Discover the healing power of wild plants as food and herbal medicine with delicious plant-based recipes for health and wellbeing in From the Wild: An essential companion to identifying, cooking and enjoying common wild plants for health and healing. Photo: Supplied.
“Sometimes it takes a lifetime to see things clearly, to have had enough life experience to contrast the good against the bad, and to realise that nothing is black and white.”
From the Wild is a herbal medicine cookbook offering a simple, resourceful, nature-based approach to healthy living.
Qualified naturopath and medical herbalist Heidi Merika has spent the past two decades studying human and plant biology and chemistry, and it’s clear to her that a whole-food, plant-based diet is optimal for the physical and spiritual health of humans, food animals and the Earth we live on.
She wants to encourage a type of expectation that respects simple living, for the good of all beings, in harmony with nature.
“We’re always swinging between the extremes of habits, good and bad,” Merika writes. “Junk food still has its way with us from time to time, with its promises of cheap thrills that come with a side of shame.
“When communities that have lived for thousands of years in harmony with nature, eating and living off the land, come into contact with the highly processed Western fast-food diet, they eventually become addicts to excessively sugary, salty, fat-laden, chemically adulterated foods and begin to think of them as ‘normal’. This dietary conversion has spread like a disease across the planet, perpetuated by the addictive physiological chemistry in our brains.
“I’ve had the physical experiences of living on whole foods and foraged plants, as well as having had my share of ‘normal’ food and junk food, and it’s obvious to me how different my body feels on these two diets. The effect it has on my behaviour is also profound, with junk food causing addictive eating patterns, lethargy and irritability.”
Merika draws on her decades of experience to create nutritious, delicious, plant-based recipes and healing home remedies from 30 of the world’s most common edible wild plants, from cat’s ear to cobbler’s pegs, dandelion to dock, and nasturtium to wild raspberry.
The 329-page hardcover is colourfully illustrated. Enjoy more than 100 recipes, including a spring salad full of wild edibles, nettle gnocchi verde and clover muffins, along with lantana itch balm, chickweed anti-inflammatory gel and St John’s wort pain ointment. Discover the healing power of wild plants as food and herbal medicine.
As well, for the past 10 years, she has been on a journey into wildcrafting — gathering wild plants as they grow in nature, steadily learning about the plants that grow literally in her own backyard. Understanding these plants and running her wildcrafting workshops has taken her more and more towards using what is available in her environment, rather than buying from a manufacturer.
From the Wild introduces the botanical, medicinal and spiritual qualities of 30 common plants, their use in folk and modern medicine, and which bits to harvest, showing you how to make your own herbal remedies from them.
Merika chooses to work with local plants because it’s a beautiful way to connect to place. Beyond the physical benefits of increased nutrition and options for home healing, this approach also offers profound psychological and spiritual benefits. She also finds a unique path with medicine-making.
Merika picks recipes that are fresher and have more life force, for optimal effects on both the physiology and the subtle energetics of the body.
“They are designed to help us reach our full potential for health and vitality, and minimise the impacts of living in a sick culture on a planet in crisis. We need to optimise our health in every way we can to face the period of transition we are in right now.
“I want to share these recipes with you so that we can create a new ‘normal’ — one that encourages us to share our resources, to make things from scratch, to find food in our environment, to eat less, to have less, and to spend less money and more time in nature. A normal that is kinder and softer and more trusting of the gifts of the natural world.”
Including information on plant identification and foraging safely and sustainably, From the Wild is all you need to forage, cook and eat wild foods for abundant health. Practical and inspiring, Merika’s work laudably combines her knowledge of natural health as it relates to nutrition, medicine, spiritual growth, environmentalism, creativity and the joy of living.
From the Wild: An essential companion to identifying, cooking and enjoying common wild plants for health and healing, by Heidi Merika, Murdoch Books, $49.99
