Urban Bounty

Foraging allows city residents to connect with the land, understand history

BY NINA RANGEL

San Antonio celebrates stories of its past, from the struggle at the Alamo to the many cultures who carved out settlements along the bank of the Yanaguana.

Even so, we don’t always think about how food played into the lives of the people who occupied this area going back centuries.

Edible plants abound within the San Antonio city limits, some of them indigenous to the area, others imported centuries ago by outsiders. Those plants can help us understand who we were in the past while being easier to find today than many think. Indeed, one need only glance to the side of the road for an eyeful of that unexpected bounty, say culinary experts.

If you’ve ever picked pecans up from the ground at Brackenridge Park or pulled a lime off of a tree in your backyard, you’ve inadvertently taken part in urban foraging — the practice of identifying and collecting the wild foods such as tree nuts, plant roots, mushrooms and flowers growing freely around your city. If urban foraging is new to you, getting started could be as simple as taking a walk.

“I think if San Antonians were to look around where they walk, where they ride their bike, they would reconnect with what our ancestors knew as not just sustenance, but as relatives, because they are so close to us,” chef, author and filmmaker Adán Medrano told the Current. “And that raises a question: where do we want to go in the future? It’s an aspiration, wanting to be in a future that is thriving, joyful, sustainable, a true community. The plants help us do that.”

Medrano, who created Truly Texas Mexican, a 2021 documentary that shares the stories and cultural evolution of Texas Mexican food, is an expert on the subject of recognizing edible plants and their significance in South Texas. Medrano spent 23 years working throughout Latin America, Europe and Asia, focusing on the importance of their food and culinary traditions. He also founded San Antonio CineFestival, the first and longest-running U.S. Latino film festival.

“I think, if you begin to respect the fact that these beings, our relatives, had a very beautiful bond with the plants we see every day, we might have more respect for them,” Medrano said. “We would pick them when it was harvesting time. And during the winters, we would let them grow so that they would create fats, minerals and vitamins when they were under the earth. And when spring emerges, they would come up and feed us. This is mother nature.”

Plants are everywhere

Medrano isn’t the only one who believes getting back to the earth — including sampling what grows in its urban settings — is vital for society’s sanity.

During a talk at the Austin’s most recent SXSW multimedia festival, renowned social media influencer Alexis Nikole Nelson discussed her efforts to demystify common edible plants found right in Americans’ front yards. In 2022, she won the first James Beard Foundation Broadcast Media Award for her social media account, BlackForager, on TikTok and Instagram.

Nelson graduated from Ohio State University in 2015 with degrees in environmental science and theatre — a double major apparent in her humorous, high-energy discussion of topics such as the indigenous roots of foraging in America and the history of U.S. foraging laws.

“I feel like, whenever I talk about foraging, people say, ‘But, loud lady, I don’t live in the middle of the woods like it seems like you do,’” Nelson said during her SXSW talk. “To which I say, ‘You silly goose. There are plants literally everywhere. They’re not more special when they’re growing in the woods. They are just as special when they’re growing out of the cracks in your sidewalk.’”

Nelson may not be a Texas native, but she argues that wherever humans reside, they need not travel far to connect with their environment. The schooled botanist was first introduced to foraging at the age of 5, when her mother pointed out a patch of onion grass in her front yard — a perennial weed that tastes just like its name.

“It’s crazy to me that I used to do this as a child literally everywhere in my neighborhood with nary a care,” Nelson told the Current. “The fact that it’s illegal in Texas is just beyond me.”

MTexas peaches lend themselves to decadent preserves, here combined with goat cheese and butter crostini.

Yes, in Texas, foraging without permission is considered stealing. Most state and federal lands prohibit gathering plants of any kind, edible or not, and the penalties include fines and loss of park privileges. Lone Star State law allows foraging on private property, but the gatherer must have permission from the landowner before taking anything to eat.

Learning online

Even though Texas law poses a potential barrier, urban foragers said people shouldn’t be discouraged from seeking out edible plants. Many are considered weeds by homeowners, making it that much easier to get permission to take them home, chemist and Houston resident Mark Vorderbruggen told the Current.

“One thing that people don’t realize is that the best place to forage is often around suburbia,” Vorderbruggen said. “Even though we didn’t domesticate them, there has been a co-evolutionary pressure where humans change the ecosystem, and certain plants really adapted … . It’s honestly a great way to meet your neighbors — if you talk to them and say, ‘I’d like to save you money, can I eat these weeds that are showing up in your flowerbeds?’”

