The Down and Dirty Truths About Wild Edibles

I didn’t exactly grow up having the importance of fresh, nutritious foods drilled into my head. For example, when I was in middle school, one of the most popular cafeteria lunches was taco pizza. It didn’t taste anything like tacos or pizza. It was a cardboard disc posing as crust smothered with low-grade ground beef, a thick caramelized layer of some distant cousin to cheese, and a mystery sauce that subtly evoked “ethnic” without deviating too far from the flavor notes that Americans have come to expect. Normally I brought a brownbag lunch to school, but on taco pizza day, I used saved-up quarters and dimes to buy as many taco pizzas as possible. I shamelessly asked my friends if I could eat any taco pizza they hadn’t finished, while struggling and failing to comprehend why they hadn’t devoured every last crumb.

Now that I’m a bit older and wiser, I don’t think taco pizza is so great. In fact, if nutrition is a virtue, then I think taco pizza is every vice ever envisioned in the course of human history, rolled up into one and smoked, chugged, and shot up at the same time.

Fortunately, I had some exposure to fresh foods in my youth. My parents taught me and my brother how to plant and tend a vegetable garden. I was also exposed to killing for food in my early years when my father taught me how to fish. I vividly remember the first time he showed me how to dispatch a brown trout by breaking its neck. I was both horrified and enlightened. At that moment, it dawned on me that those chunks of meat on my plate were once in-tact parts of living, breathing entities, and they were killed for my benefit. I also remember feeling excited yet somewhat puzzled by the fact that it was possible to pull a meal out of a river. After all, a river wasn’t a refrigerator, and up until that time, that’s where I thought meat came from.

As an adult creeping towards my mid-30s, I am finally taking a serious interest in local, fresh, nutritious foods. I wish I could say it was because my body is a temple and what I put into that temple matters. I would be lying if I said that. There is still plenty of room for mayonnaise and MSG in this temple. In part, my eating habits have changed because I live with someone who actually cares about what she puts into her temple. She has inspired me to start looking at food labels when I’m grocery shopping. There is also something of an upper crust social movement happening now around food, and people’s demands for access to wholesome, local foods have resulted in more wholesome, local foods being stocked on store shelves (well at least in the gentrified urban neighborhoods I shop in). Little by little, I am starting to pay more for higher quality, socially responsible foods. It irks me that quality foods cost more, but then I remember that in the U.S., we spend a comparatively tiny percentage of our income on food. Also, there’s no two ways about it - it costs more and is less efficient to produce foods that don’t trash ecosystems and/or torture animals.

Ethical responsibilities aside, there is another reason I am starting to think more about what I put in my body. In the past few years, I have become more and more interested in wild foods. I have committed to learning as much as I can about flora and fauna, and foraging for wild edibles. No, I do not forage all the food I eat. Not even close. After all, I have yet to find a wild mayonnaise spring in all my years foraging. However, with every passing year, more and more of the food I eat is harvested from wild and semi-wild environments, and arrives in my belly via my own labor.

Eating Manwich in a wild setting does not make it a wild food.

The more I learn about wild foods, the more it amazes how far we have moved away from them as a species, and how much knowledge has been lost in just a few short centuries. However, I suppose there’s no great mystery. It is incredibly challenging for me – one person armed with modern tools - to find and harvest enough wild food to meet even a fraction of my daily caloric and nutritional needs.

Couple that with the facts that many people spend 40+ hours a week working at jobs, and the habitats that wild foods exist in are shrinking and/or becoming more polluted/over-exploited with every passing day, it is quite clear why more people don’t gather and hunt their own foods.

However, I am proud to say I have done nobly. I have ingested numerous wild foods and try more with each passing day. In the case of fungi, I have in some way ingested - chicken of the woods, hen of the woods (in the past three years, I have had 50+ lbs. in my freezer at any given time), morels, Dryad’s saddle, honey mushrooms, Berkley’s polypore, aborted entyloma, chanterelles, black trumpets, hedgehogs/sweet teeth, Agaricus spp., Slippery Jacks, gypsies, witches butter, brick caps, turkey tails, chaga, reishi, turkey tails, hericium, boletes, and oysters - just to name some. Then of course there’s plants, fruits, berries, and nuts - stinging nettles, garlic mustard, Japanese knotweed, wild violets, dandelions, spring beauty tubers, wild onions, ramps, greenbrier shoots, miner’s lettuce, manzanita flowers, autumn olives, wineberries, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, serviceberries, cranberries, mulberries, wood sorrel, seaweed, redbud flowers, linden (basswood) leaves, crabapples, pawpaws, walnuts, acorns, wild ginger, plantain, chicory, mullein, pine needles, winter dead nettle, cleavers, milkweed, and watercress. Notice that I am not a native plant snob. I will eat invasives like garlic mustard without a second thought. And let’s not forget the animals - trout, salmon, halibut, earthworms, ants, and deer.

