May 2006
Foraging for a Healthier Planet
By “Wildman” Steve Brill
Nature was the original supermarket. Even in the cities, urban foragers can find a bounty of shoots, fruits, berries, nuts, and mushrooms.
We all know that humanity faces many challenges on our ecologically compromised planet. Our species has a long history of making grave mistakes in managing our ecosystems. Upgrading the way we relate to our planet must be part of any solution to this crisis, and I’d like to offer you a powerful tool for changing attitudes and hearts: try foraging for your next meal. The earth is overflowing with common, renewable plant species that people have been gathering for centuries — medicinal herbs, greens, shoots, fruits, berries, roots, nuts, seeds, and mushrooms.
So common and prolific that they’re denigrated as “weeds,” these wild foods are fun to collect and use — and they’re excellent vehicles for getting kids interested in nature, the environment, and the science that explains it all.
I became interested in foraging in 1980, after experimenting with gourmet dishes using natural ingredients in the kitchen. While bicycling, I spotted a group of ethnic Greek women collecting wild food in a local park. Their reply to my query was all Greek to me, but I came home with a bag of delicious wild grape leaves, which I stuffed and devoured. I was hooked. After two years of intensive self-education, I began leading foraging tours in Manhattan’s parks.
My breakthrough came on March 29, 1986, when two undercover park rangers disguised as nature-lovers infiltrated a tour, paying me with marked $20 bills. Pretending to be a married couple, the man and woman fooled me completely (after all, they never held hands, kissed, or demonstrated any affection).
The man took pictures as I held the specimens up to the camera — only I was the specimen! After I ate a dandelion, the man ducked behind a tree and radioed the rest of his platoon. Suddenly, every park ranger in NYC burst from the bushes. They surrounded me (in case I might escape up a tree), handcuffed me (lest I assault them with the dandelion), and searched me (either looking for weeds or “weed”).
I was hustled into a van and transferred to a police station, where they took fingerprints and mug shots, and searched my backpack. Fortunately, I had eaten all the evidence!
They charged me with criminal mischief and issued a summons to appear in court, where I faced up to a year in jail, if convicted. Then they made an awful blunder: they turned me loose.
I went home and called every TV and radio station, newspaper, and wire service in the phone book. The next morning, on the way to the newsstand, five cops came after me. But they all wanted my autograph — I had become world-famous overnight, with front-page headlines in newspapers around the country. After a morning of radio talk-show interviews, I returned to Central Park to be featured on CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. (The newspaper and video clips are all in the My Arrest section of my website, wildmanstevebrill.com.)
At my arraignment, I served reporters and passersby my 5-Boro Salad on the steps of the Manhattan Criminal Court House, and the press ate it up. After this second media frenzy, Henry Stern, the Parks Commissioner who had set up the sting operation, turned over a new leaf: he asked for negotiations, dropped all charges, and hired me to lead the same tours I was leading when I was arrested.
The Nuts and Bulbs of Foraging
The following principles will help you forage safely and ecologically:
• Always identify anything you’re going to eat with 100% certainty. Some wild plants are poisonous, even deadly, so begin with a small number of species that have no poisonous look-alikes. Follow their changes through the seasons to learn them really well, and then slowly add to your repertoire.
• Collect plants where they’re common and only take a small fraction of what’s available so you’ll leave virtually no ecological footprint (or, in this case, toothprint).
• Avoid contaminated areas such as sprayed agricultural fields, railroad rights of way, and anywhere within 50 feet of a highway.
• Eat small amounts of any new food at first, in case of allergies or other unusual adverse reactions. If possible, attend tours with a local foraging expert.
Here are a few delicious species you can find anywhere in the continental US to get you started:
Cattail ( Typha species )
Cattails are familiar marshland plants distributed worldwide and favored by Native Americans and Russian Cossacks alike. Each stalk has six or more smooth-edged, sword-like leaves 5-10 feet tall and one-inch wide. Unlike similar tall wetland plants, all the leaves arise from the plant’s base, not from along the stalk. Everyone has seen the fuzzy, brown, cigar-shaped, mature flower head, six inches long and an inch across, growing at the top of a 4-9 foot tall stem. This makes it an easy plant for beginners to identify.
