Wild Edible is about merging primal roots and instinct with a passion for preparing and eating good food.
It's about foraging for wild food and medicinal plants and herbs, and it's about locally and sustainably grown veggies, as well as humanely raised meat, and how they all mesh together to nourish and sustain our bodies and souls.
Wild Edible is intended to inspire a deeper connection with the earth and our local communities. We hope you enjoy reading it.
Contributors
Cindy Halbkat
As a chef, herbalist, gardener, forager and locavore, Cindy Halbkat specializes in using local, sustainable and wild food in her craft. From Cindy's first experience foraging, she realized that it fulfills an important primal instinct.
Since 1995, Cindy has been studying and exploring ways to integrate sustainable living into her life.
Over the course of 10 years she lived and served as chef and gardener at the Hambidge Center for the Arts, an artists' retreat located on 600 pristine acres of temperate rain forest in the Southern Appalachians.
While there, she learned to forage and incorporate wild foods in her meals. She also kept an organic kitchen garden and grew rare medicinal herbs, wild edible flowers and greens and heirloom vegetables.
Cindy has also studied practical herbalism for many years at several schools including Appalachia School of Holistic Herbalism and Red Moon Herbs.
Through this training and her own experience, she has developed a strong understanding of the uses of native Southern Appalachian plants, as well as non-natives, for food and medicine.
As a result of her quest to learn about and utilize medicine from the earth, Cindy has developed a knack for cultivating medicinal plants, both rare and common.
She has been cooking professionally since 1993 and remains an advocate for wild foods playing a role in our diets.
As an herbalist/chef, she practices organic nutrition as a means of weaning and healing the body from the use of processed and chemically manipulated foods.
Eric Orr
Eric Orr is the main writer, developer and admin for Wild Edible. He cut his foraging teeth at an early age with his grandmother and built this blog way back when in order to share and learn about wild foods.