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The photo above by Clive Limpkin was featured in Now magazine.
Naturalist Steve Brill is the author of Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medical Plants in Wild (and Not-So-Wild) Places. Known as "Wildman," Brill has foraged wild edible plants for fun, food, and frolic throughout New York City and beyond since the mid-seventies.
Paula: Wildman, how did you get interested in wild foods?
Wildman: One day, when I had just become interested in cooking and whole-foods nutrition, I encountered a group of ethnic Greek women in a local park, all dressed in black and picking grape leaves. I asked them why, but couldn't understand the answer (it was all Greek to me). Still, I came home with some grape leaves and found out how to prepare them. From then on, I became involved with wild foods.
I used whatever sources of literature on wild edibles I could find, and began going into the local New York City parks — which are numerous, humongous, and mostly unexplored.
So I became an expert on wild edible plants, and found that most of the books I could find on the subject had been written by people with almost no knowledge of either cooking or nutrition. Many were by botanists who wouldn't know a kitchen if it fell on their heads. So I had an entirely unexplored area to study and understand.
I started leading public tours in 1982, and I've been doing it ever since.
Paula: Can you give us an example of a yummy wild plant that we can find in most regions throughout the world?
Wildman: The cattail is one of the most important and common wild foods, with a variety of uses at different times of the year.  A stand of cattails is as close as you'll get to a wild supermarket. Cattails are easy to harvest, very tasty, and highly nutritious. They were a major staple for the American Indians, who found them in great supply. The settlers missed out when they ignored this great food and destroyed its habitats.
Cattails grow worldwide, in marshes, swamps, ditches, and stagnant water — fresh or slightly brackish. They taste like a combination of tender zucchini and cucumbers, adding a refreshing texture and flavor to salads and stir-fry dishes. I love sliced cattail hearts sautéed in sesame oil with wild carrots and ginger.
Young cattail shoots somewhat resemble nonpoisonous calamus, and also poisonous daffodil and iris, which have similar leaves. But none of the look-alikes grows more than a few feet tall, so by mid-spring the much larger cattail becomes unmistakable, even for beginners. If a stand is still topped by last year's cottony seed heads, you know you have the right plant. You can peel and eat them well into the summer.
Paula: What part of the cattail can we eat?
Wildman: Every part has uses. The fluffy white seeds were once used for stuffing blankets, pillows and toys. The Indians put them inside moccasins and around cradles for warmth.
You can clip off and eat portions of the immature, green flowerhead. Steam or simmer it for ten minutes. It tastes vaguely like its distant relative, corn, and there's even a central, cob-like core. Because it's dry, serve it with a topping of sauce, seasoned oil, or butter. It's easier to remove the flesh from the woody core, if desired, after steaming. This adds a rich, filling element to any dish, and it's one of the best wild vegetarian sources of protein, unsaturated fat, and calories. It also provides beta-carotene and minerals.
Paula: Are there special guidelines as to when and how to pick cattails?
Wildman: Harvest cattail shoots after some dry weather, when the ground is solid, in the least muddy locations. Select the largest shoots that haven't begun to flower, and use both hands to separate the outer leaves from the core, all the way to the base of the plant.
Now, grab the inner core with both hands, as close to the base as possible, and pull it out. Peel and discard the outermost layers of leaves, from the top down, until you reach the edible part, which is soft enough to pinch through with your thumbnail (this is the "rule of thumb"). There are more layers to discard toward the top, so you must do more peeling there. If you completely cut off the tough upper parts in the field, using a pocket knife or garden shears, you'll have less to carry.
Collecting shoots will cover your hands with a sticky, mucilaginous jelly. You can scrape that stuff off the plant into a plastic bag and use it to impart a slight okra-like thickening effect to soups.
Paula: Why eat plants from the wild instead of purchasing them in our local produce markets?
