(Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy of the USDA)
Everyone needs to eat. But
not everyone gets their groceries
at the shopping market. Some
people find their food. They forage
in backyards, forests, even city parks.
It’s free, some of it tastes pretty
good, and as Samara Freemark reports,
sometimes it’s even legal:
Transcript
Everyone needs to eat. But
not everyone gets their groceries
at the shopping market. Some
people find their food. They forage
in backyards, forests, even city parks.
It’s free, some of it tastes pretty
good, and as Samara Freemark reports,
sometimes it’s even legal:
It’s a beautiful fall day in New York’s Central Park, and Steve Brill is looking for
something to eat.
“Everyone come over here, we have another species. Come on over here.”
Steve Brill – I’m sorry, Wildman Steve – leads foraging tours in parks all over the New
York area. And today he says he’s going to prove to me and about thirty others that the
park is full of things to eat.
“Try this.”
But the tour starts off a little rough. At first we find a lot more plants that can kill us than
feed us. Yellow violets will make you vomit. So will pokeberries. And, so will
pokeweed.
“Is this the worst thing you’ve ever smelled? The chemical is called buteric
acid. The name comes from rancid butter. This is a common element in
decaying flesh.”
Foraging isn’t for the faint of heart – or the uneducated. Wildman is very careful to tell
people to study up before they start snacking on the weeds in their backyards. But he says
once you learn to recognize edible plants, it’s pretty easy to tell them apart from the
poisonous ones.
“You have to know what the plant is. If you go into a supermarket, you have
to tell the difference between the apples and the cigarettes. The apples are
good for you, the cigarettes will kill you. Black walnut doesn’t look much
like poison hemlock. They all have their identifying characteristics.”
And it turns out there’s a lot of stuff out there that is edible. Chew some birch bark – it
tastes like wintergreen. Primose has a root like a radish. Garlic mustard tastes like, well,
garlic. Mixed with freshly cut grass. We didn’t really love that one. But the crab apples
were great.
“This is a crab apple tree. And the ripe crab apples, they have a texture of applesauce and
a flavor like tamarind. Tell me if this doesn’t taste like tamarind.”
“Just eat it like this?”
“Yeah, just spit out the seeds. These are really addictive. I like these.”
Ok, but before you start poking around in your neighborhood park, there’s one more thing
you should know. The thing about foraging is, it’s kind of quasi-legal. You’re not really
supposed to pick the plants in most parks. And Wildman Steve himself has gotten in
trouble for this. In 1986 Central Park officials busted him for foraging. They led him off
in handcuffs and charged him with criminal mischief. Wildman eventually got off and he
hadn’t had any run ins with the law since, well, until this year.
A week after I met Wildman Steve he was in court again, this time for harvesting
sassafras.
“Defacing the park. That was my crime. There’s no defacing at all. I didn’t damage or
destroy anything. This is just total nonsense.”
Wildman Steve faces fines of up to $2000. But that hasn’t stopped him from leading
tours. Why would he stop, he asks me. His tours can change how people see the world
around them. And that’s more important than a court date.
Take 12 year old Rory Langan. Rory told me his cousin has a black walnut tree in his
backyard. But it never occurred to him that the walnuts he found on the lawn had any
connection to the nuts you buy in the store.
“I actually never thought you could eat these. I thought it was poisonous. It’s pretty cool
though. It’s actually pretty good.”
He says he can’t wait to go home and show his cousin what to do with all those snacks in
the backyard.
For The Environment Report, this is Samara Freemark.