David Squire’s book, A Guide to Wild Food Foraging, introduces readers to the possibilities and benefits of foraging and provides detailed information on over 100 wild edibles from meadowsweet, cowberry and sloe, to giant puffball, sea lettuce, and common limpet. Squire prepares readers with tips on the basics of foraging including the Foraging Code, plant conservation, and questions of legality, and proceeds with his profiles. He divides his profiles into seven groups: plants, herbs, fruits, nuts, fungi, seaweeds and shellfish and presents them alphabetically within each group. Devoting a full page or more to each type of foraged edible, Squire includes the Latin name, alternative common names, and photographs as well as tips on where the the foraged edibles can be found, identification, seasonality, edible parts, harvesting, and eating. In the section on edible fungi special attention is paid to safety with warnings and photographs of inedible poisonous mushrooms to help readers avoid the dangerous ones. Recipes are provided for some wild edibles including bilberry tart, acorn flour, and medlar jelly. Insets add depth to the text with information on health benefits, ecological concerns, and diverse cultural uses.
A Guide to Wild Food Foraging is rich in information and visually attractive. It covers a large number of diverse foraged material and emphasizes ecological concerns and sustainability. Its diversity, however, is perhaps its greatest fault, as it lacks geographic focus which diminishes its usefulness. Although Squire gives general information on geographic distribution, knowing, for example, that dewberry “is naturalizing sparingly in the United States” is not helpful for a potential forager. A book like this written for a specific area of the US would be more useful.
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