Wildman: They're much more nutritious, and they're more fun to collect. They are more nutritious because they have a greater concentration of nutrients. Commercial vegetables are bred to be heavier, to have more water and, consequently, less flavor and less nutrition. Wild plants also are free — and they're incredibly delicious. If you taste wild watercress and compare it to the watercress you buy in the store, for example, you'll never want the store-bought stuff again. Anyway, I'd rather go out into a nearby field than stand in line at the grocery store.
Paula: I understand that you don't eat animal foods at all. Why did you become a vegan?
Wildman: Personal health, family health, health of the planet, and the cruelty-to-animals issue are the reasons I became a vegan. My cholesterol and triglycerides were high and there was a family history of heart disease. Also, eating lower on the food chain is a lot better for the planet. And I don't have to feel responsible for the suffering that mistreated farm animals go through.
Paula: Based on the value of wild food, it certainly seems that the lawn is a lot of wasted space. Yet most Americans really seem to value their lawns and spend a lot of money in maintenance and keeping the "weeds" out.
Wildman: The lawn has an interesting history. Basically, it protects us from being eaten by bears. If you were living in the Middle Ages, with only forests all around you, then when you came out of your house, a bear could be lurking behind a nearby tree. So what people did was to cut down the trees around their homes. Then the bear would have to run from the edge of the forest. The person would see the bear in time, get back inside the house, get the crossbow, and have the bear for dinner, instead of the other way around.
But people didn't want to have mud around their homes, so they would encourage grass to grow. That's how the lawn originated.
The lawn wasn't all that bad way back then. In England, for example, you never had to water the lawn, because it rained all the time. And you never had to mow the lawn because you had sheep to eat the grass.
But in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries we have more crops of lawn than any other crop grown in the United States. It's a big money-making industry. We have the lawn-care industry, with new products — mowers, weed-whackers, something new every year. Leaf blowers produce ten percent of the air pollution in the country, and are filthier than any other kind of internal combustion engine. And the lawns are heavily treated with pesticides, so that every time it rains, chemicals get washed into the ecosystem, where they concentrate and eventually get back into us through the food chain.
On the other hand, there are some wonderful things to eat that grow on lawns. Dandelion, chickweed, chickory, purslane, wood sorrel, sheep sorrel, and lots of other plants that like open sunny areas like lawns, are denigrated as weeds, but are healthier and tastier than anything you can buy.
Paula: As you began to eat wild plants, did you notice a change in your health?
Wildman: I felt healthier — definitely! I'm fifty-three. I swim a mile in thirty-six minutes, and do rapid walking and bicycle riding. I'm healthier now than I was in my twenties when I was eating junk food.
Paula: What makes wild plants healthier for us than store-bought produce?
Wildman: Wild plants have to cope with herbivores, competing plants, weather, and changing climate in order to survive, so they've evolved extraordinary fitness. That's why they contain concentrations of high-quality carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, as well as vitamins and minerals.
Also, plants use fiber for structural support and to discourage some herbivores, and for this reason wild plants have more fiber than their cultivated cousins. Foods without fiber harden the stools and slow the time it takes food to travel through the bowels, often causing actual physical damage. This contributes to our current epidemics of constipation, hemorrhoids, diverticulosis, diverticulitis, and bowel cancer. These illnesses don't exist in foraging societies.
Paula: So why did some societies stop foraging and begin to domesticate plants?
Wildman: I believe that the historical mechanism was probably that when societies competed and waged war, those with the larger populations usually won — and agriculture supports larger populations than foraging does. It is ironic that people in foraging societies had much more leisure time than their agricultural and industrial counterparts, and suffered less malnutrition.
Paula: It's interesting how one can survive on wild edibles even in a major city like New York. What wild edibles can be found growing in Central Park?
Wildman: Dandelion, burdock, chickweed, Japanese knotweed, evening primrose, wild carrots, berries and fruit like American persimmons and crabapples, and lots of greens for salads.
There are herbs and nuts. The pod of the Kentucky coffee tree makes the world's best tasting caffeine-free coffee. There is sassafras, which is used for making root beer. Gourmet oyster mushrooms and Japanese enoki mushrooms abound throughout Central Park. There also are many medicinal wild plants, like gingko biloba, which is good for improving circulation and memory.
