"Native Americans called the plant “white man’s footprint” or “Englishman’s foot” because it appeared wherever white men went."
Plantago major - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Conveniently, it also has a taste like that of “very bitter salad greens with a lingering aftertaste not unlike spinach”. At least in theory. Part of dinner tonight will be a plantain and dandelion salad (or possibly an omelette variant), so I’ll post again after I’ve tried it.
The upshot of the fact that dandelion and plantain leaves are edible is that one could probably live for a summer entirely off the backyard bounty of a two-block radius in Oberlin, if one were willing to swallow his pride and a very repetitive diet of plantain, violet, and dandelion salad and stir-fried yellow daylily buds. I’m not sure where this one would get his protein in that case, though.
Please pardon that last paragraph; I’ll try not to let it happen again.
