Everyone who studies pigeons long enough seems to gain some affection for them, and I was no different. To Johnston and Janiga they are a “masterpiece.” Haag-Wackernagle wrote a richly illustrated coffee-table book documenting their natural history and the roles they have played in art and religion. At the end of my conversation with Wolcott, I asked him if there was anything else I should be thinking about, and he delivered a lovely little soliloquy on the strange alien world he has been able to glimpse by watching pigeons:
“One of the things we all naively assume about animals is that they live in the same world that we do, and they see things the way we do. And it’s very clear pigeons are not like that. For example, they are exquisitely sensitive to changes in [atmospheric] pressure. They can tell the difference between the floor and the ceiling in the room I’m sitting in—maybe eight feet of vertical displacement. We can feel it in our ears when we go in an elevator up these big skyscrapers, but we’re amateurs compared to your average street pigeon. They can hear down to these very low frequencies. Pigeons have the ability to see in the ultraviolet, which we do not. Pigeons have the ability to sense, somehow, Earth’s magnetic field. Pigeons can detect the plane of polarized light, something we have real trouble doing. Those are just some of the things that come to mind. So they live in a very different world, in a way. It’s fun to think about what that world an animal inhabits is like, and what kind of information it’s getting there, and why it matters.”
Want to open the doors of perception? You could experiment with psychedelics, or you could look to that underappreciated portal to extrasensory awareness: the pigeon. When I first started thinking about pigeons I saw only filth and pestilence. But what I was really seeing was human failings—poverty, waste, and our refusal to stop feeding these birds while shirking all the other responsibilities that come with domestication. But thanks to Wolcott I can now see them as antennae picking up signals beyond our ken. They are war heroes to me now, champion racers and devoted parents. It was disgust that drove me to pigeons, but I feel true affection for them now.
WEEDS
As she neared her third birthday, Josephine made a ritual of riding her plastic tricycle before dinner. She’d roll toward the BART station, gathering smiles from commuters walking home. Every day she would pedal about two blocks before deciding she would prefer to find something filthy on the sidewalk to put in her mouth. And then I would carry both her and the tricycle home.
One day, as she was transitioning out of the riding phase, and scanning the ground for something suitably vile to eat, I noticed an exuberant stand of wild fennel growing beside a telephone pole. Wild fennel springs up wherever there is exposed dirt in my neighborhood. It doesn’t form bulbs like the fennel you see in supermarkets, but its feathery leaves are sweet, and taste like licorice.
Sensing an opportunity to channel Josephine’s attraction away from sidewalk detritus, I plucked a tender shoot and held it out to her. “Do you know what this plant is?”
She shook her head gravely.
“Fennel. Some people call it candy plant.”
“Candy plant?”
I had her attention. I handed her the sprig.
“Can I eat it?” she asked.
And for once, I could say yes. Of course, it’s not totally safe to eat wild plants growing on the street: They could be contaminated with heavy metals, or covered with exhaust, or spritzed with dog pee. But with most things, the dose makes the poison and a little bit wouldn’t hurt her, especially relative to what she gets into on a daily basis. Dog pee isn’t actually hazardous to people, and I’d picked my sprig from near the top of the plant, some four feet off the ground.
Josephine gingerly nibbled the fennel. Then she put the whole thing between her lips and chewed. Then, before I could protest, she pulled two big handfuls of older, tougher greens from lower down—tall-dog height—and wadded them into her mouth.
I have a fantasy about being the kind of father who notices on his commute that the chestnuts on a nearby tree are ripe and brings home an armful to roast—the kind of person who is able to gather up richness where others see nothing worth noting. And so I began studying the edible plants around me. You need local guidebooks to identify plants because there are so many that look alike. But many of the things that are good to eat travel with humans, springing up in the landscapes we disturb. Many of the edible weeds related to dandelions, for instance—bristly oxtongue, prickly lettuce, chicory, hairy cat’s ear—have spread around the world with people.
