It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It

by Bill Heavey

  The Peterson guide tried mightily to strike an encouraging tone for the novice forager (“Do not let the fear of being poisoned deter you from experimenting with wild edible plants”). The trouble was that for every reassuring sentiment there were half a dozen warnings about side effects of misidentified plants, which ranged from upset stomach to sudden death. The book’s first section, for example, was “Poison Plants,” which, like an Old West gunfighter notching each kill on his gunstock, awarded an asterisk to each plant with a documented death to its credit. Of the ninety plants listed, twenty-four had asterisks.

  Other wrinkles in the vegetable kingdom arose with each new page. “Edible,” for example, did not necessarily mean “tasty.” It could also mean “suffered through for nutrition’s sake during emergencies.” I ­really hadn’t been thinking about emergencies. I’d been thinking about some tasty tuber that I might fry up like a potato chip to accompany the home brew I was planning on fermenting. As I studied the drawings and photos of the oft-confused cow parsnip (a prime edible) and water hemlock (“Our deadliest species. A single mouthful can kill.”), I tried to memorize the section under “treatment,” which, if nothing else, thoroughly covered possible contingencies. If you thought someone had eaten a poisonous plant, you were to call your doctor immediately with the name of the plant or a good description. You should also be able to specify how much and which parts of the plant were eaten, and how long ago. Should no doctor be available, your best bet was to induce vomiting at once. You stuck our finger down the victim’s throat and gave syrup of ipecac, “mustard water,” soapy water, or diluted coffee grounds. Once you had successfully induced barfing, it was off to the hospital rapidly, hydrating en route. Should it not be possible to transport the victim to a hospital, you were to “repeat the vomiting process described above several times until his stomach is thoroughly cleaned out and his vomit is clear.” Should the victim fall unconscious after this, you were to cease efforts at inducing vomiting, tilt the head back and to the side so that the victim could not swallow his or her tongue, and get ready to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  By this point, I wanted to close the book, quietly place it deep in the trash, and substitute just about anything—Dumpster diving; shoplifting; growing and eating the sprouts from my own Chia pets—for the dangerous and arduous task of learning edible plants.

  The issue of identification alone was overwhelming, calling to mind a sick person rummaging through a medicine cabinet full of unlabeled prescription drugs. In boldface type the reader was warned: Do not attempt to use any plant that you cannot positively identify. Look-alike poisonous plants, it turned out, were just the tip of the iceberg. The vegetable kingdom was a far more dynamic place than I’d ever imagined, full of hardy survivor species with no desire to be eaten whatsoever. Those most likely to be on the menu of animals or people at certain stages in their development, for example, adapted to this threat by making themselves harder to identify at precisely these most-edible stages. It was typically the young shoots in spring or the developed roots in fall that offered the best food value, which was to say before the plant’s characteristic shapes or distinctive flowers appeared, or after the flowers were long gone and the plants had begun to die back. The symmetry of confusion was almost perfect, because at those times when a plant was most easily identified, it was usually at its least edible, hard at work manufacturing bitter chemicals, poisons, or thorns to discourage would-be foragers, whether animal or human. It was a wonder that early man had stayed around long enough to become middle man, let alone late man.

  Paula had taught me the most readily available nuts and berries, along with some other plants, but the more I learned on my own the more I felt the need for a counterweight to her idiosyncratic approach. Someone with a more scientific and systematic understanding of the greater range of what was out there. A Field & Stream assignment that sent me to a wilderness awareness course led me to the “primitive skills community.” The unfamiliar phrase conjured people dressed in skins who lived in huts made of sticks and leaves and used smoke signals to invite each other to social engagements. This was inaccurate, of course. Most primitive skills enthusiasts turned out to be well-paid middle-class professionals in various technical jobs, from scientific research to software development, who were drawn to learning how people got along before technology took over: how to knap arrowheads, tan hides, build traps, and forage. Michael Pollan calls this “playing at self-reliance” but correctly notes that “something in us apparently seeks confirmation that we still have the skills needed to provide for ourselves.”

