Wild Cabbage

A guest post from Continuing Studies facilitator, Abe Lloyd.

The name Skunk Cabbage (Lysichiton americanus) will never conjure up epicurean images of greatness but given my recent experiments with the young leaf stalks, I am encouraged enough to emphasize the vegetable epithet and leave out the “skunk.” Throughout our region, the young leaves are just emerging out of saturated soils, standing water, and slow moving streams. Within the next couple weeks, their yellow spathes will unfurl and add color to the wetlands.

I have been curious about the edibility of this plant ever since 1994 when my friend Owen fed me some Skunk Cabbage roots that badly burned my tongue and left me with sores for a week. I learned the hard way that raw Skunk Cabbage is NOT edible. However, Erna Gunther wrote in "Ethnobotany of Western WA" that the Skokomish steamed and ate the young leaves and the Quinault roasted the white part of the [leaf] stalks. The Quileute and Chinook also ate the roots (although I am inclined to believe that the white leaf stalks, which extend through the soil for several inches, may have been mistaken by ethnographers for the roots).

 
Using my hands to scoop away the soft wet muck around the young rosettes of Skunk Cabbage leaves, I was able to follow the emerging shoots 4-6 inches down to the root crown. The shoots that I dug up ranged from about ½ inch to 1 ½ inches in diameter and were as white as a leak stalk.

The roots (bottom) don't look nearly as good as the leaf stalks

I have experimented with both steaming and boiling the leaf stalks and found that boiling does a better job of rendering the stalks harmless. All parts of Skunk Cabbage contain crystals of calcium oxalate called raphide that painfully embed in mucous tissues. Boiling cannot destroy raphides but it may fix the crystals into a starch matrix that prevent the sharp points from damaging our soft tissues. Leslie Haskin wrote in her 1934 publication, “Wild Flowers of the Pacific,” that Native Americans in Western Washington cooked Skunk Cabbage roots with hemlock cambium and it is interesting to speculate if the starchy cambium provided additional substrate for binding raphides. Another matter of speculation is that raphides are most concentrated in the perennial roots and least concentrated in the new leaf growth, which may explain why the young leaf shoots were traditionally eaten. After boiling for about ½ hour in two changes of water, I only noticed a slight tingle on the sides of my tongue. The leaves have a mild flavor and substantial quality that is very similar to cabbage.

While I am still too inexperienced with this plant to give it my full endorsement, I am posting this account with the hope that other people who have eaten our western Skunk Cabbage (which is different from the Easter Skunk Cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus) will share their impressions with me. If you are curious about experimenting with this plant, BE SURE TO COOK IT, only use the leaf stalks, and try a very small serving to see how you react to it before mixing it with other foods.

Chopped and ready to boil

 

Warning: In some parts of the continent, the deadly poisonous False Green Hellebore (Veratrum viride) also goes by the common name Skunk Cabbage. All parts of this plant are poisonous both raw and cooked.

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Abe Lloyd has a passion for plants and indigenous foods that traces back deep into his childhood. He holds a Master’s Degree in Ethnoecology from University of Victoria and now works as the director of Salal, the Cascadian Food Institute. He is a professor of natural history at Western Washington University, ethnobotany at Whatcom Community College, and instructs courses related to wild foods at RRU. Abe actively researches, promotes, and eats the indigenous foods of this bountiful bioregion. arcadianabe.blogspot.ca   

Join him next month for Wild Edible Foods of Southern Vancouver Island, April 25 and 26. You too might discover the secrets of Skunk Cabbage.

Find out more at cstudies.royalroads.ca.

Business Technology Certificate produces results

A guest post from our facilitator Dan Doherty.

 

When it comes to using office productivity software do find yourself doing something and think, there must be a faster way, but you haven’t the time or the knowledge to find it? Guided by the vision of instructor David Sudbury, Continuing Studies restructured its suite of MS-Office courses over the last few years from conventional feature-based courses to a comprehensive line-up of learning-centred application and procedural modules that facilitate development of knowledge, skills and values related to how to use software, and equally as important…how to learn software. This was done in response to labour market demand and through funding with Employment Skills Access (ESA), this became the Business Technology Certificate (BTC). Through this program learners “confidently use computer-based technology to perform business front-line and administration tasks.”

The secret sauce has two primary ingredients: 1) a facilitated community cohort model and 2) a focus on self-managed learning. People enter this program with a wide range of background skills and knowledge about computers, from neophytes to skilled users, for whom the technology has evolved greatly since their last use of it. Learners take responsibility for catching up on the basics or on forging out into advanced concepts, whichever meets their needs.

