I got an amazing book. It is called "The main wild growing plants of the Leningrad Region", "Leningrad newspaper and magazine and book publishing house", 1942. Pay attention to the year and place of publication, gentlemen - Leningrad, 1942 ... This is the height of the blockade of the great city and its truly heroic population. Meanwhile, in the book itself there is not a word about the famine or the blockade. This is the highest form of civic courage - dying of hunger to behave as if everything is in order! Authors of the book: Gollerbach MM, Koryakina VF, Nikitin AA, Pankova IA, Rozhevits R.Yu., Smetannikova AI, Troitskaya OV, Fedchenko BA , Yurashevsky N.K. All these people are botanists, employees of the Botanical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Academician V.L. Komarova.
The initiator of writing this work was the party's hill. Initially, plants were to be used only as an additional source of vitamins. By that time, on all fronts among the trenches began a general epidemic of "night blindness". This disease - the eternal scourge of the Russian army in the period of positional war. It came to the point that nightly scouts had to be canceled - they could not see anything in two steps. The cause of this disease is in the elementary shortage of vitamin A. Having solved this problem (botanists suggested such vitamin products as dandelion, cow-grass, nettle, etc.), they began to develop recipes for cooking plants as the main dish.
Botany attracted cooks, and the book was a success. Propaganda of wild plants was conducted at lectures, meetings, on radio and in the press. A serious fear was caused by a hypothetical possibility of poisoning with buttercups and tsikutoy, but it turned out.
