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Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Foraging
2 of 2
Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Foraging
A handful of years ago, Catrina Adams spent a summer on Scotland’s Orkney Islands, helping to excavate an 11th-century site called Quoygrew farm. The site had begun as a Viking encampment, then evolved into a medieval village.
“I was basically digging up Viking-age garbage,” Adams says, “looking at the plant remains there, identifying the seeds, and determining how they were using their land, and eating, and all kind of other things.”
Adams is a paleoethnobotanist—and if you guessed that there are not a whole lot of those, you would be right. It is hard to imagine that someone so dedicated to the study of plants “didn’t really pay that much attention to them” until middle school, but Adams says that was the case; it was wild-plant walks with her Girl Scout troop that sparked her interest. “I found I was able to learn them better when I knew what they were useful for,” she says. “I was also really interested in history. So I started researching natural dyes.” By college, she was using that knowledge to help re-create Viking wardrobes for the Longship Company, a living-history group that takes a replica longship out on Chesapeake Bay.
Adams is now acting education director for the Botanical Society of America, which is under the umbrella of the Missouri Botanical Garden. Every spring and fall, she leads foraging classes at Shaw Nature Reserve; she says the people of Quoygrew ate a lot of the same species she and her students seek out, including lamb’s-quarters and chickweed. Although foraging may seem exotic, weird, or chic to a lot of Americans, Adams says that culturally and historically, not eating wild plants is the exception to the rule.
“I get a lot of people in my classes who are from other countries and are coming to learn the local flora,” she says. “They are very familiar with their own flora and are also making comparisons, either that they recognize the plant but don’t know the name or that they are comparing it to other things they are familiar with.”
As local food has grown in popularity, so have wild edibles—there are several foragers who supply local restaurants, especially with mushrooms such as morels and chanterelles. And Adams’ classes fill up quickly.
Adams advises beginners to stick with “lawn plants”—dandelion being the classic in that category. She also cautions readers that safely foraging for wild plants is not as simple as “this one’s safe; that one’s not.” It might be that only one part of the plant is edible, or the plant is edible only during a certain period. The plant could completely change appearances during its life cycle. It might need to be cooked a certain way. Some mushrooms are benign—unless consumed with alcohol. It’s also crucial, Adams says, to “be aware of the surroundings. So on the one hand, is it OK for me to gather this here? It’s best to get permission. Most people would not care if you decided to take all the dandelions from your next-door neighbor’s yard. But then also, what is the safety of the area? Dog parks are not good places to collect lawn plants. And you have to be careful about poison ivy—if it’s growing next to or on the plant you are looking at, it can transfer the oils, and that would be a very unpleasant experience. Then there are herbicides and pesticides, and heavy metals, too… Make sure you’re in a place where you trust the water and you trust the soil.”
The safest introduction to foraging is through a class, or going out with someone who knows their plants. If you go alone, be sure to obtain a good field guide first, and take your plant to the Kemper Center for Home Gardening (4344 Shaw, 314-577-5100, mobot.org) for identification help. Wash plants well, and introduce new foods into your diet one at a time; that way, if you have a reaction, you’ll know what caused it. And if you have a specific medical condition, check with your doctor, just as you would when introducing any exotic new food into your diet.
“The best way to start learning things is to start with what’s in your own backyard,” Adams says. That includes introducing edible native plants into your garden. “If you wanted to try spicebush, which is a great plant for making tea, that is one that they will almost always have little seedlings, and it’s a beautiful tree,” she says. “What’s really cool is, you get to look at that plant through every stage of its life cycle, and then you know that plant. And that’s the best kind of knowledge to have, rather than doing it the other way around, where you say, ‘Here’s this plant, and I want to find out what it is and what it’s used for.’ It’s easier, I think, to go the other way around and say, ‘Here’s this plant that I know—let me go find that other places.’”
Recommendations for beginning foragers
Dandelion: “This is a great one, obviously, because every part of it is useful,” she says. “And every part of it is edible, at all times. I don’t know that you would want to just eat the root raw, but I suppose you could. Most of the time, you roast or cook it, but if you don’t, it’s not going to do anything harmful to you. It’s a very safe plant.” The young greens are good in salads; older, more bitter greens can be blanched. Flowers can be added to salads or made into dandelion wine; the root can be roasted and ground for tea.
Purslane: “This is available once it starts to get warm,” Adams says. “It’s a succulent that grows close to the ground and has yellow flowers and little capsules. It’s a great plant—it has a lot of omega-3 fatty acids in it. As I say to my classes, you’ll find it everywhere, but finding some you’d want to eat is a trick.” Purslane loves cracks in sidewalks and roads, but it’s better to harvest it from flower planters or vegetable gardens. It does have a look-alike, Euphorbia maculata, common name is “prostrate spurge” or “spotted spurge.” To tell the difference, snap the stem: If it bleeds milky sap like a dandelion, that’s not purslane. “If you put that in your mouth, it tastes disgusting, so you will know right away,” she says, “but it’s good to identify it before you get to that point!” Young, tender purslane is great in salads or as a soup garnish.
