Foraging Ecology (EATING WILD PLANTS) Encore with @BlackForager, Alexis Nikole Nelson
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I know I usually save my secrets for the end of the episode, but I'm going to tell you my secret favorite candy. It's Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

It's really Reese's anything. But Reese's peanut butter cups are the thing that I'm like, have I had a bad day? I get these. Have I had a good day? I get these. Chocolate, salty peanut butter, the textures. I love everything about them. Also that there's two. So I'm like, oh, I get this one for later, which is one second later. Anyway, Reese's peanut butter cups. I love you. That's all. If you're me, you can shop Reese's peanut butter cups now at a store near you. Found wherever candy is sold. And I am.

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Oh, hi. Okay. It's 2024 Allie here jumping in to say this is an absolute fan favorite episode of Ologies. It's also a me favorite one. It was a while in the making and it's the perfect time of year to serve it up on a doily for you. And since we recorded this three years ago, this guest, Alexis Nelson, aka Black Forager, and I have gotten to meet in real life. We've become pals and

And when she's in L.A., we hang out and she's just as much of a gem as you think in person. She's also an oligite. And she texted me last week after our Colombidology episode about pigeons to say that it's nudged her toward considering becoming a pigeon parent herself. Also, since this episode aired, Alexis has launched a TV show called

called Crash Course Botany, which you can find on PBS. Also, at the end of this episode, I added a new secret, which contains the reason why this is an encore this week and a special perk for patrons coming up in a few days. Okay. Wow. I just love this episode and this guest. All right.

Oh, hey, it's your friend's cat who just had a $600 hairball, Allie Ward, back with an outdoorsy, quite frankly, a scrumptious episode of Ologies. So this ologist, we're going to get right to it, studied both science and performance at Ohio State University. You know, but the role most know her in is teacher of the, can I eat this? It grew in my driveway, arts and sciences. So

So she has a million, a literal million TikTok watchers who just eat up her lessons on making violet simple syrup and magnolia cookies and garlic mustard pesto and more. And I have had so many of y'all begging me to have her on that when I DM'd her, I was

Honestly, I was shocked to get a response. This woman is busy. So we recorded this right as April was turning to May. And since it's still spring and things are still blooming and shooting and crawling from the ground, it's time to grab a basket and see what's for dinner. But we also talk about year-round edibles. We're going to get into it. But first, thank you to all the patrons who sent in their questions. You can become a patron for a dollar a month. A dollar a month. A dollar a month.

at patreon.com slash ologies. Thank you to everyone rating and subscribing to the podcast. Thanks to everyone who leaves such nice reviews, keeping ologies in the top five science podcasts globally, which is bananas. I read all the reviews and each week I pick a fresh one. And this week it's from For The Earth, who wrote, I hope I hear you read it, Allie. Thank you, Allie and team for truly some of the best content available. Thank you.

for the earth. Also, we got a rare two-star review this week from Bee Jester, who said that they do not like my voice.

And I am a woman. That's a problem for some people. But thank you so much for the feedback. And there's actually a secret about my voice at the end of the episode, which you might already know. But anyway, thank you, everyone else, for all the loving and very lovely reviews, except for B. Jester, who's probably not listening. And that's a-okay. Thanks, everyone, for leaving them. Anyway, okay. Foraging ecology. Foraging comes from a root.

for hay or straw or fodder, and then it evolved to mean hunting about for edibles. And ecology comes from the same root as oikology for the place we live and our relationship to our environment. So...

foraging for the things around us. Now for breakfast, side note, I just want you to know that I ate some loquats that I stole from a friend's tree. She didn't even know she could eat them. She thought they were ornamental. So we're doing a good job today. Anyway, pull up a stump and lean in for a bounty of information on edible versus poisonous plants, tap roots, blossoms, tinctures, brews and stews and cookies and cocktails and hikes and eating invasive species,

some dog pee talk, the best guidebooks, and how gathering what grows around us is a radical act for internet hero and teacher, autodidact, wild food maker, and your gathering guide. You know her on TikTok and YouTube and Instagram as Black Forager, Alexis Nicole Nelson. ♪

I'm so excited to be talking to you. Hello, my name is Alexis Nicole Nelson and my pronouns are she, her, hers. And my cat just clawed me in the butt. What a good time we're having already. Get him on the mic. Yeah. Hey, Ozzy, you have words to say? Use your words.

Oh my gosh. People have been asking me for so many months to get you on this podcast. When you wrote back, I was thrilled. I've been wanting to do this topic for a while, which would be foraging ecology, I believe. Right? Yes. Foraging ecology, I think is the ology that we settled on for this. Yes. It works. It totally works. Your TikTok's amazing and informative and you're so prolific and it's so great. At what point were you like, oh,

Okay, it's time the world needs to know what they can eat in their backyards. I mean, I've honestly felt that way ever since I was really little. I guess I just didn't have the tools to tell anybody outside of my parents, family members, friends, anyone who I could get to listen to me in person. Do you remember what the first thing you ate out of the ground and were you safe? Was it dangerous?

The first thing I remember eating out of the ground, I must have been about five years old, and I was helping my mom in the garden in our old house in Cincinnati. And she pointed out some grass, but it looked different from other grass. And she broke it and it smelled delicious. Like it smelled like onions and garlic. And she's like, oh yeah, it's onion grass.

And it's edible, but it's like not as good as the onions and the garlic that we get from the store. And if you tell a five-year-old that something is edible, they're going to put it in their face and they're going to get really excited about it. So I did. And it just kind of ignited a gentle obsession, a lifelong love. Where did you get a lot of your information? Did you start getting...

for your sixth birthday, did you get an encyclopedia of edible herbs? How did the information dump start? Well, my answer to that question is yes, but for my eighth birthday. Oh, got it. Got it. A little late, late bloomer, late bloomer. I know. Oh my gosh. I was so late to the game. I just, I inhaled all of my mom's books on gardening. My mom had like an entire shelf of

in our house dedicated to just her gardening books. And yeah, I'd say by the time I was eight or nine, I had read each of them front to back, was like trying to memorize every single one of the trees and flowers and herbs present in them. And when I was done with those, I bought more

Every weekend, my parents used to let me go to this independent bookstore in Cincinnati, Joseph Beth, after we'd go out to dinner and they'd be like, "Okay, you get one book." And it'd be really hard for me to choose between, oh gosh, whatever fantasy novel I was obsessed with at the time or a plant book. When it came time to figuring out your life's course,

Did you want to stick with botany? Did you decide to go more of a business route? I know that you have been like a social media manager, which explains another reason why you're like so good at TikTok. You're a professional. But what did you decide when it came to figuring out, you know, careers? I think I'm still deciding. Every time I have to remember that I'm a real adult, I'm just like, oh, oh, yeah, 28's real. I can't fudge it anymore. Definitely full adult.

Full, full blooded adult now. Growing up, I in the fourth grade when we had to draw what we wanted to be when we grew up, I said that I wanted to be a geneticist by day and a pop star by night. I love it. I love it.

