history book ever written. Each photo is purposeful, sharp, and well captioned so plant identification is almost fool proof, even for the novice. A whole chapter per plant showing thorough photographs of its progression from seedling to finished foods on a plate. While other books have color photographs, rarely are they crisp and sharp and even more rarely are they purposeful. In this book series all the photos are crisp, sharp, and purposeful.
Explanatory sidebars clarify concepts in the text. Captions are extensive. They explain exactly what is in each photograph; the plant, the part of the plant, why it’s there and the size/scale of the portion of the plant shown. Most wild food books have no sidebars or captions period. The few that have captions do not provide the kinds of contextual information that readers need. This book series excels at explaining its photographs.
This is the first series to include accurate, credible, and professionally assembled nutrient charts directly from the scientific literature. Eighty percent of this data has never been seen by the public prior to this book; even by nutrition professionals interested in wild foods. References to the original nutrient data are provide for professionals that need them.
All historic scientific names as well as the most commonly used names are found at the head of each chapter. Half the wild food books do not list the family or Latin name for plants. This book goes beyond that to aid historical researchers with all the past scientific names previously used for plants.
Lathyrites and other perplexing toxins are discussed in detail. Their impacts to the diet and health are revealed. This is the first book to correct the record and explain these substances in common language. Explained are how to manage or avoid them.
This is the first book to address the common problem of identifying safe places to forage, freer from pesticides and pollution.
While many books warn against confusing wild carrot and poison hemlock, this is the first book to focus specifically on the stage of growth that they are confused. The young spring carrot-top stage. Then a whole chapter is devoted to poison hemlock, showing it throughout its full life span.
Like volume 1, this book has something for everyone who is genuinely interested in learning about and using edible wild plants. It is designed to be useful and fun for the novice while offering access to resources for the wild food scholar. It offers information, definitions, and clarification that help create a center of gravity and a knowledge base for the field. In addition to the wild food novice; chefs, nutritionists, anthropologists, permaculturists, agronomists, the media, and many other groups will now have a basis of understanding a field where mystery used to dominate.