North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Donna &/or Kieran" <holycow@cookeville.com>]

I don't remember how to spell it, but there is an old book called Sturvesants I think that endeavored to list all the known food plants back about 1900.  There was a more recent book, Tanaka I think was the guy's name, something like edible plants of the world.  A person could go through and count only the fruits.  If you ask for these on Google, it should give you spelling corrections or suggestions.  Or go through a botany book, counting every genus you know has edible fruiting plants in it, then count the edible species in each of those.  The trouble is that there are temperate, tropical, and subtropical plants to consider, and most of us on this list know nothing about tropical fruits.  Also there are marginally edible plants.  Reminds me of the person doing research on some island in the Pacific, the natives distinguished between the foods they normally ate, and the foods they ate after a typhoon had wiped out the coconut etc crop, till their trees and bushes were producing again.  THEN they had another category, what you eat after a REALLY big typhoon, and for that information they took him to talk with a wizened little old lady who'd been alive when a monster typhoon hit in 1906, and the old people of her time had shown everyone else what to eat and how to prepare it.     Donna