It turned out that the oxalis, or wood sorrel, which seemed to spring from the earth as fast as I could pull it out, had a pleasantly tart taste. Josephine would command me to stop the stroller and bound off into the underbrush to harvest this “sour grass” and “candy plant.” We agreed that she would pick only the new growth—fresh young plants were less likely to have something nasty on them, I figured—and I taught her to make her selections from places that would not attract dogs. A few germs and impurities, I decided, were a worthwhile trade-off for the fun of eating out of the parks and unkempt front yards in our neighborhood.
DELICIOUS DANDELIONS?
I came to this study of edible plants with some skepticism about urban foraging. It seems to me that the sort of people who are excited about eating wild plants are also the sort given to the credulous acceptance of myths. There are three types of foragers in particular that bug me: the survivalists, the herbalists, and the taste-bud-less.
The survivalists are the ones with the misconception that they could someday subsist on plantain heads and dock leaves. If they were actually put to the test, most of these people would end up starving like Rebecca Lerner. She describes her experiment in eating only what she could gather in her book, Dandelion Hunter. After a week of living off the land in Portland, she wrote: “My body was achy and limp. My legs were so weak that I had to brace myself against the wall like an old lady who lost her walker.”
Lerner eventually gave in and feasted on Thai food, noting, “There’s a thin line between badass and dumbass.”
The herbalists are the ones who insist on telling me that such and such is good for the liver, or will flush out my toxins. I’m a fan of alternative medicine, but when I’m trying to learn something I like my information to be evidence based. But when someone tells me earnestly that echinacea cures colds (even though I know it’s been studied to death and ultimately looks like a good placebo), it makes me doubt everything else I’m learning from them.
Then there’s the taste-bud-less: The folks that munch on tough old dandelions and proclaim them delicious. As Tama Matsuoka Wong writes in her book, Foraged Flavor, “It was pretty easy to find nature-oriented books that told me which of these plants are ‘edible,’ but my quest instead was for plants that actually taste good” (her italics). One of the books in the vein is Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America, coauthored by Alfred C. Kinsey; it contains a comprehensive listing of species, but doesn’t tell you what to do with them. The same might be said, incidentally, of Kinsey’s more famous reports on human sexuality, which include plenty of facts, but no advice for the lay reader on putting them into practice.
There are lots of plants that the experts advise you to boil three times in three different batches of water, i.e., things you’d only eat if you were starving. The highest praise in many guides is mildness, the ability of a plant to pass through your mouth undetected. The foraging literature frequently ignores flavor, and there’s a touch of apocalyptic asceticism in many of the guidebooks I’ve leafed through. They carry the implication that, come the revolution, there will be no place for those who hesitate to scarf down hairy bittercress.
But we shouldn’t let the three breeds of hyperbolic foragers out there spoil what, done right, can be a truly good thing. The existence of survivalists, herbalists, and the taste-bud-less did nothing to stint the pleasure I got from foraging as a kid: In the Sierra foothills my friends and I would eat blackberries, pine nuts, and manzanita f
lowers in the spring and their powdery, sunbaked berries in the fall. We never expected to fill our bellies on this stuff, but it felt good to know it was there, to be able to find the landscape’s sweetness, and to think of the previous civilizations that had foraged there.
Experienced foragers understand that you can’t actually survive on wild salads alone: It’s fruits, nuts, seeds, roots, and meat that provide the calories. Lerner eventually finds her foraging groove, and with the help of a small village of friends, assembles a Thanksgiving feast. She writes, “It was an impressive display: rose hips sauce, roasted cattail, nettle, mushrooms, wapato, venison, scones, and even wild beer.”
I’d be pleased to get that at a fancy San Francisco restaurant. And of course, the finest restaurants are serving foraged weeds already. Daniel, the New York eatery with two Michelin stars, and Copenhagen’s Noma, often called the best restaurant in the world, both rely on foraged foods, tapping the flavors and textures of things people normally don’t think of as food.