I mean, I feel like this is closer than anybody, myself included, thought I was going to get with kind of melding this aspect of performance, which I've always loved. Like, right hand in hand with, like, my love of plants has been my love of entertaining people. And when it came time to choose what I was going to major in in college, I was, like, pretty...

gifted in math and science, but I was also like pretty gifted in theater. But nobody tells you to major in theater. Even when you're really good at theater, no one tells you to go and major. So everyone was like, oh my gosh, you're a woman of color. You're good at math. You're

And I didn't know if I wanted to be an engineer, but I did know that I didn't want to be a waste. So I applied to all of my schools as an engineer, got accepted to Ohio State as an environmental engineering major. On the first day of her schooling as an environmental engineer, the dean addressed the students just to tell them that most people will quit the program, about half.

which is about as opposite of a pep talk as you can possibly get. Like, welcome, this is going to suck. You'll hate my program. Attrition perhaps should not be something to brag about, but what do I know? And I've always loved the pursuit of knowledge, but I've always hated knowledge.

when some sort of like very competitive aspect has been thrown into it. So needless to say, I had a rough time my first year in engineering school, so rough that I took a semester off to kind of get my head right and decided that I did love math and science, but that I also loved writing. I also loved performing. So I came back and focused on both environmental science because I didn't take all

of that calculus and physics and chemistry for nothing. But then I also went and got a theater degree and took like master's classes in playwriting, put on a one-woman show before I graduated, wrote a couple of short plays.

So I feel like everything I'm doing right now makes sense. And in terms of where I see it going in the future, any opportunity that I get to talk to large groups of people about the value in the green spaces around them, that's how I would define the career that I want to see myself in at any given time during the rest of my life. And if that's as a TikToker, that's great. If that's, oh my God, on a TV show, hey PBS.

That's great too. If it's writing field guides and books, that's great too. I just, this is what fills my cup. And this is the type of thing that even when I'm working really hard, it doesn't feel like work. - Best thing. - Did you ever think that you'd have a million people tuning in to watch you make pesto? - No.

Never, never in a million years. I made my foraging account on Instagram originally because I was annoying my friends with the plants I was eating. They were like, we don't want to hear about it. Yeah, they're like, no, thank you. So I was like, okay, cool. I'll just make like a finsta, but just for the wild things that I put on my plate. Now I feel like my personal account is my finsta. It's weird.

a switcheroonie that I never in a million years would have called. So side note, a finsta for those of us not born in the 90s is a fake Instagram or an alternative handle that's not like one that your boss follows or something your followers would find off brand. So perhaps it's the real you, which makes me want to sit on a rock and ponder, am I living my most finsta life in the out in the open? And why not?

Anyway, Alexis had an underground passion for plants. And at the start of the pandemic, she posted something to her TikTok about foraging if you couldn't get to the store during the first few weeks of the COVID lockdown. And she posted it. She woke up to tens of thousands of views. And suddenly people were smitten, not only with her plucky delivery, but her extensive botanical knowledge. So millions of views later, she's really opened up people's eyes and noses and mouths

to edibles that we walk right past all the time, all year round. It's been really cool to see the seasons change and to see different things that you're harvesting and persimmons and then going into blossoms and stuff. When it comes to keeping yourself educated, are you looking things up before you're foraging? Are you already familiar with them? Does it really depend on the region? How are you keeping all of this knowledge? How often do you have to sharpen those tools?

Yeah, I think it's constantly a process of sharpening and the more you interact with a certain plant, just like the more you interact with certain people, you get to know them better, you know their nuances better, you know when to expect them. So there's definitely a swath of plants that I've worked with for a really long time.

I know when to expect like apples and all of the other like rose family trees to start blooming. I know when dandelions are coming up. I know when violets are coming up. There are definitely plants that I'm a bit newer to that I have to go and do a little bit of digging, a little bit of reading,

my favorite, I see that someone else in one of the regional foraging Facebook groups that I'm in is posting about them. And I'll be like, Oh, I did not know that we were already in cow parsnip season. I didn't know we were already in cow parsnip season. That's just the first plant that came to my head. Of course she knew also more on those densely hairy perennials later. And that's been wonderful as being able to have that community, uh,

to always come back to. But I'm always rereading all of my foraging books, all of these poor books, their covers are just bent as all get out because whenever I have some free time or if it's before bed, I'll just flip one open, do a little bit of reading. I feel like I notice something new every single time I read one of my foraging books. So it makes sense to go back over them again. And it's just like when you're in school, like you have to keep practicing or you lose it. If you

use it or lose it. That is the TLDR answer. Maybe you don't know what TLDR means and that's fine. It stands for too long. Didn't read. I see why am I in case you missed it. So Alexis is schooling us on internet culture at large, as well as precious overlooked botany. Okay. Question that's on my mind a lot when I watch your TikToks. How do you know if something's peed on it?

I do sniff because if it smells like fresh pee, that's just like not appetizing at all. The answer to this question, and I know, Ali, that it is not the answer that anybody wants, is

If it's out in a green space, odds are at some point in time when that green space has passed, probably in the last year, something has peed there. That's a very good point. Even tiny little invertebrates, they're making pee all the time and they're doing it on a romaine lettuce that we're buying from the store. Everything's peeing on everything. There are things in us right now peeing on each other. Exactly. Constantly. It's the circle of pee. Yes.

And that's my thing that I always love reminding people is that the farms that we get our groceries from do not exist in a microcosm either. You don't know how many field mice peed on your kale. You should wash everything you take home, whether you pulled it out of the ground yourself or if someone else did. Very good point. I just try and I try to help people kind of put that out of their mind. Now, of course,

there are some areas that I avoid because they get peed on more often than others. And that is what I call the dog pee zone, which I would say is like a solid foot, foot and a half into anyone's lawn that is on a sidewalk.

Probably best to just leave that be. I bet there's someone out there, a foraging ecologist getting their PhD in like the concentration of urea within certain feet of a sidewalk. There's got to be. There has to be. And if there's not, that's a good reason to go back to school as I personally need. I know my tiny dog, she's got...

like the perimeter of lawns absolutely covered. That's a huge weight off my mind. I love foraging. I've always thought it's so fascinating. And one thing I am so curious about, like what is something that you tasted that you weren't sure if you were going to dig it at all? And it was just delightful. Oh, that's a fun one. I would say cow parsnips. Yeah.

They are in the carrot family, which is famous for having some of like the best wild edibles, but also famous for having some very deadly lookalikes. Yeah.

to those same wild edibles. I've been eating Queen Anne's Lace for a really long time. I think I figured out that Queen Anne's Lace was wild carrots, Dacus corota, when I was in high school and it like blew my mind because where my family stays in Massachusetts, there's Queen Anne's Lace everywhere. And I'm like, you mean I could have been just digging this up this entire time.

So Calparsnip is also in the APACA family. It's also called Pushkin. Okay, so quick aside. These plants are not another internet acronym. APACA is a full word. It's just a long Latin one for a family of flowering plants.

What are some other APACA plants? Celery, carrot, parsley, dill, cumin, anise. So many APACA plants have already made it into your mouth area, but some of them are in the not to be messed with category because they are straight up poison, like hemlock, or are highly phytophototoxic, which means plant in light makes bad.

So think skin blisters that require medical attention and a lot of well-justified moaning and pouting. But cow parsnip is safe. However, it doesn't always look like it. A lot of indigenous peoples ate it, still eat it for a millennia. But...

its dangerous look like is giant hogweed, which has been in the news off and on in certain areas of the country because it's super invasive. And it's super

Super dangerous. Third degree burns if you interact with the sap while the sun is out. Dangerous. We love a phytotoxin. I mean, you got to give it to the plants. They figured it out. You do. And everyone gets really mad at them. And I'm just like, well, if it makes you feel any better, don't take it personally because we're not who they did that for. The insects are. Yeah.

It's not for you. They're not out to get us. They're out to get the small crunchy boys. Don't take it personally if you get burned. Cow parsnips, giant hogweed, leaf shapes are super similar. The difference is cow parsnips get to be like six feet, maybe even like seven or eight feet tall max. Whereas giant hogweed can end up being like just a 16-foot tower of doom.

