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

by Bill Heavey

  My own food world, hitherto a reasonably straightforward place, was becoming more complicated by the minute. There were a lot of things going on that I’d never given a thought to. I’d just returned from Louisiana, from people who had learned their food skills from their parents, who had learned them from theirs. This unbroken chain made them exceptions to the norm. The people in Baltimore Food Makers were exceptional in a different way, in their desire to learn traditions of which they had no direct experience. For the most part, though, the urban homesteaders were focused on things like gardening, canning, and bread making—activities that, no matter how passionately pursued, still fell into the domestic arts category. Aside from Michelle, who was the unofficial foraging expert, there were few interested in the wilder side of food—foraging, hunting, and fishing. Maybe I was more hard core than I’d thought, because there was something pussified about their indoor orientation.

  I knew I wasn’t Food Makers material—home ec, no matter how hard-core, just didn’t do it for me. As far as canning went, for example, I was in Paula’s camp: “Life’s too short, honey. Trust me.” I’d actually made and canned my own tomato sauce the summer before. It had started swimmingly and I was feeling fairly smug—despite the infernal heat in the kitchen. This lasted until I watched 100 ounces of tomatoes slowly dissipate into tomato-scented water vapor. The shrinkage factor was crazy-making. In the end, those 100 ounces—representing God only knows how many actual tomatoes I had personally and painstakingly planted, raised, and wrested from my garden—yielded six ounces of tomato sauce. Not me, honey.

  On the other hand, I’d known an unexpected sense of fulfilment in making a pie from foraged (okay, stolen) sour cherries, and in frying up white perch I’d caught and cleaned myself. And when I grilled the tenderloin of a deer that I had killed with a bow, and gutted and skinned and butchered myself—and that I was now eating with Michelle, who might contribute a sautéed a hen-of-the-woods mushroom she’d found or some dandelion greens—I had to admit that it felt pretty cool to have put really good food on my plate. The experience was so new that I’d only begun to parse it. I knew only that it was powerful and that the power went deep. I felt that I was starting to close the circle.

  I wasn’t the only one noticing the power of getting your food close to home. Every week I seemed to come across another locavore/foraging story in the press. In the highly competitive restaurant world, a trendy chef’s trump card had long been to serve some obscure thing that none of his competitors offered. And that coup was both more powerful than ever and getting harder to pull off. Hand-harvested day boat scallops? Heirloom tomatoes grown on a biodynamic farm within shouting distance of the kitchen’s back door? Any chef with a checkbook could get those. If you really wanted to wow folks, sooner or later you put wild edibles in front of them. The very existence of such plants set them apart. Other food had to be sown and cultivated. Wild edibles grew themselves, arising spontaneously from the earth. It didn’t get more authentic than that. Celebrity chefs weren’t just buying from foragers, they had begun putting foragers on retainer—and making sure that diners knew this by mentioning it on their menus. The hottest restaurant in the world for three years running had been René Redezepi’s Noma, a twelve-table restaurant in Copenhagen that relied heavily on wild edibles.

  Here—provided you could get a reservation—you could chomp down on wild sea buckthorn “leather” with wild rose hips pickled in apple vinegar while you sat wrapped in an actual bearskin robe. You might be served a flower pot in which entire baby radishes “grew” from the hazelnut “soil.” You ate everything but the pot—the radishes, leaves and all, as well as the soil. You would be handed an authentic Nordic hunting knife for the meat course, slices of “summer venison” cooked rare and served along with the summer plants the deer fed on: chanterelles, chickweed, fiddlehead ferns, lettuce root, burnt wild asparagus, and wild grape leaves, the whole dish bathed in a woodruff sauce. The knife was an artful folly, since the meat was fork-tender. Then you might have—well, you really have to read the review itself to get a feel for the breathlessness of it all: “Then came one of the most ethereal food experiences we have ever had. This dish was a will-o’-the-wisp—it was there one minute and gone the next but the flavours lingered and the sheer perfection of the dish will stay with us for a long time. On the bottom was some incredibly thin herb toast—just thick enough to allow you to pick up the morsel but thin so that it dissolved instantly on eating. Then some vinegar powder, an emulson of smoked cod roe and then topped with a duck stock film created by drying out the skin that forms on the top of a rich stock. The whole dish was a study in lightness and flavour—it captured exactly what we crave in food—restraint, technical excellence, flavour, lightness—and above all deliciousness.”

  I didn’t have the money to go to Noma. Fortunately, I didn’t need to. So many “I went foraging with Redzepi” stories had been written that food blogs themselves had started making fun of them. As Michelle pointed out, the writers of such stories generally knew squat about foraging. They usually described epiphanies about common plants like yellow sorrel or purslane, as if these were incredibly exotic, when in fact they were the ones you learned in the first half hour of your first foraging walk.

