Minnesota's lake weeds are plentiful. Can you eat any of them?

MINNEAPOLIS - Growing up in northern Minnesota, Nathan Stanelle spent plenty of time fishing on Lake of the Woods. The lake is known as the Walleye Capital of the World, but fish weren't the only thing Stanelle remembers reeling in.

"We would pull up some weeds and we would always joke we have our ‘salad' for the meal," Stanelle said. He never actually tried the stuff, but the joke endured.

Now living in Thailand, Stanelle has noticed an abundance of salty seaweed snacks for sale, and they made him think back to that laugh on the lake.

Wondering about those weeds, Stanelle asked Curious Minnesota, the Star Tribune's audience-powered reporting project: Are any of Minnesota's native aquatic plants truly edible?

We spoke to experts on foraging and native plants to learn about what, if anything, is actually edible. The answer was knottier than a tangled fishing line.

"There's lots of things that aren't going to hurt you if you eat them, but it's not really food, either," said Samuel Thayer, the Wisconsin-based author of "The Forager's Harvest" and one of the foremost experts on edible wild plants.

There are, of course, exceptions. Thayer named eelgrass, also known as water celery - long ribbon-like leaves more commonly eaten in eastern Asia than in Minnesota. And watershield, a slimy leaf that can be used in soups and stir fries. Some pondweeds produce small, edible tubers, but they're difficult to harvest in meaningful quantities.

Northern watermilfoil, the feathery-leaved greenery often pulled up by a fishing line, supposedly has edible tubers as well, but Thayer has yet to find one. He hasn't tried the leaves, which he said are usually covered in small organisms.

Ethnobotanist, educator and food sovereignty advocate Linda Black Elk named another possibility: filamentous algae.

Filamentous algae "almost reminds me, texture-wise, of seaweed salad - pretty delicious," Black Elk said. "When the lakes were cleaner, people could and would eat that as a vegetable."

There's a major hurdle to harvesting it today, though. Toxic blue-green algae mingles with it. One way to tell the difference is to drag a stick through the water. If the greenery hangs like spaghetti, it's likely edible filamentous algae. The oozy stuff that falls back into the water? Avoid.

Cleanliness is just one reason many of these plants have not landed in the salad bowl.

First, consider the flavor: freshwater weeds aren't salty like those from the ocean. And the texture, often mucky or slimy and maybe coated with little critters or snail larvae, isn't for everyone.

Especially when more appealing plants grow along the lakes' edges.

"Once the growing season starts, there's so much that's high-yield that tastes great," while lake weeds are "not exactly a low-hanging fruit," said Alan Bergo, the James Beard Award-winning "Forager Chef" author and host of "The Wild Harvest."

Then there are safety concerns - pollution, parasites, toxins - along with legal limitations on what can be harvested from public wetlands: in Minnesota, very little. (The rules are different in Wisconsin and on tribal lands.)

Over time, that's resulted in little history of eating the weeds from the lake bottom, since "every culture really just uses the practical food sources available to them," Thayer said. "You can read about these food traditions, but if you can't find a person who participates in it, it's a big learning curve."

So while there are "so many aquatic plants that are edible," Black Elk said, "I don't personally know of anyone who eats submerged lake vegetation on a regular basis."

There are, however, a number of emergent (meaning they grow out of and above the water) wetland plants that have long been important food sources, particularly for Indigenous communities.

The best of the best include what Thayer called the Big Four: wild rice, wapato (starchy tubers harvested from mud, also known as arrowhead, katniss or rat potatoes), lotus (Minnesota's largest flowering plant, with edible stems, seeds and rhizomes) and river bulrushes (reeds).

Wild rice, in particular, is the "number-one Minnesota aquatic plant," Black Elk said.

Additionally, cattails are one of the most versatile wild foods, with edible shoots, pollen and roots - including long, starchy rhizomes Bergo compares to water chestnuts.

"These things are incredible," Bergo said. "Pure food, and delicious."

Greens and herbs, such as watercress and mint, can be found along waters' edges, as well as berries in bogs.

"My advice would be to zoom out a little bit. Don't just look in the water itself, but look around the edge of the lake and wetland habitats," said Maria Wesserle, a Minneapolis-based forager and founder of Four Season Foraging, which offers workshops and introductory classes on wild edibles.

But if you do decide to try something edible you caught with your fishing pole, a good rule of thumb is to clean it and cook it first. "I wouldn't necessarily make a salad," Wesserle said.

Minnesota's lake weeds might not become the next packaged seaweed snack to sweep the Trader Joe's snack aisle. But they're only a small piece of a much larger food system.

The state's lakes and waterways make the region "a Shangri-La of food during our growing season," Bergo said.

Indigenous communities still rely on those waters for a significant portion of their diets, Black Elk noted.

"It's amazing what a gift the lakes are, as far as providing for us," she said.

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This story was originally published May 6, 2026 at 3:44 AM.