Where the wild food grows

The serrated dark green nettles that sting bare legs on a hike: Bothersome weeds or volunteer vegetables?

The tiny purple-black berries on the shrubs by the stream: Bird food or the makings of an antioxidant-rich jam?

The pale-green golf-ball-sized things under the black walnut tree: A mess best left for squirrels or the eventual star of a black walnut ice cream?

It's all in the eye of the beholder.

Among health-minded nature-and-food-loving folks in Nebraska and western Iowa, foraging for comestibles appears to be coming back into vogue.

While there's no good way to know how many people are scanning roadside ditches, backyards, alleys, large parks and nature preserves for free goodies, the Nebraskan who literally wrote the book on gathering and cooking wild edibles from this region says she's fielding as many questions as ever.

And urban food-foraging tours and weed walks along a midtown Omaha bike path in June, July and September had waiting lists.

The idea's not new, of course. Humans have long gathered wild plants for food and medicine. Before we were farmers and shoppers, we were hunters and gatherers — and, some anthropological research suggests, we were healthier and taller because of it.

The spread of large-scale farming, the concentration of urban areas and the proliferation of pharmacies and supermarkets made “wildcrafting” — the gathering and use of uncultivated plants — more novelty than necessity.

And, outside of Boy and Girl Scout nature hikes, it's something of a lost art.

“In the '60s, there was quite a surge with the whole ‘back to nature' thing,” said Kay Young, one of Nebraska's most recognized naturalists. “And then there was less interest for a long while. But I do get quite a few calls about wild plants now. And I do think there's quite a bit of interest.”

The 77-year-old Young has been using wild plants since she was a child in Lincoln. She minored in botany, worked as a naturalist at the Chet Ager Nature Center in Lincoln, and interviewed scores of other wildcrafters before writing “Wild Seasons: Gathering and Cooking Wild Plants of the Great Plains.” The book, published in 1993 by the University of Nebraska Press and reprinted in 2000, is still considered invaluable by many local naturalists and jam-makers.

It played prominently in the foraging tours that Michael Braunstein, founder of the Village Pointe Farmers Market, organized this summer.

Braunstein said he'd wanted to start some food-related nature walks in Omaha for decades. This summer, he found a few longtime local naturalists willing to point out medicinal and edible plants along Happy Hollow Boulevard one Sunday in June and serve up a small smorgasbord of foods they prepared from ingredients they'd foraged earlier: burdock root pickled in cider vinegar and tamari, spanikopita with lamb's quarters and nettle, wild plum and gooseberry jams, elderberry cream pie.

Braunstein mentioned the tour in his magazine, Heartland Healing, and its Web site. He expected maybe a dozen participants — but he got requests from nearly four times that many and arranged additional tours in July and September.

While the cheap thrill of free “found food” during a recession might have seemed an obvious driver, those who showed up didn't seem primarily interested in saving money.

“I just like learning about all the different things around us, things other people don't know,” said Brandon Miller, a 24-year-old from Papillion who attended two of the tours. “I didn't realize all the things I could use.”

He and others said they were there to better-understand nature, taste wild local flavors and learn how to supplement their diets with something other than pills or “superfoods” sent from afar.

Miller said he started growing his own catnip (after tasting tour guide Rose Bernstein's flavorful catnip pesto) and harvesting sumac berries and clover for sweet-tart teas.

Young said a renewed swell of concern about the environment, an attendant emphasis on sustainable and locally grown foods, and more research on the nutritional and health-enhancing properties of foods probably is contributing to recent interest.

Twenty years ago, she said, few people were talking about the antioxidant, omega-3 fatty acid or calcium content of wild plants.

“We knew Native Americans were getting vitamins from rosehips and sumac,” Young said, “but there wasn't much that I could find about their nutritional makeup back then.”

Young had good evidence that stinging nettles were nutritious: She'd found Europeans who subsisted on them to survive food shortages during World War II. But she didn't know they were significant sources of calcium, magnesium, zinc and protein. They're now among her favorite wild plants, she said, and they grow happily in her backyard.

She also knew that purslane was edible, and that the waxy round-leafed plant with tiny yellow flowers that sometimes sprouts in sidewalk cracks added a slightly sour taste and refreshing succulence to tacos and salads. Purslane now is known as one of the richest leafy sources of omega-3 fatty acids — the good-for-the-heart compounds more typically found in fish and seed oils.

Potential health benefits are one reason Omahan Marilyn Schwer wants to learn more about wild plants you can eat or drink.

“As I try these things, I just feel better,” said Schwer, who turned out for the September tour. Her favorite of the dishes offered: “The nettle bruschetta. I loved that. And just tasting the elderberries and wild grapes — I'm not sure I can identify them myself yet, but I thought they were great.”

Schwer said she's been trying to ease her family into eating more raw foods and juiced greens. She even bought a book on foraging. “Maybe this fall my husband and I can get into this.”

The future of wildcrafting isn't exactly clear.

Young said the widespread use of agricultural chemicals makes edible wild plants more scarce. Fewer of us have ties to a family farm. Foraging isn't explicitly permitted in many public areas and nature preserves. And, even if you have permission, it's hard to know if the plants have been contaminated.

If you don't know someone who can show you what to look for, it's hard to learn which plants are safe and how to prepare them. Many skilled horticulturists and botanists can help identify plants but shy away from advice about preparing or eating them.

And wildcrafting isn't as convenient as a quick trip to the grocery store. It takes time to harvest, clean, prepare and preserve wild plants. And it takes a whole lot of elderberries to get a quart of syrup.

But the challenges aren't insurmountable, said Pat Mettler, a registered nurse and community herbalist who helped lead the Happy Hollow wildcrafting tours this summer. She suggests that urban dwellers do as she has: Invite a few wild things (a stand of stinging nettle, a potted purslane, an elderberry bush) into their backyards, where they can limit chemical exposure.

Mettler, a former naturalist at Fontanelle Forest Nature Center in Bellevue, said she's been letting wild things grow in her Benson-area yard for 15 years.

“When I first started, when I wanted nettle I went out looking for it along the streams,” she said. “But then I realized it's just easier to have it in your backyard.”

It can start simply, Young said, with a little knowledge and some restraint when it comes to spraying your lawn: “If people realized they could eat wild violets, dandelions and milkweed, they might not put toxic chemicals on their lawns. ... Food is going to be, I think, a major challenge for some families. And if they knew that there were things all around them that they could eat, I think they would do that.”

Contact the writer:

444-1069, nichole.aksamit@owh.com

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