The program starts with a week in the classroom, where participants get to know each other’s strengths and learning needs. Once in the lab, the well-formed learning community serves as a base for advocacy and resource sharing, while instructor-led modules, learning plans, online modules and self-assessment provide the content and process structure. The two most recent cohorts were facilitated by two people passionate about learning and office productivity tools, Dan Doherty and Sabrina Shea.

A work shadow day is organized for the 6^th week. This is where the truth about their learning is revealed. Participants are assigned to an office team at RRU or in a best fit situation in the community, to observe the use of computers in daily work tasks, or to pitch in and help with something that requires knowledge of MS-Office. The general level of knowledge about MS-Office features is either narrowly focused or shallow, so BTC participants find they can offer practical assistance to the team they are embedded with. They are often surprised to find that their new learning is the solution to a sticky problem that an employee has been struggling with or working around.

These students demonstrate a high-caliber of application during their final presentations. They employ the suite of MS-Office tools at a level not achieved by many professional users, such as PowerPoint slides with dynamic visual design, embedded audio and video, and integrated links to applications where they show how they produce results in each of the MS-Office programs, then seamlessly return to the slideshow. With skills like these they are ready to work, and make an immediate contribution to their team.

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Find out more about the Business Technology Certificate.

Visit us at cstudies.royalroads.ca.

 

Ever heard of the Neuroethics of Mindfulness? Me neither!

A guest post from Continuing Studies' Learning and Development Consultant, Tracey Peever.

 

What do you get when you cross a neuroscientist and leadership educator with a lifelong Buddhist meditator? There’s no punchline, just potency, and I found out first-hand when I spent a February weekend in the good company of Paul Mohapel and Peter Kedge, in their co-facilitated Continuing Studies course, Neuroethics of Mindfulness.

Tracey Peever

Offered both à la carte and as part of the Applied Mindfulness Meditation Certificate between RRU Continuing Studies and the Factor-Inwentash School of Social Work at the University of Toronto, this two-day weekend course attracted all sorts of diverse seekers, from athletic performance coaches and committed meditators to primary school teachers and human resources professionals. We all came together to explore the practice of mindfulness and the ethics that guide our pursuit of a more peaceful self and world.

Meditation is simple, but not easy. Just like peace is simple, but not easy. The brain, however, is complex.  Dr. Paul Mohapel did a masterful job of simplifying the complexity of the human brain’s three-phases of evolution and explaining “the brain on fear” and “the brain on mindfulness”. Together, Paul and Peter enjoined the scientific understanding of the brain with what Buddhists and meditators have known for centuries about our human potential. With regular practice of meditation and mindfulness we can boost our capacity to be high-functioning and skillful with our words and actions, and in turn become better able to mitigate the habitual effects of fear and anxiety, to carve well-honed grooves of peace and wellbeing into the plasticity of the brain instead.

The ethical explorations of this course were the highlights for me. To unite the brain science with our meditation practices, we worked with a 16-guideline framework “for a happy life” offered by the Dalai Lama, which outlines four principles in four key areas of being: internal self-reference, external reference with others, our personal actions and choices, and a universal or systemic relationship with our wider environment. While these guidelines and the practices used to explore them were inherently Buddhist, they are also universal human values, upheld as secular principles of good conduct and relationship. Examples of these 16 universal values include: humility, patience, respect, gratitude, service and generosity.

The guiding question that any ethical exploration is concerned with is “what is the most beneficial outcome for all?” Grounding these 16 principles for a happy life in a concern for all beings offers an accessible gateway to those hoping to bring the benefits of mindfulness to a diverse audience, including those who have an aversion to anything even mildly religious. 

I have struggled with finding an easy and secular way to explain the utility of mindfulness in the workplace, as my background is in “preaching to the choir”—that is teaching experienced practitioners of yoga and meditation. Since 2010 I have been an organizational development consultant and Integral Coach, helping organizations and leaders through times of rapid change, and through the process of creating a desirable future for themselves. My interest in the Neuroethics of Mindfulness course came from my curiosity for a different approach to offering mindfulness principles and practices to work teams and organizations, who have had no previous experience. This approach offered a new way into the practice from the common ground of values we can all uphold—simple, but not easy. 

Tracey Peever

Learning and Development Consultant

Visit us at cstudies.royalroads.ca.