Feeding a Crowd

Neighborhood foraging in the Twin Cities

An old friend and colleague who teaches at Ursinus College asked me to take a moment to go over a foraging survey he's developing. Taking the survey was thought provoking -- it particularly made me appreciate my friends and colleagues interested in these issues, like Valerie Segrest, about whom we read in The Color of Food.


I'm providing here some thoughts on foraging, along with a list of the things I recounted foraging for Patrick, as a starting place for some recipes and instructions inspired by what others have taught me about foraging (via Foraging with Friends Minnesota chapter, plus workshops with Russ Cohen, Sandor Katz, Joe Mendyka and Diane Dodge).

I love knowing that the land can feed me, and I appreciate the reciprocity of interaction that eating from the land provides as I care for it. Being able to *see* and *know* the plants around me so intimately also helps provide a sharper focus (in terms of what to look for and what I can interact with) and a much more engaged way of being in the world -- and it connects me to ancestors and elders and friends and relatives to be able to know and use these gifts and medicines!

The list of plants I thought to share on this survey includes:
black nightshade, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, cherries, mulberries, black raspberries, grapes, cranberries 
ramps, hosta, mustards, burdock, chanterelles, aborted emboletas, hen of the woods -- to use as vegetables
slippery elm bark, echinacea, creeping charlie, lilac -- to make syrups and to use as medicines

And the recipe I will include is a poster education project developed with Joseph Mendyka, Stephanie Hankerson, Diane Dodge, Jenni Abere, and Valentine Cadieux, to be shown at Frogtown Farm spring 2017


This is supplemented by further work that can be found in this google folder here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1kT0KnLhuVRn-nYl3ibOZ2QsDafNnxO4sGzTIPMUm_M4

 

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