2 minute read
The Mentor
The author of the gold standard of North American field guides has opened eyes— and palates—to the wonders of wild foods for more than 20 years
WRITTEN BY Kevin Revolinski
“I added up a list of all the things I collect within walking distance of my house, and it was 346 species,” says renowned forager Sam Thayer. A count of plants (excluding spices) in all the products at his local grocery store? 124. For more than two decades, Thayer’s been touting the bounty of readily available wild foods, and the people he encounters “practically lose their minds” when they try unexpected delicacies such as a thistle stalk. Reactions, he says, are “not just ‘I could eat that if I had to,’ but ‘That’s like the best thing I’ve ever had!’”
An inductee into the National Wild Foods Hall of Fame, Thayer, who was born in Wausau, Wisconsin, and raised in Madison, took to foraging at a very early age. “I had a couple parents who didn’t really want to be parents. The more I could parent myself, the better— from their perspective and mine.” Often left to fend for themselves, he and his three siblings quickly learned to be independent. When he was four, his older sister showed him wood sorrel growing under the front porch, a common lawn “weed” but edible and rich in vitamin C. And so began his lifelong fascination with what he could eat in the natural world. Thayer is self-taught, as are many foragers, relying on tracking down information one plant at a time. “I started out learning things that were not particularly difficult or hard
Location: Madison, Wis.
Business Name: Forager’s Harvest to find. My neighbor had a black walnut tree and told me what it was. You could eat black walnuts. Lots of people know that. I just never forgot that and I started eating black walnuts.” He’d add perhaps half a dozen items each year, just by asking people. “There’s a lot of knowledge floating around, but people just aren’t picking it up and using it.” When he was 10, he discovered books on edible wild plants, which rapidly sped up the learning process. By middle school, he was presenting his learning to classmates in science class. He learned survival camping in his teens, guided foraging walks, and, after high-school graduation, built and lived in a log cabin on an abandoned farmstead near Lake Superior. But far from living a quiet life off the grid, he traveled the nation to give workshops, learning more regional wild foods as he went. He published his award-winning first book, “The Forager’s Harvest,” in 2006; his latest, “Sam Thayer’s Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants,” will be out in May 2023.
Favorite Spring Edibles: The blossoms of the common black locust tree (Robinia pseudoacacia) are “like snow peas with a little bit of vanilla and honey on them.” Try them in fruit salad, ice cream, or fritters, but they can also go savory.
Teaching the Trade
In a typical year, Thayer hosts 10 to 15 workshops. “If I have 100 people and I say, ‘Who here gathers wild food?’ 30 hands will go up. And if I say, ‘Who here gathers wild blackberries?’ 90 hands go up. As soon as people eat something, they don’t think of it as wild anymore. It really helps them accept that [foraging] really is a normal activity.”