Greg Monzel holds a handful of street-caught amaranth.
Yesterday, on a 106-degree afternoon in Portland, Oregon, I met two food enthusiasts and searched for something to eat among the sidewalk weeds.
Urban foraging, as it’s called, is the latest wave in the local food movement, where “local” can mean a crack in the asphalt, and one adopts a relaxed definition of “food.” My guides were Rebecca Lerner and Greg Monzel, who have a passion for nourishing themselves with plants that most people consider pests.
In the blazing heat on NE Alberta Street, Greg spotted a purslane plant in the dirt strip by a Quonset hut. We bent down to taste a leaf. The dirt was littered with cigarette butts and Wrigley gum wrappers, which made me less than hungry. On the other hand, Rebecca told me, purslane is known to be rich in omega-3 fatty acids. The leaves had a refreshing crunch that reminded me of Romaine lettuce.
Why bother eating weeds? One day it might be a matter of survival. As global warming disrupts our crops in the same manner that this scorching afternoon browned the lawns, humans may need to learn to seek food from the margins. But Greg and Rebecca are having more fun than that. They seek to overturn the notion that food is something that must be bought from a store, or even grown in a field.
“We have this weird mentality that we hate these certain plants, for some reason. It’s kind of silly.” Greg said.
They also say it’s fun, spotting edibles where others see only overgrowth. We found mallow, a flower that reveals a cheese-wheel-shaped morsel when the petals are stripped away. We found volunteer blackberry bushes in a vacant lot and gorged on the warm berries. In the alley next to Dixon’s Rib Pit, we found a yellow dock plant and stripped off handfuls of the amber-colored grains, which the two would later boil like rice.
Recently, Rebecca tried to go an entire week eating only what she was able to forage on in the streets and parks of Portland and wrote about the experience on her blog. It didn’t go so well. After five days of nearly starving on a diet of stinging-nettle broth, pineapple weed tea and ant eggs, she awoke weak and seeing spots, and surrendered to the grocery store. She learned that the success of foraging depends greatly on when you do it (few plants were in an edible state in late May), and that foraging as a modern-world practice works best when it supplements a more conventional diet.
We returned to Rebecca’s place, where she and Greg steeped a tea from St. John’s wort, blackberry and huckleberry leaves, and self-heal and red clover flowers they had gathered that week. The brew had a slightly spicy flavor, respectable as any store-bought tea grown on a plantation thousands of miles away.
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