#2: Foraging: or My Character Ate What?

[RPGnet Columns]

http://www.rpg.net/columns/vegetative/vegetative2.phtml

Summary:

What you can eat and where.

Go to the column (http://www.rpg.net/columns/vegetative/vegetative2.phtml) for more information.

[Hafwit]

Very informative, especially for a guy like me who plays fast and loose with the facts.

[torbenm]

What you can eat and where.



A few more suggestions:

The common burning nettle is edible (if cooked) and quite nutritious.

While the unwary can easily get in deep trouble with mushrooms, there are varieties that are both common, unmistakeable and safe. In Scandinavia all species of the Boletus family (which is easily recognisable) are either edible or taste terrible, so it is difficult to go wrong if you taste a bit of each before you cook them.

And there is a whole food group that you missed: insects and other bugs. Ants, grasshoppers, locusts, several species of slugs and snails, etc. are all edible (and treated as delicacies in many places).

[Jennifer]

I agree on the stinging/burning nettles; I thought about it and left them out because they require come cooking, and I was focusing more on instant gratification. I also left out poke (some parts poisonous, rest must be cooked) for the same reason.

For those interested, stinging nettle is a temperate field/wasteland plant; it's young leaves and shoots are cooked as greens, brewed for beer, or used as vegetables or in soup.

I admit to having a blind spot when it comes to mushrooms. Where I come from, you just don't try mushrooms unless you've had years of experience in identifying them. In fact, I just finished up Article 6, which is plants as poisons. The mushrooms we have around here are beyond deadly, destroying the liver and kidneys silently. Nasty stuff.

However there are many mushrooms out there that have no poisonous look-alikes, such as the Boletus, the sulphur shelf, morels, and chanterelles. In fact, Wikipedia has a whole article on Slavic mushroom hunting.

So if anyone has more mushrooms to contribute for characters to forage, by all means list them and if there are similar-looking deadly varieties as a possible plot point for mean GMs. :D

I left out bugs because, well... I was focusing on plants, but certainly insects are delish. :D

[smascrns]

You focuzed on plans one can eat but other than that there are plants we can "drink". I mean, plants are not useful only as substitutes for food but also as substitutes for (safe) water. Coconut water is the example that first comes to mind.

I live in India and there are many, many plants around here that people eat that I didn't know about before coming here! By the way, did you mention the bread fruit?

A further concern for Real World games is that plants moved a lot the last five centuries. Many plants that we find all around today had very specific locations before the era of Vasco da Gama.

Yes, plants can be poisonous, but when you have nothing to eat you eat what you get. You may die from the plant but then, you may as well die from hunger. That's the lesson of many a shipwreakage record.

I suppose that the best bet is to look at how birds of mamals behave: If they eat it, you probably can do it to.

Good column, I'm looking forward to the next ones.

[Jennifer]

You focuzed on plans one can eat but other than that there are plants we can "drink". I mean, plants are not useful only as substitutes for food but also as substitutes for (safe) water. Coconut water is the example that first comes to mind.

I live in India and there are many, many plants around here that people eat that I didn't know about before coming here! By the way, did you mention the bread fruit?

A further concern for Real World games is that plants moved a lot the last five centuries. Many plants that we find all around today had very specific locations before the era of Vasco da Gama.

Yes, plants can be poisonous, but when you have nothing to eat you eat what you get. You may die from the plant but then, you may as well die from hunger. That's the lesson of many a shipwreakage record.

I suppose that the best bet is to look at how birds of mamals behave: If they eat it, you probably can do it to.

Good column, I'm looking forward to the next ones.

Thanks for the compliments!

You're right about plants moving about a lot only in the past 500 years. I tried to look only at each plants' origins to keep things native. The next article is on the cultivation and trade of food and herbal plants. I learned that, surprisingly enough, some fruit, like watermelons from Africa, were cultivated and probably used for trade as long ago as 2000 BC!

And no, I didn't mention breadfruit (regarded as romantic symbol of abundance and easy living by early inhabitants of Pacific Islands), but that was due to a running out of space more than selection. I have elsewhere a list of hundreds of fruits and their edibility in other countries, such as bilimbi, feijoa, and pejibaye. I could write a book!

[torbenm]

I suppose that the best bet is to look at how birds of mamals behave: If they eat it, you probably can do it to.


You can't be sure. There are plants that are poisinous to some mammals but not to others. The horse chestnut is poisonous to humans, but deer can eat them with no problems, and while koalas eat almost exclusively eucalyptus leaves, these are also (mildly) poisonous to humans. Chocolate is poisonous to dogs and a lot of other mammals, but not to humans. There are many other examples.

Additionally, foodstufs that are nutritious to ruminants might not give you anything but a stomach ache.

But given the choice between starvation and eating an unknown plant that I have at least seen another mammal eat, I woul dchoose the latter any day.

[Jennifer]

You can't be sure. There are plants that are poisinous to some mammals but not to others. The horse chestnut is poisonous to humans, but deer can eat them with no problems, and while koalas eat almost exclusively eucalyptus leaves, these are also (mildly) poisonous to humans. Chocolate is poisonous to dogs and a lot of other mammals, but not to humans. There are many other examples.

Additionally, foodstufs that are nutritious to ruminants might not give you anything but a stomach ache.

But given the choice between starvation and eating an unknown plant that I have at least seen another mammal eat, I woul dchoose the latter any day.

As I said in the article, The few D&D games I participated in usually just occurred with some iron rations and rare hunting. The one time (about 16 years ago) that I chose to be an "herbalist" type character, I asked about finding plants and the DM couldn't really supply any information about them, so he told me that it didn't really work like that and got on with the game.

But now that I'm older, and know more about human nutrition and stuff, I always thought a list of information like this would have been perfect for me back then.