Recommended Wild Food Books

You ask...I deliver.

Here are my favorites. There are others, but these have really worked for me.

There are two kinds of wild food books.
One is the very dry but informative field guide.
My favorite is Peterson's.

They also have an Edible Herb Guide which is great.
This book gives you the finer details...what the leaves look like,
size of the flower...etc. Identification stuff. This is what you want to
have with you in the field when you need to examine plants.

The second type of book is more of a lifestyle with wild food book.
Here are the two that I have come to love instantly.

Stalking the Wild Asparagus by Euell Gibbons:

This book is GREAT. He has other ones too that are also good. Start with this.
Euell is just an amazing guy. Really great and fun reading.


And one that I really like (especially because this guy is from
the Great Lakes area of the US, is "The Forager's Harvest" by Samuel Thayer.

There are other books that are going to be more beneficial for your
bio-region (Courtney this would apply to you...:) )

These books talk about actually going out and foraging.
Good stories abound about their encounters with these edibles.
I love both books.

One book that I have to recommend against is
Peter Ragnar's "Alive and Well with Wild Foods".
HUGE RIP-OFF. He charges $50 dollars for this, and
claims that its a great 400 page book full of info.


I was a sucker and bought it, only to find that the only reason
its 400 pages is because the text is so large my 100 year old grandma
could read it. If you have money to burn and want to give more of it
to Peter Ragnar, go right ahead, but the 3 wonderful books mentioned
above are all you would need (unless you need something more specific to your
local environment). No one that has actually read this book of Ragnar's could
debate this with me. I felt very ripped off. There was some good info in there,
but overall it has very little to do with identifying and living off of wild food.
I know there are many Ragnar groupies out there, but you cant deny the fact
that this book is a huge rip off with gigantic text and crappy pictures.


I would get the books on Amazon, no tax and free shipping.

Always here to help!

-Anthony