Some local plants might be edible and even delicious, but they are either way to costly to grow or harvest, or they are nigh impossible to preserve. Or they simply are edible, but not sustaining, like sucking nectar from stinging nettle blossoms.

Some are acquired tastes like e.g. turnip tops. You could probably harvest tons of them, but there is no real market for it.

Or take edible flowers, you basically can't preserve them, and all you can do is put them on a dish for decoration.

Pearl Onions are a borderline case, for example. Between harvest and sitting in the pickling juice they only have a few hours (3-6, IIRC), or they are a case for the compost heap.

Transportability is a huge consideration. Pawpaws can't be transported nationally, for example. The plants we eat have been bred for maximum marketability, which includes getting the produce from where it grows to where people need it.

For Polish speakers theres this book by prof. Łuczaj: https://lukaszluczaj.pl/dzikie-rosliny-jadalne-polski-pelny-tekst/ - every plant that grows in our region and can be eaten. In some more edgy cases backed by his own experimentation on himself.

Tbf, many are kinda disgusting to modern palettes. Lamb's quarter sucks compared to stuff like spinach, kale, or collards. Pokeweed needs extensive preparation to make it safe. Wood sorrel, horseherb, and prickly pear grows where I currently live, but I haven't tried them yet. My dog likes horseherb despite the little spines for some reason. My grandmother used to fry dandelions and plaintain which was pretty good.

This is dumb. Most plants resist cultivation. Bragging about being able to afford them does not make you Superior.

Also yields are important

So... cool story

Ann Reardon from How to Cook That, took Coke, and tested it for HFCS, it of course indicated it was in there, then she took a Mexican Coke, and it also indicated, but it claims not to use it.

Apparently, the acid in the Coke breaks down the sucrose in the cane sugar, making the product very close to the HFCS variant. She followed up with a blind taste test (very limited size, just her family) and found they were very close in flavor.

It would appear that we do to some decent extent enjoy HFCS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajVWRx8vsjE

I live in a subtropical climate and it seems like most typical garden plants are not really good for our weather, it's too hot for some and too wet for many who like hot.

Our winners are:

Trees- starfruit, longan, mango, papaya all do well.

Garden -

summer, wet season - Okra mostly. Hong Tsoi, Eggplant (little ones) Watermelon (little ones) sweet potato (Stokes Purple), tomatoes, basil.

winter, dry season- Collards, peppers, broccoli (Green Magic) cauliflower, arugula, fennel, lettuce, radishes. Cilantro, or dill. A lot of the typical northern summer plants can be started in December or January to grow in the "spring" that runs from January to April ish.

In between - peppers, fennel, mustard greens, eggplant, pumpkin type squash (but bugs always eat it) tomatoes.

Every September, I make a year's supply of beautyberry jelly.

I do something that I don't recommend people do: I can it. I'm like 5 years in, and I haven't had a problem yet. There's a series of pages in my Ball canning recipe book that the beautyberry jelly recipe I use conforms pretty close to, but it isn't USDA approved or otherwise published by some authority as safe for canning, I'm going to recommend you avoid this.

Beautyberries, if you're not familiar with them, are a bush/shrub native to the American southeast. The plant looks like a bunch of stems with leaves that grow along them, along with clusters of tiny white flowers in the spring at the base of each pair of leaves, that turn into vivid purple berries in the fall. The leaves can be used as a mosquito repellent if rubbed on clothing, and the berries are edible...although they're bitter and astringent. Boiling them in water to make an extract and making jelly from that extract results in a bright red jelly that tastes like strawberry and tea.

It's something of a pain to harvest, so it pretty much isn't commercially done.

I harvest stinging nettle to use as a spinach replacement

I'm going to try to make maple syrup from big leaf maples this year too!

Eat your weeds... This is Common Purslane:

It grows mostly everywhere and is a huge source of Omega 3 fatty acids. It's much better cooked in my opinion. Also it's best to find them in a field and not by the roadside where it may be leeching up god knows what hydrocarbon adjacent type of poisons.

I hate to bring race and racism into this, but one reason why I laugh at many racists, especially European racists, is how they claim they love their own national culture but do jack shit to have ANYTHING to do with its pre-colonial cuisine. Take British cuisine for example. While obviously people in medieval England (even the richest people at the time) had far fewer options than most people in the UK today, but they still used many herbs and plants for seasonings that are only being rediscovered by reenactors in recent years, and they are actually quite good.

More than just culture, the dangers of over-reliance on a handful of crops and cultivars is also dangerous. The Irish potato famine happened in the 1840s due to Irish potato crops just being a few kinds instead of the hundreds of varieties that you would find in South America. The result of this is that a blight that would have had a negligible effect in South America absolutely devastated Ireland. More recently in the 20th century, we have a near complete destruction of the Gros Michel banana in the 1950s. When you go to your typical supermarket, the bananas you see there are more than likely going to be Cavendish Bananas, which were considered inferior to Gros Michel in the past, but due to disease rendering Gros Michel bananas commercially nonviable they were chosen because they were all we got...

and the same shit could happen at any time to the Cavendish banana, too.

Ok I'll bite (literally), how does a person break into this niche, since it is definitely not a market? My engineering degrees did not heavily cover edible plants in my area? I can go find morel mushrooms and identify sassafras but that about covers it.

If I could buy like a ring of +4 to local botany that would be best I think.

alot of tropical ones tend to be poisonous too, because so much diversity of insects, trying to eat them develop toxins in thier parts. also some plants have to super poisonous because insects evolve to build resistance them, so plants have to respond by becoming more toxic. thats why poisonous plants are kinda invasive.

yes english ivy is poisonous(berries) to non-avians.

I mean there probably are lots of reasons why we farm only certain plants.

For example dewberries have short harvest window and as far as i know they need to be hand picked.

Paw paws grow naturally in the area I live and are a delicious fruit. Due to cultivation and transport issues you will never find them in stores.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimina_triloba