Are you a forager?

I'm looking for freegans, hunter/gatherers/foragers. Are you into the movement? Post here or email me (heather@heatherirwin.com) if you want to be in an upcoming article.

Best,
H

could not aggree more. great post going to dig around and see what other stuff you have. Very Nice Blog!

I used to be an avid forager. Bringing a bunch of immature cattails to a friends house and insisting on cooking them there made me realize that I should back off a little. They were good, but as one said, butter anything and it is probably good.(cook them and eat them like corn on the cob)
I am have a blog and this weekend I am posting on purslane, the common "weed" in U.S. gardens which seems to be a real vegetable in every other county.

I had to laugh when I read about Catt's Sicilian parents.
My grandparents, also Sicilian, loved living in California in the 1940's after immigrating to NY a few decades earlier. Here in the Golden State was no shortage of things to find and eat. Snails... my grandmother gathered the common garden snails, put them in a box and let them eat cornmeal for a few days before eating THEM.
Mustard greens, oranges and avocados growing along the roadsides. Mushrooms and mussels. Sea urchins, too. Olives... my grandparents always carried sheets in the vast trunk of their car to spread out under various trees. My grandfather would climb into trees and shake them hard and then my grandmother would quickly gather the corners of the sheets, now loaded with the found bounty. They would hoist the loot into the open trunk and make a quick exit. My grandmother always had olives curing in her kitchen. My mother, though she is more MODERN in her cooking style than my grandparents (her parents) were, once took my sisters and I to stay in a motel in Morro Bay for a month. This was in the early 1960's. We thought it was a vacation, but later we learned that for my mom, it was a vacation away from our dad. My gorgeous 35 year-old mom, who resembled a raven-haired, olive-skinned Marilyn Monroe, asked a local fish market for their leftover fish heads, which the fish monger gave her willingly. She tied the heads to a found wire basket. Then, using a clothesline, she lowered it into the sea off of the pier. A half hour later she pulled up the basket now loaded with large crab, most of which had made a fateful decision to stay with the fish heads for the trip up. The greediest crab were then boiled in a big pot in our little motel kitchenette. Seasoned with lemon juice (from lemons we picked at the motel) the crab were cracked with a rock and eaten with gusto by my mom and her three little kittens (we were all licking our paws afterward). I will never forget that! Did I mention figs? Oh, how I loved and still love figs. No figs are as good as the tree-ripened figs you pick and then eat in the shade of the tree they grew on. There is an abandoned house with a glorious tree covered in green figs in Santa Rosa. I have my eye on that tree right now, hoping my next drive out from Bodega Bay will be timed to find the largest, sweetest, ripest, deep purple figs still barely hanging on to the branches of that tree... and to get there before the birds (and other scavengers) have beaten me to them!
The true Mediterranean diet?
Eat whatever the hell you can get your hands on!

I go mushroom hunting any chance I get. Far away from here. Really really far. The experience of cooking up a dish of food you picked from the wild is very cool. Also you know exactly where your food came from. Always cut the mushrooms at the base and your patch will come back year after year.

I'm not a freegan............just yet. Look forward to your article. Our society wastes so much, I am excited to hear new ways to "harvest" the waste.

I grew up foraging with my Sicilian parents. We picked field mushrooms, wild mustard greens, prickley pears, olives, dandelion greens and stinging nettles. My father always traveled with a supply of brown grocery bags just in case he should happen upon something on his drive! After a move to Tennessee we picked poke sallet. It was a wonderful way to grow up!

One perspective of foraging in a different light, is eating food more completely when fresh and raw. That is to say, eat the sweetness inside of the corn cob, the whole lemon or orange including the skin (navel is better), eating potatoes raw, sprouting grain into grass.

I love to forage! Usually while bicycle riding around Sonoma County, there is so much food everywhere, and so much of it falls off trees and just rots. Just keep a keen eye and it's easy to spot tons of fruit. Blackberry season is coming, loquat season is here now, cherry season just left, and I look forward to the fall fig and apple season and late winter tangerine season. I will go as far as knocking on peoples doors to ask about picking their fruit. I have many friends from OrganicAthlete.org that are major forgers of fruit, mostly by bicycle. We have cargo trailers for our bikes and will pick your unwanted no spray no chemical no pesticide fruit. Free food is abundant!

Forage on,

Jane

I plant and farm, a little. Why leave things to chance.....unless you are at Salt Point for mushrooms. Their domain.

No. I don't leave food harvesting to chance. I grow and replant.

I get miner's lettuce and acorns from my yard, and berries from creeks. I also know a mushroom picker.

In an earlier time I have foraged for most everything from cattails to wild asparagus. These days I am content to gather the purslanefrom my garden to use in different dishes.

In an earlier time I have foraged for most everything from cattails to wild asparagus. These days I am content to gather the purslane from my garden to use in different dishes.

Gerard Nebesky of Gerard's Paella fame is a super forager. He can be found most fridays at the Occidental Farmers Market or on his website gerardspaella.com

Gerard Nebesky of Gerard's Paella fame is a super forager. He can be found most fridays at the Occidental Farmers Market or on his website gerardspaella.com

I am replying for Joseph, but he is quite an adept forager here in Sonoma County...
He has collected acorns, hawthorne haws, purslane, wild rose hips, wild plums and grapes, wapato (a kind of arrowhead Native Americans collected), blackberries, and LOTS of other stuff.
I'm his friend Lauren (laur13@sbcglobal.net) and I'm sure he would be very interested in contributing to your article.
: ) lauren