by Jenna Orkin
It's with good reason that the naturalist, author, artist and chef Steve Brill goes by the moniker "Wildman." For anyone old enough to remember the "two wild and crazy guys" from Saturday Night Live, he carries an aura of nostalgia.
A foraging expedition on Saturday met at the Northwest end of Central Park. (Yes, Nature has a place in New York City, though we keep her firmly under control.) While waiting for a contingent of homeschooling families, would-be gatherers leafed through Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places; Shoots and Greens of Early Spring in Northeastern North America and The Wild Vegan Cookbook: A Forager's Culinary Guide (in the Field or in the Supermarket) to Preparing and Savoring Wild (and Not So Wild) Natural Foods. The books are entertaining as well as educational, providing, for example, the myth that accounts for a plant's name. Steve has been vegan himself since 1990, though he does "eat cattails and sheep sorrel." His wife and daughter are "ovo-lacto" and he claims to make an excellent eggless omelette.
During this milling-about phase of the afternoon, newcomers also signed brief, unintimidating release forms, presumably so we couldn't sue Steve if we stepped in any of the abundant poison ivy that stands sentry on some of the paths. (That's no mere metaphor; it's more or less what Steve explained when I asked him the purpose of the noxious plant. Native Americans considered it a Protector of the Forest because after a forest had been disturbed, it kept people out until the trees had recovered enough for shade to banish the poison ivy.)
Our party of thirty-odd contained a number of children under the age of six so the presentation leaned toward the clownish, with Steve posing for a picture eating a fistful of chickweed. ("I was born Jewish but put me in front of a camera and I turn into a ham.") Among his pursuits is jazz and he also improvised riffs on Happy Birthday, making drum like sounds on the "Brillophone" by clapping cupped hands in front of his mouth.
First stop: Wild lettuce, with poor man's pepper growing nearby. Behind us grew garlic mustard and a plant with minute amounts of estrogen which serves as a form of natural birth control against certain predatory insects. Onwards to black birch whose stem provides a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory. Steve explained in the simplest possible terms that inflammation is the body's response to damage by signaling the need to form new cells. If this signal goes too far - say, if a cell is on the verge of becoming cancer - then potential cancer may become actualized.
From there to sassafras which has a three-leaf structure: an oval, a mitten and a T. rex footprint. Along the way we also encountered Juneberry, chickweed, which really did taste like corn on the cob, wintercress, which lived up to its reputation for bitterness and something which "smells as though it hasn't been dusted in three years." To show us what a given plant looked like in full bloom, Steve whipped out an iOS/Android foraging app, WildEdibles, on which he'd stored pen and ink drawings, paintings and photos of plants at all phases of development.
At lunch, we sampled his homemade bread which was dense with wild herbs, as well as chocolate truffles sweetened with dates and, appropriately, Stevia.
On the trip back, people collected armfuls of burdock root for soup and the bolder among us, pokeweed, about which Wikipedia says, "All parts of it are toxic unless properly prepared.[14." We also encountered white snakeroot which killed Lincoln's mother when she drank the milk of a cow that had eaten it. (Via this secretion process, the cow herself managed to survive.)
I should end by saying that the small bag of greens I brought home became the most aromatic soup I've ever made but it would be a lie. I thought about the dogs who'd been walked next to the lamppost where I'd picked a red clover and threw my forlorn trophies away. (This probably isn't the real reason since I'm aware that all farming is by definition a dirty business. I seem to have greater confidence in food that arrives the "normal" way: from a store.) But I hadn't gone on the outing in search of soup; I'd gone for knowledge about a subject in which I have no background. And Lesson Number One certainly whetted the appetite for more.
Jenna Orkin is the author of The Moron's Guide to Global Collapse.
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