When I used to live and study with Helen and Scott Nearing—authors of over 50 books like Living the Good Life and Loving and Leaving the Good life, and writers of the preface of my second book, The Foot Book (HarperCollins 1981)—this visionary couple used to encourage eating and living off the land.
Soon after living with the Nearings, I got a job teaching health education in the high schools in Vermont, where, by the way, I eventually got fired for being a pagan as I taught yogic breathing for relaxation.
But one of the many good things to come out of my experience with rural Vermont was it was there I discovered dandelions on the lawn of lazy Vermonters not wanting to mow. Thank god for them. Lawns filled with yellow flowers turned out to be free, delectable, and even healthy cuisine.
Dandelions are a wonderful liver-friendly detox dish and are enormously tasty when dipped in whipped egg then in corn meal (or arrowroot for those with corn issues) mixed with sea salt and pepper, and then lightly sautéed in olive or coconut oil.
Foraging, which is eating from the land, has been around for centuries. Just be careful to distinguish between healthy wild edibles from dangerous ones, so you don’t end up upchucking on someone else’s fastidious lawn.
Consume plants only from areas that are not heavily sprayed and where you have permission, so no one will come after you with a frying pan or a rifle.
Once you taste how amazingly delicious these dandelions are, not like hard core health food but rather like 5-star expensive exotic dishes, plus kind on your liver that is forever challenged to detox the soup of chemicals we live in, you will wait with drooling mouth for Spring, when dandelions blossom forth and prosper.