Bo Brown wrote Foraging the Ozarks, a FalconGuides book on the region's edible wild plants. He teaches a wilderness school, has taught primitive skills since 1993, spent about 10 years as a contract archaeologist on more than a dozen digs, and is a musician.

Before we sat down, Bo walked Kyle Veit's backyard and ate every species in it but one, the poison hemlock. Then we talked about how he learned to forage, which plants fed people here for thousands of years, why the Ozarks are one of the richest places in the country for wild food, and how to forage without wiping out a patch.

Bo's book came up more than once when we talked wild and native foods with Tim Hammer, so the two pages pair well.

The full episode and transcript are below.

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It started with his mom. She grew up in southeastern Arkansas cotton country, and when the Depression hit, her family moved to Bruno, near Yellville, onto a gravel hillside with scrubby trees and almost nothing to eat. Bo's grandparents knew enough wild plants to get by. His mom taught him about a dozen: poke greens, lamb's quarters, curly dock, and summer fruits like blackberries, persimmons, and pawpaws that she picked and baked into pies.

The deeper knowledge came later. Around 1976, Bo was playing music at Silver Dollar City, and a flint knapper there named Jim Fire Eagle could tell you something about any plant you handed him. Bo and his bandmate Don Brink, who now works with the Springfield Nature Center, started learning everything they could. Bo says nearly everything he does today, other than music, traces back to that.

Hunter-gatherers ate 100 or even 200 plant species over a year, because almost everything has a short window. Spring ephemerals like toothwort, spring beauty, waterleaf, and trout lily are only around for a couple of weeks. When agriculture started, people tried to move those plants into gardens, but many need a specific microhabitat, often shaped by the mycorrhizal fungi that connect plant roots in the soil. They didn't grow well, and diets narrowed from hundreds of species to dozens.

Even the variety in the produce aisle is smaller than it looks. Kale, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, and Brussels sprouts were all bred from Brassica oleracea. Bo's advice is to count plant families, not vegetables. One salad from his property had 34 species from 21 or 22 families, and about half of those families can't be bought in a store.

Bo's view is that thousands of years of breeding crops to be bigger, sweeter, and milder has traded away a lot of nutrient density, and that the bitterness in wild greens often comes from compounds like polyphenols and anthocyanins.

Native Americans weren't just collecting what happened to be there. Bo points out they managed the land heavily, carrying plants and seeds back to camp and spreading them across the region. Mushrooms, from what he can gather, were used more as medicine than as food.

The Ozarks are an ecotone. The region has the eastern deciduous forest plants you'd find from Kentucky and Tennessee down to northern Georgia, and it also butts up against the tallgrass prairie, which shows up in glades and open areas. The plant on the cover of Bo's book, ground plum (also called milk vetch or buffalo pea), is a prairie plant in the pea family.

Geology adds more. Karst topography makes springs and clear rivers, and fens, which seep out of the ground at the base of a hill, still hold glacial relics: plants otherwise found up on the Canadian Shield that hung on here because it stays cool and damp. Bo says those are rare and endangered, so they're not for picking.

Bo says there are far more edible plants than toxic ones, and only a tiny handful that can kill you in a few bites. The two at the top of his list are poison hemlock and water hemlock, both in the carrot family (Apiaceae). Poison hemlock is easy to confuse with wild carrot, also called Queen Anne's lace, and there was some growing in Kyle Veit's yard. Water hemlock is even more toxic.

Bo's advice for beginners is the same one a lot of field guides give: while you're learning, avoid anything that looks like a carrot-family plant.

Bo keeps a plastic grocery bag in his back pocket so he never comes home from hunting or fishing without greens or mushrooms he found along the way.

Bo thinks it could be done with a freezer, a dehydrator, and the knowledge in his book, which he says only scratches the surface. But it would be work, and historically nobody did it alone. Hunter-gatherers lived in groups where some people hunted and some foraged, and someone had to make the baskets. Bo quit hunting about eight years ago and still keeps a freezer full of venison from salvaged roadkill.

Bo is coming back on the show to talk about Stone Age tools and primitive skills, including flint knapping, which he demonstrates at Dogwood Canyon.

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This transcript is lightly edited for readability.

Kyle Veit: Welcome back to the Ozark Podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Veit, joined by my good buddy and co-host of the show, Kyle Plunkett. You're sitting real close to me, man.

Kyle Plunkett: This is just how it had to happen to get us both on camera, it seems.

Kyle Veit: Such a cute couple. About a month or two ago, we did an episode on foraging, and we referenced this individual a couple times at least in the episode we did with Tim Hammer, and that is none other than Mr. Bo Brown, who is the author of Foraging the Ozarks, a Falcon Guide book. He teaches a wilderness school. He's a musician. Spending just the last hour with him, he's a wealth of information and knowledge. Tell the folks what we just did in my backyard.

Kyle Plunkett: Well, we just went on a foraging walk in your weeds.

Kyle Veit: In my very normal neighborhood.

Kyle Plunkett: Ate all the species but one, maybe. The poison hemlock. All but that.

Kyle Veit: Besides the poisonous ones.

Bo Brown: It's a compulsion at this point. I can't not do it.

Kyle Veit: You just go around eating everything you see everywhere you go, pretty much. It's impressive. There wasn't a plant out there that you didn't know.

Bo Brown: Well, like I said, years of OCD and, you know, just falling in love with the thing and diving in.

Kyle Veit: Well, I'm excited to spend some time with you here. We are gonna be talking about your background and how you got into foraging and wilderness skills and all the things that you do. And I also want to really get into some of the historical significance. I've started your book, I'm about halfway through it. And I love how you start the book with the history of food and how many different species of plants there are that are edible, but how few of those today we actually consume as humans in our diets and how that has changed over time. So I want to go into all those little pockets, but before we go there, let me just ask you, how did you get into the world of foraging and how did you become the expert that you are today?

