For the city dweller, learning how to forage makes the world suddenly seem uncanny. You realize there’s food and medicine everywhere you look, and that there is so much out there that money can’t buy. You just need time: to walk a little slower along the park trail, to dig through the sand, to shake a few branches on your way to work.
I don’t do it often, but a recent foray into Buena Vista Park with Shared Cultures co-founders Eleana Hsu and Kevin Gondo reminded me of how much I love foraging. While their company is focused on creating novel fermented foods like cashew miso and split pea soy sauce, Hsu and Gondo are also passionate about wild foods. With a copy of the book “Bay Area Forager” in tow, the two showed onlookers how to shake pine pollen out of male pine trees. They snapped turkey tail mushrooms off of dead logs and provided samples of pesto made from wild greens. Wild radish pods tasted like wasabi peas; oxalis like sour lemon candy. Buena Vista Park isn’t just a park with a view — it’s a feast.
Then I went poke pole fishing on the beaches of Half Moon Bay, creeping through tide pools hoping to tempt eels with pungent strips of squid flesh attached to the end of a slender bamboo pole. But I was honestly more interested in the seaweed that clung to the rocks I was fishing underneath: nori, feather boa, Turkish towel. The brown, green and rust-colored shreds of algae made the beach look like the floor of a vaudeville dressing room at showtime. The smell of it was thick in the air; with every tentative step I took on the slippery intertidal zone, kelp bladders burst like tiny water balloons. I didn’t catch any eels, but if I was really hungry, I could at least eat some seaweed.
Foraging warps the way we think about the calendar, too. Last year, in the midst of an interview about Ohlone food, I asked mak-‘amham founders and Ohlone community activists Louis Trevino and Vincent Medina how their folks understood the concept of time. (Sometimes our conversations just go that way.) While the couple’s culinary pop-up, Cafe Ohlone, lacks a physical space, their dinners-in-a-box are filled with yerba buena, Indian potatoes, acorn and other ingredients they’ve gathered in their ancestral grounds of the East Bay and Carmel Valley.
“We (Ohlone) often think of our seasons in terms of the world affecting us,” Medina said. Huyyi tiwši warép means that it’s springtime in Chochenyo language, but it also means “the world has begun to flower.” Seasons don’t just come and go, with humans as passive observers, he said: “We’re part of them.” According to oral histories and texts translated by Medina and Trevino, Ohlone people in the Bay Area would often craft flower crowns in the springtime and make cakes out of seeds to celebrate the season. Just as a popsicle signals summer, you know it's summertime when nuts and berries appear in the forests; same with acorns and autumn, and robust greens and mushrooms in the winter.
Even though we now live in a world ruled by the atomic clock, that impulse is really hard to squelch in people. That’s why people on the East Coast are serving fried cicadas at cookouts, now that the tasty legions of Brood X have emerged from underground. (Don’t eat ‘em if you’re allergic to shellfish!) And it's why families armed with buckets and dressed in waders and sun hats regularly descend on the beaches of Half Moon Bay, hoping to snag giant moon snails and rock crabs to toss into their woks for dinner.
For more on foraging, definitely read Helen Rosner’s interview with ebullient Ohio forager Alexis Nikole Nelson at the New Yorker. It comes with a very tempting recipe for lilac syrup, too. You can also listen to The Chronicle’s podcast interview with Nelson. And if you go, please don’t take more than you need! And be sure to go with a guide (book or human) and gather in places that are relatively pollution-free, i.e. far from busy freeways and factory sites that might have toxic materials in the soil.
Foraged foods are tasty, sure, but they’re also about being in the moment: letting the things you hear, smell and taste tell you where you are and what time it is.
"smell" - Google News
June 07, 2021 at 06:03PM
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Stop and smell the seaweed: The beauty of foraging food in the Bay Area - San Francisco Chronicle
"smell" - Google News
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