wild food — Blog

At a bend along the creek here that I like to visit often throughout the year—past the huge fallen oak rotting on the hillside leading down to the water, so big I can crawl inside it and take shelter from the rain, and farther still, just beyond the strange patch of scouring rush all wiry green and bright throughout the winter months—there’s a huge patch of the notable wild edible Ramps. Right now, as I write this, small perfect purple shoots are piercing the leaf duff, two tender green leaves are splitting through their sheath, unfolding, shaking off the morning rain and broadening in the sunlight pouring in through the open, leafless tree canopy.

This is a plant I feel extraordinarily passionate about. A native wildflower and woodland understory plant that often grows in the floodplain of a woodland ravine, ramps (or wild leeks as some call it, referring to edibility and taste, like a sharp strong mix between onions and garlic) grow amidst other special treasures—trilliums and bloodroot, dutchman’s breeches and ostrich ferns—a sweet and magical community of rare ephemeral blooms that have faced years and years of ecosystem degradation and population demise.

Ramps specifically have now long been an overly-popularized wild edible spring green, delicious, vibrant and choice, dug up for their onion-like bulbs and touted by restauranteurs proclaiming their terroir and local and wild offerings. And this has had detrimental consequences.

Plants like ramps, native understory herbs, are slow-growing. Ramps themselves take about 7-10 years to reach full maturity to set seed and reproduce and a ramps stand, if heavily harvested, takes more than 20 years to bounce back to full vibrancy, if it even does at all. And ramps role in the forest is far more intricate than is often discussed, a fine balancing act of nutrients and minerals and soil building. Ramps are said to play a huge role in nitrogen mineralization in the environment, storing vast quantities of nitrogen and other minerals in the early spring, nitrogen “sinks” as they are called, and then slowly releasing them for use over the rest of the season for other plants to use as they become more active, thus playing a huge role in nutrient stability in the forest. For all of these reasons, I spend every spring doing my best to advocate for these small special plants. A huge part of my goal and life’s work as an herbalist and plant person is to promote this one simple idea: not everything’s role and purpose and benefit is for us. Despite how delicious and cleansing ramps are, using them is not worth the expense of an intact native plant community like the one I’ve described. It is my firm opinion that we need to leave ramps be. As one of favourite wild foodies, Mallory O’Donnell, expressed: “if I can live without them, so can you.”

Ramps piercing through the leaf duff. This is one I found that got twisted up in the leaves and I thought it was so beautiful.

Ecologically, balance is everything. As humans we tend to have this very self-centered attitude about conservation and about the environment, that it needs our intervention, our cleaning up, our control, our management to thrive. The truth is, the forest is better off without us messing around in there, and, in fact, we most often do harm when we try to “help.” With harvesting, it is really no different. When we harvest large swaths of these patches—and they really grow very thickly in wide stands when healthy and mature—we open up empty space in the forest floor. Because these and most native plants are so slow growing, that space is quickly usurped by opportunistic, aggressive, fast-growing, and often problematic plants, thus decreasing the odds the natives will return. Those plants I speak of are here too by our own—we, the people—by our mistake and misguidance and we continue to flub it all up still, carrying their seeds unknowingly into the woods on the bottoms of our shoes or attached to our wool sweaters, digging up the forest floor, taking trees down and letting in more heat and light. Minor things that make a big difference in the plant world where time moves at a different pace.

More specifically, with ramps, I really say the best harvesting advice to promote is “please don't!” In other words, to not harvest these plants at all, even if you feel like an ethical, gentle harvester—if you’re harvesting from a patch, even on your own property, you never know who else might be coming there and taking some as well, and collectively, you could be putting significant pressure on the population. If you are certain, beyond absolute certain you’re the only one, these are the ethical principles I outline and ask everyone to follow:

harvest leaves only, one leaf per plant, one plant per 25 or even 50
take only for yourself and only what you can use
never buy ramps and never sell ramps—even if you know they are sustainably collected, it only promotes this intense over-obsession with the plant. I, personally have seen people popping out of the woods with garbage bags full of ramps, roots and all, to sell at the market or to restaurants, and it’s simply heart-breaking. As long as people know they are desired and can get paid a high price for ramps, they will heavily harvest them and sell them. We cannot promote this in any way with our social platforms, our actions, or our dollars.
wild tend your ramps patch! You can plant ramps! You can go back in the fall after they have flowered and spread their little dark seeds around! You can take a few years off picking the leaves and let them replenish and regenerate! You can sit amongst them throughout the season, watch them grow, read them poetry!

