Friday, 8:00 AM. 58 degrees, wind W, very light. The channel is mostly wrinkled, and the sky is overcast. We received .2 “ of rain last night and the barometer predicts more.
I have been collecting and shelling more beach peas for the Condominium project and I am fascinated by their similarities to garden peas in characteristics of the flowers, the pod and how it opens, and how the peas resemble garden peas although smaller. They even taste like garden peas, although more mealy.
According to Moerman’s Native American Ethnobotany, the beach pea, Lathyrus japonica, was used by several tribes for food or medicine. Although the Inuit considered them poisonous, the Iroquois used the stalks for food and to treat rheumatism, and the Mokah (Pacific Northwest) ate the immature seeds as peas. There is no reference to use by our local Ojibwa.
The garden pea, Pisum sativa, has been cultivated in Europe for thousands of years, and probably collected for food long before written history.
The common view of prehistoric or stone-age man as a lesser being than modern, technological man ignores the fact that virtually all our foodstuffs and until very recently all our medicines were derived from the curiosity, industry and experimentation of early, non-technological humans and their cultures. All progress is evolutionary, and we owe great debts to our prehistoric ancestors who developed and used sophisticated survival knowledge.
There are few modern people who could survive in the wild for more than a few days without their technology, and most of us do not even know how our technology actually works, or would be able to produce any of it.
So here’s to the first naked, hungry human who ate a pea! As the bumper sticker says, "Visualize World Peas!”
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