  Whether foraging was just having its fifteen minutes or was a genuine game changer in the food world had yet to be determined. I sure as hell didn’t know. All the same, the notion that Paula Smith and, say, Alice Waters were both fans of foraged backyard sour cherries was an interesting thing to contemplate. The difference, of course, was that Paula was throwing hers into a store-bought piecrust and eating them while looking through a hunting magazine, while Waters was cooking hers in a compote over goat’s milk panna cotta and charging fourteen dollars per serving. Fourteen bucks was about what Paula spent on her wardrobe over the course of a year.

  Meanwhile, I kept coming across references to the food scene in San Francisco, which had led the trend in restaurants serving sustainable, locally sourced food and was now clearly leading the way with wild edibles. There was an outfit called forageSF that had been receiving lots of laudatory press, including two mentions in The New York Times Magazine in the same month. The group’s goal, according to its website, was to “connect Bay dwellers to the wild food that is all around them.” ForageSF was founded by Iso Rabins, a twentysomething entrepreneur who seemed to be going places.

  Rabins sounded like the Patrick Henry of the foraging movement, a big-idea guy, a revolutionary willing to lead a charge. He sought, according to the group’s website, nothing less than to form a “wild foods community” and to “rediscover a forgotten food system and reduce carbon miles.” Through forageSF, he even hoped to make full-time foraging a “sustainable lifestyle”—aka a paying job. The group was described as offering a biweekly box of foraged edibles to ­subscribers—in effect, a foraging CSA—with half of the profits going directly to the forager. It held regular walks through the city to teach people about the wild edibles all around them, as well as a “wild seafood walk.” It put on monthly dinners where subscribers could enjoy an eight-course meal, each course built around a local and sustainably foraged ingredient. The group’s most recent undertaking was its underground markets. These were a way for ordinary people—­foragers, homesteaders, aspiring foodies—to sell their homemade kombucha and jalapeño–Meyer lemon marmalades and chocolate-covered smoked bacon to the general public.

  In short, forageSF sounded like a hub of foraging zeal and chic. I wanted to meet these people. I wanted to rub up against them and see if some of this chic might stick to me. I wrote to the “contact” link on the website and said I wanted to come and visit. Things got weird rather quickly after that. The harder I tried to pin down forageSF and its “community,” the more elusive it became. I was told that Iso was away indefinitely, traveling and foraging his way through Europe. I said that I regretted missing him but wanted to come anyway and had already picked a week during
which three forageSF events were scheduled—a wild plant walk, a wild seafood walk, and one of its “Wild Kitchen” underground dinners. In response, I received a note saying that it would be better if I could come at a time that was “less busy.” This was passing strange. Seeing the group in action was the whole point. Covering a foraging group at a “less busy” time was like reviewing a canceled concert. Having already shelled out for a plane ticket and three events, I wasn’t about to wait. I replied with a breezy e-mail saying that I was on my way and looking forward to it.

  Once I got to San Francisco, it didn’t take me long to realize that forageSF was not quite the hotbed of a foraging revolution I’d taken it for. For one thing, the underground markets were no longer operating. Actually, they’d been victims of their own success. But they had never really been about foraging anyway. Rabins had pitched them as “an incubator“ for “beginning food entrepreneurs” to get their products to the public without “the cost and delay of myriad regulatory structures that has arisen around food production.” The first one, held in a private house in 2009, attracted seven vendors and 200 attendees. Within a year, underground markets were being held monthly in warehouses Rabins rented and were attracting crowds in the thousands. Rabins would vet the sellers ahead of time, rent booth space to those selected, and charge customers five dollars a head for the privilege of entering. The events skirted the laws against selling food from noncommercial kitchens by billing itself as a private club whose members had signed up on the forageSF website, which claimed to have had “over 300 vendors and 50,000 attendees.” People in lines several blocks long would often wait hours to gain entry. But it was hard to keep something that attracted such crowds “underground”—or at least off the radar of the Health Department, which eventually shut the operation down. (In July 2012, forageSF was able to restart its underground markets by, essentially, taking them aboveground—“Permits, inspections etc., we did it all. The health inspector came and hung out with us for what seemed like hours, making sure everything was legit,” Rabins wrote in a blog posting.)

  As for the foraging CSA’s biweekly box of foraged edibles, that never even got off the ground. In the end I met only two expert foragers associated with forageSF, one of whom led the wild edibles walk I went on soon after arriving.

  The e-mailed instructions for the wild plant walk told us to meet outside Buena Vista Park near Haight-Ashbury. I showed up on a Saturday afternoon to find a dozen or so people milling about. Eventually, via mutually raised eyebrows and tentative smiles, like strangers meeting for a blind date, we confirmed that we were all here for the same purpose. Eventually, an earnest, clean-shaven young man in his early thirties appeared and identified himself as “Feral Kevin,” forageSF’s manager of wild food walks. He had on a North Face shirt, a fanny pack, and Merrell hiking boots that looked cleaner than one would want in a serious forager. He was carrying a large book, Chanterelle Dreams, Amanita Nightmares, which doubled as writing surface on which each of us signed a release form.

