Purslane

Henry David Thoreau gathered purslane in a cornfield. He boiled and salted it and called it “a satisfactory dinner.” When writing about the plant in Walden, he made sure to include its Latin name — Portulaca oleracea — “on account of the savoriness of the trivial name.” By trivial name, I assume he’s referring to purslane’s common names: “little hogweed” and “pigweed.” Perhaps he found the Latin nomenclature more appetizing?

“I learned from my two years’ experience,” Thoreau went on to write, “that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food, even in this latitude, that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength.”

I eat purslane’s succulent, green leaves raw with olive oil, lemon and also a dash of salt. Often while working in the vegetable garden, I snip off a piece and eat it there. The leaves, stems, tiny yellow flowers and seeds are edible and the herb can be eaten in many ways, such as as a garnish on sandwiches, stir-fried, pickled, braised, as a pesto or in soups (the plant contains a thickening agent). I could make satisfactory meals all summer as it grows wild in my flower and vegetable gardens and in the pavement at the edge of the driveway. I saw it last August in front of a local pharmacy. 

Yet I daresay most people don’t even notice it—and if they do, they think it a weed and yank it out. I bet they don’t know its name. And that’s a shame because purslane is a gift from nature, free of charge, and incredibly healthy. 

“A superfood,” said Calyx Liddick, an ethnobotanist at the Northern Appalachian School in Harrisburg. She has purslane in her patio and the cracks of her city sidewalks.

One of the distinguishing features of this ancient plant is that it is exceptionally high in omega 3 fatty acids — some sources say the highest amount of any vegetable and five times the amount in spinach. It contains vitamins such as A, C, and E and small amounts of B vitamins, Liddick said, which most plants do not. It has minerals including potassium, magnesium, calcium and iron, and is high in antioxidants such as beta-carotene, glutathione, melatonin and betalain.

“It is a good example of the overlap of food and medicine,” Liddick said. “The line between food and medicine is often blurred, and purslane feels like a food that can be used as a medicine.” 

And lest you think only foragers and ethnobotanists rave about purslane, read what our National Institutes of Health (NIH) says about the plant: “The antioxidant content and nutritional value of purslane are important for human consumption. It revealed tremendous nutritional potential and has indicated the potential use of this herb for the future.”

The plant is used to treat insect bites, wounds and bleeding, digestive disorders such as gastric ulcers, and modulates inflammation, Liddick said. It has been studied as an anti-cancer agent and to reduce heart disease. The Chinese treat diabetes with purslane and call it “a vegetable for long life.” Native Americans use it to treat earaches and worms, among other remedies. It’s commonly eaten in France, where it has the alliterative name of poupier potager. 

In Mexico, the herb is called verdolagas, and has been used in traditional cooking for many years. The Tarahumara tribe grind the seeds into flour. I told my Spanish teacher, who is Mexican, about the abundance of it growing in my vegetable garden and she was thrilled. I gave her a basketful and she made me a delicious stew: Puerco en salsa verde con verdolagas. (Purslane in green sauce with pork, but she substituted chicken.)

No one seems to know exactly where purslane originated — guesses include North Africa, Asia, and South America — but the plant now grows around the world in a wide range of soil. A hardy plant, it can withstand drought and even some pollution; it reproduces from broken stems and by thousands of tiny black seeds.

Liddick ranked purslane high on a list of the healthiest wild edible plants, along with stinging nettles and lamb’s quarters. “It’s underrated because people think it is just a weed,” she said, “but it is almost like taking a daily vitamin.” 

She loves wild foods because they are more nutritionally dense than what we can get at the grocery store, even if we are buying top quality produce, she said. And in gardens, people pull out wild plants only to replace them with less-dense nutrient versions. “They pull out lamb’s quarters to plant its cousin, domesticated spinach. That pales in comparison. If we know how to manage edible weeds, we can leave them and have more food.”

I managed the herb, which grew abundantly in my vegetable garden last summer, not only by eating it, but by leaving it as a ground cover. Why pull it out? Purslane grew underneath a trellis where I grew climbing baby butternut squash and beneath my tomato plants. I left it as living mulch.

“We need an awareness and a cultural shift,” Liddick said. “There are all these little plants that we ignore. Why? Because you can’t find them in the grocery store. But you can find them in your yard!” Of course, you have to know how to identify them, she said, but this is a skill that anyone can learn.

Purslane’s main contraindication, Liddick said, is that it is high in oxalic acid, as are rhubarb and spinach. That might give you a stomachache or encourage kidney stones if you eat it in large quantities, so be careful if you are prone to that, she said. 

Purslane also can be confused with spotted spurge, which is toxic. The plants resemble each other somewhat and often grow in the same place. Spurge, however, has a flat, non-succulent leaf and emits a milky substance if a stem is broken. Spurge also has hairy leaves; purslane does not. Purslane’s flowers are yellow and spurge’s pink. 

So stop for a minute. Take a look at the ground for a mounding plant, with fleshy, cactus-like leaves and reddish tendrils that sprawl in all directions. I suspect that once you identify purslane, you’ll see it everywhere. Cut off a stem and have a bite. Experiment a little. Try it with mozzarella and tomato, in a Turkish soup or a version of Argentine chimichurri.

Who said there’s no free lunch?