Famine foods and the knowledge nobody wants to need

Alongside the ordinary food of any tradition there is usually a second category: things that are edible, unpleasant, laborious to prepare, and eaten when the harvest failed.

This knowledge is transmitted in a specific way — through stories, through the memories of people who lived through a bad year, and through preparation techniques that make no sense unless you know what they were for.

What tends to be on the list

Bark. The inner bark of certain trees, particularly pine and birch, contains carbohydrate and was dried, ground and mixed with flour in northern Europe during famine years. Bark bread is well documented and it was eaten in living memory in some regions.

Acorns. Abundant and high in tannins, which makes them bitter and hard to digest. Leaching in running water or repeated boiling removes the tannins, and acorn flour was a staple rather than a famine food in several traditions, including parts of California and the Mediterranean.

Roots and tubers of wild plants, frequently requiring long preparation and yielding little.

Grasses and weeds, whose seeds could be gathered and ground with considerable effort.

Ferns, nettles and other greens that require processing to be safe or palatable.

Seed grain, eaten in desperation and with the obvious consequence for the following year, which is why it is the marker of a catastrophic rather than a difficult season.

Things normally discarded — bran, husks, bones boiled repeatedly, blood, offal, and the parts of animals that were otherwise given away or thrown out.

The processing knowledge

What makes famine foods usable is usually a technique rather than the plant itself.

Leaching removes bitter and toxic compounds. Repeated boiling with changes of water does the same. Fermentation detoxifies some materials and improves digestibility. Drying and grinding makes fibrous material into something that can be mixed with flour.

Several staples in normal use today are famine-adjacent in this sense — foods that are genuinely poisonous without processing and that people worked out how to make safe.

Cassava is the clearest case. It contains cyanogenic compounds, and bitter varieties require grating, soaking, pressing and fermenting to be safe. The processing knowledge is essential, and where cassava was introduced to new regions without it, there were serious consequences.

Nixtamalisation of maize — cooking it with an alkali — releases niacin and improves the protein. Maize adopted without it caused deficiency disease in several regions, which is one of the better-documented cases of a crop travelling and its associated technique not.

How the knowledge is held

Not in recipes, because nobody wrote them down. It sits in the memory of people who used it, in the naming of plants, and in the stories attached to particular hungry periods.

Which makes it unusually fragile. Two or three generations without a bad year and it goes, and it goes silently, because nobody notices the absence of knowledge they have not needed.

Ethnobotanists have documented famine food knowledge in a number of regions specifically because it was clearly about to disappear, and the exercise generally involves elderly informants who learned it as children during a specific remembered crisis.

The dangers

Famine food knowledge is precise for a reason. Many of the plants involved have toxic relatives, toxic parts, or are toxic at certain stages.

Getting it wrong causes serious harm, and famine periods are precisely when people are least able to be careful — hungry, weakened, and desperate enough to try things.

Historical accounts of famines routinely include deaths from eating the wrong plant or from inadequate preparation of the right one.

Which is a reason to be cautious about the popular interest in foraging. The knowledge is genuinely detailed, it is local, and a guidebook is a poor substitute for someone who knows the specific plants of a specific place.

Why it might matter again

Several lines of argument point at this knowledge having renewed value.

Agricultural systems worldwide rely on a small number of crops, and the narrowing of the food base is a well-recognised vulnerability. Wild and neglected species represent options that have been eaten before and are not currently cultivated.

Some famine foods are nutritionally excellent and were abandoned because of the labour rather than the food value — several wild greens compare favourably with cultivated vegetables.

And in regions facing changing conditions, drought-tolerant traditional crops that were displaced by higher-yielding introductions are being looked at again.

Programmes documenting and in some cases reviving these foods exist, and the framing has shifted from famine food to neglected and underutilised species — which is a better name for something people are being encouraged to eat.

The thing to keep in mind

The current interest in wild food is a leisure activity conducted by people with full cupboards. The knowledge it draws on was accumulated by people who were starving.

That is worth holding onto when reading a cheerful article about nettle soup, and it is also a reason the knowledge is worth recording properly while there is still anyone who learned it in earnest.