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Speaker 2: Mum, why did they call it Scottish cheese?
Speaker 3: It's cottage cheese, honey. And I'm not sure.
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Speaker 3: I think so. Well when we get there, well, we've
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Speaker 6: Oh hi, okay, it's twenty twenty four. Alley here jumping
Speaker 6: in to say this is an absolute fan favorite episode
Speaker 6: of Ologies. It's also a me favorite one. It was
Speaker 6: a while in the making and it's a perfect time
Speaker 6: a year to serve it up on a doorly for you.
Speaker 6: And since we've recorded this three years ago, this guest,
Speaker 6: Alexis Nelson aka Black Forager, and I have gotten to
Speaker 6: meet in real life. We've become pals and when she's
Speaker 6: in LA we hang out and she's just as much
Speaker 6: of a gem as you think in person. She's also
Speaker 6: an ologite and she texted me last week after our
Speaker 6: Columbiology episode about pigeons to say that it's nudged her
Speaker 6: toward considering becoming a pigeon parent herself. Also, since this
Speaker 6: episode aired, Alexis has launched a TV show called Crash
Speaker 6: Course Botany, which you can find on peb Yes also
Speaker 6: at the end of this episode, I added a new
Speaker 6: secret which contains the reason why this isn't encore this week,
Speaker 6: and a special perk for patrons coming up in a
Speaker 6: few days. Okay, wow, I just love this episode and
Speaker 6: this guest all right, Oh hey, it's your friend's Kat
Speaker 6: who just had a six hundred dollars hairball. Alli Ward
Speaker 6: back with an outdoorsy quite frankly a scrumptious episode of ologies.
Speaker 6: So this ologist, we're gonna get right to it. Studied
Speaker 6: both science and performance at Ohio State University, you know,
Speaker 6: but the role most know her in is teacher of
Speaker 6: the can I eat this? It grew in my driveway
Speaker 6: arts and Sciences. So she has a million, a literal
Speaker 6: million TikTok watchers who just eat up her lessons on
Speaker 6: making violet simple syrup and magnolia cookies and garlic mustard
Speaker 6: pesto and more. And I have had so many of
Speaker 6: y'all begging me to have her on that when I
Speaker 6: DMed her, honestly, I was shocked to get a response.
Speaker 6: This woman is busy. So we recorded this right as
Speaker 6: April was turning to May, and since it's still spring
Speaker 6: and things are still blooming and shooting and crawling from
Speaker 6: the ground. It's time to grab a basket and see
Speaker 6: what's for dinner. But we also talk about year round edibles.
Speaker 6: We're going to get into it. But first, thank you
Speaker 6: to all the patrons who said to their questions you
Speaker 6: can become a patron for a dollar a month a
Speaker 6: dollar a month at patreon dot com slash Ologies. Thank
Speaker 6: you to everyone rating and subscribing to the podcast. Thanks
Speaker 6: to everyone who leaves such nice reviews, keeping Ologies in
Speaker 6: the top five science podcast globally, which is bananas. I
Speaker 6: read all the reviews and each week I pick a
Speaker 6: fresh one, and this week it's from for the Earth,
Speaker 6: who wrote I hope I hear you read it.
Speaker 4: Ali.
Speaker 6: Thank you Ali and team for truly some of the
Speaker 6: best content available. Thank you for the Earth. Also, we
Speaker 6: got a rare two star review this week from p Jester,
Speaker 6: who said that they do not like my voice and
Speaker 6: I am a woman that's a problem for some people.
Speaker 6: But thank you so much for the feedback. And there's
Speaker 6: actually a secret about my voice at the end of
Speaker 6: the episode, which you might already know. But anyway, thank
Speaker 6: you everyone else for all the loving and very lovely reviews,
Speaker 6: Except for b Jester who's probably not listening, and that's
Speaker 6: a okay, thanks everyone for leaving them anyway, Okay, foraging ecology.
Speaker 6: Foraging comes from a root for hay or straw or fodder,
Speaker 6: and then it evolved to mean hunting about for edibles,
Speaker 6: and ecology comes from the same root as ecology for
Speaker 6: the place we live and our relationship to our environment,
Speaker 6: So foraging for the things around us. Now for breakfast
Speaker 6: side note, I just want you to know that I
Speaker 6: ate some low quots that I stole from a friend's tree.
Speaker 6: She didn't even know she could eat them. She thought
Speaker 6: they were ornamental. So we're doing a good job today. Anyway,
Speaker 6: Pull up a stump and lean in for a bounty
Speaker 6: of information on edible versus poisonous plants, taproots, blossoms, tinctures,
Speaker 6: brews and stews and cookies and cocktails and hikes and
Speaker 6: eating invasive species, some dog pee talk, the best guide books,
Speaker 6: and how gathering what grows around us is a radical act.
Speaker 6: For Internet hero and teacher Autodideck wild food Maker and
Speaker 6: your gathering guide. You know her on TikTok and YouTube
Speaker 6: and Instagram as a black forager. Alexis Nicole Nelson.
Speaker 4: I'm so excited to be talking to you. Hello. My
Speaker 4: name is Alexis Nicole Nelson, and my pronouns are she
Speaker 4: her hers, And my cat just clawed me in the butt. No,
Speaker 4: the time we're having.
Speaker 6: Already get him on the mic.
Speaker 4: Yeah, hey Aussie, you have words to say, use your words.
Speaker 6: Oh my gosh, people have been asking me for so
Speaker 6: many months to get you on this podcast. When you
Speaker 6: wrote back, I was thrilled. I've been wanting to do
Speaker 6: this topic for a while, which would be foraging ecology,
Speaker 6: I believe right, Yes.
Speaker 4: Foraging ecology, I think is the ology that we settled
Speaker 4: on for this.
Speaker 6: Yes, it works, It totally works. Your TikTok's amazing and
Speaker 6: informative and you're so prolific and it's so great. At
Speaker 6: what point were you like, Okay, it's time the world
Speaker 6: needs to know what they can eat in their backyards.
Speaker 4: I mean, I've honestly felt that way ever since I
Speaker 4: was really little. I guess I just didn't have the
Speaker 4: tools to tell anybody outside of my parents, family members, friends,
Speaker 4: anyone who I could get to listen to me in persons, Do.
Speaker 6: You remember what the first thing you ate out of
Speaker 6: the ground and were you safe was it dangerous?
Speaker 4: The first thing I remember eating out of the ground,
Speaker 4: I must have been about five years old, and I
Speaker 4: was helping my mom in the garden in our house,
Speaker 4: in our old house in Cincinnati, and she pointed out
Speaker 4: some grass but it looked different from other grass, and
Speaker 4: she broke it and it smelled delicious, like it smelled
Speaker 4: like onions and garlic. And she's like, oh, yeah, it's
Speaker 4: onion grass and it's edible, but it's like not as
Speaker 4: good as the onions in the garlic that we get
Speaker 4: from the store. And if you tell a five year
Speaker 4: old that something is edible, then they're going to put
Speaker 4: it in their face and they're going to get really
Speaker 4: excited about it. So I did, and it just kind
Speaker 4: of ignited a gentle obsession, a lifelong love.
Speaker 6: Where did you get a lot of your information? Did
Speaker 6: you start getting for your sixth birthday? Did you get
Speaker 6: an encyclopedia of edible herbs? How did the information dump start?
Speaker 4: Well, my answer to that question is yes, But for
Speaker 4: my eighth birthday.
Speaker 6: Oh got it got it little late late bloomer, late bloomer.
Speaker 4: I know, Oh my gosh, I was so late to
Speaker 4: the game. I just I inhaled all of my mom's
Speaker 4: books on gardening. My mom had like an entire shelf
Speaker 4: our house dedicated to just for gardening books. And yeah,
Speaker 4: I'd say by the time I was eight or nine,
Speaker 4: I had read each of them front to back. Was
Speaker 4: like trying to memorize every single one of the trees
Speaker 4: and flowers and herbs present in them. And when I
Speaker 4: was done with those, I bought more. Every weekend, my
Speaker 4: parents used to let me go to this independent bookstore
Speaker 4: in Cincinnati, Joseph Beth after we'd go out to dinner,
Speaker 4: and they'd be like, Okay, you get one book, and
Speaker 4: it'd be really hard for me to choose between oh gosh,
Speaker 4: whatever fantasy novel I was obsessed with at the time,
Speaker 4: or a plant book.
Speaker 6: When it came time to figuring out your life's course,
Speaker 6: did you want to stick with botany? Did you decide
Speaker 6: to go more of a business route. I know that
Speaker 6: you have been like a social media manager, which explains
Speaker 6: another reason why you're like so good at TikTok. You're
Speaker 6: a professional, But what did you decide when it came
Speaker 6: to figuring out, you know, career.
Speaker 4: I think I'm still deciding every time, I have to
Speaker 4: remember that I'm a real adult. I'm just like, oh
Speaker 4: oh yeah, twenty eight is real. I can't fudget anymore.
Speaker 4: Definitely a full, full, full blooded adult now. Growing up
Speaker 4: in the fourth grade, when we had to draw what
Speaker 4: we wanted to be when we grew up, I said
Speaker 4: that I wanted to be a geneticist by day in
Speaker 4: a pop star by night.
Speaker 6: I love it. I love it.
Speaker 4: I mean, I feel like this is closer than anybody
Speaker 4: myself included, thought I was going to get with kind
Speaker 4: of melding this aspect of performance, which I've always loved,
Speaker 4: like right hand in hand with like my love of
Speaker 4: plants has been my love of entertaining people. And when
Speaker 4: it came time to choose what I was going to
Speaker 4: major in in college, I was like, pretty gifted in
Speaker 4: math and science. But I was also like, pretty gifted
Speaker 4: in theater. But nobody tells you to major in theater.
Speaker 4: Even when you're really good at theater, no one tells
Speaker 4: you to go in major. So everyone was like, oh
Speaker 4: my gosh, you're a woman of color, you're good at math,
Speaker 4: you're good at science. If you don't become an engineer,
Speaker 4: what a waste? And I didn't know if I wanted
Speaker 4: to be an engineer, but I did know that I
Speaker 4: didn't want to be a waste. So I applied to
Speaker 4: all of my schools as an engineer, got accepted to
Speaker 4: Ohio State as an environmental engineering major.
Speaker 6: On the first day of her schooling as an environmental engineer,
Speaker 6: the dean addressed the students just to tell them that
Speaker 6: most people will quit the program about half, which is
Speaker 6: about as opposite of a pep talk as you can
Speaker 6: possibly get, like, welcome, this is going to suck, You'll
Speaker 6: hate my program. Attrition perhaps should not be something to
Speaker 6: brag about, but what do I know.
Speaker 4: And I've always loved the pursuit of knowledge, but I've
Speaker 4: always when some sort of like very competitive aspect has
Speaker 4: been thrown into it. So needless to say, I had
Speaker 4: a rough time my first year in engineering school, so
Speaker 4: rough that I took a semester off to kind of
Speaker 4: get my head right and decided that I did love
Speaker 4: math and science, but that I also loved writing. I
Speaker 4: also loved performing, So I came back and focused on
Speaker 4: both environmental science because I didn't take all of that
Speaker 4: calculus and physics and chemistry for nothing. But then I
Speaker 4: also went and got a theater degree and took like
Speaker 4: master's classes in playwriting, put on a one woman show.
