(Euell Gibbons was one of the few people in this country t...)
Euell Gibbons was one of the few people in this country to devote a considerable part of his life to the adventure of “living off the land.” He sought out wild plants all over North America and made them into delicious dishes. His book includes recipes for vegetable and casserole dishes, breads, cakes, muffins and twenty different pies. He also shows how to make numerous jellies, jams, teas, and wines, and how to sweeten them with wild honey or homemade maple syrup.
Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop: Field Guide Edition
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For New condition books in our store; You will be the first user. You will be the first to open the book cover. For Used condition books in our store; It shows signs of wear from consistent use, but it remains in good condition and works perfectly. There are no problems in page content and in the paper. There are no problems except minor faults. All pages and cover are intact , but may have aesthetic issues such as price clipping, nicks, scratches, and scuffs. Pages may include some notes and highlighting. For all our books; Cargo will be delivered in the required time. 100% Satisfaction is Guaranteed!
(Here Euell Gibbons shows the reader how to enjoy the culi...)
Here Euell Gibbons shows the reader how to enjoy the culinary and medicinal virtues of herbs and wild plants. Drawn from the author's wide knowledge of plants as well as from the lore of native Americans and early settlers, the information is supplemented by nutritionists at Pennsylvania State University who worked with Gibbons on analysis of the entries.
Euell Theophilus Gibbons was an American author of best-selling books on natural foods.
Background
Gibbons was born on September 8, 1911 in Clarksville, Texas, one of four children of Laura Augusta Bowers and Ely Joseph Gibbons, a blacksmith, grocer, carpenter, and homesteader. Gibbons's mother was a Tennessee farm girl. His father, also raised in Clarksville, moved the family in 1922 to New Mexico's drought-ravaged Estancia Valley, where he traded the family automobile for livestock, farm tools, and a half-dugout home. When he failed at homesteading, his father left to look for work. Within a week the livestock died, and only pinto beans remained for food. With his mother and siblings close to starvation, Gibbons foraged for familiar edible wild weeds and kept the family alive on dandelion crowns, Russian thistle, wild garlic, lamb's-quarters, wild potatoes, and small game. Upon his father's return five weeks later, the family moved to Albuquerque.
Education
Gibbons's mother taught him to hunt, trap, and identify edible wild greens and fruits. With only a night school equivalency diploma, Gibbons enrolled as an anthropology and creative writing student at the University of Hawaii in 1947.
Career
At age fifteen, Gibbons left home and became a range hand in northern New Mexico for six years, regularly sending part of his salary home. It was during this period that he acquired knowledge of the ethnobotany of the semiagricultural Navajo Indians. He became a hobo when he was twenty-one, traveling on freight trains to California and then to Seattle. He foraged at the side of roads, ditches, and streams, eating weeds because he had no money for food. He got a job as a laborer for the Continental Can Company, and his social agitation continued after he was fired from it and obtained work at a federal work camp in San Luis Obispo, California. It was there that Gibbons fell in love with the sea and discovered the food-laden zone between high and low tides, which he later described in his book Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop (1964). Jailed for inciting labor unrest, Gibbons exchanged a suspended sentence for a promise to relocate. He went to Seattle. At the age of twenty-three, Gibbons enlisted in the army and worked as a boat builder and carpenter during his two-year tour of duty. He was honorably discharged in Seattle in 1936. He continued to work as a boat builder while also engaging in political activity. Gibbons left his family in Seattle in 1941 and began building boats for the navy in Hawaii during World War II. After watching medical ships take three days to unload wounded servicemen, he resigned his job and became a hospital worker. That job soon ended when he protested the rough treatment of patients. He continued to live in Hawaii as a beachcomber on Oahu, giving lavish foraged edible food luaus served on banana leaves, which he later described in Euell Gibbons's Beachcomber's Handbook (1967). In 1948 he was hired by the Honolulu Advertiser, for which he made up crossword puzzles in Hawaiian. In 1949 Gibbons became a Quaker, won custody of his two sons by his first wife, and moved to Maui. He taught crafts at the Maui Vocational School. In 1953, Gibbons and his family moved first to a Friends' community in New Jersey, then to Greenfield, Indiana, to cofound a cooperative community. After it failed, Gibbons moved to the Quaker study center cooperative at Pendle Hill, Wallingford, Pennsylvania. While his wife taught primary school, Gibbons did maintenance work and took courses. In 1960, they moved to Tanguy Homesteads, a cooperative community near Philadelphia. In 1961, he completed "Mr. Markel Retires, " a novel about a teacher who goes native. A literary agent advised him to revise it as nonfiction, relying heavily on his own experiences. Gibbons spent a year researching the journals of Lewis and Clark, George Vancouver, and Captain John Smith, reviewing Navajo ethnobotanies, and testing his foraged food recipes on his wife's students at Tanguy Homesteads. After adding his personal experiences and philosophical asides, he published his researches in his first book, Stalking the Wild Asparagus (1962), an instant best-seller. This success allowed Gibbons to move into a home in Troxelville, Pennsylvania, in 1963. He joined the Lewisburg Quakers, where his many contributions at meetings were variously considered to be "anarchistic" or full of an "amazing religious depth. " Gibbons published a new book almost every two years thereafter and became an editor and columnist for Organic Gardening and Farming. His other works include Stalking the Healthful Herbs (1966), Feast on a Diabetic Diet (coauthored with his brother Joseph Gibbons, 1969), Stalking the Good Life: My Love Affair with Nature (1971), and Stalking the Faraway Places (1973). Although he was financially secure from book sales and writing magazine columns, Gibbons made television advertisements endorsing General Foods cereals while providing video instruction about wild edible foods. On July 4, 1975, the Federal Trade Commission decided that Gibbons's television ads were dangerous for children because they did not explicitly acknowledge the danger of eating look-alike poisonous plants, and he was dropped as spokesman by General Foods. He was working with Gordon Tucker on an encyclopedia-manual of edible plants, when he died in Sunbury Community Hospital, Pennsylvania of a ruptured aortic aneurysm due to Marfan syndrome.
Achievements
Gibbons was a famous outdoorsman and proponent of eating wild foods during the 1960s.
In 1933, Gibbons went to his first Communist party hobo camp meeting in northern California and came to believe that only the Communists were interested in the starving homeless. Even after getting a job as a laborer for the Continental Can Company, Gibbons was active as a Communist party publicist and leaflet author. He protested Japanese haulage of American scrap metal because the metal was used for Japan's military buildup and formally assumed the post of Communist party district organizer. He resigned from the Communist party in 1939 after the Soviets attacked Finland.
Connections
Gibbons married Ann Swanson in 1936; they had two children. In 1946 he was divorced by his wife. In 1948 he met Freda Fryer, a divorced schoolteacher from Philadelphia. They were married in 1949.
