Edible Wild Plants of the Prairie

Ethnobotanist Kelly Kindscher knows the prairie first-hand. In 1984 he walked nearly 700 miles from Kansas City to Denver, supplementing his diet with edible prairie plants along the way. Kindscher has a PhD in plant ecology from the University of Kansas and is a consultant for Prairieland Ecological Services. He is author of Medicinal Wild Plants of the Prairie: An Ethnobotanical Guide.

Long before sunflower seeds became a popular snack food, they were a foodstuff valued by Native Americans. For some 10,000 years, from the end of the Pleistocene to the 1800s, the indigenous peoples of the plains regarded edible native plants, like the sunflower, as an important source of food. Not only did plants provide sustenance during times of scarcity, but they also added variety to what otherwise would have been a monotonous diet of game. Nevertheless, the use of native plants as food sharply declined when white men settled the Great Plains and imposed their own culture with its differing notions of what was fit to eat. Those notions tended to excluded from the accepted diet such plants as soapweed, labsquarter, ground cherry, prairie turnip, and prickly pear. Today it is strange to think of eating chokecherries, which were a key ingredient in that staple of the Indian diet, permmican.