Speaker 4: Before I graduated, wrote a couple of short plays. So
Speaker 4: I feel like everything I'm doing right now makes sense
Speaker 4: and in terms of where I see it going in
Speaker 4: the future, any opportunity that I get to talk to
Speaker 4: large groups of people about the value in the green
Speaker 4: spaces around them, that's how I would define the career
Speaker 4: that I want to see myself in at any given
Speaker 4: time during the rest of my life. And if that's
Speaker 4: as a TikToker, that's great. If that's oh my God,
Speaker 4: on a TV show, Hey PBEs, that's great too. If
Speaker 4: it's writing field guides and books, that's great too. I
Speaker 4: just this is what fills my cup, and this is
Speaker 4: the type of thing that even when I'm working really hard,
Speaker 4: it doesn't feel like work.
Speaker 6: Did you ever think that you'd have a million people
Speaker 6: tuning in to watch you make pesto?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 4: Never, never, in a million years. I made my foraging
Speaker 4: account on Instagram originally because I was annoying my friends
Speaker 4: with the plants I was eating.
Speaker 6: They were like, we don't want to hear about it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, They're like, no, thank you. So I was like, okay, cool,
Speaker 4: I'll just make like a fence, but just for the
Speaker 4: wild things that I put on my plate. Now I
Speaker 4: feel like my Now, I feel like my personal account
Speaker 4: is my finstuh a switch to Rooney that I never
Speaker 4: in a million years what have.
Speaker 6: Called so side note, a Finsta for those of us
Speaker 6: not born in the nineties, is a fake Instagram or
Speaker 6: an alternative handle that's not like one that your boss
Speaker 6: follows or something your followers would find off brand. So
Speaker 6: perhaps it's the real you which makes me want to
Speaker 6: sit on a rock and ponder, am I living my
Speaker 6: most Finsta life in the out, in the open?
Speaker 4: And why not?
Speaker 6: Anyway, Alexis had an underground passion for plants, and at
Speaker 6: the start of the pandemic, she posted something to her
Speaker 6: TikTok about foraging if you couldn't get to the store
Speaker 6: during the first few weeks of the COVID lockdown, and
Speaker 6: she posted it. She woke up to tens of thousands
Speaker 6: of views, and suddenly people were smitten not only with
Speaker 6: her plucky delivery but her extensive botanical knowledge. So millions
Speaker 6: of views later, she's really opened up people's eyes and
Speaker 6: noses and mouths to edibles that we walk right past
Speaker 6: all the time, all year round. It's been really cool
Speaker 6: to see the seasons change and to see different things
Speaker 6: that you're harvesting and per simmons and then going into
Speaker 6: blossoms and stuff. When it comes to keeping yourself educated,
Speaker 6: are you looking things up before you're foraging? Are you
Speaker 6: already familiar with them? Does it really depend on the region,
Speaker 6: Like how are you keeping all of this knowledge? How
Speaker 6: often do you have to kind of sharpen those tools?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it's constantly a process of sharpening. And
Speaker 4: the more you interact with a certain plant, just like
Speaker 4: the more you interact with certain people, you get to
Speaker 4: know them better, you know their nuances better, you know
Speaker 4: when to expect them. So there's definitely a swath of
Speaker 4: plants that I've worked with for a really long time.
Speaker 4: I know when to expect like apples and all of
Speaker 4: the other like rose family trees to start blooming. I
Speaker 4: know when dandelions are coming up. I know when violets
Speaker 4: are coming up. But there are definitely plants that I'm
Speaker 4: a bit newer to that I have to go and
Speaker 4: do a little bit of digging, a little bit of
Speaker 4: reading or my favorite. I see that someone else in
Speaker 4: one of the regional foraging Facebook groups that I'm in
Speaker 4: is posting about them, and I'll be like, oh, I
Speaker 4: did not know that we were already in col parsnip season.
Speaker 4: I did know we were already in cal parsnipseason. That's
Speaker 4: just the first plant that came to my head.
Speaker 6: Of course, should you also more on those densely hairy
Speaker 6: perennials later.
Speaker 4: And that's been wonderful, is being able to have that
Speaker 4: community to always come back to. But I'm always rereading
Speaker 4: all of my foraging books, all of these poor books.
Speaker 4: Their covers are just bent as all get out, because
Speaker 4: whenever I have some free time, or if it's before bed,
Speaker 4: I'll just flip one open do a little bit of reading.
Speaker 4: I feel like I noticed something new every single time
Speaker 4: I read one of my foraging books, so it makes
Speaker 4: sense to go back over them again. And it's just
Speaker 4: like when you're in school, like you have to keep
Speaker 4: practicing or you use it, use.
Speaker 6: It or lose it. Is the tldr's Maybe you don't
Speaker 6: know what TLDR means, and that's fine. It stands for
Speaker 6: too long, didn't read I see why am I in
Speaker 6: case you missed it. So Alexis is schooling us on
Speaker 6: Internet culture at large as well as precious overlooked botany. Okay,
Speaker 6: question that's on my mind a lot when I watch
Speaker 6: your chicktox. How do you know if something's peed on it?
Speaker 4: I do snatch because if it smells like fresh p
Speaker 4: that's just like not appetizing at all. The answer to
Speaker 4: this question, and I know Ali that it is not
Speaker 4: the answer that anybody wants, is if it's out in
Speaker 4: a green space, odds are at some point in time,
Speaker 4: and that green spaces passed probably in the last year.
Speaker 4: Something has peed there.
Speaker 6: That's a very good point. Even tiny little invertebrates they're
Speaker 6: making pea all the time, and they're doing it on
Speaker 6: a romaine lettuce that we're buying from the store. Everything's
Speaker 6: being on everything. There are things in us right now
Speaker 6: peeing on each other exactly exactly.
Speaker 4: It's the circle of p And that's my thing that
Speaker 4: I always love reminding people is that the farms that
Speaker 4: we get our groceries from do not exist in a
Speaker 4: microcosm either. You don't know how many field mice peeed
Speaker 4: on your kale. You should wash everything you take home,
Speaker 4: whether you pulled it out of the ground yourself or
Speaker 4: if someone else did.
Speaker 6: Very good point.
Speaker 4: I just try and I try to help people kind
Speaker 4: of put that out of their mind. Now. Of course,
Speaker 4: there are some areas that I avoid because they get
Speaker 4: peed on more often than others. And that is what
Speaker 4: I call the dog p zone, which I would say
Speaker 4: is like a solid foot foot and a half into
Speaker 4: anyone's lawn that is on the sidewalk. Probably best to
Speaker 4: just leave that be.
Speaker 6: I bet there's someone out there forging a college is
Speaker 6: getting their PhD. And like the concentration of urea with
Speaker 6: certain feet of a sidewalk, there's got to be.
Speaker 4: There has to be, and if there's not, that's a
Speaker 4: good reason to go back to school. Yeah, I personally need.
Speaker 6: I know, my tiny dog she's got like the perimeter
Speaker 6: of lawns absolutely covered. That's a huge weight off my mind.
Speaker 6: I love foraging. I've always thought it's so fascinating. And
Speaker 6: one thing I I'm so curious about, like, what is
Speaker 6: something that you tasted that you weren't sure if you
Speaker 6: were going to dig it at all and it was
Speaker 6: just delightful.
Speaker 4: Oh that's a fun one. I would say cal parsnips.
Speaker 4: They are in the carrot family, which is famous for
Speaker 4: having some of like the best wild edibles, but also
Speaker 4: fas for having some very deadly lookalikes to those same
Speaker 4: wild edibles. I've been eating Queen Anne's lace for a
Speaker 4: really long time. I think I figured out that Queen
Speaker 4: Ann's lace was wild carrots Doccas carota when I was
Speaker 4: in high school. And it like blew my mind because
Speaker 4: where my family stays in Massachusetts, there's queen ants lace everywhere,
Speaker 4: and I'm like, you mean, I could have been just
Speaker 4: digging this up this entire time. So cow parsnip is
Speaker 4: also in the apaca family. It's also called pushki.
Speaker 6: Okay, so quick aside. These plants are not another Internet acronym.
Speaker 6: Apaca is a full word. It's just a long Latin
Speaker 6: one for a family of flowering plants. What are some
Speaker 6: other apaca plants? Celery, carrot, parsley, dill, human annis. So
Speaker 6: many apaca plants have already made it into your mouth area,
Speaker 6: but some of them are in the not to be
Speaker 6: messed with category because they are straight up poison like hemlock,
Speaker 6: or are highly phyto phototoxic, which means plant in light
Speaker 6: makes bad, so think skin blisters that require medical attention
Speaker 6: and a lot of well justified moaning and pouting. But
Speaker 6: cow parsnip is safe. However, it doesn't always look like it.
Speaker 4: A lot of indigenous people's ate it, still eat it
Speaker 4: for a millennia, but it's dangerous. Look like is giant hogweed,
Speaker 4: which has been in the news off and on in
Speaker 4: certain areas of the country because it's super invasive and
Speaker 4: it's super dangerous cervi degree burns if you interact with
Speaker 4: the sap while the sun is out dangerous. We love
Speaker 4: a fido chunksin.
Speaker 6: I mean, you gotta give it to the plants. They
Speaker 6: figured it out.
Speaker 4: You do, and everyone gets really mad at them, and
Speaker 4: I'm just like, well, if it makes you feel any better,
Speaker 4: don't take it personally, because we're not who they did
Speaker 4: that for. The insects are. It's not for you. You're
Speaker 4: not out to get us. They're out to get the
Speaker 4: small crunchy boys. Don't take it personally if you get burned.
Speaker 4: Cow parsnips giant hogweed leaf shapes are super similar. The
Speaker 4: difference is cow parsnips get to be like is six
Speaker 4: feet maybe even like seven or eight feet tall max
Speaker 4: giant hogweed could end up being like just a sixteen
Speaker 4: foot tower of doom.
Speaker 6: Oh my god, they don't call it giant for nothing.
Speaker 4: I believe the species name is like mega gigantium. It's
Speaker 4: I believe, a derivative of the Latin word for humongous,
Speaker 4: and it makes sense. Hal parsnip was one of those
Speaker 4: that I had heard so many good things about it.
Speaker 4: But it's really hard, even when you are so confident
Speaker 4: in your ability to ib plants to get over like
Speaker 4: the hump of the point zero zero one percent chance
Speaker 4: that's like mortal danger.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Is there an identification trick for some of the more
Speaker 6: dangerous plants, like between giant hogweed and wild carrots? Is
Speaker 6: there something you can look for, like a purplish a
Speaker 6: ring at the top, or something discerning like that.
Speaker 4: I'm glad you called out purple because I love how
Speaker 4: often purple is the color of dinger.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Nature. Yeah, when it comes to differentiating Queen Ann's lace
Speaker 4: and poison hemlock, purple is actually one of the identifiers.