Bo Brown: Well, the expert part was, like I said, just persistence and just being plumb eat up with it, as they say here in the Ozarks. But my introduction to it was my earliest memories. My mom grew up in southeastern Arkansas in cotton country, and they were fruit and cotton pickers, so they were at the bottom of the economic ladder, you know. And so the Depression hit and they had to move up to the Yellville, Arkansas area, to a little town called Bruno. And all they could get their hands on was a subsistence farm. They were gonna try to raise hogs and grow a garden. And the land they ended up with was a gravel hillside with scrubby trees and nothing else. There was just nothing to eat there. They were starving to death. And so I guess my grandma and grandpa, wherever they came from, I don't know their histories, but they apparently knew enough of that stuff. My mom taught me probably a dozen plants or so. She liked her greens, you know, she liked poke greens and lamb's quarters and curly dock and all that stuff. And then when the summer fruits come on, blackberries, persimmons, pawpaws, all that, she'd go out and pick and she'd make pies and whatnot with it. So my earliest memories were with her. She didn't have a deep knowledge, but it was definitely a part of the culture she grew up with, and she passed that on to me. Then about age 14, I discovered sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and I was off into another world for a long time. But during my early musician days, I ended up playing in a band with a fellow, Don Brink, who's still very active in this world, doing this kind of stuff. He does a lot of stuff with the Springfield Nature Center and does stuff on his own. We were backpacking at the time, and we just started trying to get more and more into the wilderness type stuff. But at that point, we were gearheads. Every time a new stove or a new tent or something else came out, we had to have it, and pretty soon we're lugging 50 pounds of crap in the woods. And then I think it was around 1976, I played several seasons out at Silver Dollar City, the theme park outside of Branson. And I think one of the first years I was out there, they had a flint knapper, a guy chipping arrowheads, a native guy named Jim Fire Eagle.

Kyle Veit: That's a sweet name.

Bo Brown: Very cool name. And he had hair down to here, and he was the deal. I'd collected arrowheads as a kid and didn't even know people still knew how to do that. So I just camped out at his feet trying to absorb as much of that as possible. And there were a lot of people that knew him, 'cause he'd been there years before I got there. And every now and then somebody'd throw a plant in his lap and ask him about it, and he'd go on for five minutes. There just wasn't a plant you could show him that he couldn't tell you something about. And that really got Don and I both into it. And so we started incorporating that. Everything I'm doing in my life now, other than music, which I was doing at the time, I really owe to his influence, to getting me to look deeper into the woods. I loved being in the woods from the time I was a kid, but I didn't know crap about it. I didn't know trees, other than a few plants that my mom taught me, and didn't really have a reason to learn it until I found out how much of it is food. You can't take a step on anything green, unless it's a sprayed lawn like you get out here, you can't take a step and not be walking on food. Still, every week or every month I learn a plant that either didn't ever make it into the foraging literature, or it's something that I knew that wasn't considered edible. Sometimes they were considered to be toxic, and for whatever reason they got that label and nobody ate 'em. Turns out they're not toxic. They're perfectly fine. They just might not be the best flavored. Then the trick, culinarily, is mixing those plants that nobody eats with other stuff where that flavor makes whatever it is you're eating really pop. You don't eat a whole salad of arugula. The idea is to get as many different plants into a salad as possible. We talked about that earlier, the history of our plant diets. I cover this in a whole seminar called Wild Food versus Industrial Food. If you look at hunter-gatherers, they're eating hundreds of species throughout the year, 'cause everything has a window, very short, sometimes a window of a few days. Right now, they call 'em spring ephemeral wildflowers. Things like toothworts, spring beauty, waterleaf. There's just a whole big list, trout lily, and they're only there for a couple of weeks, and if you don't catch 'em right then, you've missed your opportunity. So as the season went on, they would've eaten, like I said, a hundred or maybe even 200 species of plants. At the point where agriculture started and people wanted to have more control of their food supply, they tried to take those same plants and plant 'em in gardens and control the growth. But a whole lot of that stuff would not grow outside of its habitat. There's little microhabitats, or soil biomes. A lot of that is created by fungus. They call it the mycorrhizal network, just threads that fungus spreads out when it grows in the ground, and it connects tree roots and plant roots. That actually changes the soil a bit, and some plants prefer that type of soil, so that's why you just get little spots of it. Anyway, we were eating all these species, and then we took those and tried to put 'em in a garden and they just didn't do well. So we went from eating hundreds of species to dozens.

Kyle Veit: And today, the average person probably at best consumes, I don't know, 20 to 30 different kinds of vegetables.

Bo Brown: Not even that. And then if you start digging in a little further, if you go to the store, you buy cabbage, you buy kale, you buy Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, there's an ever-growing list of plants. You think you're getting different vegetables. But those were all bred from one species, Brassica oleracea, and I write about that in the book in the mustards. This is pre-Roman times that they selectively bred it. They focused on a different plant part each time. So with kale, they worked on getting a bigger, fleshier leaf. Cabbage was the terminal bud. Broccoli was the upper stem and flower buds. Kohlrabi is just a big fat stem. Brussels sprouts were the lateral buds that go up the flower stalk. And it's all from one plant, Brassica oleracea. So people get all these different vegetables thinking they're getting different stuff, and you're getting one plant. A buddy of mine out in California does foraging walks in the produce aisle and talks about plant families, 'cause that's the key. Look at how many different families of plants you consume, and it's ridiculously low. You remember I was talking about how I had 34 species of plants in one salad at my property?

Kyle Veit: Just on a nature walk.

Bo Brown: Yeah. And I broke those down into plant families, and there was over 20, I think 21 or 22 plant families, and half of those you could not buy in the store anywhere. There's no representation, unless you went to a specialty native seed store or something like that to plant it. You can't buy any of that stuff in a store or in a market or anything like that.

Kyle Veit: So do those different plant families that we don't really have access to in a store offer different nutrients and things that you wouldn't be able to get otherwise?

Bo Brown: Oh yeah. Every single one of 'em. If you look at any plant that we've been eating, anything that you can buy in the store is a result of anywhere from 200 to 10,000 years of selective breeding to get it bigger, sweeter, more mild, easier to process. All these selective pressures that we put on them to make them what we desire in a crop. In fact, there's a cool documentary film called The Botany of Desire. It was based on a book, and it talks a little bit about that kind of stuff, about how we've pressured plants to make them what we want, which is bigger and juicier. And every step of the way, you're diluting the medicinal compounds, all the things in there that are cancer fighting, immune system building, vitamin density, nutrient density, all that. You're trading all that for sugar and water.

Kyle Veit: Yeah, because naturally what I think of in a really tasty veggie is big, juicy, and sweet. I want a sweeter vegetable. And when you go out and you taste some of these wild foods, they have a bitter flavor. Is that something I'm just accustomed to, and that's why I prefer sweeter things?