  Feral Kevin quickly showed himself to be a knowledgeable and experienced forager and eater of wild plants. By this point, I’d learned that there was no shortage of people who knew the basics of foraging and could lead a walk. The number of such people who regularly ate wild plants, however, was considerably lower. Kevin was among this elite. He not only knew the plants themselves but also gave detailed descriptions of the when and how of harvesting, processing, and preparing them. He described their flavor, and how he liked to cook them. He knew a fair bit about their nutritional value—information always difficult to come by, since nutritional value is compiled only if a plant is widely consumed by livestock. More often than not, he could even say something about the plants’ importance in other cultures. He was, quite simply, as knowledgeable as any forager I’d ever met.

  On the other hand, he sucked dry any hopes we might have had about foraging being fun. He started his talk by noting that foraging in city parks in San Francisco was a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $500. “So if anybody—especially anybody in a ­uniform—asks, you are on a ‘plant identification’ walk, not a ‘wild edibles’ walk, okay?” But, he continued, you wouldn’t have wanted to forage here anyway, because we all lived in “a poisoned world” and cities—such as the sunny, beautiful one we were standing in at the moment—were “among its most poisoned places.” You’d have thought that this pretty much covered the subject, but Feral Kevin was just getting warmed up. “One definition of a city, in fact,” he said, “is any place that can only sustain itself by importing food grown outside it.” He pointed to a robust-looking dandelion sprouting from a crack in the sidewalk. Its bright yellow flower, looking as if it had just opened, nodded in the breeze. “That can make you sick,” he said. He warned us about lead in old paint and the dangers of foraging near old buildings. Roads were equally dangerous, as the lead in automobile exhaust from the days of leaded gasoline was still there in the soil. “I see people growing tomatoes in median strips and I’m like ‘No!’” he told us, and the anguish in his voice was palpable. It was as if he had lost some of his best friends to the silent scourge of median strip tomatoes.

  I wanted to like Kevin. He walked us through an impressive number of wild edibles and seemed genuinely interested in sharing his knowledge. But there was an air of gloom around him that was hard to get past. As he led us up a steep sidewalk skirting the park, someone asked why we had yet to enter the park itself. It was, he said, because you usually found more wild edibles on the edge of a park than inside. This was consistent with what I had learned from Paula about edibles and also with what I’d learned on my own while hunting deer. “Nature loves an edge” is how this phenomenon is often phrased. It’s true. Edibles often thrive in the transition zone—often only a few yards wide—between woods and more open ground. Deer trails are usually deep enough in woods to provide cover but parallel to field edges. Urban or rural, edges are where the action is.

  My brief moment of plant walk glory came a few yards later when he plucked a bright red berry from an evergreen shrub and asked if anyone knew what it was. “Yew?” I ventured. Paula had showed me yew bushes not two weeks before, saying that every part of the plant—including the seed inside the berry—was toxic to one degree or another, except for the berry itself. She maintained that yew berries had been shown to have anticancer properties, which was why she made a point of eating a few each year. “Wow,” said Kevin, genuinely impressed, “you’re the first person I’ve ever had get that one right.” For a brief moment, I basked in the group’s admiration. Had Kevin been struck dead by lightning at that moment, it was clear who would be the logical choice to replace him.

  Any hopes that San Franciscans were more enthusiastic about learning to forage than other people, however, were dashed shortly into the walk. Though I’d been scribbling almost nonstop, I saw only two other people take any notes at all. Neither was in danger of running out of ink. On the whole, my fellow attendees looked more like people who’d happened to be in the area when the walk started—in the same way that one might listen in on someone else’s guided tour of a museum—than folks who had shelled out thirty dollars apiece for a wild edibles walk. I couldn’t imagine any of them picking and eating a wild anything.

  The next afternoon I reported at the wild seafood walk along the city’s waterfront, specifically the Saint Francis jetty near the Golden Gate Bridge. By now, I easily identified my fellow forageSF walk participants: we were the ones standing around looking sheepish and unsure of ourselves. It was a cool, blustery day. A number of nearby fishermen had their backs to us as they faced the water. When one of them looked around and, seeing us, braced his rod against his bucket and strode over, I figured him for our leader. The guy was in his early forties, tall, and wore chunky geek-hipster glasses and a porkpie hat. He held a pipe clenched between his teeth, the wind tearing wisps of smoke from it as he approached.

  I had a sinking feeling. The
pipe, glasses, and hat all pointed toward somebody trying a little too hard to be a “character.” I pinned my hopes on two counterbalancing factors. The first was that he was wearing a baggy, well-worn pair of orange Gruden bibs, the foul weather gear of choice among commercial fishermen. Maybe he knew his stuff after all. The other thing was his walk. Oversize bibs aren’t the easiest things to walk in. But rather than being slowed down by them, he galumphed happily along, taking long, enthusiastic strides, almost like a kid wearing fireman’s boots. He introduced himself as Kirk Lombard or, as he referred to himself on his website—here his voice suddenly deepened to a dead-on caricature of an emcee—“Lombard of the Intertidal.” He warned us that in the next two hours he was going to tell us more than we could possibly remember. But we could find it all and more on his blog, The Monkeyface News.