As the leaves start to unfurl and the sun stays out late, a smorgasbord of secret edible plants is emerging from the forest floor.
Wild food enthusiasts are flocking to the woods, searching high and low for edible delights hidden in plain sight.
Southeastern New Brunswickers are certainly among them, so CHMA contacted several wild food and plant enthusiasts, who share extensive generational knowledge of the practice.
The first of whom answers a common concern, how do you know if something is poisonous?
Jessika Gauvin of Enchanted Mushroom Forest has been foraging wild food for over thirty years, and her specialty is (of course) mushrooms.
Her expertise is valued by veterinarians and emergency doctors, and serves as a frontline expert during poisoning emergencies.
All of this time-sensitive work is done online, in a Facebook group.
“If there’s an ingestion of a plant or mushroom by a kid or an animal, or even an adult who’s a forger who’s eaten something and then either they get symptoms, or they start to get concerned that maybe they had misidentified something, they’ll come to us,” explains Gauvin.
Her expertise, among the others in the Facebook group, is so specialized that Poison Control will often direct concerns to them.
Gauvin provides guided tours around Maritime provinces, where she instructs how to tell the difference between a culinary delight or toxic surprise.
Unfortunately there’s no rule of thumb when it comes to avoiding poisonous ones, despite what you may have heard about avoiding red mushrooms or mushrooms with gills. There are exceptions to every rule in the book.
Thankfully, Gauvin says as long as you don’t swallow a poisonous mushroom, it shouldn’t cause any harm.
“Plants are actually more dangerous than mushrooms, because plants can harm you without having to ingest them,” says Gauvin. “You can touch any mushroom, there’s no danger to touching mushrooms. You can even take a bite and chew it up and spit it out, even the deadliest mushrooms on the planet, and it won’t harm you. You have to physically ingest them in order for them to cause you harm.”
Harvesting mushrooms, she says, is actually quite sustainable. The body of a mushroom lives underground, and what humans pick and eat is just the fruit.
“You can take 100% of the mushrooms that you find, and you do no harm to the organism. In fact, some would even say that you’re helping, because when you pick [a mushroom] and move, you’re spreading the spores further than they would go on their own.”
While overharvesting may not be an issue with mushrooms, it is definitely an issue with other wild foods.
Greg Osowski of the Atlantic Wildlife Institute says that every now and then, wild foods will become popular and overharvested, such as wild leeks or chaga.
“I always recommend that you take a third of the population that’s there, and take no more than that,” says Osowski. “You never know. You may be going into an area and harvesting, and then somebody comes in behind you. If you take a good percentage of the population, and somebody comes in [and says], ‘I’ll take half of what’s here…’ Then another person comes in and takes half of that half, and then next thing you know, it’s gone.”
Osowski teaches outdoor survival skills with the Atlantic Wildlife Institute, to both kids and adults. He says that his thirty years of experience has taught him to open kids’ classes with the same warning.
“The first thing I do is introduce them to the plants that they have to be cautious around. I’ll introduce them to like water hemlock and say, ‘This plant will kill you. There will be nothing I can do about it. I could rush you to the hospital but you’re still going to die, and it’s going to be a horrible death.'”
After instilling a healthy dose of caution, Osowski then recommends that kids and adults alike start with plants they recognize. This includes plants as common as dandelions.
“Stick with the easy ones, and then slowly. Do your homework on the plant, check several sources on the plant, find some reliable online sources. Learn one plant at a time and figure out how you’re going to cook it, how you’re going to eat it, or you’re going to enjoy it, [and how] you’re not going to overharvest it.”
Most of his knowledge originated from books, “before the internet,” where sometimes misinformation can be passed down from edition to edition without being caught. It’s for that reason that he always suggests that foragers double or triple check before eating anything they find outside.
Osowski has been misled by field guides that gave incorrect preparation instructions. He even knows an experienced forager who was duped by a lookalike plant, which nearly cost them their life.
Tatum Andrews, another professional forager who owns and operates Bear Roots Forest, says being informed is the first step on any foraging expedition.
“In one aspect, I think the plants are here, and they want us to harvest them,” says Andrews. “They have all these amazing nutrients and medicinal benefits. A lot of the alkaloids that they produce, they can’t use them, so they’re just producing them, basically, for us to use. I think so anyway… [But] if you’re on the hunt for something, and you’ve come across it, you get super excited that it’s there… But there’s only a small patch? Well, maybe it’s best not to harvest it, and go back, do some research, figure out how that plant can be spread, or how we can increase the population.”
She says for her, foraging is a form of empowerment. Andrews operates an apothecary out of Bear Roots Forest, which includes some herbal medicine.
“You can learn about these plants that are going around you, you don’t have to buy them from a store, you don’t have to rely on someone else to get them for you, you can go out as long as you can identify them, obviously. Once you can identify them, and then you learn about their medicinal and nutritional value.”
Genevieve Losier of Skogen Apothica and Wild Foods also talks about empowerment, specifically when it comes to medicinal herbs and food security.
“About 15 years ago, I had a lot of health issues. I was 25, I had two babies. I went with the medical system, trying to figure out what was wrong with me, [but] there were no answers. So I took my health into my own hands, and I said, ‘I need to treat myself holistically. I need to feed my body what it needs. And I need to find out which plants are out there that are local that are growing in our local terroir so I can treat myself,’ and it worked.”
Losier is teaching the skill of foraging to her kids, in the hopes that they will learn self-sufficiency.
“I want to teach them that they can be self reliant, self sufficient, and have food security. It was very, very important to teach this for my children. Foraging for me is all about. It’s not just foraging for wild plants. It’s also foraging for meat and fish. We supplement a lot of our diet with things that we forage that are green, and that are animals, respectfully.”
Respect, says Losier, is paramount when it comes to foraging, and she does her best to teach respect along with where to find food. She says many herbalists and foragers have stopped teaching lately due to rampant overharvesting, and feels conflicted about teaching sometimes.
“A lot of them have said, ‘I can’t in good faith teach,'” says Losier. “But the thing is, we have an opportunity to teach about sustainability. We have an opportunity to teach about the right way of doing this in respect with the plants. Sure, there’s a lot of people where [it will] go right over their head. But you’ll plant that seed, and you’ll have that opportunity to teach the right way or the way that we can keep it up for the future generations.”
Losier says that you don’t have to go far to find good food. Like Osowski, she encourages people to start close to home.
“Start with the weeds that grow in your yard. Start with the weeds that are growing in your garden that you’re pulling up to plant a garden. There are so many things that I actually leave in my garden and the weeds that I will tend because I eat them,” says Losier. “You get to build that connection with them, that relationship with them. Get to know the plant, you know don’t don’t go out and rush and try to find wild leeks or morel mushrooms. There are so many [plants] that grow right next to our houses, in the cracks of the sidewalks.”
Gardeners will be glad to know that there is actually a nutritious use for one of the more pesky invaders commonly found on lawns: knotweed.
“The knotweed shoot is nice and juicy,” says Losier. “It’s green, it’s a bit hollow inside, it’s kind of like bamboo. Cut it up, and either use it or freeze it in chunks and then use throughout the year…It has lemony green taste and similar to rhubarb. So the way that you would use rhubarb, use knotweed instead.”
Other foraged favourites include lobster mushrooms (Gauvin), snowberries (Osowski), and pine pollen (Andrews).
