Urban Foragers Turn City Parks Into Produce Aisles


By ERIC WAHLGREN Posted 9:05 AM 05/01/10


Green


On a bright spring day, Iso Rabins wanders through the brush atop one of San Francisco's highest peaks. "Wild radish over there," says the 29-year-old, pointing to a leafy plant with small purplish flowers. A few steps later, he pauses in front of waist-high plant with silky green fronds. "That's wild fennel. I use it a lot."


This is Rabins's foodie twist on the nature walk. To most of us, his discoveries might look like weeds that we'd readily douse with Roundup (if they were sprouting in our yard). But to this bearded hipster, they are ingredients for his next meal. Actually, make that his next banquet: an eight-course, $75- per-person affair called The Wild Kitchen that showcases all the edibles that can be found in and around America's 12th largest city.


On the menu for a recent dinner was a soup made of wild onion, fiddleheads and heirloom potatoes and desserts including a variation on the French mille feuille -- this one made with flour from milled acorns gathered in the San Francisco Bay Area.


"Once you start to realize that the things you see around you every day are edible, it changes your relationship with nature," says Rabins, a film major who moved to San Francisco from Massachusetts in 2007. "It becomes even more important to protect it when you really understand its real value in producing food."


'People Like the Idea of Eating Snails'


Rabins is considered a pioneer in the growing urban foraging movement. Foraging is an offshoot of the locavore trend that has been sweeping the nation over the past decade. Only instead of eating food from family-owned farms located within a day's drive, urban foragers stay even closer to home, collecting and eating the fruits, vegetables and animals (snails,


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