Speaker 4: The purple splotches that you will see on poison hemlock,
Speaker 4: but you will not see on Queen Ann's lace wild
Speaker 4: carrots for col parsnips versus giant hogweed. Cal parsnips have
Speaker 4: this like very fine kind of fuzz all over them,
Speaker 4: and these really cute papery sheets over their leaves before
Speaker 4: the leaves go ahead and shoot out. Also, their leaves
Speaker 4: are very even in their serration, whereas giant hogweeds leaves
Speaker 4: similar shape, irregular serration, which I feel like makes sense.
Speaker 4: Chaos means bad, organ means good. And there are a
Speaker 4: couple other tells to like the hollowness of the stem
Speaker 4: on cow parsnips. But the moral of the story is
Speaker 4: I baby set a stand of cow parsnips for a
Speaker 4: full calendar year to watch it go through its entire
Speaker 4: life stickle where I finally ate some last year.
Speaker 6: Oh my gosh, that is an investment of time. Did
Speaker 6: it pay off?
Speaker 4: It did? Oh my gosh, absolutely delicious. The fried flower
Speaker 4: buds right before the flowers open, especially, are just a
Speaker 4: taste to behold. Behold this first sight, still a taste
Speaker 4: to behold. And the leaves are this other beautiful and
Speaker 4: aromatic this time of year, a little bit reminiscent of celery,
Speaker 4: which makes sense another abaca family member, also a little
Speaker 4: reminiscent of almost like coriander, and a little bit of
Speaker 4: burnt orange giness, which becomes much more prominent in their
Speaker 4: seeds later on in the season. So absolutely worth it.
Speaker 4: I just made a flat bread with some cow partonate
Speaker 4: leaves diced him too. The dough just yesterday A plus
Speaker 4: A plus nice, A plus ten out of ten would
Speaker 4: recommend to a friend. My caveat is if you were
Speaker 4: going to harvest it, I don't know, maybe babysit it
Speaker 4: for a year to make sure that you're not gonna
Speaker 4: get a burn and be very sad, and also only
Speaker 4: harvest from healthy stands of it. The stand that I
Speaker 4: harvest from has doubled in size year over year, two
Speaker 4: years in a row. It's the only reason why I
Speaker 4: feel comfy harvesting from it.
Speaker 6: Ah, do you ever take people with you and give
Speaker 6: up your spots? Or how protective of certain plants are foragers?
Speaker 4: Oh, oh my gosh. It really does depend on the plant.
Speaker 4: There's a handful of people who I've taken to some
Speaker 4: of my like my secret spots, some of my you know,
Speaker 4: this time of year there's ramps and cut leaf toothwort
Speaker 4: as far as the eye can see, kind of spots.
Speaker 6: Side note, what are ramps? Despite sounding like a disease
Speaker 6: you get from a dirty hot tub, ramps are just
Speaker 6: an oniony, leaky type of scalion oniony type of plant,
Speaker 6: only they're free if you find them. And also trendy
Speaker 6: and cut leaf toothwort, which sounds like another affliction. It's
Speaker 6: a wasabi horse radishye tasting plant that has gonzha looking
Speaker 6: leaves and little pinkish flowers. Also, did you know that
Speaker 6: wort means root, so tooth warped plants have roots that
Speaker 6: look like discarded teeth. So never let anyone tell you
Speaker 6: that science isn't goth.
Speaker 4: I'm not crazy possessive over any of the spaces because
Speaker 4: none of them belong to me. Yeah, and it's just
Speaker 4: it's not worth getting all riled up about because somedays
Speaker 4: someone's gonna find out about it. The only experience I've
Speaker 4: had with something that I tried to keep secret and
Speaker 4: then the beans got spilled but not by me is
Speaker 4: the persimon tree near my house, a sweet, curious soul
Speaker 4: using eye naturalists last summer probably looked up and said, oh,
Speaker 4: my god, this tree is full of these adorable, cute,
Speaker 4: little green fruits. I'm going to figure out what it is.
Speaker 4: I naturalists, being the great app that it is, immediately
Speaker 4: was like, ooh, Diosphiro's Virginiana. Congratulations you found there, And
Speaker 4: so they tagged it. And now I am not the
Speaker 4: only person who visits that tree during the fall and winter,
Speaker 4: and that's okay.
Speaker 6: Do you ever see anyone else rolling up with a
Speaker 6: basket and are you're like, oh, hello, oh, hello, hello.
Speaker 4: Oh I've just missed people before. I've seen people like
Speaker 4: taking their plastic bag and like hopping into their car
Speaker 4: and driving away right as I'm walking up with my bag.
Speaker 4: Uh huh, And I'm like, oh, no, friend, come back.
Speaker 6: So forgers make friends. Just respect the supply, and no
Speaker 6: one will have to grapple sweat soaked on a lawn
Speaker 6: for a handful of percimons. So the first rule of
Speaker 6: forger club is not don't talk about forger club. Let's
Speaker 6: say that you're a baby forager and you're just starting.
Speaker 6: You're inspired by someone with amazing energy and knowledge on TikTok,
Speaker 6: and you decide I'm going to start eating my neighborhood
Speaker 6: where do you think is a good place to start
Speaker 6: or like dandelions and entry level, what do we got?
Speaker 4: Ooh? I would say dandelions are an excellent entry level edible,
Speaker 4: not just because they are almost universally recognizable, but because
Speaker 4: every single part of the plant is useful. You can
Speaker 4: eat the flowers, you can pickle the flower stems, you
Speaker 4: can eat the greens ooh. You can ferment the greens,
Speaker 4: making like a sour kraut with dandelion young yum, yum,
Speaker 4: very tasty. The taproots you can go ahead and like
Speaker 4: dig it up and either eat it like a root veggie.
Speaker 4: Know it's a little it's a little bit bitter, So
Speaker 4: a lot of people will roast it and grind it
Speaker 4: into a coffee substitute or dice it, roast it and
Speaker 4: then throw it into some alcohol tomass rate to make bitters. Oh,
Speaker 4: plant is useful. So I feel like that's a great
Speaker 4: gateway plant because if you have fun with that, odds
Speaker 4: are you will have fun with more of them in
Speaker 4: terms of other really easily recognizable ones. And I think
Speaker 4: this accidentally ended up being a gateway foraging plant for
Speaker 4: a lot of folks. Are magnolias, so many of us
Speaker 4: have Magnolia's planet as ornamentals in our neighborhoods. They're one
Speaker 4: of those plants that, for whatever reason, a lot of
Speaker 4: us know the names of. And those white and pink
Speaker 4: flowers if we're talking about like saucer, magnolias are so recognizable,
Speaker 4: so hard to confuse with anything else, because I mean,
Speaker 4: Magnolia's as a genus are very unique flowers. That's what
Speaker 4: happens when you decide to push paws on evolution a
Speaker 4: couple million years ago, That's why. And so that one's
Speaker 4: been a really great one too. And to see so
Speaker 4: many people going out and gathering them and making magnolia
Speaker 4: syrups and making the magnolia snap cookies was so exciting.
Speaker 4: We all know that magnolias smell amazing, but did you
Speaker 4: know that their petals kind of taste ginger? So we're
Speaker 4: gonna do a play on a ginger snap cookie. It's
Speaker 4: a Magnolia snap cookie. Flower work cookie, Flow work.
Speaker 6: Cook Also side note, if you're not on TikTok, don't
Speaker 6: freak out, don't worry about it. Check out Black Forager
Speaker 6: on YouTube, where Alexis has posted a ton of recipes,
Speaker 6: including one for Magnolia Cookies, uploaded about a month or
Speaker 6: two ago, and I was just over on this videos
Speaker 6: page to grab that sound bite, and then I read
Speaker 6: the description and I had to include this. So in
Speaker 6: the description, alexis rites. I'm super proud of these cookies,
Speaker 6: and not just because they passed the taste test with
Speaker 6: my partner's family, but because a year ago, I don't
Speaker 6: think I would have felt confident creating a cookie recipe
Speaker 6: on my own. And as I found myself sitting on
Speaker 6: the couch this afternoon smelling like nothing but Magnolia flowers
Speaker 6: and warm sugar, I realized, I am quite happy with
Speaker 6: who I am right now. But yes, her TikTok Instagram
Speaker 6: YouTube I'll have great recipes and the same handle at
Speaker 6: Black Forager and she has recipes including ones for dandelions
Speaker 6: and Magnolia's Easy Gateway foraging plants.
Speaker 4: So those would be my two recommendations off the top
Speaker 4: of my head if you are in the Midwest or
Speaker 4: along the East coast like I am. Papas are another
Speaker 4: great one, Asamina cherloba, but it is not poppa season yet.
Speaker 6: What is a papa?
Speaker 4: Oh? So, Papas are the largest native fruit to North
Speaker 4: America if you're if you're not counting, squashed squash are
Speaker 4: really cool too.
Speaker 6: Okay, but back to papa's, which look like if green
Speaker 6: potatoes grew on trees. But what do they taste like?
Speaker 4: They taste as if a mango and a banana had
Speaker 4: a baby. If you get a good one, I'm going
Speaker 4: to give that paveat because last week a friend of
Speaker 4: mine pulled me aside and said, I don't know if
Speaker 4: I did something wrong, but I tried a pop paul
Speaker 4: last year and I didn't like it. And papas are
Speaker 4: a great adventure. They don't breed. True, it's very hard
Speaker 4: to assume how a papa from a certain tree is
Speaker 4: gonna taste until you're tasting it. But when you find
Speaker 4: good ones, oh body, they are fantastic. And they do
Speaker 4: look like little mangoes hanging out in the trees. The
Speaker 4: trees have these humongous, glossy, dark green leaves that make
Speaker 4: them very easy to recognize from a distance. Once you've
Speaker 4: seen one, you start seeing them everywhere if you live
Speaker 4: in a region that they're native too. And they are
Speaker 4: a fruit that did not develop for us. They developed
Speaker 4: for megafauna. They develop for giant slots to eat the
Speaker 4: fruit whole and poop out the seeds, but now we
Speaker 4: get to enjoy them, which is cool.
Speaker 6: That actually brings up the point of native and invasive species.
Speaker 6: Are we doing the earth amidstva by eating invasive species?
Speaker 6: And how do you find out in your region what's
Speaker 6: got to go and what's got to flourish?
Speaker 4: Oh? I absolutely think we're doing Mother Nature a solid
Speaker 4: by eating invasives, because eating them is much better for
Speaker 4: the environment than spraying them, which is what I see
Speaker 4: a lot of cities, towns, municipalities turning too when it
Speaker 4: comes to eradication of certain species. Two that come to
Speaker 4: mind for all of us kicking it on the eastern
Speaker 4: half of the United States are garlic mustard, which is
Speaker 4: very much in season in oh Gosh, pretty much early
Speaker 4: through late spring here in Ohio. Right now while we
Speaker 4: are recording this, it is flowering. So I'm just going
Speaker 4: through and picking the flower heads off of all of
Speaker 4: them that I see and bringing them home to have
Speaker 4: them for dinner, but mostly just because I don't want
Speaker 4: them to set seed, because they are very prolific spreaders.