Bo Brown: Well, like I said, we've had 10,000 years of getting sweet and mild to condition our taste buds. That's what we prefer. So when we taste a really strong plant, it's disagreeable. We taste something bitter. And tons of times I've heard of people that move here from Eastern Europe, where they desire those really bitter mustard greens. They're so bitter they'll take your head off in one bite, and that's what they love. And a lot of times those bitter elements are anthocyanins, polyphenols, all these phytonutrients that contain the cancer fighting agents, and what do they call 'em, adaptogens, which are things that modify your body one way or another to help. Mushrooms are really good at that. Just medicinal things that help in so many ways. I read a thing recently about the rash of food allergies. Everybody's allergic to everything, from milk to peanuts to very specific things like red tomatoes. They can eat yellow tomatoes, but red tomatoes give 'em a reaction. And from what I can gather, all of that is a function of lack of diversity in our plant diets from an early age. And they looked at cultures that eat a lot of foraged stuff, even in Appalachia, where they do it out of poverty, out of necessity. They're like my mom. They knew that stuff from an early age. They supplement their diet with all this wild stuff. They eat a lot of wild game, because that's what they can afford. And they don't have those food allergies, the cultures that eat a lot of that stuff.

Kyle Veit: That makes sense. Thinking about raising our kids, you're trying to expose 'em to so much early on just to figure out what they are and aren't allergic to. And if you can expose 'em to as much as possible, you at least know, or you can condition them to not be allergic. So it makes total sense.

Kyle Plunkett: I'm gonna put us on pause real quick, Kyle, if you don't mind. So we're sitting here with the guy who wrote the book, Foraging the Ozarks. So this episode, primarily we're trying to get into the what, the why, and the how of foraging the Ozarks. The what is easy. Food. The why, which we've just dipped our toes into, but I wanna dip into more, is why is this important? Why is a more diverse diet important? All that kinda stuff. And then we're also gonna talk a little bit about the how. The reason I wanted to set that up before we went any further is, if you're anything like me, you're gonna be maybe on a stream bank trying to catch a fish and, like you've already said, tromping on food without even thinking about it, because you've never been educated as to what it is and how to get it, how to eat it. And so we hope this is like an intro companion guide for the average Ozarker who's going, I'm out in the woods, I'm out by the rivers, I'm doing whatever I do, but I also want to figure out what the species is, what it does for me, how I get it, how to find it, and then what to do with it after. So hopefully that's a little bit of framing that helps, since we just deep-ended it. Which I love, when we jump into topics like that.

Kyle Veit: It's hard, because I can tell just talking to him, Bo, you know so much. It's a wealth of knowledge, man. I don't wanna stop you 'cause you've got all the good stuff. Let me ask you this. You were starting to go here, and thank you for framing that up within the Ozarks. You just mentioned poverty in places like Appalachia, where a lot of this came from necessity, and this is just what was around. And even before that, with Native Americans, this is just what the food was. It wasn't like a thing that you did. There weren't stores. What is the historical significance of foraging wild food in the Ozarks specifically? What's the history here?

Bo Brown: Well, like I said, it was born out of poverty, because the people a lot of times were trying to get further west. It was getting crowded in the east. They were wanting to go to the promised land, and some of them, this is as far as they got. And they talk about the myth of the lazy hillbilly. That's bunk. Because you had to work to get a living out of this hard, gravelly ground. There's just not much soil here. And that isolation also attracted a lot of people to it, because they didn't want to go out to California where everybody else was going. So that's why a lot of the early white culture stopped here. And like I said, there was a lot of interaction with the Native Americans that were still here. What we know about the plants here, the base of knowledge, came from Native Americans that were, more often than not, ready to share all this stuff. Sometimes they weren't ready to share, because they saw the writing on the wall, and they would tell 'em, oh yeah, you can eat that, but it was toxic. Play a trick. Because they could see where things were going, with people coming into their land and then pushing them out. Like I said, in every book and everything I do, I try to make it a point to honor their dedication, 'cause they knew it intimately. They knew it like the back of your hand.

Kyle Veit: Better than that.

Bo Brown: Right. Everything in the world was there. That was your food, your shelter, your medicine, your spiritual wellbeing. All of it was just right there. And then that new culture comes in that tells them, no, you need to be here in this spot and grow these vegetables and be like us, and tries to wipe out their whole way of life.

Kyle Veit: What were some of the foods that are still around today that would've been a primary food source for Native Americans or early people, that we don't even see when we're walking through the woods or walking through the backyard? What are some of those things that you can identify where it's like, this used to be a staple, but really nobody even knows about it much anymore, or it's not that prevalent anymore?

Bo Brown: Oh gosh. A lot of the native plants. There is one called Apios americana. It's called groundnut. And it's just something that people have forgotten about. It almost looks like a string of pearls. It's got a little rhizome, a little rootlet, and then there'll be a swelling, like a big bulb of a potato, and then another thread, and then another swelling, and on like that. So that was one that was a staple, and apparently it was a lot more common when they were here. I guess they encouraged it and probably planted it wherever they went. We think of Native Americans as just having all this knowledge and going out into the wilderness and collecting the bounty that was already there. They did a ton of management, a ton of horticulture. As they were out covering the whole countryside, hunting, fishing, doing other activities and foraging, they were bringing stuff into a central location. And then just from being there, processing seeds, throwing them out, there's a lot of movement, and plants getting to places that they didn't exist before, just from their activities. So it's a long-term effect of making the land more productive that they were doing.

Kyle Plunkett: That's important, 'cause people think that humans are removed from nature, that nature's a separate thing from humans. And that's just never been the case. Humans have always been intricately connected to nature. And Native Americans stewarded it better, most likely. Actually, we can say that for a guarantee at this point.

Bo Brown: When we get into the sustainability part, there's a whole thing about the sustainability of ethical foraging that relates to that very thing.

Kyle Plunkett: But it's cool to know that they're encouraging hunting grounds, controlled burns. They know what's good food. So they're finding it wild, but also encouraging the growth of it. Even trying to learn on this topic, thinking about how I'm wanting to learn more about foraging, it feels like this unknown world. It probably felt like an unknown world to the original settlers coming in. But to the natives, this is their native language. This is just how they lived, what they did. It's crazy how history can circle around like that, where now, at least me and others I know who are interested in this world, we kind of wanna know how to live off the land around us, and not have to buy everything out of a store, not have to live the way that modern society tells us we have to. And that's neat.

Bo Brown: And that's why the ethical and sustainable part is so important, because it is getting so popular. A lot of the stuff that is edible are native plants that don't grow just everywhere. They've got very specific habitat needs. You're only gonna find 'em in a certain area. I see people that collect rare plants, and they say, well, I saw a whole hillside of it, so I took a whole big bowl full of it home. Yeah, great. But look at the range map of that plant. There's only three counties that plant occurs in. So you've gotta really bore in and know a little bit more about it. And I tell people it's very important to learn the plant's name, which is its Latin name. That's its true name. You can have five common names for a plant. You call something pigweed here, and you go three counties over, it's something different. Or you go two states over, it's something different. There'll be anywhere from two or three to half a dozen names people will call something. But if it has a Latin name, that's its name.

