Introduction “The world is a huge place. How will you know where you fit in unless you explore beyond your comfort zone?” —Sir Ernest Shackleton Planet earth’s beauty and pleasure is everyone’s birthright. Ripe berries and chanterelles for all! Going out into nature to find your own food is at once a primal part of our being and yet has grown unfamiliar. Sure, you may get stared at snipping spruce tips or reaching into overgrown blackberry bushes as if performing a deviant public act. But a deep part of us still yearns for berry-stained hands and the sizzle of food cooking on live fire, and foraging is a way to make space for beauty in our lives and preparing delicious edibles creates pleasure.
And being outdoors is good for you in so many ways. It reduces the stress hormone cortisol, it can lower your heart rate, and reduce some types of illness, improves sleep, and more. But there are the non-quantifiable reasons for heading into nature that are just as important. It’s fun and keeps us learning and curious and engaged with our surrounding world. And it helps us tune in and connect to the ancient cycles of our planet.
This book guides you into the woods and water’s edge for an adventure with purpose. It helps you see delicacies hanging over the sidewalk or slipping through the cracks. Harvesting wild food is an unscripted experience that requires us to follow nature’s rhythms of tides and seasons, rain and dry spells. If we do this, she gives us incredible, nutritious food for FREE. Those $45.00 a pound porcini? You can go find your own! Pickle rosehips and oranges, make seaweed butter, ferment your own vinegar blends—you’ll have a very esoteric pantry that makes the simplest dishes more intriguing. Find miners lettuce and stinging nettles—the delicious specialties that still have the bitter, sour, yummy complexity of food before it was dumbed down for uniformity in grocery stores.
Foraging is the antidote to our too-too busy lives and crazy, convoluted, complex food systems. And when we are out in nature, we learn to live by nature’s s rules. Check the tides before going for clams or seaweed. Notice rain patterns for mushrooms. Learn what confluences between fresh and saltwater that native oysters love. What if we accepted the generosity of planet earth with reverence and passed it along? Could we then start becoming a keystone species that improves habitat for all other life on earth?
When going out to find your own food, you may get wet, or muddy, or scratched, or scared. Often, you will get tired. You may find nothing, or so much you can barely carry it home. But it’s in these dark hollows, amidst bushwhacking, or escaping waves in the impact zone you will meet parts of yourself you’ve long lost, and even discover new aspects of yourself.
Sharing the wild food you find with others is also sharing these newly discovered aspects of you with friends and family. The more time you spend in nature, the more you will recognize yourself, refracted back to you from a thousand different places—rays of light filtering through branches, mushrooms opening to release their spores, ferns unfurling, the carcass of deer left by a predator, the sting of a bee, a modest orchid, the hush of sunrise. No aspect is bad or good, they just are parts of a whole and you’ll start seeing them in yourself. Rachel Carson wrote that our blood has the same saline content as the ocean; in the book, in the book
Scent and the Scenting, Dog William Syrotuck wrote that it’s estimated our skin has the same bacterial content as the soil. We are fractals of planet earth and deep down, we crave nature. This book encourages you to rewild yourself and eat inspired by our surrounding ecosystems. This I termed “Ecosystem Based Eating.” Create dishes according to the ecosystems where you found the food; as well, follow nature as a guide for what to eat. Does your plate look like an intertidal zone, a boreal forest?
How to Use This BookThis book does not have any recipes where meat and poultry are the center of the plate. It’s not intentionally a pescatarian or vegetarian cookbook. In the woods, there are nuts and fungi; and at the coast, there are underwater seaweed, small fish, bivalves. I try to mimic nature as much as possible on the plate. I’m not a hunter. I’m not against ethical hunting for food. I just don’t do it.
I strongly believe that food systems that benefit the earth are also good for our bodies—hello oysters and truffles! And, by mimicking ecosystems, we have a deeper sense of the unique and beautiful places where we live. A big pork chop or chicken breast at the center of the plate doesn’t tell a story of these landscapes we love. Wild plums, morel mushrooms, kombu, and fir tips tell the story I want to be a part of. This is why you’ll find recipes organized by coastal, forest, and urban ecosystems. So this book is plant forward, low meat, and regenerative-focused foods. There are options for gluten free, keto-ish and vegan included in some of the recipes.
Think of this book as part instruction and part inspiration. It is by no means a comprehensive guide to wild foods, and it doesn’t advocate trying to “live off the land” and eat primarily wild foods. There are too many people for that. Rather, the foraging tips, recipes and DIY’s are meant to get you outside, interacting with the natural world and translating that experience in your food. If you just harvest salt once a year, every time you sprinkle it over your dishes, you’ll have a memory of being at the ocean’s edge, pelicans flying by in formation, the spout of a whale in the distance. The goal of this book is for you to fall in love with nature in the most visceral possible way – through food. The recipes are simple, yet the ingredients a bit esoteric. Some you may be able to find seasonally at the farmers market or grocery store, but the fun is in finding your own patches of rosehips and huckleberries.
Copyright © 2024 by Finn, Maria. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