The success of those restaurants renewed my interest in foraging. I don’t want to be the sort of guy who tries to make his family eat “actually, starvation sounds pretty good right now” salads. But Wong, who forages for Daniel, has published a book full of recipes for and advice on turning weeds into high cuisine, which kindled my hope that I might make meals a little more delicious with a touch of the wild.
We’ve reached a strange point in history when foraging, once a stopgap for the desperately poor, is now firmly associated with upper-class food—so much so that it’s impossible to say you are serving, for example, foraged sheep sorrel or wild fennel sprigs without sounding a bit pretentious. This is bizarre: I can’t afford to eat at either Daniel or Noma, but wild plants are free.
EAT YOUR YARD
There’s an effort at the University of California, Berkeley, to connect the people with the least money to the highfalutin ingredients growing in the cracks in their driveways. Philip Stark, a Berkeley statistics professor, organized a team of researchers to map edible plants in low-income neighborhoods with the goal of creating a Web site that will show residents how to find food close to their homes.
In the United States, poverty is highly correlated with obesity and diet-related disease. If poor people actually found it feasible to eat foraged greens, the public health benefit could be immense. And incidentally, the places labeled food deserts—low-income neighborhoods without markets—are also the places where Stark is finding the most edible weeds. “The hypothesis is that the food is already there,” he said. “It’s just not recognized as food.”
I asked Stark if I could tag along with him sometime when he went out looking at plants, which he said he does nearly every day. We met at his home in the Berkeley hills and strolled the winding roads.
A walk with a forager is not leisurely. Stark did not gaze at the vistas or remark on the architectural details of the houses we passed. Instead, he stared intently at the margins of the road, and regularly broke off in midsentence to dash to one side or the other to inspect something green and nondescript. He is tall, lean, and balding, with close-shorn hair about the length of the stubble on his cheeks. He wore sandals—a simple sole attached to his foot with leather laces—loose gray pants, and a rust-orange Arc’teryx windbreaker. He rattled off Latin and common names faster than I could write them down. “Lactuca virosa,” he said, squatting and plucking a hairy leaf. “Opium lettuce, or bitter lettuce.” He put it in his mouth and chewed. I did the same. It was bitter, not overwhelmingly so, but also not something I’d want to eat in bulk. “I actually quite like things with stronger flavors,” Stark said. He’ll use a bitter leaf or two like a spice, to punctuate an otherwise conventional omelet or piece of meat.
A little farther on we came to a sloping triangle of dirt between a driveway and the road. Stark began listing the edible species there. “Bristly oxtongue, curly dock, miner’s lettuce, mallow, fennel, chickweed, sow thistle, cow parsnip, wood sorrel, nasturtium—here’s a ten-ingredient salad, more than you could get in a mixed-mesclun bag at the farmers’ market. And it’s free.”
On the second day of official fieldwork for the project, Stark told me, he and his compatriots bumped into another team looking for precisely the same plants. It was a team of city workers in haz-mat suits spraying herbicide to kill the greens. They were in West Oakland, home to a lot of people whose diets would surely be improved by eating those weeds. Here were two problems—people in need of free healthy foods and weeds in need of removal—that might be resolved with a single solution.
There are still issues to sort out. First, is it safe to eat greens growing amid paint chips, auto exhaust, dog piss, and the mysterious fallout of urban grime? Second, will the people who most need more greens in their diet have the time to forage for, wash, and cook them?
Stark is running a battery of tests to answer the first question. Plants do absorb pollutants, but it’s unclear if they take in enough to cause concern. The second question is tougher. Foraging makes perfect sense if you are cash poor and time rich. But it makes no sense when you’re working three jobs and still broke. Several attempts to fix food deserts have failed because the problem isn’t simply that people lack access to vegetables; they also may not have the skills to make them delicious, or the time to prepare them.
