The New Urban Forager

Homegrown Evolution

On a hot, humid day along Houston's Buffalo Bayou, in the shadow of four abandoned concrete silos, a maggot infested corpse of a pit bull lies splayed across a sheet of black plastic. Nearby, a pile of asphalt roofing material blocks the path I'm taking down to one of the most polluted waterways in Texas. Not a promising beginning to an urban food foraging expedition.

And yet the same heat and moisture that hastens this unfortunate pit bull's return to the soil, gives life to a riotous mass of tropical plants, bursting out of cracked pavement, vining up abandoned fences, reclaiming spaces where industry once flourished. On the wild banks of this urban bayou, the cycles of life, death, creation and destruction play out just a few feet from the gas stations, tacuerias, dollar stores, and strip malls of our built landscape. Even in such close proximity to what now passes for civilization, we can return to a human history before American Idol, before Freud and Marx, before agriculture to become the hunters and gatherers we once were. A mulberry tree grows just feet from the dead pit bull, its roots entwined with the crumbling remains of the concrete plant, its branches adorned with dozens of dark purple berries, succulent, sweet, ready for the picking and not available at any supermarket.

Heading down the path along the bayou I run into Cristóbal and Jenny. Cristóbal grew up in the adjacent barrio and can remember a time before the skyscrapers of downtown Houston loomed over this semi-wild, neglected neighborhood. Jenny, in her late 40s, her hair and skin betraying many years spent in the sun, is a refugee from Kansas who was robbed of all her possessions when she first arrived at the Houston Greyhound station. They have set up a semi-permanent camp alongside the bayou's muddy banks.

When I meet up with them they are gathering blackberries in a tub. Jenny once made a cobbler out of them on a campfire, an accomplishment Cristóbal describes with great pride. Having grown up on a farm, Jenny knows how to preserve the abundance that nature presents: how to dry, pickle and can. She also knows the more esoteric art of mead making, the difference between melomels and braggots, and the finer points of racking, bottling and aging. When I ask her if she picked up her mead making skills from her ancestors in Arkansas she says that in fact she learned it all working Renaissance fairs, interrupting her stream of consciousness to launch into her medieval Irish alter-ego.

Jenny and Cristóbal are true urban foragers who also know their way around the soup kitchens of this down on its luck neighborhood. They take me to where a spigot sticking out of the slab of a demolished furniture warehouse provides a source of free drinking and bathing water. They ask neighbors for the surplus fruit from their backyard trees to supplement the wild fruits by the Bayou.

Foraging is a valuable skill set to possess, whatever your situation in life. It can help you through lean times, and enrich flush times. Wild foods are often more nutritious than their cultivated relatives, and bring a whole new range of flavor to your jaded urban palette. What's more, if you grow some of your own food, as we do, finding a feral edible-a plant you did not have to tend, but is just there for the eating-is a thrill on par with finding a fantastic garage sale, or a twenty dollar bill rolling down the sidewalk. But what we like most is that the act of foraging puts us in touch with the world of plants and the cycles of the season. It grounds us and tunes us into nature, even when we're strolling down grimy Sunset Boulevard.

The last great prophet of foraging, Euell Gibbons, argued passionately for intimacy with the natural world. His unlikely fifteen minutes of fame came during the last big economic downturn, in the 1970s, a period, like the present, of expensive oil and inflation. Some of us generation Xers and older folks will remember Gibbons as a Post Grape Nuts spokesman and the butt of jokes of 70's television talk shows (he was also a pot smoking communist and Quaker). But Gibbons was a serious and knowledgeable naturalist, and an inspiration for a whole generation of back-to-the-landers. He picked up his skills during the depths of the Great Depression, and as a teen fed his family with forays into the woods when they had run out of food.

With our disconnection from the natural world comes an ignorance and suspicion of foraging. We may know how to reconfigure a hard drive, but when it comes to recognizing what stinging nettle looks like, well, that just ain't taught in school. Gibbons says,

"This anti-nature attitude in our culture comes from very respectable sources. One of those sources was Charles Darwin: he said that sometimes the 'fittest' creature was the one which cooperated . . . but every example he gave us was an example of competition. Another source was Spencer, who first used the term 'struggle for existence.' Wallace too. Even Thomas Huxley claimed that each form of life is in continuous battle and competition with every other. There's nothing wrong with that statement except that it's pure bullcrap. Nature is typified by cooperation and mutualism. It's everywhere. The production of fruit and the scattering of seed by animals is one example. Flowers and bees are another. There are thousands and thousands of examples of mutual aid . . . of one life form absolutely dependent, on another. I find that the 'fittest' is very often the life form which has best learned to cooperate with other life forms around it." (Read the whole Gibbons interview at Mother Earth News.)