All sounds romantic doesn’t it (well maybe not the worm part)? What could be better than eating foods you found yourself?

Plenty of things.

In my early foraging days, I focused on easy-to-find, easy-to-identify, easy-to-gather, and easy-to-eat wild edibles like chicken of the woods mushroom. There really aren’t any poisonous lookalikes to chicken of the woods, and it is possible to find 100 lbs. growing on a single dead tree. It is meaty and palatable.

Rachael and I can't wait to tear into this chicken of the woods (once it's been cooked of course)

However, as I started to branch out, I realized that many wild edibles are less user friendly. Some of them, well, kind of taste like dirt. Come to think of it, many of wild edibles I have tried over the years have posed something of an affront to my modern, American gustatory sensibilities. They have a bad mouth feel. They are bitter, sharp, pithy, fibrous, tough, slimy, and grimy, just to toss out a few adjectives.

There are other concerns with wild foods. If you are able to confidently identify a specimen based on your field books and experience, it could take you hours to gather enough to constitute a meal. If you are lucky, you can eat what you find raw and with minimal processing. If not, you will have to spend hours, if not days, peeling, scrubbing, leaching, boiling, and grinding. Of course wild foods aren’t treated with preservatives, so many won’t keep for very long, even with refrigeration. Oh yeah, on the off chance you pick the wrong thing, or the right thing at the wrong time of year, or eat too much of the right thing, you could suffer grave toilet woes and/or die. Anything I’m forgetting?

My favorite is when one book tells you a plant or fungus is edible, another says “edibility unknown”, and a third says “poisonous”. Quite the spectrum of outcomes associated with one species. Kind of reminds me of the end of pharmaceutical commercials - this medication was found in clinical trials to relive symptoms of depression for most people, but in rare cases, depression may worsen and you may want to kill yourself. In rarer cases, you may lose the ability to sleeps and will go crazy over the course of weeks before spontaneously bursting into flames.

So back to toilet woes for a moment. It has taken my modern human body some time to get used to and assimilate the nutrients in some wild foods. A few years back, a friend and I went foraging in the spring. In the course of a few hours, we found ramps (spring leeks), wild onions, and watercress. Overjoyed we raced to my kitchen.

“We’ll get more nutrients if we eat them raw. Let’s make a simple salad”, I said. And so we did.

It was awful, but we powered through, each eating the equivalent of a meal-sized restaurant salad. Within five minutes, we were grabbing our tummies and fighting for the bathroom. I felt nauseous for the rest of the day and experienced intermittent stabbing gut pains. In part, our symptoms were probably caused by eating too many raw alliums. Try eating several cloves of raw garlic sometime and you’ll know what I’m talking about. However, I also believe we shocked our systems by introducing too many nutrients at once, and nutrients our bodies weren’t familiar with.

Wild foods pose other difficulties still. You may have to walk many miles and cover acres of rugged terrain to find a particular resource, which may only be visible and/or harvestable for a few days or weeks each year. You may have to crawl through pricker bushes, contend with poison ivy and stinging nettles (ironically, nettles are tasty edibles in their own right), surgically dig amongst torturous root systems and rocks, and fend off attacks by all manner of annoying, buzzing things.

Once, I was deep in a wineberry patch gathering fruit when I felt several fiery stabs in my ankles. It took me a few seconds to realize what was going on. As anyone that gets deep in berry bushes knows, painful sensations aren’t exactly uncommon. Then I saw the hornets and realized what was happening. I jumped up and made a mad dash out of the brambles, careful not to spill the berries I had placed in my baseball cap. I sprinted through the forest for a full half mile while frantically stripping off my hornet-filled clothing. Just shy of fifteen stings, when I thought it was over, a particularly vicious hornet got in one last blow, stinging me dead-center on the forehead. What a prick.

On another occasion my friend and I spent hours gathering thimbleberries only to later discover we were covered in deer ticks. My friend, who is far harrier than I, became so paranoid that he ended up shaving his entire body.