Oh my god, they don't call it giant for nothing. I believe the species name is like mega giganteum. It's, I believe, a derivative of the Latin word for humongous. And it makes sense. Halparsnip was one of those and I'd heard so many good things about it. But...

It's really hard, even when you are so confident in your ability to ID plans, to get over like the hump of the .001% chance of like mortal danger. Yeah. Is there an identification trick for...

for some of the more dangerous plants, like between giant hogweed and wild carrots? Is there something you can look for, like a purplish ring at the top or something discerning like that? I'm glad you called out purple because I love how often purple is the color of danger in nature. Yeah.

When it comes to differentiating Queen Anne's Lace and Poison Hemlock, purple is actually one of the identifiers. So purple splotches that you will see on Poison Hemlock, but you will not see on Queen Anne's Lace wild carrots. For cow parsnips versus giant hogweed, cow parsnips have this like very fine kind of fuzz.

all over them and these really cute papery sheets over their leaves before the leaves go ahead and shoot out. Also, their leaves are very even in their serration, whereas giant hogweed's leaves, similar shape, irregular serration, which I feel like makes sense. Chaos means bad. Organized means good.

And there are a couple other tells too, like the hollowness of the stem on cow parsnips. But the moral of the story is I babysat a stand of cow parsnips for a full calendar year to watch it go through its entire life cycle before I finally ate some last year.

Oh, my gosh. That is an investment of time. Did it pay off? It did. Oh, my gosh. Absolutely delicious. The fried flour buds right before the flowers open especially are just...

A taste to behold. Behold is for sight. Still a taste to behold. And the leaves are this, they're beautiful and aromatic this time of year. A little bit reminiscent of celery, which makes sense. Another APACA family member. Also a little reminiscent of almost like

coriander and a little bit of burnt oranginess, which becomes much more prominent in their seeds later on in the season. So absolutely worth it. I just made a flatbread with some cow parsnip leaves diced into the dough just yesterday. A plus. A plus?

Nice. A plus. 10 out of 10. Would recommend to a friend. My caveat is if you are going to harvest it, I don't know, maybe babysit it for a year to make sure that you're not going to get a burn and be very sad. And also only harvest from healthy stands of it. The stand that I harvest from has doubled in size year over year, two years in a row. It's the only reason why I feel comfy harvesting from it.

Do you ever take people with you and give up your spots or how protective of certain plants are foragers? Oh, my gosh, it really does depend on the plant. There's a handful of people who I've taken to some of my like my secret spots. Some of my, you know, this time of year, there's ramps and cut leaf toothwort as far as the eye can see kind of spots.

Side note, what are ramps? Despite sounding like a disease you get from a dirty hot tub, ramps are just an oniony, leaky type of scallion, oniony type of plant. Only they're free if you find them. And also trendy. And cut leaf to

Toothwort, which sounds like another affliction, it's a wasabi horseradish-y tasting plant that has ganja-looking leaves and little pinkish flowers. Also, did you know that wort means root? So toothwort plants have roots that look like discarded teeth.

So never let anyone tell you that science isn't goth. I'm not crazy possessive over any of the spaces because none of them belong to me. Yeah. And it's just, it's not worth getting all riled up about because someday someone's going to find out about it. The only experience I've had

with something that I tried to keep secret and then the beans got spilled but not by me, is the persimmon tree near my house. A sweet curious soul using iNaturalist last summer probably looked up and said, "Oh my God, this tree is full of these adorable cute little green fruits. I'm gonna figure out what it is."

iNaturalist being the great app that it is immediately was like, oh, Dios Feroz, Virginiana, congratulations, friend, you found the persimmon tree. And so they tagged it. And now I am not the only person who visits that tree during the fall and winter. And that's OK.

Do you ever see anyone else rolling up with a basket? And are you like, oh, hello. Oh, hello. Hello. I've just missed people before. I've seen people like taking their plastic bag and like hopping into their car and driving away right as I'm walking up with my bag. Uh-huh. And I was like, oh, no, friend, come back.

So foragers make friends, just respect the supply and no one will have to grapple sweat soaked on a lawn for a handful of persimmons. So the first rule of forager club is not don't talk about forager club. Let's say that you're a baby forager and you're just starting. You're inspired by someone with amazing energy and knowledge on TikTok and you decide I'm going to start eating my neighborhood.

where do you think is a good place to start? Are like dandelions an entry level? What do we got? Oh, I would say dandelions are an excellent entry level edible plant.

not just because they are almost universally recognizable, but because every single part of the plant is useful. You can eat the flowers. You can pick all the flower stems. You can eat the greens. Oh, you can ferment the greens, making like a sauerkraut with dandelion. Yum, yum, yum. Very tasty. The taproot, you can go ahead and like dig it up and either eat it like a root veggie, though it's a little,

It's a little bit better. So a lot of people will roast it and grind it into a coffee substitute or dice it, roast it, and then throw it into some alcohol to macerate to make bitters.

The whole plant is useful. So I feel like that's a great gateway plant because if you have fun with that, odds are you will have fun with more of them. In terms of other really easily recognizable ones, and I think this accidentally ended up being a gateway foraging plant for a lot of folks, are magnolias.

So many of us have magnolias planted as ornamentals in our neighborhoods. They're one of those plants that, for whatever reason, a lot of us know the names of. And those white and pink flowers, if we're talking about like saucer magnolias, are so recognizable, so hard to confuse with anything else because, I mean, magnolias as a genus are

are very unique flowers. That's what happens when you decide to push pause on evolution a couple million years ago. That's fine, it's casual.

And so that one's been a really great one too. And to see so many people going out and gathering them and making Magnolia syrups and making the Magnolia Snap cookies was so exciting. We all know that Magnolias smell amazing, but did you know that their petals kind of taste like ginger? So we're going to do a play on a ginger snap cookie. It's a Magnolia Snap cookie. Flower cookie, flower cookie.

Also, side note, if you're not on TikTok, don't freak out. Don't worry about it. Check out Black Forager on YouTube, where Alexis has posted a ton of her recipes, including one for Magnolia cookies uploaded about a month or two ago. And I was just over on this video's page to grab that soundbite. And then I read the description and I had to include this.

So in the description, Alexis writes, I'm super proud of these cookies and not just because they passed the taste test with my partner's family, but because a year ago, I don't think I would have felt confident creating a cookie recipe on my own. And as I found myself sitting on the couch this afternoon, smelling like nothing but magnolia flowers and warm sugar, I realized I am quite happy with who I am right now. But yes, her TikTok, Instagram, YouTube,

all have great recipes and the same handle at Black Forager. And she has recipes, including ones for dandelions and magnolias, easy gateway foraging plants. So those would be my two recommendations off the top of my head. If you are in the Midwest or along the East Coast like I am, pawpaws are another great one, Asimina triloba, but it is not pawpaw season yet. What is a pawpaw? Ooh, so pawpaws are the...

largest native fruit to North America if you're not counting squash. Squash are really cool too. Okay, but back to pawpaws, which look like if green potatoes grew on trees. But what do they taste like? They taste as if a mango and a banana had a baby, if you get a good one. I'm going to give that caveat because last week a friend of mine

pulled me aside and said, "I don't know if I did something wrong, but I tried a pawpaw last year and I didn't like it." And pawpaws are a great adventure. They don't breed true. It's very hard to assume how a pawpaw from a certain tree is going to taste until you're tasting it. But when you find good ones,

Oh, buddy, they are fantastic. And they do look like little mangoes hanging out in the trees. The trees have these humongous, glossy, dark green leaves that make them very easy to recognize from a distance. Once you've seen one, you start seeing them everywhere if you live in a region that they're native to. And...