In springtime, before the flower head appears, pull the leaves from the stalk and yank the inner part of the cattail upward. (Caution: never yank a cattail if an animal right’s person is watching!) Because the plant is part of a colony arising from interconnected underground stems, you won’t be killing the plant. Peel the layers of leaves until the remainder is soft enough to pinch through with a fingernail. This edible part tastes like a cucumber. Slice it and add it to salads, steam it, sauté it, simmer it in soups, or bake it in casseroles.
In late spring, when the immature, green flower heads first appear, those shoots become too tough to eat. But you can clip off the green flower head and prepare it like corn on the cob, steamed or baked. High in protein and essential fatty acids, it tastes like a combination of beans and corn. Because it’s rather dry, it’s best served with a sauce.
When the flower head turns yellow, bend it into a paper bag and shake off the pollen. You can sift this and mix it half-and-half with whole-grain flours. Although it doesn’t rise like wheat flour, this high-protein flour offers the nutritional equivalent of bee pollen supplements. It also imparts a beautiful golden color to pancakes, muffins, biscuits, and waffles. If the wind has blown all the pollen away, clip the green flower heads and store in paper bags for several days. They’ll soon produce a nice package of gust-proof pollen.
Mulberry ( Morus species )
The mulberry is a medium-sized tree with toothed, oval, alternate (growing singly) leaves 2 to 6 inches long that are sometimes lobed (subdivided). Inconspicuous green flowers hang from spikes in the spring. The fruits hang from short fruit stalks in late spring and early summer. They resemble elongated blackberries. Various species may be purple-black, white, or pink. The soft, sticky ripe berries fall the ground in large quantities and make a mess on suburban sidewalks (they also grow in parks and along the edges of woods and lakes).
To collect most efficiently, shake the more accessible branches of trees with the best-tasting fruit over a drop cloth. Spread a layer of berries on a tray, remove the unripe fruit and debris, rinse with running water in a colander set in a low bowl, and drain. Enjoy the berries raw or cook them into jams, pies, cakes, or pastries. The flavor is sweet, a little like the fig (a relative) but less dense. Because mulberries lack the tartness of most other berries, some lemon or lime juice enhances the flavor. Mulberries are perishable, so use, dehydrate, or freeze within a few days.
Chicken Mushroom ( Laetiporus sulfurous )
Mushrooms are fungi, not plants, and while this kingdom of life strikes fear in the hearts of some Americans, European and Asian foragers have been collecting them safely for centuries. Again, the key is 100% certain identification. This common mushroom is very easy to recognize and it has no poisonous look-alikes. The chicken mushroom is a polypore, a mushroom that (1) grows on trees, (2) is shelf-shaped rather than umbrella-shaped, and (3) releases spores through pores, tiny holes on the undersurface, rather than from blade-like gills. Unlike other polypores, it’s bright orange on top and either bright sulfur-yellow or white beneath (there are two main varieties).
It pops up in the spring, summer, and fall, growing most often on living oak trees as a parasite, or appearing on stumps or logs as a saprophyte (decomposer). I’ve found more than 60 pounds of this mushroom on a single log. (Note: Don’t eat it if you find it on eucalyptus, where it picks up poisonous resins.)
Eaten raw, some wild mushrooms may get you sick, so cook it for 15-20 minutes with the same seasonings you would use for cooking chicken, and you’ll make the world’s best vegetarian chicken substitute. If it’s very young and juicy, you can sauté it. Otherwise, cook it in moist heat (in soups, stews, or casseroles) to tenderize it. Remember, it takes a tough forager to cook a tender chicken mushroom! It’s not as filling as chicken, so include grains, beans, noodles, or bread crumbs if you want the dish to serve as an entrée.
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