LSU doctoral student Lauren Hull occasionally teaches workshops on edible plants, including a session in the recurring LSU Challenge summer camp themed The Hunger Games.
It’s one of the ways she’s working to build awareness about the abundance of edible plants in and around Baton Rouge.
Hull, a student in the University’s Department of Geography and Anthropology, is the co-founder of the Capital Area Native Plant Society.
As 225 Dine reports in its latest edition, the local foods movement has helped spark interest in foraging for wild edibles, but most lack the experience to find them. Hull and others are working to change that.
Hull says there’s a societal phenomenon called “plant blindness,” or a general tendency to be less aware of plants than animals.
“There have always been a lot of herbal and medicinal uses for plants, and it’s good for people to be able to identify what’s out there,” she says.
For example, the banks of the LSU Lakes near Sorority Row are thick with blackberry brambles. Chanterelle mushrooms can be found in regional parks.
Roadside patches outside of town hold a bounty of edible plants, including smilax, whose tips taste like asparagus, and thistle, which resembles celery.
Many wild-edibles enthusiasts have attended plant identification sessions presented by Charles Allen, a retired biology professor and the co-author of Edible Plants of the Gulf South.
Allen is a regular speaker at the Eat Local Challenge, an annual event held in New Orleans in June.
“People are overwhelmed by how many edible plants there are in the region,” Allen says. “They say, ‘You mean I can eat those things I’ve been mowing over all this time?’”
Arguably the most desirable subset of the wild-edibles world is wild fungi, or mushrooms. Cooks love the idea of finding them fresh in the wild to avoid their hefty retail price tag.
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