They are a fruit that did not develop for us. They developed for mega fauna. They developed for giant sloths to eat the fruits whole and poop out the seeds. But now we get to enjoy them, which is cool. That actually brings up the point of native and invasive species. Are we doing the earth a mitzvah by eating invasive species? And how do you find out in your region what's got to go and what's got to flourish?

"Oh, I absolutely think we're doing Mother Nature a solid by eating invasives because eating them is much better for the environment than spraying them," which is what I see a lot of cities, towns, municipalities

turning to when it comes to eradication of certain species. Two that come to mind for all of us kicking it on the eastern half of the United States are garlic mustard, which is very much in season in, oh gosh, pretty much early through late spring.

Here in Ohio right now, while we are recording this, it is flowering. So I'm just going through and picking the flower heads off of all of them that I see and bringing them home to have them for dinner, but mostly just because I don't want them to set seed because they are very prolific spreaders. They are a non-native brassica and brassicas are just so good at their job and their job is being spicy and spreading seeds.

And what is a brassica, you ask? That's why I'm here. Brassica are things such as broccoli and cabbage and kale and rutabaga and kohlrabi and Brussels sprouts and mustards. And the oil of the brassica seeds is where canola oil comes from. There is no such thing as a canola. The word just means Canadian oil, low acid, because it was invented in Canada. Jared, did you like when I told you all about that earlier? I loved it. I love learning about it.

Canola. There's no such thing as a canola. Okay, but back to yellow mustard flowers, which bloom in early springtime in California. And everyone gets so hyped up about nature, not knowing that it's wildly invasive and may have been introduced by Spanish missionaries tossing it out like confetti on their path up the California coast. Mustard.

It's so good for Instagram pictures, but native plant enthusiasts are hate it. Hate it. Yeah. Oh my gosh. If you are in California, go find all of the mustard, pull it up, eat it, blanch it, put it into pesto, put it in a stew, pickle the stems, eat all of it. Get rid of it. Eat it. Please. And I know here we also have Japanese knotweed, which is a prolific plant.

spreader and it is kind of becoming a scourge in a lot of areas in the Northeast. You'll just see towns just spray

the worst kind of chemicals onto them because it's a very hardy species. It's very good at the game of survival. So you kind of got to drown it in a lot of things that are not good for the rest of the environment if you want to get rid of them. But what a joy it would be if instead, you know, in the spring when they start putting all of their chunky little shoots up, people were just going through cutting them off or pulling them up and collecting them for people to eat. Eat.

Eat that knotweed, Northeast United States, and actually every state except North Dakota, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Florida, and Hawaii, who aren't yet overrun with it. If you're like, what is the knotweed? Okay, so it's been in the US since the 1860s when it was given to a nursery owner in New York, and now it's everywhere. Japanese knotweed.

Its root systems can span 70 feet. It grows up to one and a half stories tall, eight inches a day. And it has these large green leaves and a bunch of little white flowers. And the stems look a little like bamboo, which is why it's called American bamboo. It's not bamboo. And in spring, sprouts look like reddish asparagus. And it has a sour flavor or kind of lemony, like rhubarb, which is where it got the nickname.

donkey rhubarb. Now, if you want to name your EDM EP donkey rhubarb, think again, people. British electronica outfit, Aphex Twin, already beat you to it. Why? Why does Aphex Twin care about donkey rhubarb? Because in England, if you have this invasive knotweed on your property, banks might refuse to give you a mortgage because it's so robust.

And so hard to eradicate, and it ruins foundations of buildings. And in prepping for the 2012 Olympics, London spent the equivalent of $100 million to get rid of Japanese knotweed on 10 acres. $100 million! $10 million an acre. Connecticut weed scientist Jatinder Alok has said, ominously, there is no insect, pest, or disease in the United States.

They can keep it in check. So what do you do? One, make sure it hasn't been doused in herbicides. And two, eat it. It grows through the cracks in Alexis's deck. Because for a species that is very quickly changing the landscape on the outskirts of a lot of cities, it is delicious. It's very rhubarb-esque.

but slightly more vegetal than rhubarb. That being said, it does lend itself both sweet and savory so well. I made sorbet with it last year that I was obsessed with. I need to make it again this year. For a class over the weekend, I did like a fun little sauteed greens and threw a couple of the shoots in.

And they just add a lot of lemony brightness to any dish. And when the shoots are young and you cook them just right, they get kind of like melt in your mouth when you cook them. For my friends who do eat the eggs, I hear that they're a wonderful addition to an omelet. They're delicious.

What a joy it would be if we just suddenly had cities with armfuls, truckfuls of free lemony Japanese knotweed shoots this time of year instead of just going and like dousing them in herbicides. On the topic of herbicides, that's something I didn't even think of. But when you're foraging, is that something that you have to be more careful of than pee? And how do you figure it out?

I'm way more worried about herbicides than I'm worried about bees. There are a couple things that I tell people to look out for when they're foraging in urban spaces. I think some people don't realize how visually apparent it is when an area has been treated recently with herbicides. You will see like rings of discoloration around the very obviously sprayed weeds. So if you're looking at someone's lawn and

It is otherwise like it's 98, 99% beautiful grass throughout the rest of the lawn. And you look around the fringes and you see some weeds doing their thing because they're hardy AF and stubborn AF. You should probably stay away from those because the way that people get perfectly manicured monoculture lawns is...

help from herbicides. So those guys I typically leave alone. If you see any odd discoloration either on the plant or in a like little perimeter ring around the plant,

leave it alone. Absolutely any irregular wilting that you wouldn't expect to see this time of year, absolutely leave it alone. And just for the sake of things like runoff and whatnot too, and exhaust, I give a pretty wide margin to streets that are wider than two lanes and an even wider margin to railroads. Oh, really? Because of diesel engines? Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, I wasn't sure if it was that or just the, you know, getting lost in a playlist, headphones on and just, you know, yikes. And that's how we lost the forager. Wow. So sad.

When it comes to where you forage, how do you do it differently in the city versus if you're out on a hike? And what kinds of stuff do you find in each place? Yeah, so in the city, it's going to be a lot more of the kind of classic quintessential weeds, the plants that like taking advantage of disturbed ground.

where they don't have to out-compete any of our other native species. So right now in the cities, I'm seeing a lot of Queen Anne's lace already putting up their new sets of leaves for the year. Ton of dandelions, a lot of clover, white clover, red clover, and now sweet clover is starting to show up to hang out a ton.

ton of mugwort. I passed a couple very healthy stands of mugwort while I was on a walk around the neighborhood today that I will be visiting this weekend because I'm in the mood for mugwort roasted potatoes.

So what does mugwort look like? Okay, I had to look it up. It's a member of the daisy family. So its leaves look like daisy leaves, and it has clusters of these drooped bell buds at the tip of a stalk. And mugwort can grow meters and meters high. And while scientists call it Artemisia vulgaris, close friends call it riverside wormwood, felon herb, old old...

Uncle Henry and Naughty Man. And I feel like I have to buy mugwort a beer to hear how it got those nicknames. But mugwort just means marsh root, and it's best to pick the leaves and buds between July to September. And you can season some meat with it, you can make a mochi dessert, or look into its medicinal purposes. And indigenous people in North America used mugwort for a wide variety of ills like pit stank to

colds and flus, rousing folks from comas and even inducing labor. So ethnopharmacology episode, anyone? Yes. But yes, when this was recorded a few weeks ago, Alexis was planning to gather some mugwort and roast potatoes with it. Just a lot of the friends who you see enjoying spaces and

that maybe have been modified for something else. We have a couple empty lots in our neighborhood in which the ground was turned over before the winter, and now that ground is just covered in weeds. Oh, wow. Whereas if I'm in the forests right now or out in the woods, oh, gosh, it's almost a completely different biome. We're still in the middle of spring ephemeral season, so I'm seeing trout lilies, trilliums, ramps.

cut-leaf toothwort, Virginia bluebells. I'm starting to see pheasantback mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, morels of course. And then you have a lot of the trees whose early leaves are edible starting to leave out like your maples. You have pines, spruces and firs putting out their new growth and their needles are very soft right now and great to incorporate into meals too.

