One of the most fascinating books I read in recent years is A Hermit’s Cookbook: Monks, Food and Fasting in the Middle Ages by Andrew Jotischky. The authors, in his detail account of Christian…

Adam Maurizio (1862-1941) was a scholar of Swiss descent born in Krakow. He lectured at Polish-language universities for many years, primarily in Lviv. He is one of the founders of food science and the…

Why eat ferns? Ferns are plants, and you can eat them just as you can eat other plants. Firstly, some ferns have historically been used to supply people with calories, including the rhizomes of…

[The featured photo presentes fruits of Italian hawthorn Crataegus azarolus collected in a city park in Split] We associate foraging with the countryside, but in many parts of the world the countryside has become…

I wonder why so few foragers ask about pollen. Actually, the view on the nutritional availability of pollen to us varies extremely among nutritionists and I wanted to systematize it by quoting the available…

Hogweed Heracleum is a common perennial of fertile meadows, roadsides and gardens. Its range encompasses Eurasia and North America. In Europe the commonest native species is common hogweed Heracleum sphondylium. Hogweed is a forgotten…

The pandemic has caused enormous panic. It seems to me that this is mostly because we suppress death’s part in the life cycle. We pretend it doesn’t exist. I would like to introduce a…

In times of impeding crisis, it’s worth reaching for the experiences from attempts at survival in situations of total crisis which don’t go that far back. One such great challenge for the nations of…

The recent coronavirus brought a lot of turmoil to economy. We are well aware that the economy is endangered with a total collapse. Apart from the extreme lack of clarity of the contemporary economic…

Like many of you, I am writing this post while remaining in partial isolation. In the course of a few days, the world has changed beyond recognition. A paralysis in transport, the slow downfall…