Conscious Choice: Plain Good Eatin’

April 2006 | BackWords

Plain Good Eatin’

One person’s weed is another person’s salad, and other natural eating wonders of the Appalachian Mountains

By Gary Roberts

TODAY I SEE PEOPLE out spreading weed killer on their lawns to get rid of the weeds we used to eat when I was a kid. In those days when we lived on Trembling Creek, the whole world was a weed garden, except for that patch of tended lawn in front of the house. The fields we tended were mostly free of weeds too, because we kept them cleaned out — to eat.

Plantain, dock, lambs’ quarters, creases, dandelion, poke — those are the names of just a few of the weeds that we ate. Those also are alien names to many people today — whole generations who have mostly eaten out of McDonalds and Pizza Hut and are used to salads that come in bags.

But things were different when I was born in 1949 on the headwaters of Powell River in Southwest Virginia, on the border with Kentucky. It was a small, isolated farming community where all the folks living in the narrow river valley were related to each other.

While I was growing up, I was schooled in the old ways. My folks were small landholders who had a close relationship with the earth. We raised our own vegetables and also raised crops to be fed to farm animals. And each spring, we also ate plenty of greens, or weeds.

The Roberts family (including a young Gary in the foreground)

Springtime in the Mountains

The practice of gathering wild greens began because the people who settled deep in the mountains had no way to preserve greens for the barren winter months. In those days, there were no fresh vegetables in the store and no home freezers. So when the weather began to warm up, they were starved for green stuff and went across the countryside picking what edible greens they could find.

I knew that it was spring when I saw my daddy and mother go along the fields with a knife and a wash pan, picking a mess of greens. Anything that had turned green was subject to being rooted out of the ground. When my mother had enough greens as she judged it for a mess, she would clean them carefully, after picking through them to get rid of the inedible weeds that might cause complaints.

Next, the greens would be placed in a large pot and boiled at a high temperature to make them tender enough so you could chew them. Once they were boiled, they were drained, put in a skillet and fried in grease.

Most likely, the grease would be from the frying of sow belly or streaked bacon. It gave the greens a taste and a flavor that hid their rather strong acid taste. Vinegar and salt were often mixed in with the grease to give a spicy taste. It took an expert eye to determine when the greens were ready to eat. If they were cooked too long, they would be too tough to eat. If they were not cooked long enough, they would be too tough to eat.

After they were cooked just right, we would sit down to the table and pile a big clump of the steaming greens on our plates. Some people would pour more vinegar over them. Others just ate them plain. None of this is recommended for a diet today. But those were days when we were free to eat what tasted good. Seems anything that tastes good today is bad for you and prepares you for an early grave.

Back then, it was just good eating, at least to me. But we had a relative staying with us one summer, and her favorite expression was, “ Eww! What is that? It doesn’t look like anything I ever ate before!”

I wanted to say, “Shut up and eat it!” But then, she was a guest.

Poke salad

Poke salad was prized in the old days as a tonic. Poke has strong iron content and it has the same effect on the bowels as a laxative. Poke was often eaten by itself. When the young shoots are picked and boiled, it is tender and good eating. People had a belief that during the winter months poisons would concentrate in one’s body. A person needed to be “worked” in order to clear the poisons out of the body and prepare for the hard labor in the coming summer months. The same beliefs caused a lot of mountain folks to dose themselves up each spring. They used laxatives such as salts, the kind people buy to soak a sore foot in. Those things were terrible! They would tear a person’s insides out before they finished working with him.

Winter Diet

Salt is spoken of in the Bible, and mountain people thought no less of it than the people did in Biblical times.

One of the few agents that people had to preserve with was salt, so salt was heavy in our diet. Meat was salted down to cure and preserve it. To get rid of some of the salt from the meat, it was boiled before it was fried.

The diet in the winter was often meat and pickled green beans or corn. My grandmother had several big crocks and she would fill each of them with corn and beans from the harvest each fall. She would wash out the crocks and she would have her beans and corn already worked up. The beans and corn would be cooked before they were put in the crocks — a layer of beans and a layer or salt. Once the crock was full, my grandmother would send me out for a flat stone from the creek. To keep the pickled beans and corn below the level of the liquid, a rock would be laid on top of the open crock. The rock would be wrapped in a cloth. It took time for the corn and beans to cure out and one of the tasks was to change the cloth that was covering the rock at least once a week. My grandmother would use her taste to tell when the beans and corn were pickled just right and ready to be put in jars for storage.

Now I can go to the grocery store and buy greens from the produce section or frozen food section. Nothing you buy, though, tastes as good as the real items and you can’t buy the wild ones. To get the wild ones, you have to go chasing them across the fields and pastures. And when spring begins to spread across the land, I plan to get my wife, Judy, to go out with me and pick some salad greens.

Gary Roberts has lived all his life in the Appalachian Mountains except for the years he was “away attending University up North.” He and Judy still gather greens, grow herbs and collect morel mushrooms: “It is more than a habit. It’s a part of our culture. Both of us have a lot of American Indian blood. If you can identify edible weeds, it’s hard for you to starve.”

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