Happily, it is no longer difficult to find any one book that will give all the the information you might like to know about any particular plant. Our "All-in-One" category has books that do this but only for the plants covered. A good all-in-one wild food book gives you the following: 1) Thorough edibility information based on experience. 2) Enough clear and puposeful photographs and descriptive content to identify the plant at critical stages of growth and critical stages of edibility. 3) Processing and preparation information that can take you from yuk to delicious. All the other books will only do some of those things. So do you just want to be able to identify the plant or its parts? Do you just want recipes? Detailed personal accounts of forager experiences? The human-related or natural history of a plant? Nutrient data? Medicinal uses? Toxicity? Other uses besides food? Your interests will determine the kinds of books you might want for your personal wild food library.

Your Personal Wild Food Library
Is a collection of books and other educational resources that have different strengths and weaknesses. If chosen wisely, your books, taken together, will provide reasonable coverage of any particular plant and its edibility. The books that cover everything you need to know to safely begin ingesting wild plants do not cover all the thousands of plants out there. So if you are trying to learn about plants not covered by the all-in-one books, you need to build a library of mutually supportive books that can help you piece the full story together.

The study of wild foods brings together the fields of botany, nutrition, food preparation, food toxicology, and historical foodways. Authors cannot know everything and occasionally will get things wrong, give dangerous perspectives, or even fail to warn you that dandelion greens are really often bitter to most people in the raw form! But you can safeguard yourself by using a smart 'collection' of books.

How Your Library can Evolve
If your interest is strictly edible wild plants, a good 'starting' library would be the three books in our "All-in-One" category. Build on that with a mix of good regional books for your area that together will provide you with reliable edibility and identification information. Add books as you see fit.

If your interest is medicinal plants, a good starting library would be three good books on plant identification, three good books on medicinal plants, and one good book on poisonous plants. For more interests, add three more books from each new area. Develop your library as your interests develop.

What You Will Find Here
Hundreds of books have been examined and reviewed by Wild Food Adventures. Only the best have been included at this site. These books are not perfect (no book is) - they rise to the top due to our criteria and a combination of features. The criteria depends on the category they are listed in. Those criteria are stated at the top of each review page that you visit. No book is listed unless we have seen and evaluated it directly. Explore additional information (including other reviews and ratings) through special links we provide to Amazon.com (the discount on-line book seller).

What You Won't Find Here
Books with little or no redeeming value, books that just repeat the same brief uninformed and uninspired information, and "good effort but not top of the line" books are not listed here.

The Categories Above
Are not exclusive of each other. For instance, the "All-in-One" books could fit in any of the categories. "Some" books in the "Edibility" category include "some" information and illustrations to help you identify the plants. They may or may not include recipes. They may also cover some poisonous plants. Some books in the Identification category might include some edibility information. Use these categories to begin and to develop your wild food library.

More Categories to Come
As we get time we will review and post books in the following categories: Native American Ethnobotany, Sea Vegetables, Mushrooms, General Plant Identification, Primitive Skills, Survival, Edible Landscaping, Edible Flowers, and Good Reads