I have been wanting to take a foraging course to learn how to live off the land. I came across the following story on foraging during the US civil war. Samuel H. Sprott was the son of Scotch-Irish Presbyterian immigrants born in 1840 in Sumter County, Alabama. During the Civil War he enlisted as a private in the Fortieth Alabama Regiment of the confederate army. Sprott provides a description of food foraging that is fascinating. He writes, “We had been living the entire campaign on toasted cornbread, and broiled bacon, and the men were nearly crazy for vegetable[s] . . . I saw men gathering poke salad, potato tops, lamb’s quarters, and even the tender shoots of the careless weed,” in an attempt to eat some greens. Lambs quarters are edible members of the spinach and Swiss chard family but with more nutrients and potato tops are sweet potato leaves. As a “weed” and a tuber that grew underground, lambs quarters and sweet potatoes would have survived General William Tecumseh Sherman’s scorched earth strategy during his march through Georgia which he used to try starving confederate forces into surrendering, which they did in April of 1865.
