I wouldn't be to worried about it. You'll be using it in small enough amounts that it would be fine. My favorite black berry spot is next to a road and Ive personally never been concerned.
It’s great but if you eat too much you might get the shits. I like making tiny popcorn out of it and putting it on fruit.
Since many food crops grow just beyond the right of way of highways, I'd assume that there's not going to be enough metal contamination to worry about. Depending on where it is, your risk of getting hit by a car is going to be vastly more than whatever danger the plant poses to you.
Well they don’t have to be an expert. Just a warm body. I used to do something similar with a friend of mine. Though we mostly caught rabbits we’d occasionally eat wild berries and on rarer occasions mushrooms. I always let him eat first to see if it was safe.
Most heavy metals involve a slow buildup of toxicity. Ingesting trace amounts of lead, cadmium or mercury isn't going to make you immediately ill like a viral or bacterial infection would, but it's something you ought to avoid for the long term.
I think plant foraging is p much fine. Exceptions are industrial/dumping.
40 years ago, a small cargo ship sank just off the coast of a town I used to work in. Every now and then, things would wash up on the beach. I remember shortly after it sank there was something like hundreds of pairs of shoes still in the boxes ending up on the shore. Course they were all waterlogged and ruined, so not worth wearing.
I've never eaten dryad's saddle before, I never really find them tender enough to eat, but I hadn't thought about just using them for stock.
Er what? I have a book on IDing common plants and fungi in my area. Almost all the fungi are either poisonous or inedible. I'd rather just raise known cultivars myself in a storage box in the garage than bother is possibly killing myself with what I think is X. That said, I eat forage from my own yard - dandelions, Oregon grapes, blackberries, salal, salmonberries, wild raspberries, elderberry, dead nettle. Chickens love to eat all these things too, so if I am not eating them, it is free food for them. There is also foraging by asking. My neighbors have a bunch of apple trees they don't give a fuck about. I asked them if I could have them and they said fuck yes, please take them. I also give them some stuff like fresh eggs from my coop and homemade wine (and cider (both hard and non-alcoholic from said apples, lol) and whatever overage I have from my garden.