So it's a fun game kind of having to change the mindset of what you're looking for depending on where you are. And I'm lucky that where I live here in Ohio, while I very much live in the city, Columbus proper, I do not have to go very far to not feel like I'm in the city anymore. By the way, congratulations on your mushroom find.

Thank you. Pretty big deal. Oh my gosh. I know. I feel like morels are just like a badge of honor in the foraging community. I feel like I haven't been an official forager until now. I know. I saw that there are so many questions from patrons and so many of them start off. Congratulations on the morel. Like so many.

A lot of people are so thrilled for you. I was wondering what percent of your diet do you think is foraged versus market?

Ooh, I love this question because it varies a lot throughout the year. And we just finished the time of year where it's like maybe 10 or like 15% in the winter through early spring. And now I think we're kicking it up probably to closer around 25% just because there's not a whole lot of the high caloric value, high nutrition value plants out there.

out to play, but oh my gosh, once we get to late summer and into the fall where it's like acorn season, pawpaw season, hazelnut season, persimmon season, that's the time of year where I can have entire days

where everything that I'm cooking with the exception of maybe a little bit of flour being thrown in or you know an olive oil being added into a pan is something that I foraged so it very much fluctuates as we progress through the year um I have so many questions from listeners I have 35 pages of questions from listeners yeah oh my gosh 35 pages of questions single-spaced so I

A lot of questions. So many people who just love you. I mean, I can't, I should just forward you all these questions. So if you're ever having any kind of bad day, oh, wow. People love you so much. Can I ask you some of their questions? Oh,

Oh my, oh my gosh, yes. Do we have time to go through all of them? I wish we did. 35 pages of questions. Okay, but before we start answering them, first, we're going to take a pit stop to donate some money to a charity of Theologist's choosing. And this week, Alexis chose Backyard Base Camp, which aims to inspire Black, Indigenous, and all people of color across the

Baltimore City to find nature where they are and empowers them to explore further. And Backyard Base Camp also offers garden consultations, educator training, habitat discovery programs, and more. And they're awesome. We've donated to them a few times in the past, so check them out and consider donating too. That is backyardbasecamp.org. And that was made possible by sponsors of the show, who you may hear about now.

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Okay, let's rifle through a basket of your questions and then feast on her answers. Okay, two great questions I really loved. One from Lyd Hodnet, who says, it seems to me that it's important to keep in mind that there are respectful ways to forage, or at least there should be.

Are there guidelines for this? And do these guidelines draw knowledge or inspiration from the indigenous people of the region you're foraging? Lynn also says, I feel like native people are routinely harassed for performing traditional actions like foraging while white people get away with taking more than they need. And Sigwene Dana says that she learned about plants and their medicinal values, among other things, from my parents. She and her dad are Penobscot, and that knowledge has been passed down. But she is wondering...

kind of how you gain the knowledge to know you're not going to poison yourself because she trusts learning from elders more than books, because she would rather learn in the field hands on. So yeah, any thoughts on kind of what you've learned from indigenous cultures and foraging? Oh my gosh. I mean, that's the indigenous peoples of the Americas. That's like the crux of

everything that foraging is here right now. Their knowledge is the foundation of the knowledge that everyone else has had the opportunity to interact with and build upon. I know Michael Twitty talks about this a little bit in his book, The Cooking Gene, because a lot of enslaved Black folks in the South foraged, but

Obviously, the people who they got that information and that knowledge from were the indigenous people. So coming from my dad's side of the family, my dad's mom hails from the Seneca up in like the New York area. But she passed away when my dad was in high school. So he got like bits and pieces and little like inklings about certain plants and

in certain foods, but not in the way that he wished he had. And honestly, he also knew a whole lot about plants. I'm very lucky that as a person of color, both of my parents are very outdoorsy. Also got a lot from his dad's side of the family down in Mississippi from bits of information that they had been passing through the generations since they had been enslaved there. So yeah, of course, I feel like

In some way or another, every single one of us who's talking about foraging in North America is only doing so because of the generosity with knowledge of the indigenous people who now, yeah, do not get to continue some of those practices and some of that land stewardship.

That is the whole reason why this nation looked the way that it did, period. I honestly feel like we need more Indigenous voices front and center when it comes to foraging here in the United States. Because while I like to think that I know a whole lot about

foraging in a way that preserves for not just me next year, but me in 10 years and children in 20 years and their children in 50 years, 60 years. I know that I don't know everything.

Alexis notes that we could do an entire series of episodes on the role of indigenous land stewardship before colonization. And this field does have an ology, environmental anthropology, further proof that I will make this podcast until I die because there are so many good ologies. So please just get used to me, friends.

Oh, and 2024, me again. So we actually have done some really great episodes since we recorded this. We have an indigenous wildfire ecology episode with Dr. Amy Christensen about land stewardship and an indigenous colonology episode with Mariah Gladstone, who's awesome of Indigikitchen and a really great indigenous phytology episode about ethnobotany with

Thank you.

all of those in the show notes, my friends. Speaking of friends, first time question asker, Alexander Holland wrote in to say, quote, I love Alexis so much. I'm going to die of excitement. And Alexander wants to know, how do you use foraging to connect to other people and to yourself? And Konstantin Gutnichenko asks, are there any clubs that I can join? So yes, do foragers hang out together? How does one get invited to those gathering gatherings? Oh, absolutely. We have a whole little community. Yeah.

I love it. I love it so much. We have Facebook groups divided by region and divided by country and divided by continent and just like global foraging groups too that really let us bond with one another.

past all of our borders. So it's great. You get to know the people very closely who are near to you. I'm in like a Midwest foraging group. I'm in an Ohio foraging group. I'm in a central Ohio foraging group. So we definitely have a community and we exchange recipes and we exchange ideas and we build each other up and we buy each other's books. It's really...

It's really nice. I'm so thankful that the internet makes it possible to

digitally, you know, get to know all of these people and spend time with them, especially in the age of COVID, because it's not like any of us were able to go out and actually see each other in person. Such an interesting thing about the last year for you is, you know, when so many people felt so isolated, they gained a new appreciation for being outside and then also had like a really cool new friend to show them, which is so great. We have so many questions.

use the word newbie. By the by, so many people, literally almost 50 folks ask this question. So I'm just going to shout out for this one, the first time question askers, including Caitlin James, Alex Nelson, Curtis Roderick, Dane Shuckman, Katie Kyle, and Bennett Gerber wants to know what are some go-to foraging tips, the mushy, what are your favorite tools for different kinds of foraging? So just one huge question. How do you start? My...

The Black Forager Guide to Getting Started Foraging is threefold. Number one is get a foraging guide that is as specific as you can find for your area. For some places, that's just going to be a regional foraging guide like the book Midwest Foraging.

For some places, like where some of my family lives in Massachusetts on Martha's Vineyard, there is literally a Martha's Vineyard guide to wild edibles that their conservation society puts together each year. So find a guide as everyone.

hyper specific as you can find is number one. Number two is to join a regional foraging group on Reddit or on Facebook, wherever you find groups of people hanging out digitally because one,

It will introduce you to people who are like-minded, but maybe have a bit more experience than you. And two, what a perfect way to see what is in season because, you know, 10, 15 times a day, other people are posting what they're seeing and they don't live too far away from you. So get a book, join a group. And then what's the last step? And then three,

make friends with one of the folks in that group and go out with them because you can't replicate seeing the plants in real time in all three dimensions. For me, that's where the real learning comes and that's where the real memorization comes from. Just for me personally, I can see a plant or a mushroom in a book until the cows come home.