Vorderbruggen — who goes by Merriwether online, a nickname inspired by Meriwether Lewis of the famed Lewis and Clark Expedition — teaches classes on wild edibles at the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center and runs a meticulously catalogued field guide to edible plants called Foraging Texas.

Accessible at foragingtexas.com, the site offers comprehensive lists of edible plants found throughout Texas, categorized by type, color, season and use. A series of YouTube videos further aids in plant identification. If you’re unfamiliar, consider it a great starting point for urban foraging.

What’s more, Vorderbruggen leads cooking classes and walkabouts in the Houston area and across South Texas. He said socializing around found food transcends into his personal life as well.

“Humans love to eat, and we love to eat with each other. It’s meant to lift our mood and our spirits, and that does all sorts of wonderful things for us,” he explained. “Hosting a pizza- or cheese-making party is just another way of building those social bonds through food, and the creation of food. If it involves stuff they pick from their yard, even better.”

The popularity of Vorderbruggen’s classes reflects a national upward trend in urban foraging. Since COVID-19 and the subsequent surge in food prices, foraging in the U.S. has increased in popularity, a February 2023 report by the National Library of Medicine notes. Online foraging database Falling Fruit currently displays more than 1.8 million locations around the U.S. where food foraging is permitted, up from 1.4 million in 2018.

The crowdsourced website allows users to drop dots to pinpoint foraging locations and provide species information to other hobbyists. It also suggest the appropriate windows to harvest fruit. Each dot also links to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s homepage for further information about each species.

Reinforcing community

Even though it helps to start with some online learning or by accessing a book such as Vorderbruggen’s 2022 Outdoor Adventure Guide, Foraging: Explore Nature’s Bounty and Turn Your Foraged Finds Into Flavorful Feasts, when it comes to foraging food, community is key, experts said.

Truly Texas Mexican chef and filmmaker Medrano recently appeared on an episode of Atlas Obscura’s short film series Gastro Obscura, where he prepared slow-braised quelitre, or Texas Amaranthus retroflexus, surrounded by his family. Yes, the same fibrous weed many of us used to slap friends with during our childhoods can be sautéed, braised, pickled or added to salads.

In the film, Medrano gathers redroot amaranth from a San Antonio roadside in what looks like a plastic H-E-B sack and hauls it home. He prepares the leafy vegetable guisada-style, cooking it with onion, garlic, tomato and serrano pepper. His older sister jokes about whether she is, in fact, the oldest sibling, and the family laughs and shares memories about eating the spicy, tender greens as children.

For Houston scientist Vorderbruggen, teaching people about foraging allows them to learn about nature together. As of his mid-March interview with the Current, his classes were already booked through the end of 2023.

The ability to gather edible goods from understanding neighbors’ yards is akin to borrowing a tool or cup of sugar, he added.

And for TikTok foraging sensation Nelson, she started foraging as a family activity, guided by a parent who set her on an early path to familiarizing herself with readily accessible food.

The idea that food creates relationships

FORAGING DOS AND DON’TS

DO respect the law.

and bonds families isn’t new, but for many, the idea of seeking them out in familiar territory can be one more way they bring people together. Especially since face-to-face interactions these days are so often thwarted by screens, distance and time.

“These plants not only sustain you physically and nutritionally, they also bring joy and understanding to our life,” Medrano said. “It’s a sense of a oneness and of belonging to one earth. And that can be a very joyful thing to recover.”

In Texas, you must have permission from a property owner to collect plants. DO respect the land.

Fill your holes, pack out your garbage and treat nature with the care it deserves. DO be smart.

Positively identify any plant before eating it, since some can make you sick or cause death. Be aware of hazards in your foraging location, ranging from snakes to contamination from oil fields and roadways.

DO be conscious of your surroundings.

If you’re thinking of pulling up edible things near houses built before 1970 or railroad tracks, remember it’s unsafe to eat food from areas subject to lead contamination, flooding from sewers and heavy duty insecticides.

DON’T be a jerk.

Harvest sustainably to ensure others can eat too. Minimize damage by cutting leaves with a sharp knife or shears.

DON’T forget your tools.

Gloves, pruning shears and wax-coated storage sacks are necessities. A field guide such as Foraging: Explore Nature’s Bounty and Turn Your Foraged Finds Into Flavorful Feasts by Mark Vorderbruggen also helps.