Shufer, who is all of five feet, has a childlike quality I find hard to pin down. She prefers T-shirts, she wears no makeup, and her dark hair is almost certainly its natural color. Although she is widely known and respected in her field, sometimes asked to be keynote speaker at wild-foods gatherings, she shows little interest in celebrity. She has never published a guide to edible plants, for example, the normal route to prominence in her field. “I just figured there were plenty of ’em already,” she says with a shrug. “Besides, every time I’ve tried to do something with the idea of making money it’s been a disaster. But if I just do what I love—which is being outside, working with plants, teaching—the money takes care of itself.” On the other hand, she’s a natural networker and people person, constantly calling friends and meeting potential business partners. She does a lot of contract work for the Virginia State Parks, such as the workshop where I met her. “Anytime people are scared, my courses fill up faster. I had a big jump after 9/11. Terrorism, a bad economy, global warming, high gas prices—all that tends to make people want to know how to survive if they couldn’t get to the store.”

She shows me the tools of wild-food storage and preparation. A Foley Food Mill to pulp fruits and berries. A Reed’s Rocket Model 816 nutcracker sitting among bowls of pecans, walnuts, and acorns. An Excalibur food dehydrator. I ask about canning. “I did all the canning I needed to growing up,” she says. “Now I either freeze it or dehydrate it.” Although she was unaware of it at the time, her childhood was superb vocational training. As she puts it, “My whole upbringing was a survival course.” Her father farmed ten acres of tobacco and ninety more of livestock and crops for the animals and the family near Leitchfeild, Kentucky. Two parents and eight children lived in the four-room shack. There was one woodstove to cook on, and running water from a well that often ran dry in summer, in which case they carried water from the creek.

“We didn’t know we were poor,” she insists. “We lived like our neighbors did.” Her parents kept flour, sugar, meat, and coffee on hand, but that was about it. Nobody bought nuts or fruit from a store in those days, she says. “You either planted and grew them yourself or got them from the woods. If you wanted something special, you had to find it.”

Shufer worked in the kitchen, as her sisters did, and says this is where she learned to trust her cooking instincts. “The big thing is to be comfortable in the kitchen,” she says. “I may not know what to call something until it’s about to go on the table. But I’m comfortable, so it always turns out all right.”

Into the Woods
We head outside to gather plants to make a wild dinner. Right past her pecan trees we find burdock, a common weed, with a root both nourishing and popular among herbalists as a cure for ailments ranging from liver disease to eczema. We harvest some for a soup, but even in this sandy soil it’s a struggle. The root is long and tapering, and only the last 40 percent is considered the best tasting. There’s also groundnut here, a threadlike vine with a string of starchy little tubers along its roots. We pick purslane and oxeye daisy greens for a salad, and the tips of common greenbrier vines. The yard is littered with plastic baby pools. “I used to buy really expensive pots until I discovered these were perfect for growing wetland plants.”

Over on the low ground by the creek that runs through the farm, Shufer shows me jewelweed, which she says is wonderful on poison ivy. “I pulp it up in a food processor, freeze it in an ice tray, and just rub some on the rash,” she says. We’re standing thigh deep in weeds, looking for more things to put in our mostly wild supper. She spots ground bean, a skinny vine that resembles groundnut, except it produces beans similar to lentils. They’re a lot of work to harvest, however, and it seems as if we’re spending more calories finding and digging than we’ll take in by eating them. Shufer says she read that the Native Americans’ preferred method of harvesting ground bean was to raid a mouse’s cache of them, leaving a token amount of corn as payment. I tell her that sounds absolutely awful. She shrugs and goes back to foraging. At a certain moment, she cautions me to make more noise. “Snakes,” she says by way of explanation. I ask what kinds of snakes she has in her yard. “Well, could be copperheads, canebrake rattlers, or cottonmouth moccasins,” she says. “We’ve got all three kinds.” I pretty much stop foraging after this.

Dinner starts with an appetizer of young kudzu leaves battered in flour and fried. It’s not bad. On the other hand, you can batter-fry anything short of a cinder block and it will taste pretty good. We follow that up with a soup made of ground bean, groundnut, burdock, wild carrot, stinging nettle, and field garlic. It’s not terribly interesting and needs a lot of Shufer’s homemade ramp-infused salt. She pours glasses of her ginger elixir (the one mixed with the applejack brandy). It’s quite tasty, and I’m soon on my third. Our main course is a salad of purslane, upland cress, and some very potent sea rocket, which grows along the beach just a few miles east. It seems at first like a pretty thin meal, but I notice that I feel surprisingly full and mention it to her. “Yep, that surprises a lot of people,” she says. “People worry that they’re not getting enough nutrients or the right ones from foraged foods. The truth is, you’re getting much more nutrition out of less food. It’s fresher, and it hasn’t been stressed by chemical fertilizers and junk.” I’m agreeing to one more glass of ginger elixir, perhaps even buying into the more charming aspects of foraging, and enjoying my wild meal, when my legs suddenly start to itch ferociously. I’m on fire with itching and the irresistible urge to scratch. “Oh, it’s the chiggers,” she says sympathetically. “You’re gonna be itching for a week. Go wash off right now in the shower. Use a washcloth and go at ’em hard. I should have had you wash with my pine tar soap. It’s all I use now. Nothing bites me anymore: ticks, mosquitoes, or chiggers. Don’t ask me why, but it works.”