And the way that it'll stick in my mind and the way that I will be able to like point from across the field and be like, look, it's Yellow Rocket is being able to see it in person for the first time and get a good gander at it. So hit the trails with someone who's been at it for a bit longer than you. There is no replacement for it. Well, also, I guess you can't smell a book, can you? But smell must come into it, right?

You can't. And so when people are like pheasant back mushrooms, they smell like cucumbers. Well, yeah, there's no scratch and sniff that I know of, at least, foraging books yet. I don't know. That could be a million dollar idea for somebody out there. Scratch and sniff foraging book. I'd buy it. Okay. So I looked it up and I found one title, The Scratch and Sniff Book of Weeds. But alas,

On second glance, it just said weed, not weeds. So the scratch and sniff book of weed. The blurb on the front boasts, this book is dope. Also, I looked up when is a plant a weed? And essentially a weed is just any plant that is unwanted in a human controlled setting. And so weed as a name for marijuana, perhaps as ironic as they come, because for the most part, it seems pretty wanted. P.S. Is weed and reefer and trees and...

The devil's lettuce.

But that must be good to know when you're out foraging that you're using a lot of your senses at once too. Yeah, and that's one thing I think so many people get very worried about lookalikes, which you should. That little like layer of anxiety is something that keeps you safe.

I can't even fully communicate how you are truly using all of your senses for IDing. Yes, I made a video on how to tell the difference between Queen Anne's Lace and Poison Hemlock when they are still wee babies, just wee little rosettes. When honestly, the best way to tell the difference is that Poison Hemlock smells like rat pee and Queen Anne's Lace doesn't.

Poison hemlock does not smell like something you want to put in your face. And for good reason. If you don't like rat pee. If you don't like rat pee. If you do like rat pee, I don't know what to tell you.

But what if something smells like fungus genitals and you like it and want to put it in your mouth? Well, all mushrooms share that characteristic. Maybe not if you wanted to put it in your mouth, but they're all fungus genitals. And so many patrons, including Ned Lansing, Dory, Brenna Anderson, Eden Sunshine, Morel Hunters, Madeline Duke, and Curtis Roderick, Rebecca Weinsettle, Haley Everson, Rachel Stearns, Kate

bell madeline winter new listener nicholas maritime archaeologist chanel zap christy kazakov sebastian papineau anya marion rj doidge katherine jameson annie c zoe hull all asked about this in thimblewim's words i love foraging for garlic grass fiddleheads and dandelions i never forge for mushrooms because i don't know enough and i'm way too addicted to not dying

And Rachel Kasha wrote in, "All mushrooms are edible. Some mushrooms are only edible once. Where do you even start learning proper identification?" I have a lot of questions about mushrooms because, okay, set me straight here. I feel like mushrooms is like you level up to mushrooms. Is that correct?

So I feel like you level up to mushrooms because I grew up being very plant specific in my study of what's growing around me. So I think it kind of depends on what you feel more comfortable learning first. For me,

I guess I've just, I've been learning about plants for long enough and interacting with them for long enough that I can go into a new space in a region that I'm somewhat familiar with and be like, I have a good idea of what I'm going to find here flora wise. Do not ask me what I think I'm going to find fungi wise because I will not have a good answer for you.

Every time I find a mushroom, it is a pleasant surprise. Yeah. Someone about your morels asked, Zoe Hole says, oh my goodness, I love Alexa so much. Yay. She just found her first morel. So I got to know, what is the secret to this elusive cerebral delight? So unfortunately, the only secret that I know that seems to be worth its salt is the one that I did have in that video. And it is if you are in...

an area that is known for having morel mushrooms and the ground temperature has been consistently between like 40 and 60 degrees and it has rained within the last week

look for trees that are dead and have bark starting to peel off of them. The cool thing about morels is they begin their life in between the cells of those trees. And then when those trees die, that is when morels then kind of

convert to breaking down that dead matter and put up those fruiting bodies. So you're going to be finding them near dead trees, but not trees that have been dead for a very long time, just because they would then be devoid of the nutrients that the morels need to grow and to fruit. And honestly, I've had that knowledge up in my noggin for a while, and I still only found my first morel last week. Oh!

So exciting. How did you cook it? I brought four home and everyone was just, because I've only had them dried before, which are still, you know, delightful, but

There's something about like not having to reconstitute them that everybody says is just miraculous. So I went super simple. I melted a little bit of vegan butter. I added in a splash of white wine and I added in a little bit of diced field garlic, some allium banale-y.

just to like get some aromatics going. And then I halved the morels and tossed them in the sauce, cooked them until the wine had cooked off and had caramelized them just a wee bit and then just ate them that way. And Allie, they were so good. I cried a little. Oh my gosh, that's so exciting.

Is this the season for it or is that are they a seasonal mushy? So they are a seasonal mushy here on the eastern side of the United States. We are like right in the middle of morel season right now in the Midwest specifically. Things are a little up in the air right now. We've had some very chaotic weather. It has been both 80 degrees and we have had an inch of snow all within the last seven days. Oh, wow.

So we have no idea if that means good things for the rest of Morel season or if it means bad things for the rest of Morel season. But on the West Coast, where you also have things like burn Morels, those are going to be dependent on wildfires, whether or not you're going to be able to find them. And Morel season is much more like late winter Morel.

♪ Well, mushrooms, they're kinda creepy ♪ ♪ But at least they taste good ♪ - Kendra Sinclair wants to know if you write your songs ahead of time or if they are musical improv. - Oh my gosh, what a great question. It is a little bit of both. If I'm just riffing in a video, that is almost always just musical improv. I was in an improv group called Affirmative Distraction here in Columbus for a couple of years.

- Amazing. - An all black improv group here in the city. And I love, I love musical improv. It used to scare the crap out of me and now it's one of my fun little side hobbies. That's a really, it's a thing that I really enjoy doing. But things that involve instruments, ooh, absolutely written ahead of time. I am not one of those people who can just pick up an instrument and be like, "And now here's a song fresh out of my brain hole." I mean, I can do that. It just won't be good.

Understood. Great question from Catherine Jameson wants to know why are so many foraged plants so mucilaginous? I think the answer is a lot of plants are mucilaginous and we just don't cultivate a lot of them. So then when it's time to go out and forage things, you just get constantly surprised.

by the plants and the fungi that do a slimy when you cook with them. - Do a slimy. Well, you know, you compared it to okra as a kind of a thickening agent, right? - Yeah. And that's exactly what I was going to mention. I was going to say for folks who grew up eating okra, that is not a crazy surprising thing. But for people who didn't, like giving them something made with like mallow for the first time might

be a bit of a squeaky experience for them if they're not prepared. Just a little slippery. Just a little bit. Just

It's just a little slippy. It's a little slippy for you. And from slime to something more serious, a lot of patrons had cultural questions about foraging, like Riley McInnes, Emily Richardson, and Claudia Dana, and first-time question asker Vicki Preston, who wrote in to say,

But Vicky wanted to know, alongside listeners Alexis Jarvis and Amani Alkidwa, how and why can it be empowering as a Black, Indigenous, or person of color forager? My Instagram handle is Black Forager. And that was 100% on purpose because one, I didn't see a lot of people who looked like me in the space. And I still don't see a lot of people who look like me in the space. It's...