Rose Hips: Multiflora rose is considered an invasive species by the state of Missouri, so by eating the rose hips—a false fruit that nevertheless contains the seeds of the plant—you’re also supporting the environment. Each rose hip has more vitamin C than a pile of oranges, but it also has a feature you should be aware of before whipping up a large batch of rose-hip jam (which you can find in shops in France, labeled confiture de gratte cul). “That translates to ‘itchy butt jam,’ basically,” Adams says. “If you slice a rose hip open, it will have a bunch of hairs around the seeds… You can actually dry those and make itching powder from them, for practical jokes. And if you eat them, they maintain that all the way through your digestive system. I guess since the French have that as a commercially available product, I suppose they don’t mind.” If you’re not French, consider using rose hips to make juice or tea instead.
Purple Passionflower: The purple flowers of Passiflora incarnata, a Missouri native, are incredibly exotic looking, and though the plant spreads prolifically, but it isn’t considered an invasive per se. A related species, Passiflora edulis, is used to flavor Hawaiian Punch. The tiny red fruits, which ripen in summer and fall, are known as maypops; they can be eaten raw or made into jelly. “It has a nice, tropical, passion fruit kind of taste,” Adams says. “It’s like any other passion fruit you would eat, where you put it in your mouth and spit the seeds back out.”
Nettles: “They are super-useful. They get a bad rap because if you touch them unprotected, they’ll sting you; they actually inject a kind of formic acid, which is the same as ant bites,” she says, “but just drying the leaves or cooking them gets rid of the stinging properties. So you can eat the leaves, or you can make them into a really nice tea or broth.” She adds that most health food stores carry nettle tea, for those who want to try it before wrangling the stuff in the wild. (Note: Wear gloves.) “It’s more savory than what you might associate with herbal tea,” she says. “It’s almost like a broth, very good and very nutritious. They are better a little earlier in the spring—they are still around by late spring, but they are a little tougher.”
Blackberries and Black Walnuts: “This is a low-risk one as well—a blackberry is pretty recognizable, and most parks don’t mind you eating berries while you’re there,” she says. “It’s when you start carrying things out that they get concerned.” Black walnuts, on the other hand, are ubiquitous—“the trick is getting them out of the shell!” From our reading—Adams did not recommend this to us, by the way—the preferred method in Missouri is to put them in a sack and run over them in the driveway. Also note that black-walnut hulls are rich in tannins…so rubber gloves are in order, unless you like having bright-orange hands.
Pawpaws and Persimmons: “It’s just such unique flavor,” Adams says of papaws. “There is nothing else like it. Greens are greens, and they are very healthy and they taste good, but there is not a lot distinguishing chickweed, other than texture, from spinach. But pawpaw is its own unique tropical kind of flavor. If you haven’t ever had one, it is something to try.” A Japanese variety of persimmon is available, from time to time, in local grocery stores. “They taste very similar,” she says, “so you can at least get the experience of it. Those are nice because they’re so big, so if you actually want to make a dish, you can. The native ones are very small, and their seed-to-pulp ratio is not ideal,” she says.
Hunting and Gathering
Adams will lead a foraging class, It’s OK to Eat the Weeds–Edible Wild Plants of Summer, through St. Louis Community College–Meramec (11333 Big Bend, 314-984-7500, stlcc.edu) on June 21.
To purchase spicebush seedlings, as well as other edible Missouri species, go to the annual native plant sale at Shaw Nature Reserve (Highway 100 and Interstate 44, Gray Summit, 636-451-3512, shawnature.org) held on May 10 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Although it has been dubbed the Shaw Wildflower Market, the sale also offers ferns, shrubs, trees, and nonflowering green plants.
Jan Phillips’ 1979 book Wild Edibles of Missouri is out of print—but you can download it as a series of PDFs on the Missouri Department of Conservation’s website (mdc.mo.gov). Included are some lovely recipes for wild greens, including a lamb’s-quarters quiche, as well as cake recipes for wild fruits and even some ways to prepare game, including, um, “squirrel pot pie.”
Falling Fruit (fallingfruit.org) is a group-sourced Google Map that identifies wild edibles, mostly fruit trees, by address.
Eat the Invaders (eattheinvaders.org) identifies edible invasive species such as garlic mustard and even provides recipes.
The Missouri Mycological Society (momyco.org) offers classes and fungi-hunting excursions throughout the year.
Ryan Maher of Missouri Wild Edibles is another local expert on foraging; find him on Twitter (twitter.com/wildedibleguy).
Finally, to really experience foraging to its fullest, consider it as a way of connecting with your environment—not just as a food trend. When harvesting plants, be gentle; don’t pull out a whole stand of plants or pluck every single berry. Consider going out on plant walks at Shaw Nature Reserve or The Green Center (8025 Blackberry, 314-725-8314, thegreencenter.org) with the goal of spotting edible plants but not eating them. It’s a way to stay conscious of wild plants as living things that have their place in an ecological web—rather than just another consumable.
