Episode Five - Growing Health: Plants as Food & Medicine
Episode Description:
Herbalism is seeing a huge rise in popularity, as more and more people turn to natural remedies to keep their bodies healthy. In this episode of Grounded Hope we explore the American medical botanical movement called Eclecticism, visit a soda fountain that doubles as a delicious apothecary, we’ll drop in on a class about foraging for backyard wild edibles, and take a walk in the woods with an Ohio organization that’s working to save medicinal plants in forests around the world.
Trail Marker at United Plant Savers Sanctuary In Rutland, Ohio
Photo Credit: Renee Wilde
Podcast Script:
HOST INTRO: Herbalism is seeing a huge rise in popularity, as more and more people turn to natural remedies to keep their bodies healthy. In this episode of Grounded Hope we explore the American medical botanical movement called Eclecticism, visit a soda fountain that doubles as a delicious apothecary, we’ll drop in on a class about foraging for backyard wild edibles, and take a walk in the woods with an Ohio organization that’s working to save medicinal plants in forests around the world.
From the Highways to the Hedgerows, we bring you Grounded Hope.
EXPLORING ECLECTIC MEDICINE AT THE LLOYD LIBRARY
RENEE WILDE: From around 1850 and into the 1930’s, there was a branch of American medicine that combined herbalism with other holistic treatments to create a gentler approach to medicine, known as Eclecticism.
ALEX HERRLEIN: And the Lloyds had a close relationship with the Eclectic medical movement. Right across the street from where we’re standing, at one time, was the Eclectical Medical Institute.
I’m Alex Herrlein, reference librarian at the Lloyd Library.
The Eclectic’s in Cincinnati were not only the longest lived, but the largest of the Electrical Medical Schools, and it was, sort of, the mothership, as it were, of the medical movement.
WILDE: The American medical Eclecticism movement was a direct descendent of one of Wooster Beech’s Reformed Medical Colleges, which favored botanical remedies over the more invasive treatments of that time.
HERRLEIN: Again, we’re talking about a time period where they were coming out of what’s known as heroic medicine, the idea that you attack the body to get at the disease. So that’s maybe something like bloodletting, or purging, or something like that.
You know, the story goes George Washington had bloodletting and it led to his death.
WILDE: Medical Eclecticism used non-invasive therapies and healing practices that worked in harmony with the body's natural curative properties. Treatments drew from many different Native American medicines and the alternative treatment known as Thomsonian Medicine, founded by botanist and herbalist Samuel Thomsan.
HERRLEIN: Again, using plant material to sort of try to build up the body, not to attack the body to get at the disease.
WILDE: With their invention of the Lloyd Cold Still, a process for extracting the essence of fresh herbs, brothers John, Curtis and Nelson Lloyd’s pharmaceutical company became the primary supplier to Eclectic Physicians - producing their own plant based formulas under the name Specific Medicines.
HERRLEIN: But, this was a highly concentrated fluid extract that the Lloyd brothers developed and produced, and it actually tied in with the Eclectic philosophy of using fresh, and often indigenous plants, in a medicinal preparation.
WILDE: John Uri Lloyd also co-edited a two volume set of books for the identification and use of medicinal herbs, which served as a reference manual for Eclectic practitioners.
HERRLEIN: So we’re going through the King’s American Dispensatory, I’ve picked echinacea as an example. That’s a plant a lot of people are familiar with, the coneflower.
They mention Puerperal fever due to septicemia.
They talk about in some aspects a remedy for pain. Not sure if we still would use it in that capacity.
WILDE: When the American Medical Association was formed at the end of the 19th century, they began work to establish uniform medical requirements, which led to the demise of medical Eclecticism.
The Eclectic Medical Institute in Cincinnati, the largest and longest lived of the Eclectic Schools, closed their doors in 1942, but the Lloyd Library’s collection of books and papers from the Eclectic movement keeps their knowledge alive for today’s modern herbalists.
HERRLEIN: In fact a lot of times people who are herbalists, or practitioners of natural medicine these days will often draw parallels between their own philosophy or their own approach and the Eclectic medical movement of the 19th century.
It’s a way to make connections between the past and the present, or the past and the future, and to bring the use of plants in human history, sort of full circle.
PULLING UP A CHAIR AT THE SODA PHARM COUNTER
Aidan Combs Mixing Up A Stress Relief Soda At The Soda Pharm Store In Marysville
DAWN COMBS: I was actually kicked out of the medical system as broken. There was nothing anyone could do for me. I was not going to have any kids.
So I devised a program - not just herbs, but food, and what we were putting on our bodies, and what we were cleaning with - I mean everything changed in our household.
RENEE WILDE: Dawn Combs is an herbalist whose personal journey led her to write the book Conceiving Healthy Babies: An Herbal Guide to Support Preconception, Pregnancy and Lactation.
COMBS: And the two kids that work this bar are our two kids that I had at home in our farm bedroom.
WILDE: We’re at the Soda Pharm Cafe, Dawn’s family run store in Marysville, Ohio.
