Wild Rice vs. Modern Grains: A Gut-Health Comparison
Wild rice is not rice at all. It is the seed of Zizania palustris, an aquatic grass with a protein and fiber structure that behaves in the gut like an…
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Mary Allen
27 posts
Mary Allen is a food educator and ancestral-food researcher with deep experience in Indigenous food traditions, traditional foodways, fermentation, foraging, and the connection between what we eat and our health & well-being. Her work explores how time-tested practices- from the Three Sisters tradition of corn, beans, and squash to wild-food foraging, seasonal eating, traditional preservation, and indigenous fermentation can inform a more natural approach to everyday nutrition. Through her work with Food Is Our Medicine, Mary is particularly interested in preserving food knowledge that connects people to the land, seasons, community, and traditional food systems. She brings a practical, deeply grounded perspective to various topics related to farmers markets and local food access, ancestral diets, food preservation, and she is deeply passionate about long history of fermented and minimally processed foods.
Sunchokes (Jerusalem Artichokes): The Native Prebiotic Tuber Hiding in Plain Sight
Raw sunchokes contain up to 90% inulin by dry carbohydrate weight, which will cause severe abdominal cramping and flatulence if you eat a full bowl without prior acclimation. Double-boiling raw…
Wild Berries and Polyphenols: An Ancestral Gut-Health Superfood
Cultivated blueberries are bred for size and water retention, giving you roughly a quarter of the actual berries per cup compared to wild stands. Frozen wild berries deliver twice the…
Ramps, Fiddleheads & Sumac: Spring Foraging for a Healthier Gut
Wild spring plants provide distinct prebiotic fibers and polyphenols that modern grocery store greens simply cannot replicate. Never harvest more than one in four plants from any healthy patch, and…
Foraged & Wild: The Native Plants That Built Gut Diversity
Modern grocery produce is bred for shelf stability and tenderness, which strips out the very defense compounds and fermentable fibers that train your gut microbiome to be resilient. Jerusalem artichokes…
The Three Sisters: How Corn, Beans, and Squash Became a Prebiotic Trio
The three sisters corn beans squash benefits that matter for gut health come from resistant starch and prebiotic fiber in storage cultivars, not fresh sweet corn or snap beans. Beans…
How Indigenous Diets Fed the Gut for 10,000 Years
Fossilized human waste from pre-contact sites shows ancestral diets carried 80 to 150 grams of fiber a day. The modern American average is about 15 grams. Most people trying to…