A little-known foraging secret is that you can find wild quinoa right here in the United States!

Common names of this awesome edible include goosefoot, lambs quarters, and pigweed, sometimes even fat hen. It’s Latin name is Chenopodium album is in the same Family and Genus as the quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) you can buy at your grocery store and it’s one of the earliest grains. You can harvest it and use it just like you would quinoa.

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Identification

Description: Can grow to up to 1 meter tall.

Habitat: Waste areas, farms, gardens.

Leaves: Lanceolate to triangular leaves with teeth, smooth. eaves are alternate and irregularly toothed. New leaves have a strange grayish coating.

Flowers: Tiny, green flowers on spikes blooming between June to September.

Common Look-Alikes: There are many look-alikes, such as amaranth (Amaranthus retroflexus), oak-leaved goosefoot (chenopodium glaucum), (Atriplex prostrata), spear saltbus (Atriplex patula), and others can be confused with goosefoot.

Harvesting

The main thing you’ll want to keep in mind when harvesting is that the chaff takes up the majority of the seed. Many foragers just leave the chaff in as it only adds extra fiber to your diet (and most of us need more fiber, not less), however, Samuel Thayer from Forager’s Harvest recommends removing it. He believes you can eat as much of the seeds with the chaff as you want and still starve.

Regardless, you can separate the chaff by rubbing the seeds in your hands and separating the chaff out. This may sound daunting, but grains are great to have in a survival situation and you should be able to get 3 cups of finished grain in and hour, which is a lot better than some plants such as dock.

You’ll want to wash the grain just like you would quinoa since it also contains a mild pesticide in the form of saponins. And that’s it! You’re good to go try out wild quinoa!

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