I honestly think of it kind of like an act of restorative justice to be a person of color who is foraging.

because historically, culturally, and legally, a lot of barriers were put in place to prohibit us historically from being able to do so. I talk about it a little bit in a video that I had made for Black History Month, but in the South, immediately after the Civil War, a lot of laws were put in place to purposefully curb

recently freed Black folks from being able to forage and trap to provide for themselves, essentially kind of holding them in economic bondage to the plantations. So they, you know, they weren't enslaved anymore, but now they pretty much have to be sharecroppers because there's not much else you can do because

trespass went from being a civil offense to being a criminal offense, which suddenly makes it a way more expensive problem for you if you are on somebody else's land and they don't want you to be there. But also if you're recently freed, you don't have land of your own to be foraging on, to be growing things on, to be trapping on, to be hunting on. And both physical

physically in some places, but mostly metaphorically, fences were put up around public property. And in a lot of spaces, it became illegal to forage and trap there too. A lot of that also has some history in the very beginnings of the national park movement in the late 1800s, you know, the 1880s and the 1890s, when a lot of

quite men wanted to preserve the pristine conditions of the green spaces they saw around them while completely ignoring the fact that the way that those green spaces became the way that they were were because of a lot of these symbiotic relationships

between the people who were living off of them and the land itself. So when a lot of laws are put in place to purposefully disenfranchise people from being able to do something, it has usually a lot of generational and cultural spillover. There's a pretty big cultural barrier to hop over to be a person of color, even just existing in the outdoors when a lot of us have grandparents or even in my case, parents

who grew up in a time where there was like a very real fear of being a black person in the case of my family by yourself out in the middle of the woods. Like that wasn't a situation that you would ever want to find yourself in for fear of like extreme acts of violence. So for me to be a black woman foraging in,

Yeah, it feels like justice to me. It's an act that I feel like we should begin reclaiming. We have just as much a right to do it as anybody else. But because we have all of these historical and external factors working against us, there's just not a lot of us out here. Thankfully, I do see that

beginning to change and I hope to see a change even more rapidly as we move forward. Alexis notes that if your great grandparents aren't foraging, well, they're not going to teach your grandparents how to forage and they aren't going to teach your parents who aren't going to teach you. And not to mention so, so much oral tradition and teaching has been lost over the years. And

And I think one of the things that's so powerful about Alexis's lessons are that she has been captivated by foraging since she was five and has been studying it for years and years. And part of her work feels like carrying on a certain kind of oral tradition of her own and telling stories and showing us exactly what to look for, how to prepare for it.

parrot in a manner that has been missing through generations of trauma. And her work is igniting a new interest in folks who have been kept from this knowledge and resources. Gathered around the glow of our phones, folks listen intently to her lessons.

I think it's so great that you're bringing so many people together who feel similarly. We actually, we have one question. Jessica Duncan says first time question asker and fellow black girl who loves plants here and is from the Pacific Northwest. I'm interested in getting into foraging for mushies. However, I'm also concerned about trail erosion and the negative effects of trampling through forests. Do you have any tips for Jessica on how to ethically and sustainably forage? Yes. Well, uh,

Since she said that she is specifically interested in mushroom collecting, I would say if you have like a little pocket knife and you go ahead and just cut off the fruiting bodies instead of, you know, maybe disrupting the mycelium that are doing their thing. A lot of foraging is honestly evaluating space by space where you are at any given time. If you are in a place that is having issues with erosion of soil,

And you look around and you see signs of erosion of soil, you see a top layer with poor soil quality, you know, the wind blows and you see a whole lot of the kind of nutritionally depleted topsoil blowing around. Like that's probably not an area that you want to be taking any biodiversity out of. You want to kind of give it as much of a chance to thrive as it could possibly have.

So a lot of it is just reading the space that you're in visually, reading up on a space that you're going to be in ahead of time. And that doesn't even just go for things like erosion. I know when I'm on the East Coast, if I'm foraging seaweed, I'm checking the water quality. Those are levels that are usually posted for commercial fishermen, but anybody who is out there, you know, fishing clamshells,

in my case, dragging seaweed directly out of the ocean to put into their gullet. You also want to be knowing about the water temperature, algal blooms, any spills that have happened in the area. So a little bit of it is just doing the research that you can if you are able for a space that you hope to be foraging from. Are those the dead man's fingers?

Yes. Oh, my God. I love dead man's fingers so much. They're so creepy. Dead man's fingers, a healthy bouquet of them. Okay, so we're not talking about the mushroom called dead man's fingers, which truly are a ghastly, grayish, fingery-looking sight on the forest floor. Rather, these dead man's fingers are also called green sea fingers, stag seaweed, green fleece, and oyster thief, also known as codium frigilei.

if you're feeling specific. Now, Alexa says that she tries to use the binomial nomenclature or genus and species format because so many forageable foods have tons of local names. And she says that if a thing is important enough to have different names in a bunch of different places, it's because it's really tasty or it's really, really gross or lethal. Now, how do you make sure that you keep eating dead man's fingers without having dead man's fingers?

You know, Hope says, and maybe this is some flim flam you could bust. Hope says, I'd been told that you can test for berries being poisonous by rubbing them on your hand and seeing if it tingles or numbs. And then if it doesn't, doing the same with your cheek. And if nothing there either, you might be able to eat it. Is that true at all? Is it flim flam? Is it reliable? For a lot of us, especially who grew up being very outdoorsy, that was...

Kind of the way that we were told to deal with the situation if we like found ourselves stranded in the middle of the woods. The way that I always heard it was, you know, you'd rub it on the inside of your ankle. You'd pretty much just travel to more sensitive pieces of skin and wait a few hours to see if it reacts. Because I am a cautious being and because not every person

hazardous plant behaves the same way or possesses the same toxins. I'm just going to go ahead and say that unless you are dying, probably not the best rule of thumb to go by. And even if you are dying, probably not the best rule of thumb to go by. Also, if you are looking for berries, I can say with confidence, if you are in North America, we don't have any poisonous compound berries. So if it looks like a raspberry,

You're good to go. Okay, so compound or aggregate berries include the dewberry, the blackberry, the raspberry. So that should help Rebecca, Rachel Sorter, Mandy Smith, Donnell O'Neill, and Megan Burnett Taraskowitz. Oh, on that topic, this is a very, very good question. Emma Kiley is a first time question asker. And their greatest love is for service berries. Is a service berry like a raspberry?

Oh my God, service berries. I'm so glad someone brought service berries up because I always want to shoehorn them into the conversation. But I never know if people are going to know what I'm talking about. So service berries, which are the amelanchier genus,

There are a couple different species that fall under it, but we call them all service berries or June berries or Saskatoon berries. In Southern Ohio, sometimes they just call them sarvice or sarvice berries. They actually look a lot more like blueberries. They are crowned berries. So, you know, they have the little points sticking out of them, the little last signs of their flowers. They...

They might be my favorite. I love pawpaws just from like a purely ethnobotanical history standpoint, but surface berries might be my favorite thing to forage. They taste like apples and blueberries mixed together. Oh, man. Can you make a cobbler? Can you get enough to make like a cobbler out of them? Or is it like if you get three of them, you've had the best day of your life?

Oh, no. So last year, just from the sole tree closest to my house, I gathered enough berries while still leaving all the ones that I couldn't reach, which was most of them for the birds. I gathered enough to make like 10 hand pies. Last year, for whatever reason, I gathered like one big jar of service berries and was like, you know what?

I'm tired. And by the time I wasn't tired anymore, service berries season was over. So this year I'm going to stock up all of my energy and my strength and we're going to go ham on service berries. My neighborhood loves planting them as ornamentals. So they are. Oh, man. That's got to be in like apartment listings. What is around you that you could eat? Yeah. Yeah.

