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Forage Garlic Mustard for your good health and for the environment

May 27, 2021
photo of garlic mustard from https://www.baycounty-mi.gov/

Image: Garlic Mustard. Source: Bay County, Michigan website

June 2021, Christine Muller

Eating a wide variety of food provides the body with different vitamins and valuable trace elements. So, adding some wild edible plants to your diet can contribute much to your good health! They are nutritionally denser than cultivated food varieties, so you get more nutrition with each bite.

Let’s focus on one plant – Garlic Mustard. Its leaves “just prior to flowering have higher vitamin C content than oranges and more vitamin A than spinach.”* You can chop up Garlic Mustard leaves and flowers and add them to any salad, or stir-fry them with other vegetables. They will add a delicious mild garlic-mustard flavor to your dishes.

That’s not the whole story, though. In addition to the fact that the plants are healthy and free, there is an even more important benefit when eating Garlic Mustard: In North America, it is an extremely invasive species and displaces native vegetation. We can help reduce its spread by pulling it out by its roots—which is easy to do—and eating it. Bon appétit!


For more information about Garlic Mustard, visit this Rural Sprout website page. For tips about safe and responsible foraging, I recommend this Rural Sprout article: 25 Edible Wild Plants To Forage For In Early Spring.

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Christine Muller, Teacher of Music and the Environment

Board Secretary, International Environment Forum

I was interested in environmental issues already at a young age and became a Bahá’í when I was 17, which was the beginning of a life-long study of the Bahá’í Faith. As the environmental crisis was worsening, I began to systematically study climate change at a time when not much information was easily available. I also searched the Bahá’í teachings for a spiritual solution to the climate crisis. At that time, climate change was not known to most people and there were no educational materials available. That’s why I wrote Scientific and Spiritual Dimensions of Climate Change – an Interfaith Study Course, which the International Environment Forum posted in 2009. I joined the Wilmette Institute as support faculty for its Sustainable Development course in 2011 and created its Climate Change course the following year. I also teach a course on climate change for the Environmental Sciences Department of the Baha’i Institute of Higher Education (BIHE) in Iran. I have served on the board of RI Interfaith Power&Light for more than a decade. In recent years, much of my time is spent serving the Bahá’í-inspired International Environment Forum (iefworld.org) as its secretary.  My formal academic background is in music, and I enjoy part-time piano teaching, playing and - when there is time - composing music. A recent composition is Humans on Earth – a Ballad of Our Time for two singers, string orchestra, piano, and percussion. Its lyrics include quotations from scientific sources and the Bahá’í Writings. Christine’s articles on BahaiTeachings.orgSee Faculty Bio

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