May 14, 2005
FOOD-FILLED CLEARING IN THE DISTANCE:
He shows visitors how to eat wild in New York's parks (Lonnie Burstein Hewitt, 5/11/05, The Christian Science Monitor)
It's not what you'd normally think of doing in New York on a Saturday morning - hunting for chickens in Central Park. Actually, it was chicken mushrooms we were after, a form of wild fungus said to taste just like chicken.Posted by Orrin Judd at May 14, 2005 9:35 AMMy husband and I were on a foraging tour with "Wildman" Steve Brill, a naturalist who has been leading walks through New York's urban parks since the early 1980s.
Mr. Brill is not just an observer of nature's resources. He eats them. Only the renewable ones, of course, and the tastiest. Nuts and berries, greens and mushrooms, roots, shoots, and seeds are all part of his diet, and over the years he has extolled the virtues of such delicacies as Japanese knotweed, garlic mustard, and burdock root.
Years ago, Brill - a tournament chess player - saw a group of Greek women gathering wild grape leaves in a park near his apartment in Queens. They couldn't speak English, but they managed to communicate the fact that the leaves would be delicious stuffed and steamed. Once he went home and tried them, he was hooked.
He read everything he could about wild edibles, and threw himself into the field work, exploring, collecting, tasting, and inventing recipes. He soon discovered he didn't have to go out to the country to find things to eat. They were literally right in his own backyard, or neighborhood park.
Wouldn't it just be easier to hide out behind Tavern on the Green and prowl through the garbage?
Posted by: John at May 14, 2005 10:02 AMI remember as a kid playing little league in Bay Ridge, Bklyn seeing old Chinese and Italian women harvesting dandelion greens on a hill overlooking our field on the Narrows, and thinking "you can eat that stuff?"
Now I eat dandelion greens often -- of course I buy them fro the store, easier to spend 2 bucks on a bunch then to spend 2 hrs of backbreaking labor picking them myself.
Posted by: Jim in Chicago at May 14, 2005 11:24 AMMy Polish grandfather used to come along on fishing trips, not to fish but to disappear into the woods reappearing hours later with a bushel of wild mushrooms. Marine Corps survival training broadened my appreciation of wild vegetation.
Hunting the wild asparagus may be expedient but not lawful, to reverse St. Paul. Most public lands have some sort of blanket prohibition of taking vegetation that makes all this at least technically illegal.
Posted by: Lou Gots at May 14, 2005 12:36 PMMy Polish grandfather used to come along on fishing trips, not to fish but to disappear into the woods reappearing hours later with a bushel of wild mushrooms. Marine Corps survival training broadened my appreciation of wild vegetation.
Hunting the wild asparagus may be expedient but not lawful, to reverse St. Paul. Most public lands have some sort of blanket prohibition of taking vegetation that makes all this at least technically illegal.
Posted by: Lou Gots at May 14, 2005 12:37 PMHow about "harvesting" a few squirrels while you're at it? Would that be okay?
Ewell Gibbons lives on!
Posted by: Mike Morley at May 14, 2005 8:47 PMWouldn't it just be easier to hide out behind Tavern on the Green and prowl through the garbage?
That's what the raccoons though at the resort where I used to work summers. The kitchen would close at 10:00, and by 10:30 they'd be lined up beside the dumpster waiting for their leftover schnitzel and pfannkuchen.
Posted by: joe shropshire at May 15, 2005 9:49 PM