Back before the invention of agriculture, long before the first Big Mac slithered and slopped its way down the assembly line, people depended on wild foods for survival.
Paula: When we go out to our backyards, lawns, public parks, and woodland areas to forage for wild edibles, are there some important guidelines that we should follow?
Wildman: Always collect at least fifty feet from heavy traffic. Wash all plants under running water before you use them, and make sure the plants aren't contaminated with pesticides or herbicides.
And you must know with absolute, one hundred percent certainty what you are eating.
Paula: Since you actually forage in the parks of New York City, do you ever get into trouble?
Wildman: Yes. In 1986, undercover agents — a man and a woman — infiltrated one of my tours. They said they were married, but they never held hands or kissed, so I figured they had to have been married a good long time. They paid me with what I later learned were marked bills to teach them about wild edible plants. Every time I found an interesting plant, the man would take out his camera. I would hold up the specimen and he would snap a shot.
At the end of the nature walk, I showed people that you could eat the leaves of the dandelion. This was in March, before the flowers come up, when the leaves are quite delicious and very healthy.
When I ate the leaves of the dandelion, the male "spy" ducked behind a tree and spoke into a walkie-talkie. New York City park and law-enforcement agents suddenly jumped out from behind the bushes, surrounded me, put me in handcuffs (lest I bop them on the head with a dandelion?), and hauled me off to the police station, where they charged me with criminal mischief for removing vegetation from the park — because I ate a dandelion. They took fingerprints and mug shots. They even searched my backpack. Fortunately, I had eaten all the evidence.
They gave me a desk appearance ticket that said I could face a year in jail if convicted. Then they made a really bad mistake — they let me go.
I went home and called TV stations, newspapers, radio shows, and the wire services. Next morning, I went to the newsstand. Some cops saw me, but they wanted my autograph. I was on page one of the Chicago Sun Times, page two of the New York Daily News. I came home, and CBS Evening News called me. After that, Dan Rather had me on the evening news for five minutes. Kathy Lee and Regis had me on the next day. I was on everything from Letterman to MTV.
Paula: How did the arrest turn out?
Wildman: They took me to court. But I served Wildman Five-Borough Salad on the steps of the Manhattan Criminal Court House to reporters and passers-by [for this recipe and a wonderful fresh mint dressing, go here]. The press "ate that one up," too. After that, the city decided to negotiate with me. They were getting very bad publicity. I couldn't have gotten that much press if I'd spent ten million dollars.
So they dropped the charges. Then they hired me. They started paying me to lead the same tours that I was leading when I was arrested!
Paula: I love it.
Since you've been eating wild plants for so long, do you have any favorites?
Wildman: There are so many of them. Right now there is the black raspberry and an Asian red raspberry called the wine berry that are in season that are really, really good. There are different types of raspberries that grow across the country. Every region has its species. You find black raspberries throughout the country. The wine berries are only on the East Coast.
There are green purslanes, which I just had in some tacos that my wife and I made, that are absolutely wonderful.
I use wild plants in just about anything: a casserole, cheese spread, sauces, homemade noodles, stroganoff, fettuccini Alfredo. . .
Paula: What can you tell us about wild mushrooms?
Wildman: There are many wild mushrooms that are very easy to recognize and identify: the chicken mushroom or sulfur shelf, giant puffball, morel, and chanterelle are considered so obvious that people call them the Foolproof Four.
 There is the wild oyster mushroom, which lives up to its name — it looks, smells, and tastes like oysters. Oyster mushrooms grow throughout North America. If it rains enough and it's not too hot or cold, you can find them any month of the year, although they're most common in the second half of autumn.
With virtually no stalk, this mushroom usually grows in layers on dead deciduous wood, like clusters of oysters. The moist, hairless, fragrant, white-to-smokey-gray caps are two to eight inches wide. The white, hairless gills (which become yellow-tinged with age) descend the short, stub-like, lateral stalk, when it exists. The spores are white.