Speaker 4: They are a non native brassica and Brassicas are just
Speaker 4: so good at their job, and their job is being
Speaker 4: spicy and spreading seeds.
Speaker 6: And what is a brassica, you ask? THAT'SI I'm here
Speaker 6: in Braska are things such as broccoli and cabbage and
Speaker 6: kale and rudebega and col robbie and Brussels sprouts and mustards.
Speaker 6: And the oil of the brassica seeds is where canola
Speaker 6: oil comes from. There's no such thing as a canola.
Speaker 6: The word just means Canadian oil low acid because it
Speaker 6: was invented in Canada. Jarrett, did you like what I
Speaker 6: told you all about that earlier?
Speaker 4: I loved it. I loved learning about Canadian oil, low
Speaker 4: acid cannol.
Speaker 6: There's no such thing as a canola. Okay. But back
Speaker 6: to yellow mustard flowers which bloom in early springtime in California,
Speaker 6: and everyone gets so hyped up about nature, not knowing
Speaker 6: that it's wildly invasive and may have been introduced by
Speaker 6: Spanish missionaries tossing it out like confetti on their path
Speaker 6: up the California coast. Mustard it's so good for Instagram pictures,
Speaker 6: but native plant enthusiasts are hey it hey.
Speaker 4: Yeah, oh my gosh. If you are in California, Go
Speaker 4: find all of the mustard, pull it up, ate it, blanket,
Speaker 4: put it into pesto, put it in a pickle, the stems,
Speaker 4: all it.
Speaker 6: Get rid of it, eat it please.
Speaker 4: And I know here we also have Japanese not weed,
Speaker 4: which is a prolific spreader, and it is kind of
Speaker 4: becoming a scourge in a lot of areas in the Northeast.
Speaker 4: We'll just see towns just spray the worst kind of
Speaker 4: chemicals onto them because it's a very hardy species. It's
Speaker 4: very good at the game of survival. So you kind
Speaker 4: of got to drown it in a lot of things
Speaker 4: that are not good for the rest of the environment
Speaker 4: if you want to get rid of them. But what
Speaker 4: a joy it would be if instead, you know, in
Speaker 4: the spring, when they start putting all of their chonky
Speaker 4: little shoots up, people were just going through cutting them
Speaker 4: off or pulling them up and collecting them for people
Speaker 4: to eat.
Speaker 6: Eat that not weed. Northeast United States and actually every
Speaker 6: state it's up north Dakota, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Florida,
Speaker 6: and Hawaii who aren't yet overrun with it. If you're like,
Speaker 6: what is the not weed. Okay, So it's been in
Speaker 6: the US since the eighteen sixties when it was given
Speaker 6: to a nursery owner in New York, and now it's everywhere.
Speaker 6: Japanese not weed. Its root systems can span seventy feet.
Speaker 6: It grows up to one and a half stories tall
Speaker 6: eight inches a day, and it has these large green
Speaker 6: leaves and a bunch of little white flowers, and the
Speaker 6: stems look a little like bamboo, which is why it's
Speaker 6: called American bamboo. It's not bamboo, and in spring sprouts
Speaker 6: look like reddish asparagus. And it has a sour flavor
Speaker 6: or kind of lemone like rhubarb, which is where it
Speaker 6: got the nickname donkey rhubarb. Now, if you want to
Speaker 6: name your edm EP donkey rhubarb, think again, people, British
Speaker 6: electronica outfit AFX twin already beat you to it. Why
Speaker 6: Why does AFX twin care about donkey rhubarb? Because in England,
Speaker 6: if you have this invasive not weed on your property,
Speaker 6: banks might refuse to give you a mortgage because it's
Speaker 6: so robust and so hard to eradicate, and it ruins
Speaker 6: foundations of buildings and in prepping for the twenty twelve Olympics,
Speaker 6: London spent the equivalent of one hundred million dollars to
Speaker 6: get rid of Japanese not weed on ten acres one
Speaker 6: hundred million dollars ten million dollars an acre. Connecticut weed
Speaker 6: scientist Jatinder Alloc has said ominously there is no insect
Speaker 6: pest or disease in the United States. They can keep
Speaker 6: it in check. So what do you do? One make
Speaker 6: sure it hasn't been doused in herbicides and to eat it.
Speaker 6: It grows through the cracks in a lexusis deck.
Speaker 4: Because for a species that is very quickly changing the
Speaker 4: landscape on the outskirts of a lot of cities, it
Speaker 4: is delicious. It's very rhubarb esque, but slightly more vegetale
Speaker 4: than rhubarb. That being said, it does lend itself both
Speaker 4: sweet and savory so well. I made sorbet. Was it
Speaker 4: last year that I was obsessed with? I need to
Speaker 4: make it again this year for a class over the weekend.
Speaker 4: I did like a fun little sauteed grains and threw
Speaker 4: a couple of the shoots in and they just had
Speaker 4: a lot of lemony rightness to any dish. And when
Speaker 4: the shoots are young, and you cook them just right,
Speaker 4: they get kind of like melt in your mouth when
Speaker 4: you cook them. For my friends who do eat the eggs,
Speaker 4: I hear that they're a wonderful addition to an omelet.
Speaker 4: They're delicious, And what a joy it would be if
Speaker 4: we just suddenly had cities with armfuls truck falls of
Speaker 4: free lemony Japanese notweed shoots this time of year, instead
Speaker 4: of just going and like dousing them in herbicides.
Speaker 6: On the topic of herbosides, that's something I didn't even
Speaker 6: think of. But when you're foraging, is that something that
Speaker 6: you have to be more careful of than pea? And
Speaker 6: how do you go?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm way more worried about herbicides that I'm worried about. Yeah,
Speaker 4: there are a couple of things that I tell people
Speaker 4: to look out for when they're foraging in urban spaces.
Speaker 4: I think some people don't realize how visually apparent it
Speaker 4: is when an area has been treated recently with herbicides.
Speaker 4: You will see like rings of discoloration around the very
Speaker 4: obviously sprayed weeds. So if you're looking at someone's lawn
Speaker 4: and it is otherwise like it's ninety eight ninety nine
Speaker 4: percent beautiful grass throughout the rest of the lawn. And
Speaker 4: you look around the fringes and you see some weeds
Speaker 4: doing their thing because they're they're hardy af and stubborn AF.
Speaker 4: You should probably stay away from those because the way
Speaker 4: that people get perfectly manicured monoculture lawns is help from herbicides.
Speaker 4: So those guys I typically leave alone. If you see
Speaker 4: any odd discoloration either on the plant or in a
Speaker 4: like little perimeter ring around the plant, leave it alone. Absolutely,
Speaker 4: any irregular wilton that you wouldn't expect to see this
Speaker 4: time of year, absolutely leave it alone. And just for
Speaker 4: the sake of things like runoff and whatnot to and exhaust.
Speaker 4: I give a pretty wide margin to stream that are
Speaker 4: wider than two lanes, and an even wider margin to railroads.
Speaker 6: Oh really because of a diesel engines?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 6: Oh, I wasn't sure if it was that or just
Speaker 6: the you know, getting lost in a playlist, headphones on
Speaker 6: and just atitute you know, yis.
Speaker 4: That's and that's how we lost the forageer. Wow.
Speaker 6: So that when it comes to where you forage, how
Speaker 6: do you do it differently in the city versus if
Speaker 6: you're out on a hike and what kinds of stuff
Speaker 6: do you find in each place?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so in the city, it's going to be a
Speaker 4: lot more of the kind of classic quintessential weeds, the
Speaker 4: plants that like taking advantage of disturbed ground where they
Speaker 4: don't have to, you know, outcompete any of our other
Speaker 4: native species. So right now in the cities, I'm seeing
Speaker 4: a lot of Queen Anne's lace already putting up their
Speaker 4: new sets of leaves for the year, a ton of dandelions,
Speaker 4: a lot of clover, white clover, red clover, and now
Speaker 4: sweet clover is starting to show up to hang out,
Speaker 4: a ton of mugwart. I passed a couple very healthy
Speaker 4: stands of mug wart while I was on a walk
Speaker 4: around the neighborhood today. But I whibble be visiting this
Speaker 4: weekend because I'm in the mood for mugwort rested potatoes.
Speaker 6: So what does mugwort look like? Okay, I had to
Speaker 6: look it up. It's a member of the daisy family,
Speaker 6: so it's leaves look like daisy leaves, and it has
Speaker 6: clusters of these drooped bell buds at the tip of
Speaker 6: a stock. And mugwort can grow meters and meters high,
Speaker 6: and while scientists call it artemisia vulgaris, close friends call
Speaker 6: it riverside wormwood, felon herb old uncle Henry a naughty man,
Speaker 6: and I feel like I have to buy mugwart a
Speaker 6: beer to hear how it got those nicknames. But mugwort
Speaker 6: just means marshroot. And it's best to pick the leaves
Speaker 6: and buds between July to September, and you can season
Speaker 6: some meat with it. You can like a mochi dessert,
Speaker 6: or look into its medicinal purposes. And indigenous people in
Speaker 6: North America used mugwort for a wide variety of ills
Speaker 6: like pitstink to colds and flues, rousing folks from comas,
Speaker 6: and even inducing labor so ethno pharmacology episode, anyone, Yes,
Speaker 6: but yes. When this was recorded a few weeks ago,
Speaker 6: Alexis was planning to gather some mugwort and roast potatoes
Speaker 6: with it.
Speaker 4: Just a lot of the friends who you see enjoying
Speaker 4: spaces that maybe have been modified for something else. We
Speaker 4: have a couple empty lots in our neighborhood in which
Speaker 4: the ground was turned over before the winter, and now
Speaker 4: that ground is just covered in weeds, oh wow. Whereas
Speaker 4: if I'm in the forests right now or out in
Speaker 4: the woods, oh gosh, it's almost a completely different biome.
Speaker 4: We're still in the middle of spring ephemerals seasons. I'm
Speaker 4: seeing trout liies, trilliums, ramps, cut leaf two for Virginia bluebells.
Speaker 4: I'm starting to see pheasant back mushrooms, stir mushrooms, morals
Speaker 4: of course. And then you have a lot of the
Speaker 4: trees whose early leaves are edible starting to leave out,
Speaker 4: like your maples. You have pines, spruces, and furs putting
Speaker 4: out their new growth, and their needles are very soft
Speaker 4: right now and great to incorporate into meals too. So
Speaker 4: it's it's a fun game kind of having to change
Speaker 4: the mindset of what you're looking for depending on where
Speaker 4: you are. And I'm lucky that where I live here
Speaker 4: in Ohio, while I very much live in the city
Speaker 4: Columbus proper, I do not have to go very far
Speaker 4: to not feel like I'm in the city anymore.
Speaker 6: By the way, congratulations on your mushroom find. Thank you
Speaker 6: pretty big deal.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, I know. I feel like morels are
Speaker 4: just like a badge of honor and the foraging community.
