Apart from pine nuts, are any other part of the pine tree edible?

neelie_447

"The soft, moist, white inner bark (cambium) found clinging to the woody outer bark is edible and very high in vitamins A and C. It can be eaten raw in slices as a snack or dried and ground up into a powder for use as a thickener in stews, soups, and other foods. A tea made by steeping young, green pine needles in boiling water (known as "tallstrunt" in Sweden) is high in vitamins A and C as well." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine#Food_uses Mar 19 08, 5:27 PM

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"Tallstrunt" is also the Swedish name for a beer and a liquor. The Swedes also make (or used to make) soup, vinegar and etherical oils seasoned with pine needles. http://g3.spraakdata.gu.se/saob/show.phtml?filenr=2/43/76442.html The etherical oils are rather made from the pine sprouts, not the needles. http://g3.spraakdata.gu.se/saob/show.phtml?filenr=2/43/76442.html There is also a spruce beer, which was made by Swedish emigrants to the USA. http://www.bruzelius.info/nautica/Medicine/Tallstrunt.html Obviously, both the needles, the shoots and the bark could be used for soup and other edibles, as the Indians knew. It is very rich in C vitamins. Quote: In 1535, the french explorer Jacques Cartier and his men were in desperate condition after a particularly severe winter in Newfoundland. Already 25 lay dead and not one of the remaining survivors was not suffering from the ravages of Scurvy. Fortunately for history a group of local indians took pity on them, and told Cartier that their medicine man had the perfect cure. Shoving their prejudices aside, they went to the medicine man. The miracle brew of this wise man was so simple that Cartier and his men nearly rejected it at first. Without any hocus pocus, the medicine man simply plucked a hand full of pine needles from a nearby tree and boiled them in a pot for a few minutes. Then he gave each one a cup of "soup". Although skeptical, they did as they were told and the soup transformed their health in a matter of 6 days. This is recorded because they lived to tell the tale. Pine needles contain 5 times the vitamin C found in lemons. http://www.textfiles.com/survival/pinesoup.txt Mar 20 08, 4:58 AM

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Note also this, quote: Pine needles have been used to produce abortions in many societies, for a long time. Dioscorides and Pliny the Elder, physicians writing almost 2,000 years ago, both reported that snow on Ponderosa pine consumption of pine needles caused abortion. American Indians, including the Arapaho, independently acquired and used the same knowledge. During harsh circumstances, a pregnancy had a low probability of producing a healthy child and it endangered the life of the mother; a tea of ponderosa needles was used to produce an abortion. http://asthecrowflies.org/category/wild-edibles/ Here is a recipe of spruce beer. I suppose you could do the same with pine. Take four ounces of hops, let them boil half an hour in one gallon of water, strain the hop water then add sixteen gallons of warm water, two gallons of molasses, eight ounces of essence of spruce, dissolved in one quart of water, put it in a clean cask, then shake it well together, add half a pint of emptins, then let it stand and work one week, if very warm weather less time will do, when it is drawn off to bottle, add one spoonful of molasses to every bottle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spruce_beer Mar 20 08, 5:20 AM