5 Great Acorn Articles! - NatureOutside

Acorns are magical!

Every autumn they rain from the trees, providing us with nutritious food and even toys!

I want to share five articles with you about foraging, processing, and using acorns in recipes. There is even an article on making your acorns into spinning tops! These should help you get started if you would like to learn more about using acorns.

Why You Should Gather Acorns

Acorns remind us of nature’s bounty. Each year at this time nutritious food literally falls from the trees. Wherever they are found acorns were used by indigenous peoples for food. Acorns possess a rare combination of nutrients and chemical preservatives. These made them an ideal staple to sustain native peoples through winter.

We can celebrate human ingenuity. How did ancient man learn to leach the bitter tannic acids to process acorns into food? When we replicate their methods, it forces us to ponder the intelligence and enterprising spirit of our ancestors.

Acorns link us to the Earth. The process of selecting, gathering, processing, and cooking acorns connects us to our environment in a way that is missing from modern life. We experience the heightened sensitivity and focus of the gatherer. We gain the satisfaction of producing food from nature and our own ingenuity. But most importantly, we begin to understand what it is like to depend on nature for our next meal.