Kyle Veit: We were just walking in the backyard and you pointed out a ragweed, and you said in Latin it was Ambrosia. Is that right? Which is funny, because ambrosia translates to, what did you say it was? Food of the gods. And then we call it ragweed. And it's hated. Everybody hates it 'cause it gives you allergies. And so that just highlights two completely different names. Food of the gods sounds really good. Ragweed, not a good name. You're not gonna want to eat that.

Kyle Plunkett: Food of the gods sounds like something you go out to find. Not ragweed.

Kyle Veit: Not ragweed. But we ate that and it was good. You would put that in a salad, right? What did people use ragweed for?

Bo Brown: Mostly the seed. They used the female seeds, which are pretty good sized seeds. And they also used the male flowers. And I think the seed, they determined, was 47% crude protein, which is higher than wheat. It's a ton. So they were doing that, eating the greens, probably as a boiled green. They didn't eat salads back then, but they probably trail munched whatever was along there. So there was that, and another one called Iva annua. That's marsh elder. Those two plants, they were mostly for the seeds, and they selectively bred those over several thousand years. This was about 4,000 years ago. I think the Iva annua, the marsh elder, they got it five times larger than the parent variety. Then they just quit doing all that stuff, probably because corn got there, and it was much better, easier to grow, and you get a lot more. For whatever reason, they quit growing it, and that big-seeded variety of marsh elder went extinct. So the only place to see those large seeds is in the archaeological record from 4,000 years ago. But the ragweed got reincorporated. The genetics of that big seed got reincorporated into the parent variety. So every now and then you'll find a big giant seed that you could probably trace back to being selectively bred somewhere in that Eastern Agricultural Complex. A buddy of mine is an archaeobotanist. He studies plant remains from archaeological sites.

Kyle Veit: That's cool.

Bo Brown: The stuff he's looking at, you can hardly even see it. Just little grains. But it's charcoal plant remains dug out of archaeological fire pits, and under a microscope there's a key where you can identify the cellular structure and get it to plant part and to species. And I come up to him in the lab looking at the stuff, and I'm looking at it, I can't even see it, and I said, what are you doing, picking fly shit out of black pepper? It just looked so tiny. But he was the authority on that stuff. And that opened up a whole new field for me, to learn new plants that didn't make it into the foraging literature, learning what the Native Americans were using. Like I said, it's such a cultural thing that goes back to the first inhabitants of this area. I worked as a shovel bum, a contract archaeologist, for the Center for Archaeological Research out of Springfield, over a period of about 10 years. So I worked on over a dozen digs and got to hang out with Neal. Gosh, what is his last name? Dr. Neal Lopinot is the guy. He's retired now. But that just opened up a whole new aspect of learning about the far-back cultural aspect of what was being eaten here in the Ozarks.

Kyle Veit: I'm just curious, based on your research, what were Native Americans' typical eating patterns, in terms of when they ate and how often they ate? For us, it's so common to think of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, three meals a day. But then you're talking about trail munching and eating this here and this here. Was it just a continual process, based on what we know? How would their patterns have differed from ours?

Bo Brown: Well, they didn't have mealtime, probably, other than a big dinner whenever they found something. It was all on what you found. Sometimes you're living in the land of plenty, where there's a lot of stuff. Other years you're scrapping and really trying to find every little scrap that you can get. And there's a lot of what they call survival foods. They didn't like it that much, but you eat what you had. Nobody knows, 'cause they've not really talked to the individuals about, when did you eat breakfast? Did you eat lunch? There may be knowledge out there about that, but I assume that they ate when they were hungry, and they ate when the food presented itself. And then I assume that after a day of activity, they'd all come in and have kind of a communal dinner or whatever.

Kyle Veit: I can picture the same thing. A day where you and me are out turkey hunting and we're going through the woods, or we're scouting. There's points and periods where you're stopping, you're taking breaks, you're looking around. We're usually looking for morels and things like that. And when you find some, I can imagine you just go ahead and eat it right there. And then if you got a turkey, at the end of the day you might have a big supper.

Bo Brown: But you wouldn't want to eat a morel out in the field just straight up. All wild mushrooms need to be cooked. Native Americans, from what I can gather, did not eat a lot of mushrooms for food, really. They considered them more medicinal. Protein-wise, there's stuff there, but there's way more medicinal content. My buddy Mike Snyder, who's a big mushroom expert, does a whole program on medicinal mushrooms, and the science on what medicines are in mushrooms is just blowing up right now. We're finding out just how critical that is to health on all levels. You remember Ötzi, the Iceman that they found? He had some dried mushrooms on a piece of rawhide hanging off his belt, and I think they were turkey tail mushrooms, which are a medicinal mushroom.

Kyle Veit: Really?

Bo Brown: Yeah, they're adaptogens, immune system building things. And there's fungi like the reishi mushroom that has been studied in Chinese medicine for 5,000 years, and over there they called it the mushroom of immortality. And so the Native Americans, they ate 'em, but they didn't concentrate on that as a food source. You can throw 'em in a soup or something like that, but they didn't have skillets and frying pans. They did fry when they could extract oil from seeds, like they did with the ragweed and the Iva annua. And they could also boil acorns and skim the oil off the top. We've got white oak and red oak, which are just large groups of different types of oaks. The white oaks are the ones they would leach and make acorn flour with, to make a hardtack type of bread. We think of bread as this big, fluffy, spongy stuff. That didn't exist until we had domesticated wheat with a high level of gluten. So when they speak of bread in pre-colonial times, it was a hardtack kind of bread with no gluten. It was a flatbread type. Like a power bar.

Kyle Veit: Would it be like, I'm thinking pita bread in my head.

Bo Brown: Even that's got the bubbles from fermentation from the gluten in there. This would be more like crackers. Something dense like that. And in the grasslands book, the one on the cover is called breadroot. It occurs in Missouri, just a little bit north of the Ozarks. It was a staple of the Lakota. In fact, from the evidence they can find, they routed their bison hunts around areas where that plant was very plentiful, and they collected tons of it. And when the settlers started coming across the prairies moving west, they'd have the big trade rendezvous, where they'd bring this stuff and barter. So Native Americans would collect these roots and trade them to the settlers for things they wanted. And the settlers had been driving over this stuff for 200 miles to get where the natives were selling it to 'em. They didn't know what the plant looked like. But like I said, it was critical to their survival. It was one of the main things. They could dry the whole root, and then when they wanted to eat it, they'd pound it into a powder, add a little bit of water, and bake it on a hot stone.