COMBS: Everything that’s on our shelves started out as something that we needed to be able to rebalance our bodies to be able to do what we wanted to do with them.
WILDE: The Soda Pharm Cafe model is based on the soda fountains of the 19th century, where pharmacists worked with seltzer water to create the first sodas.
COMBS: All around the room you’ll see ads for lithiated lemon soda, which is 7-Up, you’ll see Pepsi, you’ll see coke. These sodas began intending for it to be medicinal, and we can use a delicious menu as an apothecary.
So if somebody comes in and they have a headache, if they’re in the mood for something cold, I can make them a fun fizzy soda that helps with their headache.
We believe in everyday vitality as opposed to medicine. We have things for (the) acute, but we want people to come in and love something that they're using everyday, just because they're enjoying it, and it's fun, and it’s part of a beautiful life that they're loving.
Otherwise why be healthy?
WILDE: Another one of Dawn’s books is called Heal Local: 20 Essential Herbs for Home Health Care, which Joel Salatin calls a ‘compelling case for re-informing ourselves with ancient healing arts (and) re-connects us to the sheer abundance and provision of our ecological nest.’
COMBS: It’s important that our kids be a part of what we’re teaching here, which is self sufficiency in health and knowing how to take care of yourself. They learned how to do a plantain poultice when they could walk, and they know these things. It’s in their daily conversations.
Natural methodologies have always been here, and so the mentality of the ease - the ease of food that isn’t food, the ease of medicine that, unfortunately in a lot of cases does just perpetuate our problems - it’s too easy to get. And if you have the money to get it and the insurance to get it, you stay in that system.
Whereas if you drop out, and you try to live without those systems, you suddenly appreciate
what’s available to you at your feet. The free dandelions, or the chickweed, or the plantain that’s right there. That’s food and medicine, both, for anybody.
WILD EDIBLES
JANET LASLEY: My husband actually said something that was just hilarious to me. When we were eating dinner one night and he said, ’did this come from the dirt?’
I said, ‘honey, everything comes from the dirt.”
I’m Janet Lasley, and I’m here to teach people about wild edibles - that as long as they're not poisoning their yards, they’re everywhere.
You know, like people will poison the onions that grow - what they call it onion grass - in their grass. I say just break them off, and take them in, and put them in your salad.
They’re delicious. They’re just onions, that’s all they are.
And, these are leeks right here.
RENEE WILDE: We’re at Agraria, Ohio’s first center for regenerative practices, where a group of people have gathered to learn how to forage wild edibles in their yards.
LASLEY: I’m the oldest of five, and my dad taught me what we could eat in the yard, because he knew we would taste stuff anyway. Five kids, yeah!
I was in charge to make sure we only ate the good stuff. So he taught me everything in the yard that was wild, and of course we had a big vegetable garden too, we had a big two acre property.
This is dandelion juice, and this is spicebush tea.
WILDE: Janet’s laid out a variety of food and drinks made with foraged ingredients, like her rosemary biscuits made with clover flower flour which she makes by gathering and drying the clover’s white flowers.
LASLEY: The dandelion tea is - I take a lot of flowers, you can make it with the leaves but the flowers are sweeter. So this was a packed jar, pint jar, and it was packed with flowers, and then I put water in it and just let it sit for three days.
And, I did put the sugar in there, too, like a teaspoon, maybe two teaspoons, of maple syrup. Then I drained it off today, and the (dandelion) color is even in the, I’m calling it dandelion-ade.
WILDE: It’s beautiful.
LASLEY: Yeah, it’s really a pretty color.
WILDE: Foraging has become a trending topic, thanks in no small part to Ohioan Alexis Nikole Nelson, who goes by the handle @blackforager. Alexis has been using her social media presence to teach her half a million followers how to identify, harvest and prepare wild edibles.
Most of the people here today have already tasted edible plants in their yard.
DOUG LYON: I’m kind of a foodie, so it’s just another aspect of that.
WILDE: So what’s your favorite thing to forage?
LYON: Purslane. This is one of the only places in the world where it’s a weed. It’s a legit farmed, cultivated vegetable most other places in the world. And it’s great!
WILDE: Did you try the bud that looked like a caper?
LAURA CARSON: Oh, the dandelion buds? We do that at home.
When I was a kid, my grandmother actually took us out in the yard and we picked the little buds, and then she sauteed them in butter and salt.
I’m like, ‘oh this is good!’
I think anything sauteed in butter is gonna be good. But, yeah, so that was my early introduction to foraging.
TOM HOLLY: She mentioned the plantain, the shoots from the plantain. I sauté them with butter and garlic, the real fresh green ones. They were very good. I agree with her assessment of that wild plant.
WILDE: Those plantains not only taste good, but are good for you. This relative of spinach is highly nutritious, and herbalists consider plantains a useful remedy for a cough.
Throughout the class Janet mentions where not to forage for edible plants, which she identifies as along roads where there is pollution from car exhaust, or in lawns that have had chemical treatments, nature preserves, or state parks, or private property without permission.