My co-blogger and best friend Matt coined the term “goalies” to help describe the above phenomena. In ice hockey, goalies are the things that make it more difficult for the puck to go in the net. In Nature, goalies are the countless things that make it difficult, annoying, or downright impossible to exploit a wild resource. Goalies can take many forms - spines, stinging compounds, itching compounds, shells, husks, barb wire fences, private property signs, and strip mall development. Regardless of form, they are effective at what they do, and they suck.

Pretty nice haul of wineberries despite those savage goalie pricks.

Despite the difficulties and hazards, there are few things I would rather be doing than learning about, searching for, and eating wild foods. Wild foods haven’t been meddled with by geneticists and taste engineers. Most of the produce that modern people eat has been selectively bred over centuries to favor the attributes of size and sweetness, not nutrient content. It’s amazing to think that most modern humans survive on a handful of ultra-hybridized, hyper-saccharine, low-phytonutrient, high-protein foods.

Moreover, wild edibles intrigue me because they are far more common than most people think, yet largely forgotten. I tend to be drawn to common things, and things that the majority of people aren’t (actually maybe that’s why I’m drawn to them). Sure, there are pockets of people out there foraging for chanterelles and morels, but very few are interested in the things I am. I can assume with confidence that I will never have to compete for space in a patch of stinging nettles. I will never have to take up arms to defend a downed log covered in turkey tail mushrooms (Trametes versicolor).

Aboriginal people have sustained themselves on wild foods for millennia, however, most wild foods are brand new to me. My culture has moved so far away of wild foods that for most of my life I didn’t have a clue how many potential resources were out there. There are thousands and thousands of wild edibles on every continent, in all manner of ecosystems, that I know nothing about. In age where so much is known by science, it is exciting to have the opportunity to discover so many “new” things. I once read that more than two-thirds of the Earth’s oceans remain unexplored. However, I’m not interested in exploring the oceans. There’s nothing to see there but plastic.

Wild edibles are all around us, hiding in plain sight, driven largely into obscurity by modern, industrial agriculture. Finding wild edibles doesn’t have to involve scouring forests while fighting off prickish insects. In many cases, wild foods are more abundant in cities and suburbs compared to wilderness areas. The next time you take a walk, find a lawn (preferably one that doesn’t have little flags with skulls and crossbones warning not to walk on it because it’s covered in chemicals). Ask yourself what you are looking at. The word “grass” may come to mind. However, grass species represent just a percentage of the numerous organisms in those green patches we conveniently call “grass”. I would bet anything there is as much oxalis, clover, dandelion, plantain, and violet in that lawn as there are grasses - all of which are edible. Go out and get yourself a good field guide. Join some online forums for foragers and see what other people are picking and eating. Join a local foraging club and take a walk with experts. Don’t try to learn too much too fast. Start with just one plant species and become intimately familiar with it. Learn its leaves, flowers, stems, and roots. Pay attention to it’s different phases as it grows over the course of a season. Learn its Latin name. Do some research and learn how various cultures have used that plant throughout history. If you are feeling confident, go back to that lawn. Harvest a few leaves or flowers from that plant you are now intimately familiar with. Place it in your mouth. Chew. Swallow. Now go to the store and buy yourself something that actually tastes good.

Spring leeks and rock-cooked bacon in the campfire. The bacon tasted awesome.

Equals to Be Honored

If there is one principle that guides my actions, it is that all beings are worthy of the same respect as Homo sapiens. Species such as Odocoileus virginianus (white-tailed deer), Laetiporus sulphureus (chicken-of-the-woods mushroom), Urtica dioica (stinging nettle), and Lactobacillus delbrueckii (lactic acid bacterium), as well as entities like mountains and streams, are equals to be honored, and not simply resources for my use or mistreatment. I will strive throughout my life to embody this principle in all of my actions. Judging by the way I effortlessly grouped the above beings into living/non-living, and how I put the ‘living’ in roughly size order, I still have quite a ways to go before I live my ideals!

Though I do kill and eat members of the species above, drink from streams, and erode the mountains with my feet, my duty is to better fit in with these beings to help ensure their survival. This role seems daunting because I was not taught the principle of universal respect growing up. Fitting in with nature is intuitive to me, but conditioning has not set me up to easily match my intuition and actions. I came up in a community and society where I was told that I was extremely important, that there was an outside and an inside, and that there was some type of narrative that I was roughly supposed to live out, albeit with a few of my own choices permitted. Humans were the pinnacle, with pets as a close second, followed by perhaps ornamental flowers. I was presented with a menu, if you will, that I was free to pick and choose from; but, the menu was the menu and it was all I saw. As a result, parts of my life are still tied to that menu.