  Anyway, through a chain of people I’d met in that community, I heard about Rick Hueston. He lived in Baltimore but worked at the Pentagon, just three miles from my house. “He’s into all the skills, was a Special Forces type who taught survival in the military and now has some high-clearance job with Army Intel. But what he’s really into is plants,” one acquaintance told me when he gave me Hueston’s number. I called and got a soft-spoken man who said everybody called him Hue and listened as I described my desire to get more of my food myself. Then, immediately and casually, he agreed to to teach me what he knew about edible plants. He made no mention of compensation. In fact, he offered to stop by my house after work two days later. If you know anything about the work culture of the D.C. area, generously extending yourself to a stranger like this has a well-known and highly specific meaning. It means you’re about to be played like a kazoo. Nobody in this town fears the guy who would happily throw his mother under a bus for a promotion or a corner office. That’s normal here. This is a place where politicians proudly cite Ayn Rand as a favorite author and spout aphorisms like this one: “If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.” In other words, “me first.”

  If you really want people here to lie awake at night in a state of fear and paranoia, do something nice for them and ask nothing in return. By this point, however, I was desperate for instruction. So I thanked Hue for his kind offer, accepted, and prepared for the worst.

  As the appointed afternoon approached, I stocked a fanny pack with what I usually took along on forays with Paula: my Peterson’s, a notepad, a water bottle, and a digging stick I’d fashioned from a deer antler. Despite the warm weather I put on heavy boots and pants, my protection against poison ivy and briars. (I’m deathly allergic to poison ivy, a condition that seems to be worsening as I age. The last time I was exposed it went systemic, erupting in places like behind my ears and in the folds of my eyelids. I’d had to get shots of cortisone and Benadryl in the butt followed by ten days of steroid pills.) When Hue pulled up, I walked out to greet a lean guy a few years my junior in business casual slacks and dress shirt who started pointing out edible plants almost before we’d finished shaking hands. “You got wood sorrel growing there in the cracks of the sidewalk,” he said, picking a four-inch stem with clover-like leaves and tiny yellow flowers. “Good trail nibble, nice sour taste. You can add them to other greens for a salad or make a kind of lemonade by steeping the leaves for ten minutes. Peterson’s says to use hot water. Thayer”—the author of another guide to wild edible plants—“says cold.” I accepted the sprig, took a little bite, and found it agreeably acerbic.

  Before we were halfway up the steps from the street to my front yard he identified star chickweed, seaside plantain, and gill-over-the-ground, a particularly prolific uninvited guest in my lawn. I asked what this last one was good for. “Mostly crowding out other plants,” he said. “It’s not native but it thrives here. In the same family as catnip. You can make a nice tea out of the dried leaves.”

  For a guy with such an unassuming air Hue was certainly destructive, popping my foraging fantasies left and right. Foraging, I was almost certain, required that you travel great distances until you stumbled on some secret glen—perhaps like the one where I’d discovered watercress, only minus the old appliances and droppings of deer and homeless pe
ople—where choice, ripe edibles grew. Hue, essentially, was telling me to forget that. Foraging was actually more about the stubborn little weeds that grew through your own sidewalk. In fact, so far the trait common to all the plants Hue had named was commonness itself, an almost wilful pedestrianism on their part. To a plant, they were small, low, and—this may be unfair, but it needs to be said—homely. They were, in fact, plants I’d been seeing and dismissing as unworthy all my life. Damn. You could forage while taking out the garbage. We hadn’t even made it to my front door. Had Euell Gibbons started this way?

  By the time we’d gained the porch steps, Hue had ticked off three more edible species: wild lettuce, Pennsylvania bittercress, and deadnettle. “See the square stem on deadnettle?” he asked, plucking one and handing it to me. The stem was indeed almost perfectly square. How odd. “Everything in the mint family has a square stem. Deadnettle’s not in your Peterson’s but it’s a pretty good potherb, full of vitamins, iron, fiber. Other than that, I’m not a big fan of it.” He picked a piece, bruised it between his fingers, and held it up for me to sniff. It smelled of mildew, with overtones of wet laundry and basement mold. Something about that smell suggested that my romance period with wild plants was already over.