Kyle Veit: Fascinating.

Kyle Plunkett: Are the Ozarks a pretty rich place for foods?

Bo Brown: Probably one of the richest places.

Kyle Plunkett: In the country? That's what I was gonna ask. Because you're talking about how some areas are gonna be sparse, or some are gonna be more diverse. Are we like the bread basket?

Bo Brown: It's absolutely blessed, as far as places for wild food. Because we've got all the eastern deciduous forest stuff, which, if you go east of here into Kentucky, Tennessee, all the way down to northern Georgia, all the way to the Appalachians, that's a lot of what's in the Ozarks book. Those generalized plants that are in that kind of habitat. Moist, rich slopes, hillsides, river valleys, that kinda stuff. But we also butt up against the tallgrass prairie. So we've got things like what's on the cover of my book, which they call ground plum, or milk vetch, or buffalo pea. It's in the pea family. It's a prairie plant. So we have influence from the prairies in our glades and open areas and stuff like that. So it's a combination. It's an ecotone of those two habitats, and so we get the richness from both. Plus, there's a segment in the front of the book called The Ozarks, the Physiographic Region, and I did a whole thing about why geologically the Ozarks formed and what made it such a rich botanical area, because of the geology of the place and how it was formed. We've got karst topography that produces tons of springs and clear rivers. And there's fens. It's spelled F-E-N, and it's like a spring, but it's one that seeps out of the ground, usually at the base of a hill. And those things will host what they call glacial relics, which are plants that are nowhere else in this part of the country. You've gotta go to the Canadian Shield to find those. But because it's cool and damp, they hung on after the glaciers retreated.

Kyle Veit: Still now?

Bo Brown: Still now. They're called glacial relics. And like I said, they're usually in fens and stuff like that. There's a whole class of them.

Kyle Veit: What kind of plants would those be? What's an example of a glacial relic?

Bo Brown: Oh God, you would ask me that. I'd have to get out the, there's a Rare Plants of the Ozarks, a little book that came out years ago. But you're getting into the deep weeds of botanical lingo to get into those. They're not commonly known plants, and they're all endangered, so you don't want to go picking them or go eat 'em. Cave entrances will harbor some of that kinda stuff. They weren't food plants for the most part. They were just a lot of tiny little things. Orchids, specialized habitat things that, like I said, only have that one little spot.

Kyle Veit: You just mentioned endangered plants, and you don't wanna pick those. And you talked earlier about ethically harvesting, foraging in a sustainable way. Why is that important? I could make the leap myself, but I'm thinking these plants are wild, they're native, they're everywhere. They're gonna pop up again if you pick 'em. But is that not the case? Can you really wipe out a hillside?

Bo Brown: Well, depending on what you're after. If you're digging roots, and that's one of the first things I cover in my classes or in any kind of conversation about doing this stuff, digging roots on any public land is illegal, because you are killing the plant. Now, if you're on your own land and you're after the roots, you are killing the plant when you do that. But I showed you how they did it. If you're picking a bulb plant that's got little bulblets off the main bulb, they would plant that little bulblet back in the ground where they dug the initial bulb out. So there's ways like that to preserve the plants. So that plant I was talking about, the breadroot. I just found this out a few years ago. How the Lakota harvest it is, when they dig the thing out of the ground, they leave the top attached. It looks like a lupine, which you get out west, the big beautiful blue flowers with the five-fingered leaves, and it's a real hairy plant. They would dig the whole plant out of the ground with the top intact. Then when they harvested the root part of it, they left about three quarters of an inch of the taproot attached to the top, and they would bury it upright in the hole that they dug. And then the flowers would go ahead and mature and drop seeds. And the seeds were something like 50% more likely to reproduce in those plants than the ones where the seeds fell out on compacted ground. So that's the aspect where the conservation department, and a lot of people in prairie management, are missing the boat. They want to just burn the prairies to get the new growth in. You do have to have a minimal amount of disturbance, just like the bison would come through, eat a little bit, and move on. They didn't stay there and eat like cows do. They ate a little bit here, a little bit there, and kept moving. And that little bit of disturbance allows those plant seeds, especially forbs, the plants that aren't grasses, to be able to get a toehold. Otherwise, the grass thatch will just build up, and nothing else can penetrate that. And a lot of the regenerative agriculture now, that's what they're doing. They're using sheep, goats, pigs, whatever, and doing a very high rotation rate on 'em. They'll take electric fencing and fence off an acre, and they'll move 'em every three or four days. And then after they've been on there a little bit and kind of beat the ground up, they'll come back and sow it with these native prairie plants and grasses. It takes a while, but you can turn a piece of totally abused ground that's been over-pastured or over-cropped or whatever into productive prairie. And if you keep doing it that way, it's self-maintaining. And that's where you get these big prairie grasses that grow 10-foot-long roots, if it's in soil. They get these enormous root systems, which are better carbon sinks than forests. They talk about planting trees for the carbon capture and all that. So that's another aspect of the whole climate change thing. People want to clear out all that stuff and put in fescue, which doesn't have those root systems.

Kyle Veit: You were telling us about this a couple weeks ago, talking about carbon sinks, and you educated me on it, 'cause I had never heard of grasses being better than forests. But it's the right kind of grasses. That regenerative agriculture movement, I just see it everywhere on my social media. It's on the TV, there's documentaries about it. I'm curious how that overlays with the foraging world. Do you seek out places that have had these regenerative practices done on them, to go and find different types of foods that maybe aren't available in other places?

