Colonial and Native Survival Foods, Foraging and Cumbungi.

In Australia the cattail plant is also known as the narrow leafed cumbungi. This plant is known as the most prolific food plant worlwide. The flower head is both male and female, the male being on the top and very thin can supply pollen for adding to meals, the female portion under the male spike is larger and can be eaten in it's green state like corn.
The new green shoots in spring are my favourite, because they taste good and they are easy to harvest. The roots or rhizomes contain starch, which can be extracted by washing the fibres and letting the starch settle, or by squeezing it out like getting the last out of a tube of toothpaste, or you can chew on it. I have chewed on it raw and baked and both are pretty tasteless. However, food is food when you are trying to survive.

Prolific and invasive. The leaves can be used to make mats for covering shelters or for weaving mats for the interior.

These fluffy seed heads are a good source of tinder and can be used for insulation. I have heard that woodland Indians used this to put inside their moccasins in winter, but if you use it be warned, some people are allergic to it bringing up hives!

This is a root/rhizome that I dug up today (Autumn). You can see on the right the old dead upper plant, and to the left more roots where another shoot would have come up in spring.

Here you can see on the right a new shoot. This is edible now.

Here is the fibrous root, the rhizome split open exposing the starchy inner core.