  By this point I just wanted to get inside and leave my front yard behind. Hue, however, was intrigued by the neglected flower bed along the front wall of the house, which had a few straggly azaleas and some other sort of flowers that had been there before I took possession of the house and instituted a comprehensive program of neglect. In the meantime, it had been colonized by assorted weeds, some of which were now three feet tall. Dominant among them was a thick-stalked, leggy plant with a multitude of brown, circular, thistle-like “stickers” that adhered to anything they touched. I knew this weed by sight if not by name because it grows everywhere, and I’d carried home countless hundreds of those round stickers Velcroed to my clothes. Now Hue named it. “Common burdock,” he said. “Another introduced plant with several edible parts.” (Who, I wondered, was introducing all these plants? And where, specifically, was the individual who had introduced this particular pain in the ass?) The pattern emerging, while unpleasant, was clear. Based on what I’d learned so far, the uglier and less inviting a plant looked, the more likely it was to be edible, though it seemed highly unlikely that it would actually be fun to eat.

  Hue asked if I could name any of the plants in my yard. He did this not in a challenging way but simply to gauge the extent of my knowledge. I happily marched over to the dark green stalks of wild onion, vivid against the moribund yellow of my zoysia grass, and plucked a few. “Onion grass,” I said. Hue nodded, bruised the stalks, and held them up to my nose.

  “Smell,” he said. I registered an agreeably stinky odor. He gave me an is-that-your-final-answer look. I shrugged. It sure smelled like onion grass to me.

  “That’s wild garlic, not onion,” Hue said. Not unkindly, by the way.

  We still hadn’t made it into the house. I had one hand on the doorknob and wanted nothing so much as to go inside and shut out the world of ugly-ass edible plants. But Hue had just discovered pokeweed growing along the chain-link fence I share with a neighbor and more wild lettuce growing directly beneath my kitchen window. He picked a leaf of the lettuce, tore it in half, and held it up as a milky white substance bled along the torn edge. “Latex,” he said in response to my questioning look. “All the lettuces have it.” So rubber came from lettuce? That was a handy conversation-stopper to have at one’s disposal. He then said, “I’m glad you’re not using any herbicides in your fertilizer, if you do fertilize.” I was curious how he knew this from looking at my lawn. He explained that most lawn “fertilizers” also incorporate various toxins to kill dandelions and other “weeds.” The thriving dandelion population in my yard indicated the absence of such poisons.

  At long last we went into the house and had a cup of tea. To forestall the complete de-romanticizing of foraging, I asked Hue about his background. As he talked he revealed a number of traits I liked immediately. He seemed without guile, something I find attractive in competent men, and equally unassuming. He had a military background and had been in on the invasion of Grenada in 1983 and Desert Storm in 1991, where he won a Bronze Star. “They were handing those out like coupons,” he said dismissively when I asked about it. “I didn’t do anything special. Grenada was actually scarier. They were shooting RPGs instead of bullets. A rocket-propelled grenade is like a beer can coming at you.” I have been around enough men who’ve survived combat to know that it imbues some with a kind of aura you can recognize if you’re attuned to it. It’s as if, having been tested and acquitted themselves honorably in the most dangerous circumstances a man can face, they no longer have any need for external validation. They don’t take up as much space in the room as other men, aren’t as concerned with the pecking order, are less easily hooked by the petty irritations of everyday life. These traits, however, don’t make a man more accessible. I would come to feel that I knew Hue intimately but not well, if that’s possible. I suspect that no one knows him well. He strikes me as one of those men who never set out to be a loner but ended up there anyway.

