Foraging in the Triad
F
oraging can mean several things. It can refer to urban dumpster diving aka “Urban Foraging”, it can mean
foraging in the woods for wild foods and herbal medicines, and it can also refer to foraging in cities for edible plants. For this month’s topic “Foraging in the Triad”, we are focusing on wild foraging, urban (wild foods) foraging, and the more loosely defined foraging of buying/eating in sea- son.
Did you grow up foraging? Perhaps
your great grandfather or a favorite great uncle and aunt had a fruit orchard and you fondly remember going to their house or farm and picking fresh, ripe peaches that were dripping with juice with every bite and remember it being the best peach you ever ate. You may even remember a time
when it was a rare treat to have an orange or apple in your stocking for Christmas because fruit was not shipped in from Brazil year around. Or perhaps a relative walked you out into their yard to proudly show you their pecan trees and you helped them scoop them up by the bagful to eat raw or to be made into pecan pies with vanilla ice cream on top. Or, perhaps you remember hot summer days of picking blackberries (and contracting those nasty bugs, chiggers) and your mother making homemade blackberry cobblers with thick homemade crusts. Or like with the case of local hobby forager, Eric Juday, maybe your parents and grandparents taught you to hunt morels (an edible mushroom) and flour and fry them with a nice steak. If you have any of these experiences, well, then,
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you were foraging. Is it a lost practice? No it’s not, and
fortunately it is making a comeback with those who want to have more control over where their food is coming from and how they obtain it. Foraging does not have to be scary. Polls show that most Americans have been implanted with unreasonable fears against foraging by false propaganda when the truth is that deaths by accidental poisonings due to wild plants are rare. But let’s go ahead with the disclaimer anyway, should you decide to try your hand to foraging, this article is in no way is respon- sible for any mistakes you may make in identification and or consumption of any plant, berry, stem, leaf, root, mushroom, etc. that you may eat. It is ultimately YOUR responsibility to safely identify anything you put in your mouth.
But, that said and done, the chances
of you killing yourself with a wild edible are very slim. Thanks to misnomers and outright untruths such as Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”, many are more afraid of wild plants, but they shouldn’t be. For the record, it has been 100% scientifically proven that Chris McCandless (the true character in the book and movie) did not die of the “poisonous potato plant” which is not even poisonous. He died of starva- tion. Just starvation, not starvation brought on by the “poisonous potato plant” that is not poisonous. So, put your fears aside for
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