mostly) that are found growing in the sidewalks, street medians and urban parks just feet from their homes. "People like the idea of eating snails that could be in their backyard," Rabins says. "We actually have the same genus of snails here that are found in Europe."
Those snail-loving foragers aren't just living in picturesque and eco-friendly San Francisco. They can also be found combing the urban landscapes of much grittier metropolises like Chicago and New York. While there are no figures on the number of urban foragers nationally, foraging blogs lately seem to be popping up like the very Morel mushrooms they chronicle. What's more, Stalking The Wild Asparagus, the book by Euell Gibbons long considered the forager's bible since it initially appeared in 1962, was recently updated and reprinted to keep up with the rising demand.
"For me, it's about enjoying the fact that there really is a whole lot of local food that is right under your feet," says Ava Chin, who writes the Urban Forager blog for The New York Times. "I've found the Mexican herb Epazote in a parking lot in Brooklyn. I smashed it up with some avocado and made the best guacamole ever."
Turning Wild Mushroom Gathering Into a Business
For Rabins, a graduate of Emerson College in Boston, the interest in foraging traces back to 2007 during a visit with his father in Humboldt County in Northern California. That's when he got his first taste of wild mushrooms that some family friends had just picked. "I had this moment when I realized 'Wow, someone actually went out and found these,'" he says.
Rabins started helping mushroom foragers in the area sell their fungi to restaurants in the Bay Area -- a fateful move that set him on his unconventional career path. "I decided I didn't want to be waiting tables," he says. "What I wanted to be doing is hanging out in the woods a lot and talking to people about wild food."
Rabins has turned his foraging hobby into an expanding enterprise called ForageSF that, among other things, sells "Community Supported Forage" boxes of wild foods to 25 customers once a month.
For $20 to $80 a month, depending on the box's contents, subscribers to the CSF might get foraged Black Trumpet and Chanterelle mushrooms, chickweed and Miner's Lettuce, huckleberries and blackberries. Rabins works with area fisherman to add locally-caught fish to the mix. "I'm trying to keep the CSF business a small part of what I'm doing as it's an astounding amount of work," he says.
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