I honestly think that people need to start listing it because if someone told me that a house that I was maybe going to move into has a serviceberry tree out front, I'd be like, oh, I'm done. Sold. You know, you don't have a washer or dryer, but you have a serviceberry tree. Who cares? I'll wash my clothes in the sink. That's fine. It's better for the environment anyway. No.

Now, a certain film came up a few times and Lena Zekas and Julia McDonald wanted to know how to avoid the same fate. Julia asked, please tell us how to not Chris McCandless ourselves. Does Alexis get this question a lot? Are there any movies about foraging or survivalism that are inspiring to you or that you fucking hate at all? Oh, my gosh. I mean, people do bring up Into the Wild.

That's like everyone's literary experience with foraging. And I feel like for a lot of people, their literary experience with foraging is like people being in mortal peril. It's always either into the wild or it's that like freaking scene in the Hunger Games where it's just like, that's Nightlock, Peeta, it'll kill you. That's the way that everybody...

Who thinks about it? I'm trying to think of how I know of any movies in which their portrayal of foraging doesn't make me big sad. Oh, no. Oh, no.

None are coming to mind. Quick, someone write a heartfelt children's film with foraging in it. You can consult me. I'll do it for free. Yes. First PBS show and then consulting also, please. Yes, please. Last questions I always ask. What sucks the most about either foraging or having a million people watching your foraging? What is one thing that you would change about it? Oh, man.

I don't think there's anything that I would change about foraging. Processing what you bring home is sometimes tough. I feel like that's what I don't get as many questions about, but I feel like I need to warn people about is if you're getting into foraging.

80% of the fun is going out and finding the thing, but you do have to bring it home and do things with it or like either cook it immediately or do something usually a little labor intensive to it so you can preserve it for cooking with it in the future. I don't get to just bring the acorns home and crack them open and have a snack.

Yeah. Unfortunately, oh God, acorns especially, that's like a weeks long process every fall. But that being said, I also find processing my fines to be very like meditative. It's like a great thing to do after a busy week. I'm a freak. I will process plants for two hours in complete silence in my kitchen and be just the happiest version of myself after.

I bet, especially after you've had each thing that you're processing has a narrative to when you found it, how you decided to pick that one over the one next to it. I mean, there's there's so much context for every single leaf, you know? Exactly. There's there's so much to consider here.

And I find that taking the time to really pause and to really think about how thankful I am for everything that I brought home for each one of those plants and for all of the people, places, and books where I've gotten my knowledge about that plant from. It just, it fills my heart up, makes my heart feel warm and fuzzy. And then at the end you get a snack. Who doesn't like that? Yes.

So since I would change nothing about foraging because foraging is amazing and wonderful, I will say being a person who a lot of people are watching on the internet, nine times out of 10, super cool, very surreal experience. But a lot of people talk to you

or at least leave comments on your things as if you are like not a real human person who then has to process what it is that they have said. And that stinks. Additionally, being a woman and a woman of color in the space comes with a lot of added pressure to be so incredibly honest

And I mean, yes, this is a line of study, a line of work in which you want to be perfect and you want to be accurate because you care about all of the people who follow you and you want them to be safe and you want them to feel like they are prepared knowledge-wise to go out and find something or at least prepared to ask the right questions when they go and find more information about it. But being a person of color, I don't,

I do find that I tend to incur skepticism a lot more than some of my delightful white peers. God, that sucks.

Yeah, it sucks. Thank you. It sucks. Yeah. Alexis recounted that online, her knowledge gets doubted more than others, even though she's been studying this for years. And it's impossible to ignore that sexism and racism. But it's also partly why she knows the work and being in this space is important. And also, she's just entertaining as hell. I think what's so compelling about it is it's

and it's funny and it's personable and it's science and it's food and it's history. It's like a, a septuple whammy. Just a one-stop shop for all different kinds of content. It really is. And I just love the way that it gets people to notice their surroundings more and, uh,

not take for granted all of the things that are growing around us. Yeah, I think a lot of people have found solace in nature and a lot of folks who maybe wouldn't have otherwise. And for me,

my mo has always been when you see more value in a space you take better care of it and foraging is absolutely a way to see more value in the space around you and that being said i always i always end on your favorite thing about it but i don't even how do you even pick a favorite thing about it i also feel like your microbiome must be so good you must have such a healthy microbiome i don't

I don't know, I eat normal things too. Like right now I do have a glass of like a Redbud and Dandelion fermented beverage that I just bottled earlier this week. And I'm like, yay, good gut bacteria. We love to see an active fermenting drink. But I also ate two Oreos for breakfast this morning. So jury's out on that one. I guess I don't get sick a lot.

What about your favorite, favorite thing about it? What just gives you butterflies? Getting to see either in real time or to have people like relate to me, like a breakthrough that they have had or like a special moment that they have now had in their surroundings because of my content. One of my best, best, best friends has never been super outdoorsy, but she she loves food.

an amazing chef. And so her kind of foray into the outdoors has been through foraging and watching kind of like the light bulb go off for her now when we go out on hikes together and, you know, watching her being able to like recognize things so confidently on her own. I'm just like, yeah, that's why I do the thing. I do. And those moments supersede the negatives of

by so many degrees and make me make me feel like I'm doing something beneficial I guess I hope so ask smart people simple questions because chances are they do what they do because they really love what they do and you never know you might gotta know get hit by a bus so you might as well ask questions

Also, follow Alexis. It turns out she's a fellow ologite and she'd listened to the show before I ever reached out, which was so cool to learn. And she is at Black Forager on TikTok, on Twitter, and on Instagram. So do follow her. We are at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Allie Ward.

Just one L on both. Thank you to all the patrons at patreon.com slash ologies where you can join for just one tiny dollar a month and submit questions. Thank you, Aaron Talbert, for adminning the Ologies podcast Facebook page. Thank you, Emily White of The Wardery who makes our transcripts. Thank you to Caleb Patton who bleeps them. Bleeped episodes and transcripts are available for free at the link in the show notes.

Ologies merch is available at ologiesmerch.com. Thank you, Shannon Feltes and Bonnie Dutch of the comedy podcast, You Are That, for managing that. Thank you to Susan Hale and Noelle Dilworth, who help with social media and scheduling. Thank you to main squeeze and huge editing hero, Jared Sleeper of Mind Gem Media, and longtime editor, newly unmustached, Stephen Ray Morris of the podcast's

The Purrcast and See Jurassic Right. Oh My Stache, they both shaved this week. Steven and Jarrett. People are vaxxed.

Stashes are waxed. Wow. Springtime in America. Oh, Nick Thorburn of the band Islands did the music. Okay, here's a new secret for 2024. And it's that I just returned from Mexico City a few days ago where I went to talk to some axolotl experts. But on day two, I completely lost my voice.

like to a rasp, like I couldn't make sounds with my throat or mouth. So we're going to be working on a workaround for that. Also, that's one of the reasons this is an encore episode this week, because I could

couldn't talk for a bit. We're also working on a real chunk of an episode for next week. And I wanted to keep doing some tweaks on it. I wanted it to be as good as possible. And here's the thing, patrons, if you're a patron, I'm releasing next week's

episode early. I've never done this before. Probably on Thursday or Friday. So in a few days to get some ideas and some feedback on it before it comes out to the public next Tuesday. So if you're not already a patron and you want to know what next week's episode is and you want to give me some feedback on it, that'll be happening a little bit later this week. And yeah, my voice still hurts and it sucks. So I'll rest that right now. Okay. Go eat your backyard.

Do it safely. All right. Bye-bye.

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