Bo Brown: It can be. I don't seek them out, because if somebody's doing regenerative agriculture, that's usually private land, and they don't want people dropping in out there to take whatever it is they just planted. But yeah, you're gonna find more diversity, and a lot of the stuff they're planting is gonna be not just animal food, but human food. Those are the two big movements happening right now that do kind of give me hope. A lot of people are planting native food forests. So an area that's been in an apple grove, or some kind of plant that Europeans brought over, once that's played out, they come in and plant all wild plums and persimmons and pawpaws, and prepare it where everything out there is producing some kind of food, or pollinator food, or host plant food, whatever. It's a way of looking at the Earth as just a big giant mosaic that we're a part of. We've always looked at it as us and nature. Like you said earlier, the definition of wilderness used to be a place that man hasn't set foot in. That's bunk. Every plant out there has evolved with us and animals and everything munching on it. And that's something I cover with ethical foraging. If you're doing it right, you're mimicking what the animals do. If you're eating greens, you're gonna get the little tender growth. They call it meristematic growth, the meristem, which is the actual green part that's pushing out and growing new stuff. The keywords are young and tender. Whatever you get, you're gonna get the top tender part of it, on bigger shrubs and even vascular plants. It's just like trimming your mint. When you trim a whole bunch of the ends off of the stems, what does it do? It splits and it grows more. So if you do that quite a bit, it stimulates the plant, and it will actually double the amount of reproductive parts that it would produce. So you're making that plant produce more fruit than it would've if you hadn't picked on it. There's even a name for it. It's called herbivory overcompensation. When herbivores are munching on a plant and eating all the goody parts, it responds by splitting and making more. I've got shrubs of things like spicebush close to my building where I teach my classes, and just out of convenience, since they're the closest ones there, I break the limbs off all the time to use for pit baking. I'll break the whole limb off with the leaves attached, get a big deep pit bed of coals, put about a three-inch layer of those spicebush leaves on there, put your food on top of that, put another two- or three-inch layer on that, and then put all the big embers back on it. So the same shrubs that I've been breaking, just really devastating 'cause there's so much of it, I come back and that thing is a gigantic, bushy, luxurious thing. And the ones further back in there, they just get tall and spindly and don't even look as healthy. So that's another aspect of foraging, where you're not overdoing it, but you're doing what nature does. And there's some basic rules. Some people say never take more than a third. I'll say more like a fifth. Because if you take a third, and then somebody else comes along and says, well, there's this much, I wanna take a third, all of a sudden there's not much left. And everything that we eat out there, there's other things that want to eat that. Same with mushrooms. There's entire insects that live in mushrooms, whose entire lifecycle depends on that mushroom. So if you go out and pick morels, and you pick every single one, even the old dried-up ones, and don't leave anything out there, there's an insect that might not make it. And they're all integral to the life of these plants. A lot of them can't make it without these things. So it's all interconnected, and we just have to find our place in there to do it right. I say you can't live on the planet without making impacts, but you can be aware of your impacts and make 'em positive whenever possible.

Kyle Veit: Absolutely. There's a quote that says the first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts. You think about taking something apart that's got a lot of pieces. When you finally try to go put it back together, you hope you hadn't lost the piece that actually ends up being super important. And sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. And in nature, it's the same thing. We don't always know the ecology of all the plants and animals and how they interact. We think we have a good idea, there's science out there, but sometimes we're just completely wrong. So to get rid of something that could be integral in the health of our systems and throw things out of balance would be...

Bo Brown: Well, that's the whole thing about endangered species. A lot of times they don't even know what ecological role that thing plays. But when you remove it, all of a sudden you've got a whole chunk of things that goes haywire. Somebody said it's like an airplane. You can pull a rivet out here and a rivet out here, and you keep pulling rivets out, pretty soon something bad's gonna happen. And we're doing that with our native ecosystems, just from people being unaware, and human activity. Until people get educated about what's going on out there and learn basic ecology. And I tell people, not everybody's gonna have the willpower or whatever it takes to go as deep into plants as I have, but you can just become aware of stuff in your own backyard and get to know it. With my primitive skills, I started teaching that stuff in '93. The ulterior motive for all this kind of stuff was, yeah, you can make cool tools and weapons and stuff that might save your butt in a pinch, but every aspect of that, if you're gonna make a basket, or you're gonna make a bow, or a bow drill fire, or anything like that, there's almost always a specific wood or a specific plant that's gonna fill that purpose. Then it makes you focus in on learning its name and learning about it, and pretty soon you're starting to amass knowledge. You're seeing all this as a whole. We're really good at compartmentalizing things and looking at a field and saying, well, that's a field, I don't need to look at that any further. Once you learn all the little things, the magic things that are going on in there that we just don't see in our everyday lives, then you find out, oh, there's food, there's medicine, there's clothing, there's fire, there's everything we need to live in that field or forest. And it just makes you look at the natural world in a new way.

Kyle Plunkett: The natural world really is more magical than we like to think. But I've got two questions for you that I hope are easily answerable, but I also know we can spend a long time on 'em, so try to keep it high level if you can. I was told growing up, by parents who wanna make sure I don't do something dumb and kill myself, don't pick things in the woods and eat them unless you know exactly what it is. Which is great advice. However, my question is, if you think of the Ozarks in large swaths, what percentage of forageable, findable food is edible, and what percentage is potentially detrimental? I know there's gonna be a gradient, where there's some middle where it's like, you wouldn't want to eat it.

Bo Brown: I wouldn't want to put a percentage, put a number on it, but it's way, way more plants that are edible than are toxic. There's a tiny, small handful of plants that'll actually do you in.

Kyle Veit: But there's one out there in your backyard.

Bo Brown: Yeah. That's the poison hemlock. Poison hemlock probably kills more people than the other plant, only because of its similarity to wild carrot, which is also Queen Anne's lace.

Kyle Veit: So if I went out there and I ate that, what would happen? Would I have to eat a lot to do me in?

Bo Brown: Well, of the greens, I always read that the root, three to four or five small bites of the root can kill a person.

Kyle Veit: Three?

Bo Brown: Three, four, five bites. And it also depends on your makeup at the time. It depends on the stage of the plant. All of it is, it depends. But the general consensus was that the greens weren't as toxic as the roots. And yet some, like 15 or 20 years ago, they found a woman dead in her apartment, I think in New York, where the remnants of the salad that she ate were still there. She didn't eat all of it, and they determined that she had probably 15 little pieces of the ends of that leaf, just what you've got growing right out there, that she thought were wild carrot tops. And she put 'em in her salad, and from the remnants of the plant, they estimated she ate about 15 or 16 little fragments.

Kyle Plunkett: You gotta get rid of that, bro.

Kyle Veit: Get that out of your yard. See, Bo, this is what gives me a little bit of nervousness about trying new stuff. I know that if I don't eat anything, I can never get sick from eating stuff. So what would you say to someone like me, who's got that concern but is curious about foraging?

Bo Brown: Well, like I said, that is one family. That's the carrot family. The actual name is Apiaceae. It used to be Umbelliferae, because all the flowers make an upside-down umbrella, but they changed it a while back. A lot of books advise that anything that remotely looks like that, just avoid it when you're learning. Because there's another plant that's even more toxic than that one. It's water hemlock. It's a different species, but it's actually more deadly. Poison hemlock has about, I think, a 20 to 30% fatality rate from people that eat it. The water hemlock's like 50 to 60.

