Issue 28 | October 2023

Halloween is my favorite time of year. Spooky season also brings us golden days and the last bounty of our gardens. Wild critters who go bump in the night — like bats, spiders, snakes and ravens — bring health to these gardens. Yet many of these wild species are endangered because of what people eat and how it’s grown — and nothing is spookier than extinction.

In my home, Halloween is the season for making plant medicines, like fire cider — an old folk concoction to build up immunity so you can ward off the evil spirits of colds and sniffles. If you want to make it yourself, try the Center’s easy, Earth-friendly recipe.

Historically, the pagan day of the dead known as Halloween comes from my own ancestors and the Celtic festival of Samhain, which marked the end of harvest season. In Shakespeare’s “Scottish play,” three witches cast a spell with that famous “double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble”:

Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

These wild ingredients were names for medicinal plants and herbs. Knowing that “eye of newt” is a common name for mustard seed, while “toe of frog” is a common name for buttercup, “wool of bat” for holly leaves, and “tongue of dog” for gypsyflower makes filling Shakespeare’s cauldron quite a bit easier.

But today we’re far removed from the days of celebrating herbal plant medicines. Growing food in the modern world has become a leading cause of biodiversity loss.

That’s why the Center works to protect wildlife threatened by cattle grazing (including Mexican garter snakes and gray wolves), pollution (including hellbenders) and pesticides (including California red-legged frogs and monarch butterflies).

And we’re fighting to protect bats (like eastern small-footed and northern long-eared bats), owls (like northern spotted owls), and black cats (like jaguars—OK, partly black) from threats like habitat loss. We’re not just fighting for wild animals but for wild plants too, like with our recent lawsuit to save ghost orchids.

Protecting wild plants and animals begins by acknowledging humans’ relationship with the land — ancestral and contemporary — and our kinship on a shared planet. Building a just and sustainable food system means changing destructive habits and establishing policies ensuring that wild critters like bats and wolves have a future, too.

Center staff take this to heart by growing Earth-friendly, organic food in our community gardens and even converting pavement to pollinator havens right at home. Check out photos of our fearless warriors for wildlife in their gardens — and the bounty of healthy and sustainable food they grow.

Community-building through sharing the food we grow — and the meals we whip up in our modern-day cauldrons — supports the principles of the Center’s Take Extinction Off Your Plate campaign. But to scale them up, connecting climate targets with food production in policies like the Dietary Guidelines for Americans is important. We’ll talk about that more in next month’s issue.

Until then, enjoy your autumn harvest, and don’t forget to have a wildlife-friendly Halloween.

Write to me anytime with questions at EarthFriendlyDiet@BiologicalDiversity.org. Would someone you know like this newsletter? Forward it! And share Food X on Facebook.

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Photo credits: sunflower via Canva; fire cider by Jennifer Molidor/Center for Biological Diversity; ghost orchid by Tony Pernas; smiling woman holding green garlic courtesy Lori Ann Burd/Center for Biological Diversity.

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Center for Biological Diversity
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Tucson, AZ 85702
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