Can we forage our entire diet? No. But we can supplement our gardens and supermarket forays with a bountiful harvest of unique wild plants. Responsible foraging places us within the mutualistic sprit of nature that Gibbons refers to, not to mention the benefits of fresh air and exercise. Our hunter/gatherer ancestors actually spent less time gathering food than we do now, if you consider "gathering" the 40+ hour work weeks and long distance commuting we do to afford trips to the supermarket. While we may not be able to reclaim our ancestral past, we certainly can learn the lessons of Gibbon's cooperative life lived in the abundance of nature.

Here's a few of Homegrown Evolution's favorite plants to forage for, things you might find growing near you:

1. The ubiquitous dandelion (numerous members of the genus Taraxacum). This is an easy one that most people can recognize. Pick the young leaves and prepare them as you would any green. We like to steam them for a few minutes and then fry them up in a pan, Italian style, with some olive oil, hot pepper flakes, salt and pepper. The flowers can be fermented into dandelion wine--we haven't tried this but we hear from those who have that it's delicious. The roots can be roasted, dried and made into a non-caffeinated coffee substitute. In New Orleans, dandelion root is added to coffee as a flavoring.

2. Broadleaf plantain (Plantago majus), the scourge of lawn fetishists. This is a plant that brings terror to golf course turf managers, all the more reason to celebrate it, in our opinion. Eat the leaves when they are young. Prepare as any green or put raw in salads. Sometimes called "white man's foot" since it was imported to North America by the original settlers of Jamestown and traveled, like Starbucks franchises, wherever white people went. The seeds can be used as a laxative, an additional benefit to the golfing demographic.

3. Wild Mustard (Synapis arvensis and Synapis alba). Eat fresh or cooked. It's a bitter green, with a distinct mustard heat that is very exciting. Young leaves are more tender and less bitter, but we like bitter. In fact we resent the general infantile sweetening of American food that came along with the ill-named "Greatest Generation's" post war 1950s blandification campaign. Sure they won WWII, but they also took the hops out of beer and the flavor out of vegetables. Damn them, skip the bland frozen food isle, and reclaim that bitterness by hunting down some mustard.

4. Wild salad fixings. Learn to identify a few of the following plants, and you'll be able to make a feral salad that will make store-bought lettuce boring ever after: chickweed (Stellaria media), wood sorrel (Oxalis stricta, or similar), miner's lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata), purslane (Portulaca olearacea), mallow (of the family Malvaceae), and wild watercress (Rorippa officinale).

4. Blackberries (varies members of the genus rubus). Free berries? Do we need to say more? Many of these plants have nasty thorns, so bring some gloves and look out for poison oak/ivy, sometimes found amidst berry patches.

Some foraging etiquette: don't get greedy. Harvest a few leaves off a plant rather than pulling up the whole plant, that way you'll ensure more tasty finds for the next season.

Lastly, you should know a few things about plants before you head out there. While the overwhelming majority of plants are merely inedible, such as most grasses, there are a few very deadly things to look out for like hemlock and oleander, and we strongly recommend taking a hands-on workshop before you start eating any weed you see.

Odds are someone in your area leads wild food hikes. Foraging experts tend to come from one of two camps--Sierra Clubish naturalists and hard-core libertarian survivalist types. The truth is that either camp can provide the knowledge you need to keep yourself from accidental poisoning, though the more botanically focused Sierra Club types will do so without the libertarian harangues. Note that gathering mushrooms is a whole other discipline that needs to be approached with a higher level of care due to a greater abundance of toxic look-alikes.

Homegrown Revolution's Kelly and Erik are the authors of the upcoming handbook The Urban Homestead, available in June 2008 through Process Media.

Photo by uBookworm, courtesy of Creative Commons license.