Why you should try foraging for food — at least once

Foraging — the act of finding wild, edible food — is a lost art in modern society. It’s time for a revival. Foraging will of course never replace agriculture. Meeting the calorie-intensive diets of 8 billion people with wild foods is impossible. Nor should we romanticize the idea of hunting or gathering wild foods to meet our daily nutritional needs.

But we have lost something essential once everything we eat comes ready to eat or wrapped in plastic. Foraging enabled humans to survive for hundreds of thousands of years. In the process, says Maria Finn, chef and author of the foraging cookbook “Forage. Gather. Feast.,” it let us find and understand our place among the incredible diversity of life on Earth.

Finn discovered the value of foraging in Alaska’s Yukon Delta during her early 20s, when she worked with the native Yup’ik people.

“We used to forage for fun because the food in the grocery store was really expensive and half rotten,” she said. “We could go out and pull a crab pot, or gather raspberries. There was this glorious wild free food.”

Over time, she found the process of finding her own food deepened her relationships with every aspect of where she lived.

“Wild food is building relationships with the ecosystem around you,” she says. “Even if people are foraging in a city, you have to get to know your neighborhood and talk to your neighbors.”

Today, her Institute for Ecosystem Based Living is an effort to help people find a way to find their own niche in their local ecosystems.

While there are too many of us to forage for survival these days, we can do it responsibly for fun and food, forging a connection to the seasons and our local ecosystems. When starting out, it is key to get guidance from someone knowledgeable or a reputable online site so that you can identify lookalike plants that could be poisonous, or trigger an allergic reaction.

Finn has a few suggestions for new foragers. Remember to check all rules and regulations if you are on public lands and ask before foraging on private land. Make sure you are in an area with no runoff from farms or factories and not close to industrial pollution, she said. Have a light footprint — take a little and leave enough for all the other animals that live off these foods. It always helps to find an expert, or a friend, to help introduce you to edible wild plants.

I asked Finn where people in the United States can find foods to forage, no matter where they live. Here are some common forageable foods from five regions of the country.

Seaweed, the name for countless species of marine plants and algae, has been eaten for centuries around the world. Today, it grows luxuriously on coastlines from Maine to Florida, and is farmed around many parts of the country.

Low in calories and rich in nutrients, it’s an overlooked ingredient that can enhance everything from bread (seaweed appears in brown soda bread in Ireland) to butter, such as this seaweed-infused butter with a rich, truffle-like scent from a Michelin-starred chef. It adds a savory layer packed with beneficial polyphenols, carotenoids and omega-3 fatty acids.

“Use it for teas and soup stocks, shred it into salads, infuse cream for butter or add it to grainy breads for a savory, salty layering,” Finn said. “I had a dream of seaweed soft-serve ice cream. I’m still waiting to meet it in waking life.”

It’s easy to harvest: seaweed doesn’t need to be pulled from the rocks, but can be snipped with scissors, leaving enough for the algae to grow back that same season. Here’s a recipe for seaweed seed and nut bread.

This tart, tangy orange native to Asia came to the United States with the Spanish, becoming the first citrus to reach the Americas. It has now naturalized across the Southeast and parts of the West, where the trees are often neglected or decorative.

Also known as bitter orange or Seville orange, it can be plentiful, thanks to its disease resistance and hardiness, and easily foraged, especially from neighbors with little use for them (ask first). It’s recognizable by its smooth, brown bark with thorns. The spherical fruit has a thick orange or green knobby peel.

They’re not eaten like sweet oranges because their pulp is too sour, but their tangy juice is a much sought-after acid in popular Cuban and Yucatán dishes like yuca con mojo and cochinita pibil, as well as a flavoring in triple sec, a liqueur. The skins are very aromatic. They have lots of large seeds and are rich in pectin, making the fruit a favorite to turn into a bitter orange marmalade. Finn’s friend in Central Florida advised they also make great pies.

“Sour orange pie? Yes please,” she said.

“The whole pine tree is edible,” Finn said. Pine nuts, a culinary delicacy rich in protein, have been foraged by Native people for millennia. Pine tips emerge each spring boasting a mild, lemony flavor that is delicious when infused in syrups and salts for pickling, curing salmon and seasoning. Pine cones star in Italy’s syrups and candies. On the West Coast of the United States, even the inner bark of the ponderosa pine was eaten by Native people in the spring for its carbohydrate-rich cambium layer.

Few places have an abundance and diversity of pines like the West Coast: Monterey and bishop, white pines, bristlecone, pinyon and sugar pines are all on the table. Finn recommends starting with syrups, candies or even jams. Simply pack small green pine cones (or pine tips) into a clean glass jar and fill it with turbinado sugar. The sugar will dissolve, and, voilà! A month or more later, you have pine syrup. For the dark aromatic Mugolio syrup prized in Italy, you can use very small, green pine cones here from a variety of species, wrote chef Alan Bergo.

For even more adventure, try Éclade de moules, a sensory-rich outdoor meal experience from southwestern France by setting dried pine needles aflame atop mussels in a tureen. “This is my favorite way to prepare mussels” says Finn.

Ramps (Allium tricoccum) are beloved heralds of spring. As the snow melts, each bulb sends up several smooth, light green leaves with the flavor of onions and strong garlic.

These alliums, also known as wild leeks or spring onions, carpet the rich, moist, deciduous forests of North America from Quebec to South Carolina. In some regions, they are harvested. But ramps cannot only be foraged — they are readily transplantable into your backyard.

The ramp greens make savory oils, butters, pasta and dumplings. Pesto can be frozen for later use. Pickle them. Sprinkle on omelets or anything calling for onions. The recipes are endless. If you’re harvesting from the wild, only take a few per cluster and use the entire plant.

If there’s a desert near you, you’ll probably find a prickly pear.

The family of cactus thrives from Canada to South America (there are 18 species in the Sonoran Desert alone). There are almost as many recipes.

All parts of this cactus can be eaten from the thick pads (or nopales in Spanish) to the baseball-size fruit that turn a rich magenta when ripe. But beware: most of the plant is covered in spines, even the fruit, which has tiny sharp spines that evade the most careful forages. Thick leather gloves and tongs are a must.

But the reward is worth it. The paddles are tangy and nutritious. The fruit is sweet and versatile. Finn said she has a family member from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, who dices the pads and mixes them with salt (so they aren’t quite as gelatinous). They add them to salads with diced tomatoes or sauté them for scrambled eggs, a popular Mexican dish known as nopales con huevo.

When the fruit ripens in August and September, you can make everything from jelly to sorbet, lemonade, margaritas, prickly pear candy and even deep-magenta fruit leather. Some property owners are usually happy to give them away — be sure to ask. Some states may require a permit to forage on public land. But don’t take too much, as desert quail love them too.