THE FATHER OF WEED EATERS
Still, there’s often at least one person in a household who might have time to forage, even if it’s a child. In 1922, Euell Theophilus Gibbons was a child, and his family was starving. His father had left their homestead in rural New Mexico to look for work, and his mother was sick because, rather than eating, she was giving the food she had to her four children. The horse died, and the family dog ate her. Then the eleven-year-old Gibbons went out looking for food—and found it. He found rabbits and prickly pears, mushrooms and berries. He fed his family every day for a month until his father returned. And then he kept on foraging.
Forty years later, after hoboing, and picking cotton, and busting broncos, and working as a Communist agitator, Euell Gibbons wrote a book about foraging titled Stalking the Wild Asparagus. It was a bestseller. It’s this book that planted the romance of foraging into our culture, setting the taproot for the later flowering of foraged dishes at restaurants like Daniel. The seed of our current fascination with foraging was a hungry kid searching the New Mexico desert for something he could bring home for his mother.
DELICIOUS INVADERS
Gibbons counseled that the deep wilderness is a poor place to go looking for food. The best spots, he wrote, are “old fields, fence rows, burned-off areas, roadsides, along streams, woodlots, around farm ponds, swampy areas and even vacant lots.” Many of the plants that are good for people to eat have traveled with us. Dandelion seeds came to the New World on the Mayflower, though historians don’t know if they were for use as medicine or food. (Dandelions can provide real sustenance if you dig up their starchy roots, rather than trying to eat their leaves.)
I tend to dislike invasive plants, because they take over and crowd out diversity. But when I began to look closely at these weeds, I saw a lot to admire. They can grow in incredibly hostile environments, without water, fertilizer, or even soil. They grow despite the fact that people frequently pull them up and poison them. They are tough, versatile, and resilient. And, as Wong points out, the chemicals that make these weeds strong also give them the powerful flavors prized by chefs. There’s something about these flavorful plants that seems to improve the health of the people who eat them. These phytochemicals are mysterious because many of them are poisons produced by plants to defend against being eaten. But the theory is that because humans evolved eating low doses of these toxins, we need them: They trigger a stress response, much like exercise does, and give your system a workout.
Eating weeds has allowed me to engage with the natural world in a new way. I chew on peppery nasturtium leaves on my way to work. When I’m making a sandwich and realize we’re out of greens, I just go ou
tside and pick some. I pluck unfamiliar plants and take them home for identification.
When Josephine learned which species she could eat, this knowledge worked transformative magic upon her: At mealtime, she normally rejects anything green, but she’ll happily sample what she gathers. As a passive recipient of food, there’s no incentive for her to eat anything but the most pleasing flavors. But when she seeks out her own food, it produces a pronounced shift in cognition. If I serve her something unfamiliar, she acts as if I’m trying to poison her. When she’s sampling wild leaves, on the other hand, she grows intensely contemplative, pondering the challenging new flavors. I suspect it’s true for us all, not just toddlers: It’s as much human nature to resist novelty when someone else is trying to force it on us, as it is to open ourselves to novelty when we are seeking it for ourselves.
“Once your brain registers that there’s food out there, your brain starts interacting with the environment in a different way,” Stark told me. What was once just a green jumble in every unmown verge began to come into focus as soon as I had a good reason to pay attention to these weeds. Josephine, who never learned not to see these plants, can identify almost as many species as I can. As a game, I’ll sit on our stoop and send her off to search for sorrel or dock, and a few minutes later she’ll come running back with the correct leaf. It still seems miraculous to me that toddlers—all of us, actually—can find one nondescript plant among many. When you learn about an edible plant, something clicks into place. Here’s how Gibbons described it to the writer John McPhee: “It is exactly like recognizing someone’s face; once you know a person, you know that person from all other people. If you came home at night and a woman you had never seen was standing there in your house, you wouldn’t think it was your wife. God help you, anyway, if you would.”
Unseen City Page 5