~12,000 generations of human food knowledge · lost in 3 to 4
I grew up in Crawford County and spent most of my life surrounded by people who could not name a single plant growing in their own yard. That is not an insult. It is an observation about what I now call The Grocery Store Generation™.
For roughly 12,000 generations, people knew where food came from. Not from a label on a package. They knew which plants grew where, when they fruited, how to prepare them, and which ones would kill you. That knowledge was not optional. It was passed down for thousands of generations without interruption.
In three or four generations we replaced all of it with a single interface: the grocery store. Most people alive today cannot identify more than a handful of wild plants and could not feed themselves from a landscape if they needed to. A species that loses knowledge of its own food supply has introduced a fragility that did not exist before.
This app is my attempt to start closing that gap in Crawford County and across Missouri. The plants in this deck grow here, right now, in fields and creek bottoms and roadsides across the state. Most Missourians drive past them every day without knowing their names.
Learning to identify them is a start. It is not enough, but it is a start.
Daniel Dandelion, Crawford County, MO