The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [54]
Someone else in the group eagerly accepted this burdock root, and after Tim pulled up another plant, he handed the next root to the first bidder. I didn’t get to snatch a gobo, but that was all right; by the time we had toured for an hour, I had tasted more plants than I expected I would be able to keep track of. Most of them were of the leafy-green variety, with similar looks and tastes, and to further complicate things, I hadn’t brought enough bags to properly separate them. So I decided to go easy on my gathering this first time around, gradually inaugurating my stomach to the various new plants. I already had a good handful of dandelion leaves, some cloverlike sprouts called wood sorrel, which tasted lemony and sweet, and lots of the spicy poor man’s pepper.
With all these edible leafy greens came several red flags, though. We passed a poisonous plant called the Star of Bethlehem, which resembled the thin, cylindrical shoots of the ubiquitous wild onion and could easily be confused for it. Another common plant called the pokeweed was edible only around this time of the year, as a leafy green, but later on it would become poisonous. I thanked my lucky stars I was getting my introduction to foraging from an expert, instead of foolishly going off on my own.
“I want to talk a little bit about the philosophy of the forager,” Tim said, once we had found a grassy spot to sit down and take a break. We had all taken a seat in a patch of shade on a hill overlooking Grand Army Plaza.
“The difference between the forager and the consumer is about accepting what nature has to offer, rather than demanding what you want to take from it. You all know that today, you can get foods shipped in from halfway around the world at the corner store. But that isn’t what this is all about. The forager must bend with what the earth allows, and its cycles.”
At this point, I wanted to raise my hand and ask if this wasn’t why humans had created agriculture, to grow what made the best sense for us, and not have to spend our days foraging and hunting. But as he continued to speak, with obvious passion and a unique sense of appreciation for the spontaneities of wild nature, I decided not to interrupt. Eventually, I think I got his point about foraging. It was done in defiance to the standard, and often hazardous, ways we had treated the earth in order to produce our food. It was an attempt to prove that the wild still held a bountiful harvest, and it was a celebration of that. Moreover, it was healthy (as long as you didn’t eat the Star of Bethlehem). And some people, like Tim, were living off of it for a very significant part of their diets, even in urban areas. That part was particularly enlightening. I didn’t know many other people ate from the wild, especially in densely populated places like Brooklyn, but judging from the size of my bags from a couple of hours of foraging, I figured it could easily be done.
“Does anyone want any cookies?” Madeline said once Tim had finished his talk. “I just found them, this whole wrapped package of them, outside on my street. Somebody must have put them there; I don’t know why.” She broke the seal on a package of oatmeal raisin cookies and passed them around. I took one, shrugging. What an odd combination, though, I thought, to be eating such factory-processed food that was found on the street, and at the same time, nutritious wild food from the city.
When I left after our tour split up, I had two plastic bags full of weeds that I hoped I would be able to tell apart from one another. At the beginning of the tour, Tim had advised that for any wild plant we were trying for the first time, to eat just a tiny taste of it the first day, then wait twenty-four hours. If nothing happened—no allergic reactions or unpleasant side effects—then it was fine to go ahead and eat more. I definitely