This year, we have the unique and strange experience of restaurants being shuttered, events cancelled, festivals closed down, and markets minimal. I think it’s a rare and perfect opportunity to do a little shifting as a society about how we look at plants and particularly these ones we have spent a lot of recent years abusing. An opportunity to find a little balance, to shift our mindset about the forest to one of stewardship, to learn to sit and be and admire from afar. At least, that’s what I’m going to do.

Ramps flowers exploding across the forest floor in late July. Later you can go back and collect the little round black seeds to spread elsewhere or just replant into the soil to assist their self-propagation.

Me in the ramps patch on the land where I live.

Some links to other articles:

https://unitedplantsavers.org/ramps-allium-tricoccum/

https://www.grit.com/food/ramps-wild-leeks#axzz2yCpIbusb

https://plants.usda.gov/core/profile?symbol=ALTR3

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/20/dining/20forage.html

https://unitedplantsavers.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Plugging-the-Leak-on-Wild-Leeks_Edgar-Brubaker-Tuminelli.pdf

Why forage? Why wildcraft? Why learn about plants, use herbal medicine or eat wild foods? This winter I’ve been doing a lot of visioning and these questions, all focuses of my work and my life, have come up. Why do I do what I do, for one thing, but also why am I invested in sharing it? And why should people care, show up for this and learn?

The first thing I’ll say is that I’m a believer in bioregional herbal medicine. I don’t believe in an industry that centers on shipping plant matter all across the globe in plastic bags—who knows who grew it or chopped it down, how much was used, how many taken, and what was the ecological impact. It’s really hard to truly know. I’m not an advocate of essential oils, tiny expensive bottles of exotic plant scents that contain thousands of plant lives in just a few measly milileters. This is not the herbal medicine I believe in and this year I’m going completely essential oil free.

So when I say bioregional or often the term I use is “place-based” I mean medicine and food just outside the door, plants that live and thrive in our particular climate, decorate our hillsides or skulk quietly around the edges of our gardens. With this place-based mentality, our medicine and food, we can go out and gather it; it’s something accessible, something that we can form a relationship with, in person, skin to leaf, nose to flower, hands running the grooves in the bark, the kind of relationship our ancestors all had. This might sometimes mean planting and growing the plants ourselves or maybe a nearby friend or farm does and shares in the bounty—these obviously won’t be wild foods and herbs, but still we build a real relationship with our sustenance and with the land. Some people will argue for a deep spiritual element, maybe even say it has to be part of it. I don’t so much feel like that is required, or required in the way that it has to look a particular way for everyone. But I will say that for me, in the forest, I feel closer to a god than I ever felt in a church.

This also means that there’s a seasonality to our food and medicine—that we must learn, change, grow, and eat with the seasons. There are seasons to our bodies as well as to the land, and it’s an exciting practice to merge the two and live accordingly. It’s fun and exciting and deeply empowering to step outside and collect wild strawberries growing along the path or clip a few twigs off a black birch to boil into tea or spend some quiet contemplation hours plucking the bright yellow heads off the pesky dandelions in your neighbor’s yard to make into wine you can sip in winter while you wait for spring to come back.

This leads me to the inevitability in this craft of having to learn to lean into the fact that those wild strawberries are momentary treasures, and we have to be paying attention to catch them ready to eat and then wait one whole year to taste them again—and we have to live with that. We’re not used to waiting in our culture, rather to feeding our cravings by popping over to the store to grab our plastic carton of strawberries whenever we want, mid-December even. This can be the disappointment factor for some who are used to the same foods they love being available whenever they have the urge, or one could argue that makes this type of living and eating difficult, unsustainable even. Preservation comes hand-in-hand with seasonal wild gathering, an added exciting, mind-stimulating activity as we experiment with collection, processing—drying, pickling, fermenting, powdering, fruit leathering—and storage.

The question as to whether it’s sustainable? Well, it requires effort on our part, moving our bodies and using our minds, but what it doesn’t require is being shipped around by trucks and airplanes and other-gas powered devices, pumped full of chemicals we can’t pronounce to keep it fresh on top of what it was sprayed with while growing to keep it looking the “right” way, and then shrink-wrapped to a piece of styrofoam and handed to you inside another plastic bag plus another one for good measure so it maybe doesn’t drip water in your car that you drove half an hour to go pick it up. If that’s not the definition of unsustainable then I’m not sure what is.