Kyle Veit: Oof.

Bo Brown: Yeah, it's pretty high. It's really toxic. And how they kill you is really fascinating to me. I just learned this a while back. Poison hemlock interferes with the electrical impulses between your brain and your motor function. So basically you have organ shutdown and failure, and you just kind of go out. The whole story of Socrates, he had to choose his method of execution, and he chose that because he knew it would be an easy out. You just kind of fade out and go to sleep and die. You cramp up, I'm sure. But water hemlock, on the other hand, interrupts the thing that regulates that electrical flow. So when people die from that, they spasm so hard they break their own bones. And there's a term called the sardonic grin. I don't know if it's true or not, but the story that I read was that it was from an actual event in Sardinia, where people moved into an area that had that water hemlock, and it's a common plant here now too. They thought it was parsnip and they ate it. And when they found them, they all had the Joker grin, like the story of the Joker falling in the acid. I tell that one to the school kids, and they say, I'm never eating anything in the wild, I guess. But like I said, it's just a very, very tiny handful. I can't really even think of another plant right offhand that could kill you in a few bites.

Kyle Veit: Gotcha. So the overwhelming majority of the stuff that you would find in the Ozarks would be an edible plant. But the rule of thumb, like you're saying, is don't eat it unless you know for sure.

Bo Brown: There's a lot of stuff that is so easily identified that you're not gonna mistake it for something else. But if it is something, that's why when I wrote my books, I put a lot of detail into the descriptions. Rachel West is another forager, she's a wild food chef, and she started putting together these forager certification courses that we did. We've done 'em two years now. We certified people on 20 plants, 10 natives and 10 non-natives, and we would have them sit by the plant and read that description line by line, and look at what the book was describing as they saw it on the plant. I've learned that people don't read the front material. They don't read the back material. They usually don't even read the descriptions. They look at the dang pictures. So I tell people to sit down, and if you think it's that plant, just go line by line, and you'll come to a point where you'll say, okay, that's gotta be it, because all these things add up. Or pretty soon you'll say, well, it's got this, but I'm not seeing this. And I tell people to get three independent confirmations. So if you think it's something, look it up in the book. There's the Missouri Wild Food Foraging Facebook group. There's a whole bunch of different national plant groups. There's the Missouri Native Plant Society. There's the Missouri Mycological Society for mushrooms. So there's all these online sources. There's plant apps now. There's mushroom apps. Don't trust those things, especially as an only confirmation, but it's a tool. It's just one more little tool in your bag of tricks that you can use to help cement your ID. But a lot of it is just the dirt time. Just spending time out there, familiarizing yourself. You don't even have to know what a plant is, but if it's something that catches your eye, spend time with it so you recognize it each time. Then when you do run across it in the book, you can look it up, and once you know its name, you've got Google. You can find out everything about that plant that human beings know. So it's, how important is it to you to learn it? That's how much time you'll spend. So, like I said, you guys are out hunting and fishing. There's absolutely no reason why you're not coming home with pocketfuls of greens. I always carry one of those Walmart plastic bags. It's probably the worst thing, but I carry those because it's nothing extra I have to carry. It fits in my back pocket. And if I find a big pile of greens or mushrooms on the way in and out of the woods, I just pull that out and load it.

Kyle Plunkett: That was my other question. So the first one, the majority is edible, but be careful, know your stuff. Second question is, how difficult would it be to hunt, fish, and forage a whole year of food in the Ozarks? And that's all you're doing.

Kyle Veit: Good question.

Bo Brown: Talk to Karen and, oh God, I'm drawing a blank on his name. They're a couple out in Oklahoma, and they did exactly that. They lived an entire year on stuff from their farm and foraged material. If you Google Karen, I think it's Karen Smith. Johnny and Karen Smith. They have a farm. They have a business that they run off that, and they do permaculture, and they did that for a year and wrote about and documented it.

Kyle Veit: If you didn't have a farm and you were in the Ozarks, how tricky would that be?

Bo Brown: You could do it, but think about it. We were never an isolated single person going out doing these activities. We were always a tribe, a group, a hunter-gatherer group or whatever. So whoever's the best hunter is gonna be out there hunting. And a lot of times the men were the hunters and the women were the foragers, but everybody did everything. So you'd be a basket weaver, Kyle.

Kyle Plunkett: I don't know about that.

Bo Brown: Well, you can't just carry your stuff out in your arms. If you're gonna go out and forage, you've gotta have something to carry your stuff in. You need a basket. A well-made basket.

Kyle Plunkett: So if you're gonna do it, you'd have to have a community of people doing it.

Bo Brown: I'd say it could be done, but it would be work, and you would have to put up, you would have to dehydrate. Are you talking about doing it primitive, or with modern stuff?

Kyle Plunkett: With modern, I guess. If you had a freezer. I'm thinking like a bucket list item for me at some point. Do a whole year. If I said I'm gonna do a year of it, knowing that I have a freezer, I can freeze my venison, I can dehydrate the stuff I forage, how difficult would it be?

Bo Brown: It could be done. If you had the knowledge that's in that book, if you knew every plant in that book. And that book is just scratching the surface. There's so many plants I wanted to put in it, but when you write for somebody like Falcon, you don't write the book you want. You write the book they give you space and time for. But just what's in that book would give you the base, and then, like I said, you'd have to dehydrate, freeze, whatever. And a lot of it you're gonna be eating just on the spot. But also, I quit hunting about eight years ago, and I still have a freezer full of venison at any given time, just from picking up roadkill. It's legal in Missouri. You can pick up roadkill as long as you call 'em within 48 hours. They'll send you the paperwork, and you can legally have it transported.

Kyle Plunkett: So you're foraging your venison?

Bo Brown: Oh yeah.

Kyle Veit: No way. That's amazing. Do you not get worried about it, like it's been there for a while and all that?

Bo Brown: I teach at these big primitive skills gatherings out west, and the first one I went to, about 25 years ago, was Rabbitstick in Idaho. And a guy there, he was a computer IT guy, but his whole passion was this primitive skills stuff, and his name was Roadkill, because he got into the science of how bad meat gets before it's actually dangerous. If spoiled meat killed people, we would never have survived as a species before refrigeration. You go to any third world country, and it's a 90 or 100 degree day out, and they've got big hunks of meat that have been out there for four or five days or whatever. And with meat, the rule is, if it smells good, it's good. I find roadkill that has been out there sometimes a week and a half, two weeks, in moderate temperatures. Pull the skin off. The outer skin is kind of green. Well, you cut past that, cut about an inch into the meat, past that exterior stuff that's getting spoiled looking, cut into where it's red, cut a little piece of that out, get it away from the stink of the carcass, and smell it. If it smells bad, then yeah, I wouldn't eat it. But if you get it out and it smells like meat, it's good.

