Back before the invention of agriculture, and even before the day the first Big Mac slithered and slopped down the assembly line, people depended on wild foods for survival. Because wild plants, to survive, have to cope with herbivores, competing plants, weather, and changing climate, they've evolved extraordinary fitness. That’s why they contain concentrations of high-quality carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, as well as vitamins, minerals, and fiber, thus serving themselves and us. By the way, many of the flavors we enjoy, such as sourness, pungency, saltiness, bitterness, and the flavors of onions, garlic, wintergreen, licorice, and mint, are adaptations that discourage herbivores.

Because we co-evolved with these plants, our present nutritional needs reflect what we found in the environment, not what we find in the candy store. We lost the common mammalian ability to synthesize vitamin C because a chance mutation destroyed this trait in an ancestor. But because this nutrient is so common in wild foods, natural selection didn’t kill off our ancestors who had this gene, and because the gene is dominant (when paired with a recessive gene, only the dominant gene expresses its trait) the trait spread throughout the population. Foraging populations normally don’t get scurvy (acute vitamin C deficiency), but agricultural societies were often plagued by this illness until modern times.

Plants use fiber for structural support and to discourage some herbivores. Although we can’t digest fiber, our digestive system depends on the large quantities of it present in natural, unprocessed foods to push food through the intestines. Remove the fiber by refining food and you harden the stools and slow the time it takes the material to travel through the bowels. Actual physical damage plus increasing exposure to accumulating bacterial toxins (given a chance, bacteria multiply geometrically) due to the lack of sufficient fiber contribute to today's epidemics of constipation, hemorrhoids, diverticulosis, diverticulitis, and bowel cancer. These illnesses don’t exist in foraging societies.

So why did we abandon foraging and domesticate plants? Because agriculture supports larger populations. The historical mechanism was probably that when societies competed and waged war, those with the larger populations usually won. It is ironic that people in foraging societies had much more leisure time than their agricultural and industrial counterparts, and suffered less malnutrition than agricultural people in pre-industrial times, and indeed less than many people in modern society.

Because we buy and sell food according to its weight, size, and appearance instead of flavor or nutrient content, we breed bigger plants with less flavor and nutrition. Agribusiness uses herbicides and pesticides that kill beneficial insects, earthworms, and other vital soil organisms, making it necessary to use artificial fertilizer in order to force damaged soil to produce poor-quality crops. Misuse of the science of biotechnology aggravates the situation.

Just taste a commercial vegetable and compare it to the same food grown by an organic gardener. Or compare wild watercress, strawberries, or blueberries with their supermarket counterparts. Participants of my field walks rave about the wild foods’ flavor and deplore supermarket fare's blandness. Finding, identifying, collecting, and using wild foods is an exciting way to provide delicious meals, enhance your health, get some exercise, and put you in touch with your environment.