Speaker 4: I feel like I haven't been an official forager until.
Speaker 6: Now, I know. I saw that there are so many
Speaker 6: questions from patrons, and so many of them start off
Speaker 6: congratulations on the morale, like so many we're so thrilled
Speaker 6: for you. I was wondering, what percent of your diet
Speaker 6: do you think is foraged versus market?
Speaker 4: Ooh, I love this question because it varies a lot
Speaker 4: throughout the year, and we just finished the time of
Speaker 4: year where it's like maybe ten or like fifteen percent
Speaker 4: in the winter through early spring, and now I think
Speaker 4: we're kicking it up probably to closer around twenty five percent,
Speaker 4: just because there's not a whole lot of the high
Speaker 4: caloric value, high nutrition value plants out to play. But
Speaker 4: oh my gosh, once we get to late summer and
Speaker 4: into the fall, where it's like acorn season, pop pap season,
Speaker 4: hazel not season, person in season, that's the time of
Speaker 4: year where I can have entire days where everything that
Speaker 4: I'm cooking, with the exception of maybe a little bit
Speaker 4: of flour being thrown in or you know, an olive
Speaker 4: oil being added into a pan, is something that I foraged.
Speaker 4: So it very much fluctuates as we progress through the year.
Speaker 6: I have so many questions from listeners. I have thirty
Speaker 6: five pages of questions from listeners. Yeah, oh my gosh,
Speaker 6: thirty five pages of questions single space, So a lot
Speaker 6: of questions. So many people who just love you. I mean,
Speaker 6: I can't. I should just forward you all these questions.
Speaker 6: So if you're ever having any kind of bad day,
Speaker 6: Oh wow, people love you so much. Can I ask
Speaker 6: you some of their questions?
Speaker 4: Oh my, oh my gosh. Yes. Do we have time
Speaker 4: to go through all of them?
Speaker 6: I wish we did thirty five pages of questions. Okay,
Speaker 6: but before we start answering them, first, we're going to
Speaker 6: take a pit stop to donate some money to a
Speaker 6: charity of the ologist Choosing and this week Lexus chows
Speaker 6: Backyard Base Camp, which aims to inspire Black, Indigenous, and
Speaker 6: all people of color across Baltimore City to find nature
Speaker 6: where they are and empowers them to explore further. And
Speaker 6: Backyard Based Camp also offers garden consultations, educator training, habitat
Speaker 6: discovery programs, and more. And they're awesome. We've donated to
Speaker 6: them a few times in the past, so check them
Speaker 6: out and consider donating to that is backyard base camp
Speaker 6: dot org. And that was made possible by sponsors of
Speaker 6: the show, who you may hear about.
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Speaker 6: Let's rifle through a basket of your questions and then
Speaker 6: feast on her answers. Okay, two great questions. I really
Speaker 6: loved one from Leid Hodnet, who says it seems to
Speaker 6: me that it's important to keep in mind that there
Speaker 6: are respectful ways to forage, at least or should be.
Speaker 6: Are there guidelines for this and do these guidelines draw
Speaker 6: knowledge or inspiration from the indigenous people of the region
Speaker 6: you're foraging? Then, also says I feel like Native people
Speaker 6: are routinely harassed for performing traditional actions like foraging.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 6: White people get away with taking more than they need
Speaker 6: and seguiny. Dana says that she learned about plants and
Speaker 6: their medicinal values, among other things, from my parents. She
Speaker 6: and her dad are Panopscott and that knowledge has been
Speaker 6: passed down, but she is wondering kind of how you
Speaker 6: gain the knowledge to know you're not going to poison
Speaker 6: yourself because she trusts learning from elders more than books,
Speaker 6: because oh yeah, she would rather learn in the field,
Speaker 6: hands on. So yeah, any thoughts on kind of what
Speaker 6: you've learned from indigenous cultures and foraging.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, I mean, that's the indigenous peoples of
Speaker 4: the Americas. That's like the crux of everything that foraging
Speaker 4: is here right now. Their knowledge is the foundation of
Speaker 4: the knowledge that everyone else has had the opportunity to
Speaker 4: interact with and build upon. I know Michael Twitty talks
Speaker 4: about this a little bit in his book The Cooking Gene,
Speaker 4: because a lot of enslaved black folks in the South foraged,
Speaker 4: but obviously the people who they got that information and
Speaker 4: that knowledge from were the indigenous people. So coming from
Speaker 4: my dad's side of the family, my dad mom hills
Speaker 4: from the Seneca up in like the New York area,
Speaker 4: but she passed away when my dad was in high school.
Speaker 4: So he got like bits and pieces and little like
Speaker 4: inklings about certain plants and certain foods, but not in
Speaker 4: the way that he wished she had. And honestly, he
Speaker 4: also knew a whole lot about plants. I'm very lucky that,
Speaker 4: as a person of color, both of my parents are
Speaker 4: very outdoorsy also got a lot from his dad's side
Speaker 4: of the family down in Mississippi, from bits of information
Speaker 4: that they had been passing through the generations since they
Speaker 4: had been enslaved there. So yeah, of course I feel
Speaker 4: like some in like some way or another, every single
Speaker 4: one of us who's talking about foraging in North America
Speaker 4: is only doing so because of the generosity with knowledge
Speaker 4: of the indigenous people who now, yeah, do not get
Speaker 4: to continue some of those practices and some about land stewardship.
Speaker 4: That is the whole reason why this nation looked the
Speaker 4: way that it did period. I honestly feel like we
Speaker 4: need more Indigenous voices front and center when it comes
Speaker 4: to foraging here in the United States, because while I
Speaker 4: like to think that I know a whole lot about
Speaker 4: foraging in a way that preserves for not just me
Speaker 4: next year, but me in ten years, and children in
Speaker 4: twenty years and their children in fifty years, sixty years,
Speaker 4: I know that I don't know everything.
Speaker 6: Alexis notes that we could do an entire series of
Speaker 6: episodes on the role of Indigenous land stewardship before colonization,
Speaker 6: and this field does have an ology environmental anthropology for
Speaker 6: the proof that I will make this podcast until I
Speaker 6: die because there are so many good ologies, so please
Speaker 6: just get used to me, friends. Oh and twenty twenty
Speaker 6: four me again. So we actually have done some really
Speaker 6: great episodes since we recorded this. We have an indigenous
Speaker 6: wildfire ecology episode with doctor Amy Christensen about land stewardship,
Speaker 6: and an indigenous colonology episode with Mariah Gladstone, who's awesome
Speaker 6: of Indigena Kitchen, and a really great indigenous phytology episode
Speaker 6: about ethnobotany with doctor Lee Joseph of Squalin Botanicals. We
Speaker 6: also have an indigenous pedology episode about soil science with
Speaker 6: doctor Lydia Jennings, and of course the biology episode about
Speaker 6: moss with the legend doctor Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of
Speaker 6: Braiding Sweet Grass. And yeah, we will link all of
Speaker 6: those in the show notes My friends. Speaking of friends,
Speaker 6: first time question asker Alexander Holland rode in to say, quote,
Speaker 6: I love Alexis so much, I'm going to die of excitement.
Speaker 6: And Alexander wants to know how do you use foraging
Speaker 6: to connect to other people? And to yourself and Constantine gutnachenkos.
Speaker 6: Are there any clubs that I can join?
Speaker 4: So?
Speaker 6: Yes, do forgers hang out together? How does one get
Speaker 6: invited to those gathering gathering?
Speaker 4: Oh? Absolutely, we have a whole little community. I love it.
Speaker 4: I love it so much. We have Facebook groups divided
Speaker 4: by region and divided by country and divided by continent,
Speaker 4: and just a global foraging groups too that really let
Speaker 4: us bond with one another past all of our borders.
Speaker 4: So it's great. You get to know the people very
Speaker 4: closely who are near to you. I'm in like a
Speaker 4: Midwest foraging group. I'm in an Ohio foraging group. I'm
Speaker 4: in a central Ohio foraging group. So we definitely have
Speaker 4: a community. And we exchange recipes, and we exchange ideas,
Speaker 4: and we build each other up, and we buy each
Speaker 4: other's books. It's really it's really nice. I'm so thankful
Speaker 4: that the Internet makes it possible to digitally, you know,
Speaker 4: get to know all of these people and spend time
Speaker 4: with them, especially in the age of COVID, because it's
Speaker 4: not like any of us were able to go out
Speaker 4: and actually see each other in person.
Speaker 6: Such an interesting thing about the last year for you
Speaker 6: is you know, when so many people felt so isolated,
Speaker 6: they gained a new appreciation for being outside and then
Speaker 6: also had like a really cool new friend to show them,
Speaker 6: you know, which is so great. We have so many
Speaker 6: questions that use the word nubie. By the bye, so
Speaker 6: many people literally almost fifty folks asked this question, so
Speaker 6: I'm just going to shout out for this one. The
Speaker 6: first time question askers including Kaitlyn James, Alex Nilsen, Curtis Rodrick,
Speaker 6: Dane Schuckman, Katie Kyle, and Bennet Gerber, wants to know
Speaker 6: what are some go to foraging tips the mushy? What
Speaker 6: are your favorite tools for different kinds of foraging? So
Speaker 6: just one huge question, how do you start?
Speaker 4: My The Black Forager guide to getting started foraging is threefold.
Speaker 4: Number one is get a foraging guide that is as
Speaker 4: specific is you can find for your area. For some places,
Speaker 4: that's just going to be a regional foraging guide like
Speaker 4: a book Midwest Foraging. For some places like where some
Speaker 4: of my family lives in Massachusetts, on Martha's Vineyard, there
Speaker 4: is literally a Martha's Vineyard Guide to Wild Edibles that
Speaker 4: their conservation society puts together each year, So find a
Speaker 4: guide as hyper specific as you can find is number one.
Speaker 4: Number two is to join a regional foraging group on
Speaker 4: Reddit or on Facebook wherever you find groups of people
Speaker 4: hanging out digitally, because one, it will introduce you to
Speaker 4: people who are like minded but maybe have a bit
Speaker 4: more experience than you. And two, what a perfect way
Speaker 4: to see what is in season because you know, ten
Speaker 4: fifteen times a day other people are posting what they're
Speaker 4: seeing and they don't live too far away from you.
Speaker 6: So get a book, join a group, and then what's
Speaker 6: the last step?
Speaker 4: And then three make friends with one of the folks
Speaker 4: in that group and go out with them, because you
Speaker 4: can't replicate seeing the plants in real time in all
Speaker 4: three dimensions. For me, that's where the real learning comes,
Speaker 4: and that's where the real memorization comes from. Just for
Speaker 4: me personally, I can see a plant or a mushroom
Speaker 4: in a book until the cows come home. And the
Speaker 4: way that it'll stick in my mind, and the way
Speaker 4: that I will be able to, like, point from across
Speaker 4: a field and be like, look it's yellow rocket is
Speaker 4: being able to see it in person for the first
Speaker 4: time and get a good gander at it, so hit
Speaker 4: the trails with someone who's been at it for a
Speaker 4: bit longer than you. There is no replacement for it.
