Are Cattail Plants Edible?

Cattails are aquatic plants native to the northern hemisphere, where they can be seen growing in ditches and alongside lakes and marshy areas. They have brown cigar-shaped heads, tall stalks, and sometimes release massive amounts of pollen into the air. Many outdoor enthusiasts have wandered past them without realizing that cattail plants are wild edibles. In fact, they have a wide range of edible parts.

Are Cattail Plants Edible?

Yes, cattails have many edible parts, including pollen, shoots and stalks, green flowers (female flowers), and cattail roots. Hikers will find these wild edibles are an opportunity to get creative since they have so many different parts and ways these starchy plants can be prepared.

Each plant has both male flowers and female flowers. The male flowers release yellow pollen for about a week in the early spring. This fluff will be everywhere. You can simply bend the cattail flowers into a jar and give them a little shake in order to collect the edible pollen. It will keep for a long time, so many people use it as a replacement for wheat flour in recipes throughout the year.

The female flowers will be green in the spring. You can find the green flower stalks hidden inside the outer leaves. Harvest them, bring them home, and cook them the way you would cook corn on the cob.

The shoots and stalks can be eaten raw. Some people pull them up and eat them while they’re hiking on the trail. Others harvest this part of the cattail plant to bring home and roast them up. You can use them in recipes where you would use asparagus.

Cattail roots can be eaten like potatoes. They are a heavily starchy food. Many like to peel off the outer layers, clean them, and then boil or fry them the way you would cook potatoes.

Alternatively, cattail roots have been dried out and processed into flour that can be used as a replacement for wheat flour.

Why Cattails Are Often Known As The Survival Plant

There are a few reasons that Cattails have gained a reputation as excellent survival food. For one thing, you can eat a lot of different parts of the plant, as explained above. For another thing, in a true survival situation, finding cattails means you’ve found a water source. These wetland plants grow in marshy areas, so you should not be at risk of dehydration if you’ve found them.

Another reason cattails gained this reputation came about in WWII. The United States military was considering what to feed the troops. They soon learned that cattails produce a lot of starch. In fact, there is more starch in an acre of cattails than an acre of potatoes. The government was looking at options for feeding the troops using cattails, though the plan didn’t get put into action before the war ended.

Can Eating Wild Cattails Be Dangerous?

There are dangers any time you eat wild plants. The biggest danger is that you believe you are eating an edible plant when in actuality, you’ve incorrectly identified it. As a rule, you always want to use two trusted sources when identifying any wild foods. That being said, cattails are not as hard to identify as many wild plants, like berries. A mature cattail doesn’t look like any other plant. It looks a lot like a cat’s tail growing out of the ground. They are tall stalks with a brown oval flower head and they grow to be between five and ten feet tall.

While mature cattails are hard to mistake once you know them, young cattail shoots are a different story. Without the cigar-like brown flower on top, young cattails aren’t easy to recognize. These native weeds of North America look like a number of different plants when they’re young. While most of the similar plants are harmless, two kinds of Iris are poisonous look-alikes for the young shoots.

One of the best ways to be sure you’re looking at cattails is to look at last year’s growth around the new shoots. It’s also noteworthy that cattails, even the new shoots, just smell like earth. You can break apart the cattail and give it a sniff, and you should only find the scent of mud for your trouble.

Poisonous look-alikes are a serious danger. The other danger to keep in mind is that cattails clean the water they’re in, which means they can absorb pollutants. For this reason, you never want to harvest cattails from a roadside or from a polluted water source. Know where you’re foraging and what the environment is like.

When To Find Edible Cattails

Depending on what part of the cattail plant you want to eat, you could arguably eat cattails all year round. Cattail rhizomes (another name for the thick white cattail roots) are edible and could be eaten at any time of year. It’s important to note that they may not be particularly tasty in the heart of winter if you live somewhere very cold where the ground has iced over, and the plants have dried out in the snow, but technically, they would still be an option in a survival situation.

The ideal time to eat most of the edible parts of the cattail plant are from early spring through early fall, in most areas. Since cattails grow in so many places, there may be regions or seasons where cattails don’t hit their stride until late spring or cattail pollen stops being an edible option much sooner, but it’s fair to say that the summer months are when you’ll find your best luck.

Native Cattails Are Less Common

Cattails are one of the plants in North America that are actually native to the land; however, most of the cattails we see are not the native ones. Typha Gracilis, the native cattail, is being replaced by two different hybridized cousins: Typha Angusitfolia and Typha Gracilis. Outdoor enthusiasts in the southern United States are most likely to be seeing Typha Domingensis, the southern cattail. Typha Latifolia is known as the Common Cattail and is the one people will see most often, since it grows in more shallow waters, while Typha Angustifolia likes to take root in deep waters. These specific kinds are similar enough that people won’t notice the differences for the most part, and they’re all edible.

Native American Uses For Cattails

Many parts of Cattails have proven to be edible and useful. Native Americans were well aware of this. As mentioned above, these plants absorb toxins in the water. Native Americans realized this and used these plants for water filtration. They also used these plants for cooking, basket weaving, and used them as tinder for starting fires.

Are Cattails Flammable?

Generally, most people wouldn’t think to light aquatic plants on fire, so it may come as a surprise that one of the many uses for cattails is as a candle. If you dip the brown head of the plant into some gas and then light it on fire, the cattail will burn for several hours. Like any time you are mixing gasoline and fire, this should be done very carefully.

Do Cattails Have Medicinal Uses?

If you have pulled a cattail out of the ground and taken apart the inner core, you may notice that there is a slime between the leaves. The slime is clear and looks like something you might want to just clean off the plant, but is actually where its medicinal history comes from. The slime is a natural antiseptic, meaning it can help clean a wound, and a topical anesthetic, meaning it helps relieve pain. It has been popularly used to help with bug bites and sunburns.

Cattails Are A Surprisingly Edible Plant That Gives Life All Year Round

Foragers have been finding exciting new uses for cattails for generations. While basket weaving isn’t as popular today as it once was, today, people online are sharing their recipes for cattail pasta, bread, stir fry, and more. As a food source that is plentiful and in little danger of extinction, it seems likely that people will find more uses for them in the years to come.