But it’s also important to make the distinction between ethical foraging in your backyard and pillaging your neighbor’s woods for trendy edibles.
Dawn Combs, who wrote the book Heal Local, and lives in a rural part of Ohio says it best.
DAWN COMBS: Because so many people are living artificially in cities on land that can’t actually support that amount of people, and then those people go out onto the land that is supporting those people. And the land and the plants can’t handle that weight.
So I don’t tend to talk a lot about foraging, I talk about what’s in your backyard, which is technically foraging, but it’s different.
I think foraging has received this idea of it’s romantic - I’m going to go get fiddleheads and morels - and please don’t. Don’t go get the fiddleheads, they’re endangered. And be careful where you’re stepping because you are not invested in that community, You don’t know that community.
UNITED PLANT SAVERS
CHIP CARROL: (It’s) super important to respect and honor the existing culture in the hills here of Appalachia.
I’m Chip Carroll. I’m the sanctuary steward for United Plant Savers. We’re an international non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of at risk medicinal plants. In a nutshell we’re basically working with herbs that grow in the forest and those herbs that are most at risk, either do to overuse, overharvesting, or habitat loss, things of that nature.
CARROL: Ready to take a walk?
WILDE: I’m ready to take a walk.
CARROL: Throughout Appalachia the traditional wild harvesting is really strong, so people, beginning this time of year, start to go out and harvest things like ramps, and goldenseal. And moving into the summer and fall they’re digging black cohosh and ginseng, and more goldenseal.
And a lot of families depend on that supplemental income for expenses. For getting gas for their stoves, or for getting Christmas gifts, or school supplies in the fall. So it’s a balance of, again, respecting the culture that’s been existent here for hundreds of years, but at the same time conserve and protect the native treasures we have here in the forest.
RENEE WILDE: We’re at the United Plant Savers three hundred and sixty acre Botanical Sanctuary in Rutland, Ohio. The sanctuary’s location in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains has had the reputation of being one of the best places to collect medicinal plants since the 1900’s.
CARROL: Fiddleheads, which are Christmas ferns just unfurling here. These are a popular spring harvested item for food, especially in the northeast. In fact I would compare some of the problems we’re having with the overharvesting of ramps, when you get up in New England, they're having the same problem with fiddlehead ferns.
When they’re at this young stage and just unfurling, people will harvest them, and again they’re going to the restaurants, where they get pan fried and added as a wild food on your $80 plate of food. And there you have it.
WILDE: Ramps have long been a staple in Appalachian kitchens, but the recent hype for ramps, like the fiddlehead ferns, is causing a huge strain on the wild population. In an article on the Salon website called, Ok, I’ll bite: What’s All The Fuss With Ramps? It's estimated that even conservatively harvesting only 10% of the plant, will require ten years for the plant to recover.
CARROL: The goldenseal and the ramps are really getting hammered now, for a couple of different reasons. One is again, there is more and more demand for these things. More and more people want to use medicinal herbs. More and more people want to taste wild foods.
So the high end restaurants in all of the big cities are putting out orders for these ramps, which are basically a wild leek, or wild onion, and therefore harvesters have an opportunity where guys can go out and make $500 a day digging these plants.
But, when you're talking about that kind of money, in this impoverished region, people don’t make the best choices. So you have a lot of trespassing, people coming onto land they're not welcome on and digging out entire patches, and a lot of these plants, for the ramps for instance, they don’t even reproduce until they’re five to seven years old.
So if those plants are being dug every year, and the babies are never allowed to get old enough to reproduce, it really doesn’t take very long before the populations in severe decline or disappear all together.
WILDE: United Plant Savers have created a list of species that are at risk due to the impact of human activities. Half the plants on that list are thriving in abundance at this sanctuary, which serves as a ‘living model for protecting diversity, and ensuring that the rich traditions of North American and Euro-American folk medicine continue to thrive’.
CARROL: This is kind of the showcase sanctuary for our organization, but we’ve created, and helped create, hundreds of botanical sanctuaries across the country.
One of our mantras is conservation through cultivation. So working with landowners in the region who have the proper sites to grow some of these medicinal plants intentionally, which of course takes the pressure of the wild populations.
So anybody with land can become part of our botanical sanctuary network and make their property a sanctuary and put those conservation tools in place on land for the long term, so that we can preserve some of these sites that are becoming rarer and rarer.
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HOST OUTRO: You can listen to past episodes of this podcast by going to our website at Grounded Hope dot o.r.g. You’ll also find recipes there to make your own herbal bug spray, herbal all-purpose salve, and herbal first aid kit under the resources tab.
Our webmaster is Rachel Isaacson. Beth Bridgman and Rick Livingston serve as our scholars.
This podcast is brought to you by the Arthur Morgan Institute For Community Solutions, Agraria Center for Regenerative Practice, and by a grant from the Ohio Humanities.
I’m Renee Wilde, and you’ve been listening to Grounded Hope.
Agraria Farm at Sunset