Pics of a Flemish wild food guide from 1945

This Flemish booklet 'Wilde planten op het woudloopersmenu' (wild plants on the wood trackers menu) was published in 1945 and given its age and the brittleness of the paper it's a remarkably well preserved scouting publication. The introduction is followed by a short essay that tells of a country walk ending with a wild food feast: pure outback joy that is within your reach with this publication in your knapsack. And while the fern soup described does not appeal to me much, my lacklustre attempt to research the history of foraging has here found another important avenue for future investigation. I had hoped that the writer, a certain R. Hermans, would have said something about WWII but alas: not a word. 

Would Baden Powell's little soldiers still forage their own meals today?
 
Below are a number of pages from this book. Click to enlarge.
 

 

Pointing you to an important paper on edible wild plants

"lacto-fermented hogweed soup (+eggs): the original borscht"

Nancy Turner and six co-authors wrote "Edible and Tended Wild Plants, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Agroecology" a very readable look on the possible importance of weedy plants for food. It's hard to summarize the paper because there are no words wasted but if you are interested in the wider implications of foraging I advice you to read it. The crux of the matter is stated here:

Wild plant species, even for agrarian peoples or pastoralists who mainly used animal products, would have assumed a special importance during times of crop failure and famine. Some of these are the species that we know of today as “weeds”: species well adapted to disturbed conditions and often associatedwith human habitation. In turn, some of these weeds became the candidates for domestication: for example, mustards, wild carrot, chicory and lettuce. Altogether, widely used domesticated species comprise only a fraction of the 20,000 or so plant species known to have been used as food by humans. Canadian Indigenous peoples alone have used over 500 species of plants for food. In recent times, however, especially in urban areas of the world, most people have come to depend on fewer and fewer species to provide them with their daily nutrition. Today, only around 20 domesticated species supply up to 85% of the world’s food base.

What follows then is a ten page overview of selected edible wild plants from around the world as documented in scientific literature. That's an approximate 250 plants, way more than an average forage guidebooks will give you. The paper continues with various strategies for wild plant use and management before giving a very good definition of weeds, their downsides and upsides. It then continues by giving various examples of weeds used in local cuisines. I am quoting from the paragraph on Borsch:

Nowadays the Russian name borsh and Polish barszcz designate a kind of vegetable soup, specifically one made with beetroots (Beta vulgaris). However in the past this name applied mainly to a soup made from the young shoots of hogweed, or cow-parsnip (Heracleum sphondylium) which in Polish bears the name barszcz and in Russian barshchevnikh. How did it happen that this shift in the meaning of the name arose? This issue fascinated professor Jozef Rostafinski, a Polish botanist from Cracow, who in 1916 published a treatise on the history of the shift from eating Heracleum to eating beetroots. Hogweed is reported as an important food plant in Poland in the sixteenth century. In the herbal of Marcin z Urze¸dowa (1595) we can read: “Whoever eats hogweed, moistens his living.. . . When they make it sour in the Polish way, it is good to drink in fevers, thirst, as it alleviates thirst and cholera and it induces greed for food with its spice.. . . Garnished with egg and butter, it is good to eat on the days when they do not eat meat soup, as it works in the same way.”

Isn't that lovely? The paper ends with the observation that the traditional knowledge of gathering wild plants is mostly down to old women whose skills are not being handed down to a new generation. And this is a shame because with it we lose a local, practical, hands-on knowledge that appreciates diversity and gives independence and understanding of the environment to its practitioners.

Two forage walks in two days in two parks with two guides

FORAGE WALK ONE

Saturday the 23th of June was the national day of architecture and the theme for 2012 was food and the city. The Utrecht Architecture Centre Aorta assembled an extensive program but I only joined the forage walk led by Edwin Flores. He is a well known wild food expert and educator who, amongst other things, supplies some of the finest restaurants in the country. Flores is well groomed guy in Bear Grylls chic and what you can only describe as a real character. His outgoing style, an incident with a participant that caused a sudden change in atmosphere, a run in with a group of drunks combined with a bad traffic decision that nearly had us all killed made for an expedition that was also action theatre.

From the meeting point we cycled to the nearby Julianapark where we spent one and a half hour looking at about 15 to 20 plants. Flores had never visited the park previously but this was no barrier to finding an abundant variety of plants to eat and this in itself illustrated the general point of the food and the city theme. Flores is obviously extremely knowledgeable and he delivered a high-density hands-on crash-course that introduced us to the richness of city nature. He told more than you could ever hope to remember, but I was also surprised by the number of participants who, with their writing pads out, turned out to be seasoned foragers already endowed with a repertoire of things to do with the blossom of a large-leaved linden.