Speaker 6: Well all, see, I guess you can't smell a book,
Speaker 6: can ya? But smell must come into it, right, you can't.
Speaker 4: And so when people are like pheasant mushrooms, they smell
Speaker 4: like cucumbers. Well, yeah, there's no scratch and sniff that
Speaker 4: I know of, at least forging books. Yet I don't know.
Speaker 4: That could be a million dollar idea out there, scratch
Speaker 4: and sniff foraging.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'd buy it, Okay, So I looked it up
Speaker 6: and I found one title, the Scratch and Sniff Book
Speaker 6: of Weeds, but alas on second glance it just said weed,
Speaker 6: not weeds. So the Scratch and Sniff Book of Weed.
Speaker 6: The blurb on the front boasts this book is dope. Also,
Speaker 6: I looked up when is a plant a weed? And
Speaker 6: essentially a weed is just eddie plant that is unwanted
Speaker 6: in a human controlled setting. And so weed as a
Speaker 6: name for marijuana perhaps as ironic as they come, because
Speaker 6: for the most part it seems pretty wanted. Ps is
Speaker 6: weed and reefer and trees and laughing grass, cabbage, that's
Speaker 6: smoochy woochy poochy is that even native to North America. Nope,
Speaker 6: it originated in Central Asia before making it way to
Speaker 6: Africa and then the Caribbean and South America. And then
Speaker 6: after prohibition ended, the agency that became the.
Speaker 7: DEA was like, quick, what should we ban next?
Speaker 6: And they turn their attention to this smokable plant that
Speaker 6: humans have used for eons. That sticky, icky skunk weed
Speaker 6: which brings us back.
Speaker 4: To smells the devil's lettuce.
Speaker 6: But that must be good to know when you're out foraging,
Speaker 6: that you're using a lot of your senses at once too.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And that's one thing I think so many people
Speaker 4: get very worried about lookalikes, which you should. That little
Speaker 4: like ladder of anxiety is something that keeps you safe.
Speaker 4: But I can't even fully communicate how you are truly
Speaker 4: using all of your senses for iding. Yes, I made
Speaker 4: a video on how to tell the difference between Queen
Speaker 4: Anne's lace and poison hemlock when they are still we babies,
Speaker 4: just we little rosettes. When honestly, the best way to
Speaker 4: tell the difference is that poison hemlock smells like rat
Speaker 4: and Queen Han's lace doesn't poison. Hemlock does not smell
Speaker 4: like something you want to put in your fist, And
Speaker 4: for good reason.
Speaker 6: If you don't like rat pe.
Speaker 4: If you don't like rat if you do like rat pe,
Speaker 4: I don't know what to tell you.
Speaker 6: But what if something smells like fungus genitals and you
Speaker 6: like it and want to put it in your mouth, Well,
Speaker 6: all mushrooms share that characteristic. Maybe not if you wanted
Speaker 6: to put in your mouth, but they're all fungus genitals.
Speaker 6: And so many patrons, including Ned Lansing, Dori Brenda Anderson, Eden,
Speaker 6: Sunshine Morel Hunters, Madeline Duke, and Curtis Rodrick, Rebecca Winesettle,
Speaker 6: Haley Everson, Rachel Stearns, Kate Bell, Madeline Winter, New Listener,
Speaker 6: Nicholas Maritime archaeologist, Chanelle Zapp, Christy Kazakhov, Sebastian Papanou, Anya,
Speaker 6: Marian R. J. Deutsche, Catherine Jamison, Andy c and Zoe
Speaker 6: Hull all asked about this. In thimble Whim's words, I
Speaker 6: love forging for garlic, grass, fiddleheads and dandy lyons. I
Speaker 6: never forge for mushrooms because I don't know enough and
Speaker 6: I'm way too addicted to not dying, and Rachel Kasher
Speaker 6: wrote in all mushrooms are edible, some mushrooms are only
Speaker 6: edible once. Where do we even start learning proper identification?
Speaker 6: I have a lot of questions about mushrooms because, okay,
Speaker 6: send me straight here. I feel like mushrooms is like
Speaker 6: you level up to mushrooms. Is that correct?
Speaker 4: So? I feel like you level up to mushrooms because
Speaker 4: I grew up being very plant specific in my study
Speaker 4: of what's growing around me. So I think it kind
Speaker 4: of depends on what you feel more comfortable learning. First.
Speaker 4: For me, I guess I've just I've been learning about
Speaker 4: plants for long enough and interacting with them for long
Speaker 4: enough that I can go into a new space in
Speaker 4: a region that I'm somewhat familiar with and be like,
Speaker 4: I have a good idea of what I'm going to
Speaker 4: find here, Flora wise, do not ask me what I
Speaker 4: think I'm gonna find fun guy wise, because I will
Speaker 4: not have a good answer for you. Every time I
Speaker 4: find a mushroom. It is a pleasant surprise.
Speaker 6: Yeah, someone about your morel's ask. Zoe Hall says, Oh
Speaker 6: my goodness, I love Alexis so much. Yay, she just
Speaker 6: found her first morels, So I got to know what
Speaker 6: is the secret to this elusive cerebral delight.
Speaker 4: So unfortunately, the only secret that I know that seems
Speaker 4: to be worth it salt is the one that I
Speaker 4: did have in that video, and it is if you
Speaker 4: are in an area that is known for having moral mushrooms,
Speaker 4: and the ground temperature has been consistently between like forty
Speaker 4: and sixty degrees and it has rained within the last week,
Speaker 4: look for trees that are dead and have bark starting
Speaker 4: to peel off of them. The cool thing about Morel's
Speaker 4: is they begin their life in between the cells of
Speaker 4: those trees, and then when those trees die, that is
Speaker 4: when Morel's and kind of convert to breaking down that
Speaker 4: dead matter and put up those fruiting bodies. So you're
Speaker 4: you're gonna be finding them near dead trees, but not
Speaker 4: trees that have been dead for a very long time,
Speaker 4: just because they would then be devoid of the nutrients
Speaker 4: that the morals need to grow and to fruit. And honestly,
Speaker 4: I've like had that knowledge up in my noggin for
Speaker 4: a while and I still only found my first moral
Speaker 4: last week.
Speaker 6: So exciting. How did you cook it?
Speaker 4: I brought four home, and everyone was just because I've
Speaker 4: only had them dried before, which are still, you know, delightful,
Speaker 4: But there's something about like not having to reconstitute them
Speaker 4: that everybody says is just miraculous. So I went super simple.
Speaker 4: I melted a little bit of a vegan butter. I
Speaker 4: added in a splash of white wine, and I added
Speaker 4: in a little bit of dice field garlic, some Alium banailey,
Speaker 4: just to like get some aromatics going. And then I
Speaker 4: have the morels and tossed them in the sauce, cooked
Speaker 4: them until the wine had cooked off and had caramelized
Speaker 4: them just a wee bit, and then just ate them
Speaker 4: that way, and Ali, they were so good. I cried
Speaker 4: a little, Oh.
Speaker 6: My god, that's so exciting. Is this the season for it?
Speaker 6: Or is that? Are they a seasonal mushy?
Speaker 4: So they are a seasonal mushy. Here on the eastern
Speaker 4: side of the United States, we are like right in
Speaker 4: the middle of morel season right now. In the Midwest specifically,
Speaker 4: things are a little up in the air right now.
Speaker 4: We've got some very chaotic weather. It has been both
Speaker 4: eighty degrees and we have had an inch of snow
Speaker 4: all within the last seven dates.
Speaker 6: Oh wow, So we have.
Speaker 4: No idea if that means good things for the rest
Speaker 4: of Morel season or if it means bad things for
Speaker 4: the rest of Morell's season. But on the West coast,
Speaker 4: where you also have things like burn Morell, those are
Speaker 4: going to be dependent on wildfires whether or not you're
Speaker 4: going to be able to find them, and Morel season
Speaker 4: is much more like late winter Morele mushrooms. They're kind
Speaker 4: of creepy, but at least they say it's good.
Speaker 6: Kender Sinclair wants to know if you write your songs
Speaker 6: ahead of time or if they are musical improv.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, what a great question. It is a
Speaker 4: little bit of both. If I'm just riffing in a
Speaker 4: video that is almost always just musical improv. I was
Speaker 4: in an improv group called Affirmative Distraction here in Columbus
Speaker 4: for a couple of years, and I'm a like improv
Speaker 4: group here in the city, and I love I love
Speaker 4: musical improv. It used to scare the crap out of me,
Speaker 4: and now it's one of my fun little side hobbies.
Speaker 4: That's a really something that I really enjoyed doing. But
Speaker 4: things that involve instruments, Oh, absolutely written ahead of time.
Speaker 4: I am not one of the people who can just
Speaker 4: pick up an instrument and be like, and now here's
Speaker 4: a song fresh out of membrane hole. I mean I
Speaker 4: can do that, it just won't be good understood.
Speaker 6: Great question from Catherine Jamison wants to know why are
Speaker 6: so many forged plants so mucilaginous.
Speaker 4: I think the answer is a lot of plants are mucilaginous,
Speaker 4: and we just don't cultivate a lot of them. So
Speaker 4: then when it's time to go out and forage things,
Speaker 4: you just get constantly surprised by the plants and the
Speaker 4: fung gui that do that do a slimy when you.
Speaker 6: Come to a slimy well, you know you you compared
Speaker 6: it to okra as a kind of a thickening agent, right, Yeah.
Speaker 4: And that's exactly what I was going to mention. I
Speaker 4: was going to say, for folks who grew up eating okra,
Speaker 4: that is not a crazy surprising thing. But for people
Speaker 4: who didn't like, giving them something made with like mallow
Speaker 4: for the first time might be a bit of a
Speaker 4: squicky experience. Yeah, they're not prepared.
Speaker 6: Mm hmm. Just a little slippery, just a little bit,
Speaker 6: just a little slippy and from slime to something more serious.
Speaker 6: A lot of patrons had cultural questions about forging, like
Speaker 6: Riley Mcinness, Emily Richardson and Claudia Dana, and first time
Speaker 6: question asker Vicky Preston, who wrote in to say so,
Speaker 6: I'm an Indigenous person living in my rural homelands and
Speaker 6: for us foraging or gathering is still a common and
Speaker 6: necessary practice as much as it's always been. But Vicky
Speaker 6: wanted to know, alongside listeners Alexis Jarvis and Ammani al Kidwa,
Speaker 6: how and why can it be empowering as a black,
Speaker 6: Indigenous or person of color forager.
Speaker 4: My Instagram handle is a black forager and that was
Speaker 4: one hundred percent on purpose because one, I didn't see
Speaker 4: a lot of people who looked like me in the space,
Speaker 4: and I still don't see a lot of people who
Speaker 4: look like me in the space. It's I honestly think
Speaker 4: of it kind of like an act of restorative justice
Speaker 4: to be a person of color who is foraging, because historically,
Speaker 4: culturally and legally a lot of barriers were put in
Speaker 4: place to prohibit us historically from being able to do so.
