>Jen Stotland
plucks a loose, lovely light purple petal from a bed in the Public
Gardens. “Mallow,” she says, placing it quickly in my open palm.
Eat it?
Yup.
The whole thing?
Just pop it in your mouth. You can eat the leaf too.
I do.
“It’s a little bit slimy,” she says. “It’s really high in vitamin
C.”
Stotland is an urban forager. And I’ll answer your next question
before you even ask: it’s not dumpster diving; it’s harvesting
wild-growing edible plants in the city.
“What I do is I look for things and I eat them,” she says. “And if I
take a weed out of someone’s bed that is by the roadside, I don’t think
they are going to be too upset.”
Stotland picks Japanese knotweed in the spring and steams it (looks
like asparagus; tastes like artichoke). She also snacks on goutweed
(kind of celery-ish).
Gardeners with those invaders would no doubt welcome Stotland for a
snack. (Actually, I’m not joking: she’s no weirdo. She owns a
landscaping business and is married to a computer programmer.)
On our walk from the base of the Citadel, through the
sample-abundant Public Gardens and Camp Hill Cemetery (thank you, Effie
M. Salter, for the dock I ate from your grave) I gulped a salad of
treats—juniper, mustards, rose petals, violets. I also came away with
enough knowledge that later I snarfed bites of wood sorrel at
Gorsebrook Park, feeling only slightly nervous.
The whole trip was an exercise in eliminating typical North American
food fears—from worrying about whether dogs had peed on the chickweed
I was enjoying outside Citadel High (Stotland: “there’s so much rain in
this city, the plants get washed off.” Then a pause. “Unless the dog is
sick…meh…”) to wondering whether I wasn’t just going to drop dead
from eating some poisonous berry.
I didn’t. And Stotland, 28, hasn’t yet.
Her mom taught her to forage as a kid.
“Most people hear from their parents or guardians that all plants
are poisonous and that you should stay away from them. That’s an easy
thing to say to a child—if you see a berry, don’t eat it. But that’s
a real shame.”
Stotland wrote a zine—available at The Grainery—called Eat
Yer Weeds!. She’ll do workshops if people contact her (organicgardenerhalifax@gmail.com).
She calls urban foraging “empowering” and says “it lets you get to
know a place.”
And right at the moment I’m thinking, holy crackers, I am so
totally set for the collapse of the economy, me and my little handfuls
of chickweed and these delicious petunia petals from the hanging
baskets at the Public Gardens, Stotland says, “I used to think it
would help our food security, or that it would help people with certain
food deficiencies. But these [foods] are not very high-calorie.”
She’s right. I suspect I burned more calories on the walk than I
foraged for food. Still, Stotland says, “I think people would respect
nature a little more if they knew the properties of what’s around
them.”
Speaking of properties, what about the pollutants in roadside foods?
Not, like, dog pee, but deposits in the soil from years of everyday
zooming cars?
“You would do better to not forage in the city, but I accept that as
a risk to take part in an enjoyable hobby,” she says. “You can
tell—if a plot looks really barren and there are gum wrappers. I
mean, I have standards.”
Obvious off-road forage spots are Point Pleasant Park, Needham Park
and the Mount Saint Vincent campus. “City gardens,” Stotland says,
“when they don’t mulch, are really good for pigweed.” (It’s also called
lambs quarters, tastes like spinach, and is one of the highest-known
plant sources of calcium.)
Generally, Stotland suggests foraging a couple of metres back from
the road if possible and avoiding mown areas.
Also, watch out for places there is an abundance of wild berries. It
might have once been a dump. And! Bodies used to be preserved with
arsenic, so forage in cemeteries lightly.
Other rules? Never take too much. Never take a rare plant.
Vis-à-vis accidental poisoning, Stotland says, “Halifax isn’t
the jungle. We have maybe 15 to 20 really toxic poisonous plants that
will kill you. And once you learn those—Virginia creeper, tansy,
common buttercup— you can basically experiment.”
“If you poison yourself,” says Stotland, “you can’t blame anyone but
yourself.”
I’ll take that line too.
This article appears in Sep 24-30, 2009.