Only afterwards did I notice how effective his educational style had been. While the list of uses for individual plants never fully registered  in my memory I did pick up a good number of things to keep in mind about what, where and how to forage, from the need to avoid duck shit to hints on plant biology. Bits of information unobtrusively presented but together very helpful in setting you in the right direction to approach the challenges of wild foods. This may reflect my own concerns more than anything else as my own interest in foraging has less to do with recipes and more with foraging a way of knowing place and as a rationale of exploration. There was a lot of touching trees, feeling leaves, harvesting cress, tasting stalks and looking at the ground; an important part of the expedition was to get people over any non-touch inhibitions in regard to plant life.

The GPS-trail below (click to enlarge) is informative of the forager's tendency to forsake the shortcut that makes us see less in order to arrive somewhere faster in favour of a 'longcut' that takes an extra effort to see something different. See us consistently strolling outside the path, making frequent stops with the odd little turbulent sideways move if some plant or tree presented itself away from the footpath.

FORAGE WALK TWO

The next day I joined a forage expedition led by Elma Roelvink of the foraging app Plukdestad. It's hard not to write about this walk in comparison to the first. Roelvink gave us less the feeling of being shot at with surplus information and accordingly there was less distance between guide and us nitwits. This walk was more informal, conversational and interactive, which is perhaps the best way to learn. As we progressed Roelvink told us about her recent experiments in using the various plants we encountered and I liked the fact that we could share some of that excitement.

 

Again we explored a park, this time the Griftpark in my very own Whiteladies. For me this certainly added to the usefulness of this walk. Even though I visit this park at least a number of times a week and have done so for the last 10 years I never walked it as slow and deliberate like this. We found several plants that I knew by name but never had consciously seen and I learned the name of two or three plants that had so far remained nameless. Alongside Roelvink another guide tagged along, I unfortunatly didn't get her name, who specializes in the history of the park. I only knew this in broad lines (there is toxic stuff underneath the park but all authorities state that these are deep below the park and don't enter into the ecosystem/your ground elder nibbles) and I enjoyed this unexpected bonus of local history that also explained a lot about the way the park looks and functions in the wider landscape, visibly and invisibly.

The Griftpark opened in 2002 which makes it 99 years younger than the Julianapark and I think the GPS-track show it. The design of the Griftpark has the birds-eye computer perspective written all over it. As we walked there was very little reason to diverge away from the paths that were sided by well manicured lawns. Most of the trees and plants we looked at were planted and the rest grew in the cover of hedgerows and corners where the mowing machines fail to reach. Despite this our walk took longer than scheduled and could easily have gone on for a few hours more. We kept finding other plants as we progressed, each corner opening up a new line (literately) of enquiry. Foraging and deep exploration go hand in hand; not that I needed to be reminded. 

Many uses and recipes were suggested to me during these two walks and I could not help to observe that foraging can provide green stuff as vegetable but that in most cases the foraged ingredient is a novelty item, an exotic taste-maker to be drowned in as much butter, bread, pasta, melted cheese or creamy sauce as you possible can. I am exaggerating, a little. 

These two walks certainly showed that there is food in the city but it also showed that it won't feed the city. If anything it made me saviour the hard graft of the peasant that gives me my beloved calories. 

Hunting, gathering and the origins of Ray Mears the Fatty

Preparing acorn meal

In the fifth episode of Ray Mears' Wild Food (2007, all available on YouTube) we learn what Britain's bronze-age hunter-gatherers may have eaten and how they prepared it. With gusto Mears harvests, tastes and prepares acorns, wild apples, service berries, mushrooms, hazelnuts, the roots of the black bryony and one or two others plants. Everything tastes delicious and lovely, the methods used are all wonderful, fascinating, interesting, inspiring etc, etc. And yet when at the end of the episode (the end of the series) it is time to thank all people involved with the production of the show they aren't served a delicious acorn pie with a service berry compote and a hazel porridge as desert (yummie). Oh no, out of his high hat Mears conjures a prepared wild boar to be roasted on the spit, serving it with french bread. 

With the wine (in paper cups) and the ketchup carefully kept out of sight (?) Mears celebrates the fruits of the manly hunt as the only thing fitting for a gatherers party. The foraged acorns were later fed to his two-score army of Filipino maids.          

Spitting out a wild apple after stating that is is "lovely"

In the end it is all about the meat.