If Only We Could Eat Trees
You can! People have survived famines eating trees and their products thought by ordinary people to be inedible! Not only are they food, they can enhance your immune system!!!
“Tex, I am going to have to stop you there. Some of the crap that has come out of your mouth has been a bit of a stretch to believe but there is no way you could be telling us that trees constitute a healthy diet.”
No, I am going further than that. Much further this time. I am about to tell you why tree bark is a superfood that is scientifically proven to strengthen your immune system, reverse aging, make you look measurably younger, stop scurvy, increase testosterone in men and make women increase estrogen and collagen repair compounds. Tree diets can keep men, women and children alive in a famine.
Not tree bark exactly. Rather a layer beneath bark that is a thin supple conduit of nutrients from the inside of the tree to the outer bark. This special conductor of nutrition from the roots is known as cambium in “dendrology” - the study of trees and their physiology.
The cambium layer of many deciduous trees is edible, particularly during spring when it's most abundant. It's a thin layer of living tissue between the bark and wood - and can be a source of starch, sugar, and other nutrients including vitamin C . However, not all trees have edible cambium, and some are even toxic, so proper identification is crucial before consumption. The cambium is typically most edible during the spring when it's most abundant. It can be harvested even in the winter when necessary, however.
Cambium is the layer of tissue between the bark and the wood of a tree, where new cells are produced for growth. Many trees have edible cambium, including pine, birch, linden, elm, and willow. Cambium can provide carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, and fiber. Depending on the tree species this can vary widely but one common yield of all the trees safe for consumption is vitamin C to ward off scurvy - which can cause many fatalities in a famine long before people actually starve.
A big exception is fruit trees! They can produce potassium cyanide in their bark when they begin to flower to keep insect predators away. These trees can be lethally poisonous so it is never safe to try to get cambium from a fruit tree, even if it is not blooming! Stick to the wide variety of deciduous trees commonly found all over North America.
You can harvest cambium by removing strips of bark (outer bark) from the trunk and/or branches and then peeling off the inner cambium layer, best done with a big knife, a small hatchet or a machete. Stand back and take care you don’t cut yourself when harvesting this bark.
Always be 100% sure of your tree identification before eating any part of it, as some trees are poisonous. Avoid stripping a complete ring of bark from a tree, as this can kill it.
Cambium can be a valuable emergency food source in survival situations. It can literally be the difference between living and dying for people who otherwise have no other food to eat.
This food source has been called “famine noodles” in China and a young boy who survived on them grew up to found a company selling them as a health superfood which has made him a millionaire!
Excellent guide to harvesting, preparing and cooking cambium for human consumption :
Cambium harvested from pine trees any time year round is usually the most nutritious. Pine trees especially have complex compounds that enable them to fight off fungus, bacteria, insects and other varmints and it turns out almost all of them produce similar protection in people when consumed.
Assuming you have access to a safe kind of pine to get cambium from, there is a better way to get Vitamin C from it’s products by gathering up and preparing a tea from the needles around the base of the tree, outlined here by the same content producer :
You’re probably thinking that you’d have to drink a lot to catch up with a piece of citrus fruit. You’d be wrong! Pine needles have approximately 3 to 5 times more vitamin C than an orange!!!
In 1536, French explorer Jacques Cartier and his crew were cured of scurvy by drinking tea of pine needles and by eating bark given to them by the Iroquois after the crew suffered months of nutritional deprivation at sea. Jaqques is one of many explorers deep inland in North America whose life was saved from a horrible death by scurvy with a bit of pine tea. Lewis and Clark were near death when their Indian guide, a woman named “Sacagawea” prepared them a lovely cup of the tea when both men were prostrate on the ground, lacking even the strength to rise and running fevers. Within an hour of drinking some of the tea, both men were back sitting up and feeling much better. The following day the expedition was resumed.
While we’re assuming you have access to this pine tree during a famine, you may be able to prepare a feast from the tree’s products including the extremely nutritious pine nut.