Speaker 4: I talk about it a little bit in a video
Speaker 4: that I had made for Black History Month. But in
Speaker 4: the South, immediately after the Civil War, a lot of
Speaker 4: laws were put in place to purposefully curb recently freed
Speaker 4: black folks from being able to forage and trap to
Speaker 4: provide for themselves, essentially kind of holding them an economic
Speaker 4: bondage to the plantations so they know they weren't enslaved anymore.
Speaker 4: But now they pretty much have to be sharecroppers because
Speaker 4: there's not much else you can do, because trespass one
Speaker 4: from being a civil offense to being a criminal offense,
Speaker 4: which suddenly makes it way more expensive problem for you
Speaker 4: if you are on somebody else's land and they don't
Speaker 4: want you to be there. But also if you're recently freed,
Speaker 4: you don't have land of your own to be foraging on,
Speaker 4: to be growing things on, to be trapping on, to
Speaker 4: be hunting on, and both physically in some places but
Speaker 4: mostly metaphorically, senses were put up around public property, and
Speaker 4: in a lot of spaces it became illegal to forage
Speaker 4: and trap there too. A lot of that also has
Speaker 4: some history in the very beginnings of the national park
Speaker 4: movement in the late eighteen hundreds, you know the eighteen
Speaker 4: eighties and the eighteen nineties, when a lot of quite
Speaker 4: men wanted to preserve the pristine conditions of the green
Speaker 4: spaces they saw around them, while completely ignoring the fact
Speaker 4: that the way that those green spaces became the way
Speaker 4: that they were were because of a lot of these
Speaker 4: symbiotic relationships between the people who were living off of
Speaker 4: them and the land. So when a lot of laws
Speaker 4: are put in place to purposefully disenfranchise people from being
Speaker 4: able to do something, it has usually a lot of
Speaker 4: generational and cultural skill over there's a pretty big cultural
Speaker 4: barrier to hop over to be a person of color,
Speaker 4: even just existing in the outdoors, when a lot of
Speaker 4: us have grandparents or even in my case, parents who
Speaker 4: grew up in a time where there was like a
Speaker 4: very real fear of being a black person in the
Speaker 4: case of my family, by yourself out in the middle
Speaker 4: of the woods, like that wasn't a situation that you
Speaker 4: would ever want to find yourself in for fear of
Speaker 4: like extreme acts of violence. So for me to be
Speaker 4: a black woman foraging, yeah, it feels like it feels
Speaker 4: like justice. Me. It's an act that I feel like
Speaker 4: we should begin reclaiming. We have just as much a
Speaker 4: right to do it as anybody else, But because we
Speaker 4: have all of these historical and external factors working against us,
Speaker 4: there's just not a lot of us out here. Thankfully,
Speaker 4: I do see that beginning to change, and I hope
Speaker 4: to see a change even more rapidly as we move forward.
Speaker 6: Alexis notes that if your great grandparents aren't foraging, well
Speaker 6: they're not going to teach your grandparents how to forage,
Speaker 6: and they aren't going to teach your parents, who aren't
Speaker 6: going to teach you, and not to mention so so
Speaker 6: much oral tradition and teaching has been lost over the years,
Speaker 6: And I think one of the things that's so powerful
Speaker 6: about Alexis's lessons are that she has been captivated by
Speaker 6: foraging since she was five and has been studying it
Speaker 6: for years and years, And part of her work feels
Speaker 6: like carrying on a certain kind of oral tradition of
Speaker 6: her own and telling stories and showing us exactly what
Speaker 6: to look for prepare it in a manner that has
Speaker 6: been missing through generations of trauma, and her work is
Speaker 6: igniting a new interest in folks who have been kept
Speaker 6: from this knowledge and resources gathered around the glow of
Speaker 6: our phones, folks listen intently to her lessons. I think
Speaker 6: it's so great that you're bringing so many people together
Speaker 6: who feel similarly. We Actually we have one question, Jessica
Speaker 6: Duncan says, first time question asker and fellow black girl
Speaker 6: who loves plants here and is from the Pacific Northwest.
Speaker 6: I'm interested in getting into foraging for mushies. However, I'm
Speaker 6: also concerned about trail erosion and the negative effects of
Speaker 6: trampling through forests. Do you have any tips for Jessica
Speaker 6: on how to ethically and sustainably forage.
Speaker 4: Yes, Well, since she said that she is specifically interested
Speaker 4: in mushroom collecting, I would say if you have like
Speaker 4: a little pocket knife and you go ahead and just
Speaker 4: cut off the fruit and bodies instead of, you know,
Speaker 4: maybe disrupting the mycilium that are doing their thing. A
Speaker 4: lot of foraging is honestly evaluating space by space. You
Speaker 4: are at any given time, if you are in a
Speaker 4: place that is having issues with erosion of soil, and
Speaker 4: you look around and you see signs of erosion of soil,
Speaker 4: you see a top layer with poor soil quality, you know,
Speaker 4: the wind blows, and you see a whole lot of
Speaker 4: the kind of nutritionally depleted top soil blowing around like
Speaker 4: that's probably not an area that you want to be
Speaker 4: taking any biodiversity out of you. You want to kind
Speaker 4: of give it as much of a chance to thrive
Speaker 4: as it could possibly have. So a lot of it
Speaker 4: is just reading the space that you're in, visually reading
Speaker 4: up on a space that you're going to be in
Speaker 4: ahead of time. And that doesn't even just go for
Speaker 4: things like erosion. I know, when I'm on the East Coast,
Speaker 4: if I'm foraging seaweed, I'm checking the water quality. Those
Speaker 4: are levels that are usually posted for commercial fishermen, but
Speaker 4: anybody who is out there, you know, fishing, clamming, in
Speaker 4: my case, dragging seaweed directly out of the ocean to
Speaker 4: put into their gullet. You also want to be knowing
Speaker 4: about the water temperature, aligal blooms, any spills that have
Speaker 4: happened in the area. So a little bit of it
Speaker 4: is just doing the research that you can if you
Speaker 4: are able for a space that you hope to be
Speaker 4: foraging from.
Speaker 6: Are those the dead Man's fingers?
Speaker 4: Yes, Oh my god, I love dead Man's fingers so much.
Speaker 6: Dead Man's fingers, a healthy booku of them. Okay, so
Speaker 6: we're not talking about the mushroom called dead man's fingers,
Speaker 6: which truly are a ghastly grayish fingery looking site on
Speaker 6: the forest floor. Rather, these dead man's fingers are also
Speaker 6: called green sea fingers, stag seaweed, green fleece, and oyster thief,
Speaker 6: also known as codium for gila. If you're feeling specific now,
Speaker 6: Alexi says that she tries to use the binomial nomenoclature
Speaker 6: or genus and species format because so many forgeable foods
Speaker 6: have tons of local names. And she says that if
Speaker 6: a thing is important enough to have different names in
Speaker 6: a bunch of different places, it's because it's really tasty
Speaker 6: or it's really really gross or lethal. Now, how do
Speaker 6: you make sure that you keep eating dead man's fingers
Speaker 6: without having dead man's fingers? You know, Hope says, And
Speaker 6: maybe this is some flim flam you could bust. Hope says.
Speaker 6: I'd been told that you can test for berries being
Speaker 6: poisonous by rubbing them on your hand and seeing if
Speaker 6: it tingles or numbs, and then if it doesn't, doing
Speaker 6: the same with your cheek, and if nothing there either,
Speaker 6: you might be able to eat it. Is that true
Speaker 6: at all? Is it flim flam? Is it reliable for a.
Speaker 4: Lot of us, especially who grew up being very outdoorsy.
Speaker 4: That was kind of the way that we were told
Speaker 4: to deal with the situation if we like found ourselves
Speaker 4: stranded in the middle of the woods. The way that
Speaker 4: I always heard it was, you know, you'd rub it
Speaker 4: on the inside of your ankle. You'd pretty much just
Speaker 4: travel to more sensitive pieces of skin and wait a
Speaker 4: few hours to see if it reacts. Because I am
Speaker 4: a cautious bean, and because not every hazardous plant behaves
Speaker 4: the same way or possesses the same toxins, I'm just
Speaker 4: gonna go ahead and say that unless you are dying,
Speaker 4: probably not the best rule of thumb to go by.
Speaker 4: If you are dying, probably not the best rule of
Speaker 4: thumb to go by. Also, if you are looking for berries,
Speaker 4: I can say with confidence if you are in North America,
Speaker 4: we don't have any poisonous compound berries. So if it
Speaker 4: looks like a raspberry, you're good to go.
Speaker 6: Okay. So compound or aggregate berries include the dewberry, the BlackBerry,
Speaker 6: the raspberry, So that should help Rebecca racial sorder Mandy Smith,
Speaker 6: Donnell O'Neil, and Megan Burnett Tarascuwitz. Oh on that topic,
Speaker 6: this is a very very good question. Emma. Kylie is
Speaker 6: a first time question asker and their greatest love is
Speaker 6: for service berries. Is a service berry like a raspberry?
Speaker 4: Oh my god, service berries. I'm so glad someone brought
Speaker 4: service berries up because I always want to shoehorn them
Speaker 4: into the conversation, but I never know if people are
Speaker 4: gonna know what I'm talking about. So service berries, which
Speaker 4: are the amulanchier genus. There are a couple of different
Speaker 4: species that fall under it, but we call them all
Speaker 4: service berries or juneberries or Saskatoon berries. In southern Ohio
Speaker 4: sometimes they just call them service or service berries. They
Speaker 4: actually look a lot more like blueberries. They are crowned berries,
Speaker 4: so you know they have the little little points sticking
Speaker 4: out of them, the little last signs of their flowers.
Speaker 4: They they might they might be my favorite. I love
Speaker 4: papaus just from like a purely ethno botanical history standpoint,
Speaker 4: but service berries might be my favorite thing to forage.
Speaker 4: They taste like apples and blueberries mixed together.
Speaker 6: Oh man, so can you make a cobbler? Can you
Speaker 6: get enough to make like a cobbler out of them?
Speaker 6: Or is it like if you get three of them,
Speaker 6: you've had the best day of your life. Oh no.
Speaker 4: So last year, just from the soul tree closest to
Speaker 4: my house, I gathered enough berries while still leaving all
Speaker 4: the ones that I couldn't reach, which was most of
Speaker 4: them for the birds, I gathered enough to make like
Speaker 4: ten hand pies.
Speaker 6: Ah.
Speaker 4: Last year, for whatever reason, I gathered like one big
Speaker 4: jar of service berries and was like, you know what,
Speaker 4: I'm tired. And by the time I wasn't tired anymore
Speaker 4: service berries. So this year, I'm gonna stock up all
Speaker 4: of my my energy and my strength and we're gonna
Speaker 4: go ham on service berries. My neighborhood loves planting them
Speaker 4: as ornamentals, so they are everywhere.
Speaker 6: Oh man, that's gonna be in like apartment listings. What
Speaker 6: is around you that you could eat? Yeah.
