The Fun of Urban Foraging. Wild Girl Goes Urban Foraging in Portland. Photos via Culture ChangeUrban foraging is gaining appeal among more people as a way to gather up the free bounty of wild plants that still thrive in city settings.
However, it's not an easy thing to do - at least not at first. You need to be able to identify plants, know rules about public property, and enjoy cooking up food that we're used to seeing as weeds. Ecolocalizer let us know about Becky Lerner, AKA Wild Girl, a blogger who has taken on the task of eating only what she can forage from her Portland, Oregon urban forest. Lerner is blogging at Culture Change about her experience. And no, this isn't urban foraging like a freegan out of dumpsters or restaurant back doors. She writes: Most of what I know comes from spending time with knowledgeable friends who are herbalists, survivalists, ethnobotanists and primitive skills enthusiasts. Many of us think gathering anything in a city setting that doesn't look like the produce we buy at the grocery store is a bit on the risky side. Urban foraging - ethical? Urban Foraging with Leda Meredith - Green Edge NYC * Community for a Sustainable Future. Urban foraging.
Top 10 Ways to Forage in Los Angeles - Los Angeles Restaurants and Dining - Squid Ink. Click to enlarge Willy Blackmore What's there to eat?
Spring means many things in Southern California--the end of citrus season, the beginning of masses of bright green reappearing in local farmers' markets--but it is not associated with the food-gathering traditions long upheld elsewhere in the country. The first somewhat warm, wet months that follow winter bring about morel hunts in the Midwest, ramp digs in Appalachia, fiddlehead fern gathering in New England. Like the king of wild ingredients, the truffle, these highly season, intensely local foods are loved not just for their taste, but for the traditions which have built up around their seasons, the effort needed to experience their aromas, flavors and textures.
But other than hoping a plane to Iowa and somehow convincing a seasoned mushroom hunter to take you to his or her most treasured tract of woods (author's note: this is goddamn impossible, and I can say that from experience. 1. 2. Willy Blackmore Fennel Plants 3. 4. & 5. Foraging The Weeds For Wild, Healthy Greens. Can we come up with a tasty, healthful salad, just by foraging the urban neighborhood around NPR's Washington, D.C., office?
That would be the ultimate in locally grown food. But most of us don't know the first thing about foraging wild greens. Hide caption Sam Thayer, an urban forager who has written field guides to edible plants, munches on Siberian elm seeds called samaras he found in Washington, D.C. Thayer says the seeds taste like a cross between sweetened oatmeal and lettuce.
Photos by Maggie Starbard/NPR/NPR Hide caption By a wall at the back of a parking lot, Thayer discovers edible dandelions. Hide caption Thayer chomps on some common chickweed while digging for more wild treats in the green spaces around Washington, D.C. So we asked Sam Thayer to join us in a hunt for wild greens. "I'm looking for green," he says. And he finds it, right across the street: chickweed growing along a chain-link fence. Top 10 ways to forage for free food - Times Online. The modern harvest — Urban foragers share the wealth. In some circles, it’s known as “urban foraging.”
Or “urban crop sharing,” or “urban communism.” The terms all describe a growing movement that brings together diverse lovers of produce, freebies, and practical idealism. The goal? To make use of publicly available food that would otherwise go to waste. Urban Foraging and Guerrilla Gardening. One trend that has really caught my interest lately (to the chagrin of certain hygiene-obsessed boyfriends) is urban foraging.
No, I'm not talking about the Freegans. (Call me elitist, but—although I love the idea of reducing waste—I hate the idea of Dumpster-diving; if you're not similarly inclined, you can find out more about that movement here). I'm talking about foraging for free fruits, vegetables, and other "wild food" around the city.
A whole bunch of web guides to these free food locations have sprung up in cities around the US—particularly in Portland, Ore., where the Urban Edibles web site ("A community database of wild food sources in Portland, OR") includes a frequently updated Google map with dozens of detailed location descriptions (for example: "Pear Tree @ N Albina and Failing: Good sized, yellow pear tree on the NW corner. Small italian plum is next to it. ") At Vacant Homes, Foraging for Fruit. She noticed something else.
Those forlorn yards were peppered with overgrown gardens and big fruit trees, all bulging with the kind of bounty that comes from the high heat and afternoon thunderstorms that have defined Atlanta’s summer. So she began picking.