It wasn’t until very recently that I threw out the menu. I didn’t like the taste of many of the items anymore. I’ve realized that the plane flights, the car rides, the food choices, the ‘jobs,’ the forms of entertainment, the obligations, all the way down the fate of my poo when it leaves my body, were not what I wanted. In fact, as I slowed down and reconnected with myself and the humans and non-humans around me, I was able to clearly see the destruction that my way of living was and is causing. It was not pleasant. But, by unearthing the source of my life-long unease, I discovered why I have been largely passive, unexcitable, academically high achieving, and ultimately directionless. Importantly, I’ve caught glimpses of living fully and in the present, and am starting to see some picture of how to live the right way.

Tulip poplar flower in the woods down the street.

Something awesome happened when I gave myself time and space to do what I wanted to do, and removed the typical constraints that I would put on my time. Namely, as an almost 30 year old, I allowed myself not to think about ‘what I wanted to do’ in terms of ‘how I will make money.’ I stopped scheduling so much and just allowed myself to be. One thing that I discovered is that I enjoy finding my own food, or knowing first-hand who grows or finds it. A simple realization, really; and, I can lessen the ecological damage of my food choices this way. I have also lessened the damage of my “entertainment” choices because procuring food, and observing nature while doing it, takes time and I like doing it. Spending time in the ecosystem, instead of shielded from it, is what I choose to do above all else.

Because there is a non-human world out there that sustains me, but that I’ve neglected, I find wonder around every corner, in every square foot. There are individuals, let alone entire species, that I’ve never met. In living and dynamic ecosystems, something is always new to be found. Their tracks come and go, as they are born, die, and change with the seasons. In contrast, when I look out the window of my current residence or office, concrete does not change particularly quickly or provide stimulation. Diversity and life are paved over with pourable material designed to choke it all out. People are hurrying around to get, well, somewhere.

Center: sad American Chestnut in MD. Casualty of humans out of balance.

Because of the wonder close by, I've found that my desire to travel long distances has waned. Granted, I have traveled looong distances in the past, and likely will again. These past trips may have also affected my current outlook. But, I have no flights on my horizon, and I feel content with that. I’m sure I will have some explaining to do, at least for a bit longer, amongst my peers as to why I’m not jet setting any time soon. There is so much to be found near where I live, especially where human populations drop off. I am beginning to own and internalize that feeling.

I am experiencing something that I haven’t for the vast majority of my life – comfort in my own skin, as opposed to comfort in my job or comfort in living up to expectations. Let me tell you, it is wonderful. Is life the best ever, every day now? Definitely not, and it never will be. But, the good times are greater than ever and last for longer periods. At times, I can say I’m proud of myself, which I haven’t said much despite my long list of societal accomplishments. I am proud every day to be lessening or at least figuring out ways to lessen the destructiveness of my lifestyle to ecosystems. Connection makes my life better, and I am getting more of it every day.

To be sure, tensions arise often. I find myself attracted to people that reflect the innocence, comfort, and helplessness of my past, where I was just a person floating through life and hoping that I would get caught on something. I feel in myself a tendency to relapse, to throw in the towel and say that I must be mistaken, grab the menu, and cobble a few choices together. But, deep down, I know better. I’ve mixed, matched, and tasted from the menu to no avail: PhD student, fellowships, girlfriend-get married-mortgage-kids, federal government pensions. None of the combinations have brought me satisfaction.

Instead, here has been my guiding principle all along, waiting for me to just turn and face it: I should be living the way humans lived before we lost our connections to what keeps us alive, before we started disrespecting ourselves and others. The challenge and the excitement comes from the fact that there is no well-established path to where I’m going. There is no formal school, no certifications, no guarantee of safety. I am casting my net broadly, being mindful of relapsing into my old ways, and opportunities are beginning to open up. I’m meeting new people, going new places, seeing differently through these same old eyes. All the while, I have to keep reminding myself, until it sinks into my bones, “you are not the most important thing out there.” I am amongst the uncountable that are just as worthy of respect and care, and I must not thoughtlessly harm them.

Young buck in the woods down the street.