Speaker 4: I almost think that people need to start listing it
Speaker 4: because if someone told me that a house that I
Speaker 4: was maybe going to move into has a service berry
Speaker 4: tree outfront, I'd be like, oh, I'm done. So yeah,
Speaker 4: you know, you don't have a lasher or a dryer,
Speaker 4: but you have a service Berry Tree, who cares. I'll
Speaker 4: wash my clothes in the same That's fine, it's better
Speaker 4: for the environment.
Speaker 6: An Now, a certain film came up a few times,
Speaker 6: and Lena Zekis and Juliet McDonald wanted to know how
Speaker 6: to avoid the same fate. Julia asked, please tell us
Speaker 6: how to not Chris mccantless ourselves. Does Alexis get this
Speaker 6: question a lot? Are there any movies about foraging or
Speaker 6: survivalism that are inspiring to you or that you fucking
Speaker 6: hate at all?
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, I mean people do bring up into
Speaker 4: the wild. Yeah, that's like everyone's literary experience with foraging.
Speaker 4: And I feel like for a lot of people, their
Speaker 4: literary experience with foraging is like people being in mortal peril.
Speaker 4: It's always either into the wild or it's that like
Speaker 4: freaking scene in The Hunger Games where it's just like
Speaker 4: that's night, look, Peter, it'll kill you. That's the way
Speaker 4: that everybody thinks about it. I'm trying to think how
Speaker 4: I know of any movies in which their portrayal of
Speaker 4: foraging doesn't make me big sad? Oh no, oh no,
Speaker 4: none are coming to mind. Quick, Someone write heartfelt children's
Speaker 4: film with foraging in it. You can consult me. I'll
Speaker 4: do it for free.
Speaker 6: Yes, first PBS show and then consulting also please yes, please.
Speaker 6: Last questions, I always ask what sucks the most about
Speaker 6: either foraging or having a million people watching your foraging?
Speaker 6: What is one thing that you would change about it?
Speaker 4: Oh? Man, I don't think there's anything that I would
Speaker 4: change about foraging. Processing what you bring home is sometimes tough.
Speaker 4: I feel like that's that's what I don't get many
Speaker 4: questions about. But I feel like I need to warn
Speaker 4: people about as if you're getting into foraging, like eighty
Speaker 4: percent of the fun is going out and finding the thing,
Speaker 4: but you do have to bring it home and do
Speaker 4: things with it, or like either cook it immediately or
Speaker 4: do something usually a little labor intensive to it so
Speaker 4: you can preserve it for cooking with it in the future.
Speaker 4: I don't get to just bring the acorn some and
Speaker 4: crack them open and have a snack. Yeah, unfortunately, Oh god,
Speaker 4: acorns especially, that's like a week's long process every fall.
Speaker 4: But that being said, I also find processing my fines
Speaker 4: to be very like meditative. It's like a great thing
Speaker 4: to do after a busy week. I'm a freak. I
Speaker 4: will process plants for two hours in complete silence in
Speaker 4: my kitchen and be just the happiest version of myself after.
Speaker 6: I bet, especially after you've had each thing that you
Speaker 6: thing has a narrative too of when you found it,
Speaker 6: how you decided to pick that one over the one
Speaker 6: next to it. I mean, there's there's so much context
Speaker 6: for every single leaf you know.
Speaker 4: Exactly, There's there's so much to consider, And I find
Speaker 4: that taking the time to really pause and to really
Speaker 4: think about how thankful I am for everything that I
Speaker 4: brought home, for each of one of those plants, and
Speaker 4: for all of the people, places and books where I've
Speaker 4: gotten my knowledge about that plant from it just it
Speaker 4: fills my heart up, makes my heart feel all warm
Speaker 4: and fuzzy. And then at the end you get a
Speaker 4: snack who does like that? So, since I would change
Speaker 4: nothing about foraging, because foraging is amazing and wonderful, I
Speaker 4: will say being a person who a lot of people
Speaker 4: are watching on the internet nine times out of ten,
Speaker 4: super cool, very surreal experience. But a lot of people
Speaker 4: talk to you, or at least leave comments on your things,
Speaker 4: as if you are not a real human person, who
Speaker 4: then has to process what it is that they have said,
Speaker 4: and that stinks. Additionally, being a woman and a woman
Speaker 4: of color in the space comes with a lot of
Speaker 4: added pressure to be so incredibly perfect. And I mean, yes,
Speaker 4: this is a line of study, a line of work
Speaker 4: in which you want to be perfect and you want
Speaker 4: to be accurate because you care about all of the
Speaker 4: people who follow you, and you want them to be
Speaker 4: safe and you want them to feel like they are
Speaker 4: prepared knowledge wise to go out and find something, or
Speaker 4: at least prepared to ask the right questions when they
Speaker 4: go and find more information about it. But being a
Speaker 4: person of color, I do find that I tend to
Speaker 4: incur skepticism a lot more than some of my delightful
Speaker 4: white peers.
Speaker 6: God that sucks.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it sucks, Thank you, it sucks. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Alexis frekuna that online her knowledge gets doubted more than others,
Speaker 6: even though she's been studying this for years, and it's
Speaker 6: impossible to ignore that sexism and racism. But it's also
Speaker 6: partly why she knows the work and being in this
Speaker 6: space is important, and also she's just entertaining us. Hell,
Speaker 6: I think what's so compelling about it is it's outdoorsy,
Speaker 6: and it's funny, and it's perconaval, and it's science and
Speaker 6: it's food and its history. It's like a septople whammy, just.
Speaker 4: A one stop shop for all different kinds of content.
Speaker 6: It really is. And I just love the way that
Speaker 6: it gets people to notice their surroundings more and not
Speaker 6: take for granted all of the things that are growing
Speaker 6: around us. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think a lot of people have solace in nature,
Speaker 4: and a lot of folks who maybe wouldn't have otherwise.
Speaker 4: And for me, mymo has always been when you see
Speaker 4: more value in a space, you take better care of it.
Speaker 4: And foraging is absolutely a way to see more value
Speaker 4: in the space around you.
Speaker 6: And that being said, I always I always end on
Speaker 6: your favorite thing about it, but I don't even how
Speaker 6: do you even pick a favorite thing about it. I
Speaker 6: also feel like your microbiome must be so good. You
Speaker 6: must have such a healthy microbiome.
Speaker 9: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I eat normal things you like right now, I do
Speaker 4: have a glass of like a red bud and dandelion
Speaker 4: like fermented beverage that I just bottled earlier this week,
Speaker 4: and I'm like, yay, good gut bacteria. We love to
Speaker 4: see an active fermenting drink, but I also ate two
Speaker 4: oreos for breakfast, so journey's out on that one. I guess.
Speaker 4: I don't get sick a lot.
Speaker 6: What about your favorite favorite thing about it? What just
Speaker 6: gives you butterflies?
Speaker 4: Getting to see either in real time or to have
Speaker 4: people like relay to me like a breakthrough that they
Speaker 4: have had or like a special moment that they have
Speaker 4: now had in their surroundings because of my content. One
Speaker 4: of my best best best friends has never been super outdoorsy,
Speaker 4: but she she loves food, an amazing chef, and so
Speaker 4: her kind of foray into the outdoors has been through
Speaker 4: foraging and watching. Kind of like the light bulb go
Speaker 4: off for her. Now when we go out on hikes
Speaker 4: together and you know, watching her being able to like
Speaker 4: recognize things so confidently on her own, I'm just like, yeah,
Speaker 4: that's one. Those moments supersede the negatives by so many
Speaker 4: degrees and make me make me feel like I'm doing
Speaker 4: something beneficial. I guess. I hope.
Speaker 6: So ask smart people simple questions, because chances are they
Speaker 6: do what they do because they really love what they do,
Speaker 6: and you never know, you might gott to know and
Speaker 6: get hit by a bus, so you might as well
Speaker 6: ask questions. Also follow Alexis. Turns out she's a fellow
Speaker 6: Ologite and she'd listened to the show before I ever
Speaker 6: reached out, which was so cool to learn. And she
Speaker 6: is at Black Forager on TikTok, on Twitter and on Instagram,
Speaker 6: so do follow her. We are at Ologies on Twitter
Speaker 6: and Instagram. I'm at Ali Ward just one l on both.
Speaker 6: Thank you to all the patrons at patreon dot com
Speaker 6: slash Ologies, where you can join for just one tiny
Speaker 6: dollar a month and sub big questions. Thank you Aaron
Speaker 6: Talbert for admitting the Ologies podcast Facebook page. Thank you
Speaker 6: White of the Wardery who makes our transcripts. Thank you
Speaker 6: to Caleb Patten who bleeps them. Bleeped episodes and transcripts
Speaker 6: are available for free at the link in the show notes.
Speaker 6: Ologies Merch is available at ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you,
Speaker 6: Shannon Felt to some Bonnie Dutch of the comedy podcast
Speaker 6: You Are That for managing that. Thank you to Susan
Speaker 6: Hale and Noel Dilworth who helped with social media and scheduling.
Speaker 6: Thank you to main Squeeze and huge editing hero Jared
Speaker 6: Sleeper of mind Gem Media and longtime editor, newly unmustached
Speaker 6: Stephen Ray Morris of the podcasts The Podcast and see
Speaker 6: Jurassic Wright. Oh my stash. They both shaved this week,
Speaker 6: Stephen and Jarrett. People are vaxed. Stashes are waxed. Wow,
Speaker 6: springtime in America. Oh, I'm Nick Thorburn of the band Islands.
Speaker 6: Did the music? Okay, here's a new secret for twenty
Speaker 6: twenty four, and it's that I just returned from Mexico
Speaker 6: City a few days ago, where I went to talk
Speaker 6: to some axe lotto experts. But on day two I
Speaker 6: completely lost my voice. I'd like to a rasp like.
Speaker 6: I couldn't make sounds with my throat or mouth. So
Speaker 6: we're gonna be working on a work around for that. Also,
Speaker 6: that's one of the reasons this is an encore episode
Speaker 6: this week, because I couldn't talk for a bit. We're
Speaker 6: also working on a real chunk of an episode for
Speaker 6: next week, and I wanted to keep doing some tweaks
Speaker 6: on it. I wanted it to be as good as possible.
Speaker 6: And here's the thing, patrons, if you're a patron, I'm
Speaker 6: releasing next week's episode early. I've never done this before.
Speaker 6: I'm probably on Thursday or Friday, so in a few
Speaker 6: days to get some ideas and some feedback on it
Speaker 6: before it comes out to the public next Tuesday. So
Speaker 6: if you're not already a patron and you want to
Speaker 6: know what next week's episode is and you want to
Speaker 6: give me some feedback on it, that'll be happening a
Speaker 6: little bit later this week. And yeah, my voice still
Speaker 6: hurts in a sex so I'll rest that right now. Okay,
Speaker 6: go eat your backyard, do it safely, all right? Bye bye,
Speaker 6: pack a dermis college, Homeology, crypto zoology, lithology, Zemnology, meteorology, pertology,
Speaker 6: the apology, seriology.
Speaker 7: Samology, Good night, last rita.
Speaker 6: You we did in a minute.
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