Kyle Veit: Bo.

Bo Brown: So that's the rule.

Kyle Plunkett: Unbelievable. So you're foraging your own roadkill.

Kyle Veit: Oh my goodness.

Kyle Plunkett: And I get it. You can carve away enough meat, and the internal stuff will be fine. That makes sense, 'cause historically, you are just brave. You kill an animal and you're bringing it back to camp, and camp's weeks away from where your family is. You gotta eat it. You gotta figure out how to get it there.

Bo Brown: But it's an informed bravery. I'm not just casting the dice. It's based on being around a lot of these primitive skills people that are living that way, that have done it.

Kyle Plunkett: PSA, this is not an advice podcast, so don't go do anything that we're talking about. You cannot hold us legally bound. We release all liability.

Bo Brown: Well, it's in the book right off the bat. Falcon puts that in there. It's called "Eat at Your Own Risk." But yeah, that's been my rule ever since I learned about it from that guy. Squirrels, rabbits, whatever's on the road, if it hasn't been there too long, if it's not mashed flat, there's almost always something good you can pull off of it.

Kyle Veit: Well, and if you're driving the same roads, you're gonna know what's been there and what's not. Like, that's a new deer that just happened to be hit right there.

Kyle Plunkett: That makes me feel better about the deer that may have sat just a little too long. 24 hours, everybody.

Bo Brown: When you shoot a deer, do you just go and eat it immediately, or do you hang it?

Kyle Plunkett: I hang it.

Bo Brown: When you hang it, what are you doing? It's a controlled rot.

Kyle Plunkett: That's fair. You're aging it. You're breaking down the fibers, making it more tender. Aging is a civilized way of saying controlled rot.

Kyle Veit: Sure. But I guess I would say, yes, it's controlled, and I'm making sure that it's staying under like 40 degrees.

Kyle Plunkett: And I'm controlling when I'm doing it too. If it's an early season deer, it's going straight to the fridge, or processed by myself and straight to the freezer. But if it's a cold November deer, there's been times I'll let a deer hang with the skin off for days and keep deer hunting.

Bo Brown: Well, what happens is, as the skin dries, it develops what the old-timers called the cuticle, where it just dries hard. And the flies can't even lay eggs on it. They call it fly blow. They can't even get on there to lay eggs on the thing. And if they do, you just scrape 'em off. You're gonna cook the thing anyway. There's a lot of evils that are done away with by cooking things. Just like with mushrooms. All wild mushrooms have toxins. You really have to cook them well. Even morel mushrooms make people sick every year. Morels killed a whole group of people, I think it was last year, up in the Northwest. They were farmed morels that had been shipped from China, and people were suspicious of the stuff they'd sent, but a whole bunch of other restaurants served the very same mushrooms and didn't have any issue. It was one restaurant, and they undercooked them.

Kyle Plunkett: They undercooked them.

Bo Brown: So you'd have to take pains in preparing them, to where you're sure there's no problem. And that's probably the most commonly eaten wild mushroom. And even under the best circumstances, there's gonna be something out there that is going to give you a reaction that 99.99% of the rest of the population won't be bothered by. So that's another piece of advice I give on plants and mushrooms or any of that kind of stuff. The first time you're eating a new species of anything, especially if you've got a history of any kind of allergies, take a very little bit the first time. Not a helping, just a sample. A little bite, and see what it does for you, and wait 24 hours. And then with mushrooms, there's the big one they call the big red mushroom. They call 'em false morels. To this day, MDC says that's a toxic mushroom. And there's a group called False Morels Demystified on Facebook, and it's a bunch of mycologists that actually did the work. They found a new way to test for the toxin, which is gyromitrin, I think is how it's pronounced. It's got monomethylhydrazine, which is something they make rocket fuel from. So it's very toxic, and it can collapse your liver. But that's one species that they eat. The one that's the most toxic is called Gyromitra esculenta. It's a European species, but they sell it in stores. They can it, they eat it, but you've gotta boil it before you cook it. And they say you've gotta boil it in an open space that's not closed in, because the vapors can even make you sick. But the name of that is esculenta, and in Latin, esculenta means fit for the table, or good to eat. So it's in the name. But we don't have that one here in Missouri. It's never been found in this part of the country. And the more they find out about it, the ones that they thought were that same species in the United States are not even that actual species, and the level of toxins is way lower than the ones in Europe. But the one that's here, they call it big red. It's really convoluted. You know what I'm talking about? The false morel. It's Gyromitra caroliniana, and actually they've even changed the Latin of that. But anyway, that one is no more toxic than the morel. You just cook it well. And I think they're even better than the morel, really. And they're enormous. They get these giant, foot-tall things.

Kyle Veit: So you eat them regularly?

Bo Brown: Oh yeah. Whenever I find them. And anytime you mention that mushroom on a page of any kind, it starts the argument. Oh, you're gonna kill yourself. You're gonna blow up your liver. And then, well, my family's been eating them all my life. So there's always that argument. But the guys that actually do this for a living have looked into it. You just gotta make sure you cook 'em well.

Kyle Plunkett: That makes sense. It's like anything, you gotta know what you're doing with it. I would eat a deer rare, no problem. But if I've got a buddy who's like, well, I'm cooking this bear to 125, I'm like, I'm not touching that. I don't want trichinosis. Same thing. I'm not gonna eat a raw morel or a raw false morel, but fried up right, it's different. That's interesting. That's good. Bo, we appreciate you. Thanks for being on the show. If you're listening, go find some greens out in your yard. Read the book.

Bo Brown: Maybe I might plug my website. It's my name. Bo Brown Foraging dot com.

Kyle Veit: That's great. We appreciate you. This has been a really fascinating one. I love diving into the history of things, and the history of foraging in the Ozarks, I think, is super interesting. What you can know today about where we came from, and how you can connect back to the land, is cool stuff. Don't go anywhere. We're gonna have Bo back on the show, and we're gonna be talking about Stone Age tools and primitive skills. Bo, I know you do a lot of stuff on this, and demonstrations up at Dogwood Canyon and other places like that. So if you're interested in that kind of stuff, flint knapping, anything like that, we're gonna be talking about that on the next episode. So thank you guys for tuning in, and we'll see you on the next one.