Pine nuts are the seeds of certain species of pine trees, and they are safe for human consumption. Boiling them helps assure they are sterile and clean and can neutralize some of the alkaloids that cause allergy in susceptible people. You can eat them raw if necessary but preparing them by boiling them at least ten minutes makes them far more palatable.
Pine nuts are a good source of monounsaturated fats, vitamin E, and other nutrients. Vitamin E is a peculiar kind of deficiency if you catch it and unlike scurvy has weird symptoms you may not recognize until it is too late. So a natural source of Vitamins C & E is truly a double-winner in an environment scarce of other food!
Roasting can also make them taste pretty good. Pine nuts can be eaten raw or they can be roasted to enhance their flavor with a little browning.
Some people may experience a bitter or metallic taste in their mouth after eating pine nuts, a condition known as pine nut syndrome. These people or others with allergies to other nuts should not consume them but for most they are well tolerated.
Pine trees have remarkable antimicrobial properties, including antibiotic-like effects. Specifically, pine needles contain compounds like pinosylvin, which exhibit antibiotic activity. Additionally, essential oils extracted from pine needles have been shown to inhibit the growth of certain bacteria across a broad spectrum in people and in animals.
Pinosylvin, found in pine, has demonstrated antibiotic properties of great interest to drug companies. Studies have shown that these extracted oils have antimicrobial activity against various bacteria, including Staphylococcus aureus - a superbug which causes flesh-eating viral diseases that have no known cure amongst conventional medicines! Maybe a cup of pine tea will do you in many situations of ill-health!
This explains why pine sap, (or “resin”) has been used traditionally as a natural antiseptic and wound dressing due to its antibacterial properties for centuries by both the Indians and the settlers of the New World.
Pine tar oil, also derived from pine trees, has been investigated for its potential antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory properties. Some think it is better to apply to wounds as it adheres better and dries as a protective film over the wound to keep out contamination.
I hope this brief review illuminates this subject a little bit. This is only a superficial look at the nutritional, medicinal and health-promoting qualities found in tree bark, cambium and all their natural products including nuts, needles, acorns, sap and even oils.
The most important thing to take away from this article is the knowledge that when you are starving or very hungry, you are in the midst of plenty if you are in a forest that still has trees left growing in it. All you need is a knife or hatchet, a cup to boil in, some water and the ability to make fire. This knowledge could save your life and provide a bridge to a better diet when you can find it.
I imagine this to be inestimably useful information if you are on an emergency bugout somewhere maybe trying to reach a safe haven and you discover you are completely out of food. Rather than panicking, you tell the kids to sit tight … you know where a noodle shop is in the nearby woods. “I better hurry before my friend Mr. Won Ton Lee closes up, I am sure he will have a fresh batch for me.” You come back ten minutes later and hopefully have some interesting spices to add while you boil the noodles to gossamer silk before serving some up to everybody. Your children are none the wiser, calling the noodles a “little peanutty” and they do not go to bed hungry. Several days or even weeks later, you arrive at that sanctuary or cache that was your backup plan and discover your kids look fine, a bit thinner but a bit of a glow in their cheeks and not much worse for wear. That’s why this sort of knowledge is paramount in a very tight jam.
Here in the Journal of Ethnobiology below you will find an interesting review of 500+ years of hungry or sick people in North America and Scandinavia harvesting this inner bark of trees for nutrition and miracle healing from a variety of conditions.
Hosea 4:6 KJV
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.
Regards, Tex
A previous post here about the Purslane “weed” found growing everywhere.
Purslane, The Useless Indestructible Junk Weed
Once you find out the miraculous properties of Purslane, you will have trouble believing the stuff is real. Hardy, robust, ubiquitous and found all over.
THE MORINGA TREE is called the tree of life.I have grown moringa, leaves,bark roots, all are edible.More potassium in a handfull of Moringa leaves than a batch of bananas.
True.
The Russian Army used the sap from the interior of the pine trees, as you suggest, during World War II to build immunity, heal wounds, and as a health elixir.
It is still used in Siberia for the same purpose.