On an herbal level the sense of empowerment transcends into health and healthcare because when we start to learn about turning plants into medicine, we start to learn about how to use it. We start to learn about our body, the way it works, the things it needs, its patterns and rhythms. And then we start being an advocate for it, in every sense of the word and in every setting we find ourselves. Food becomes medicine too. And we begin to rely on our experience and expertise in our own body’s needs to determine how to heal ourselves, whether we need to pay money to see a doctor or take a drug, and even if we do, we can start to engage in that relationship with greater awareness and critical thinking.

Wild food is also FREE, wild medicine is FREE. Much of it is incredibly abundant, sometimes overly abundant and our taking of it actually helps create balance in the ecosystem! This reminds me of the Rainbow Gathering, a yearly pretty ridiculous meeting of a motley crue of folks on National Forest land around the country every summer. At the gathering, everything is free and people set up camp for a week together. There are many little camps scattered about that cook food for everyone—Jesus camp makes pancakes, the Hare Krishnas make kitchri and daal, there’s a camp that each year builds giant mud ovens out of which pump pizza and bread and, on some nights, large batches of weed cookies. When food is ready at a camp, a group of people will get together and shout “FREE FOOD IN THE WOODS” to alert everyone that you can come get you some (but don’t forget your “bliss,” the rainbow term for cup, bowl, and utensils). There’s also this other chant that’s a little less exciting where people gather at night somewhere others are sleeping and shout at the top of their lungs “WAKE UP AND RAGE!” That one I’m less fond of. Whenever I’m out foraging and find something in great abundance or something I’m excited about, I want to shout this out loud to the world—“FREE FOOD IN THE MOTHERFUCKING WOODS!” This freeness allows us a little more leeway to then use our dollars wisely for things we can’t find in the woods, to support causes and producers that match up with our ethics.

There are so many arguments for engaging in foraging, in eating wild foods and taking herbal medicine (or finding someone who practices bioregional medicine and buy from them!). Someone a long time ago, when I was a young fledgling herbalist and somehow found myself on a plant walk with a lot of botanical big wigs, turned to me on this walk, recognizing it as an early time in my journey and said to me very seriously “this life will save you.” Ten years later, dear reader, I’m saying that to you. High nutrition, pure compounds with potent medicinal properties, these wild plants blow store-bought spinach and pre-packaged freeze-dried supplements out of the fucking water.

This ends me at the point where I dig into the real heart of my work and purpose. On the surface, it’s about herbs and health, botany, wild food; much of my “content” centers on these things. But it’s also about something deeper. Learning about wild food and how to make your own medicine is really just an entry point, I think, for ecological understanding and appreciation. It’s an easy way to corral people into the plant fold—show them how to use and apply nature for themselves, how to benefit from it. But as you learn, understanding grows—you start to recognize, hypothesize, and really see the interplay in the natural world and our role in it, which is most often not a leading one. We see when to simply acknowledge something’s beauty and leave it alone, which is most of the time. Care and meaning, then, I think become inevitable, and we fight for what we care about, for what has meaning to us. This is important.

I often think about what that guy meant when he said to me “this life will save you” because he didn’t elaborate and I was too shy to ask him to. There are countless ways for me personally that it has, the people I’ve met, direction in the hard moments of my 20s. What this work is really about is a re-envisioning that we have to do as a culture, as a species. We have to learn to see, we have to have a huge perspective shift. We have to, with more vigor than ever before, get by with less of certain kinds of things—plastic, fossil fuels, war—and more of another. We have to participate in making our communities and ourselves more localized, more bioregional, more place-based. That has to become normalized and until it is we have to stand behind our beliefs and do the crazy thing even if the dominant culture is laughing in our faces. We have to sign all the treaties and agreements ourselves if the government won’t do it (but we can call them and ask them to and vote out the ones who won’t) and reduce our own personal emissions. We can cut ourselves off from Amazon. I’m not perfect, I say this for myself too as a person who commutes to work and gets food to go. Are we really committed to change? Do we consider every decision? A question I’m committed to constantly asking myself—does this uphold life or does it annihilate it? And if the answer is annihilate, I need to hold myself to turning and walking away. We need a “renaissance of the hands” as Janisse Ray once called for, and I’d like to put all my energy into helping make that happen for people, whatever way I can. That life is going to save all of us.

The Fight for Ramps!

Why forage? Why use herbal medicine?