  It was troubling, as I researched foraging, to discover how many of the best-known foragers traced their interest to a traumatic childhood of one sort or another. Euell Gibbons—known as the father of modern foraging for his 1962 book Stalking the Wild Asparagus—spent part of his youth in dire poverty in central New Mexico during the Dust Bowl era. He started foraging to help feed his mother and siblings while his father was off trying to find work. Sam Thayer, whose two diligently researched field guides, The Forager’s Harvest and Nature’s Garden, have become the go-to reference for modern foragers, grew up in a household where the only foods his parents could be relied on to provide were cereal and milk. Paula’s father was an alcoholic. I’m as damaged as the next person, but I wasn’t sure I had the makings of a good forager in me.

  I hadn’t known Hue very long when it emerged that his interest in foraging also stemmed from a childhood wound, though less outwardly dramatic than most. He grew up in Buffalo, New York, and his parents divorced when he was seven. The couple didn’t handle the split well themselves, nor did they give much thought to how it might affect their children. That they handled it by not handling it wasn’t unusual, but neither did it lessen the trauma to a child. “They didn’t even announce it,” Hue remembers. “My dad just stopped showing up. I guess he was more interested in being a good doctor than a good father.” Hue had two younger sisters and, as the eldest, may have felt especially responsible—as do all children, to some extent—for the breakup. He just wanted out, so he ran away from home. “But I forgot to bring anything to eat,” he said, “and when I got hungry there was no place to go but home.” It doesn’t take any great stretch of the imagination to see how such a child might vow to become as self-sufficient as possible.

  The boy immediately began to apply himself to the study of edible plants, natural history, and outdoor skills. If he wasn’t in the woods, he was in the library. In college, he went into the woods of New Hampshire with nothing but a wool blanket and the clothes on his back. He made a rough shelter in the crotch of a tree with sticks and leaves and went hungry for the first week. By the twentieth day, he was making bread from acorn flour, making tea from dried herbs, and not only feeding himself but storing food. It was, he said, paradise.

  In the army, he attended a number of survival schools, even though by this time he knew more about wild edibles than his instructors. During one that involved spending a night alone in the Arizona desert, Hue decided to perform a vision quest of the kind he had read about in the books of Tom Brown, a well-known figure in the primitive skills movement. He fasted, prayed, and meditated for twenty-four hours, seeking a deeper understanding of the world and himself. Hue ended his quest thinking he had failed. There had been no vision, no epiphany. The only thought that occurred was that
maybe he needed some help. A teacher.

  The next evening, having completed the course and eaten dinner at his favorite diner in Bisbee, Hue was walking down an alley when he encountered a Native American man coming the other way. The man was middle-aged and had hair almost to his waist. Hue stood to one side to let the stranger pass. The man mirrored his movement. Hue stood to the other side. The man did the same. Tired of the Laurel-and-Hardy routine, Hue asked the guy if he intended to pass or not. The man regarded him for a moment and said, “I hear you’re looking for a teacher.”

  The Indian’s name was Sunday and he became both friend and teacher to Hue until his death seven years later. Under his tutelage, Hue learned about medicine wheel philosophy. He learned about the distinction between a man’s “dream”—his own idea of happiness for himself—and his “vision,” the fate that the cosmos nudged him toward. Hue once told me that he’d wanted nothing more than to be a father. He has been married three times and had children with the first two women. But he was often deployed while his children were growing up and the first two marriages failed. “I’ve loved every woman I’ve ever been with,” he said. “But it never worked out. They were too . . . independent or something. After a while, you realize that it’s not just a coincidence.” Hue came to believe the universe was telling him his dream of fatherhood was not to be and that he should instead fulfill his vision of passing on the knowledge and skills he had learned so that they wouldn’t disappear. This, I finally realized, explained his willingness to help me.

  One of the plants Hue talked a lot about was cattail, a species even non-foragers often know. Most wild edibles go from “almost ripe” to “you just missed it” in the time it takes to hit a fast-food drive through window, but the cattail is edible in one form or another—shoots, stalks, flower spikes, pollen, and roots—almost year-round. Experienced foragers almost seem to compete over who loves the plant the most.