To use oyster mushrooms, you must cut out any part near the stem that's so tough you can't pinch through. You can save it for stock. Cook the tender parts for ten to twenty minutes, using any method. They have a soft, chewy texture, and they do taste a little like seafood. If you use the same seasonings, you can use them to create a mock-seafood soup.
Varieties like the chicken mushroom and the puffball are easy to recognize. I can teach kids how to recognize those without any mistake. By contrast, there are whole families of mushrooms that have edible and poisonous members that look alike, so we must learn to recognize those particular families and not eat any species within them.
Paula: What else can you tell us about poisonous mushrooms that can be helpful?
Wildman: Always try them on your boss first [laughter].
Each plant and each mushroom has its own identifying characteristics. Poisonous mushrooms may make you sick or kill you. As we said before, it is your responsibility to identify any wild food with one hundred percent certainty before eating it.
Some mushrooms cause adverse reactions in some people in combination with alcohol consumption. Some people experience allergies or other adverse reactions after eating mushrooms that are harmless to other people. This is why you should eat small quantities of any new food the first time you consume it.
If you don't know of a local expert who can teach you about your regional mushrooms, join a mushroom club. The North American Mycological Association, or NAMA, has a list of regional organizations and other useful information (see namyco.org). I also suggest reading books on mushrooms.
Paula: How do you prepare mushrooms?
Wildman: Refrigerate mushrooms for short-range storage, and prepare them as soon as possible. They are very perishable. A mushroom that's wholesome one day may be filled with maggots the next.
Clean mushrooms with a soft mushroom brush or a toothbrush. To minimize sogginess, use as little water as possible. Trim away any bad or hard parts with a paring knife.
Cooking methods depend on the mushrooms. Some are good sautéed. Some species, especially those with high water content, need to be simmered or steamed. The least flavorful species improve greatly if you first marinate and then bake them.
Paula: I understand that a lot of your work is with children. Did you have an interest in wild plants when you were a child?
Wildman: No. I always liked science and nature when I was a child, but information about wild plants was and still is pretty much absent from our educational system.
I've been working with kids of all ages for over twenty years now, often in day camps with hundreds of kids. I'll teach from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., with an hour off for lunch, in extremely hot humid weather where I have to be covered from head to toe because mosquitoes love me. I do tour after tour like this. It's pretty intense. But as a result, a lot of kids are learning about their environment.
All kids are interested in nature. But they think that what they learn in school and on TV represents nature, so they don't even consider wild plants until they eat the berries, use plants for mosquito bites, make their own root beer, or taste sorrel, which has a wonderful lemony flavor that explodes in your mouth. Then they realize that there is more to nature than what they're seeing on TV or learning in school.
Paula: I realize that many kids who live in the city don't know about nature, but what about in rural areas?
Wildman: Even in the country, kids know more about the tropical rainforests than they do about their own local woodlands. I am now trying to change that by offering programs in day camps and after school. I'm trying to give children a glimpse into the local natural environment that was denied to me when I was a kid.
Paula: Do you ever have an intuitive hunch about a plant that's unfamiliar to you?
Wildman: Once, I found a plant that had such a wonderful smell, it made me feel like biting right into it. But even though it was tempting, I decided to verify it first. And it turned out to be water hemlock — the most deadly plant in the U.S. It was just so surprising to me that it had this wonderful fragrance — but one bite of water hemlock will kill you, and it's a pretty miserable death.
So don't ever go by intuition alone when it comes to wild edible plants. Know with absolute certainty what you are eating.
I tell people to learn a small number of plants that are easy to recognize really well, then follow them through the seasons. After that, you can slowly add more plants to your knowledge base. This is the safest way to proceed if you can't find an instructor.
Paula: Is there anything else you would like us to know?
Wildman: I want people to be out there — to start enjoying our renewable resources: the things you can collect that grow back again. Use that to reaffirm a commitment to protect the non-renewable resources: the rare species, the water, the air, the global temperature, all those things which are being impacted so badly by human activities.
We can't do it from the vantage point of an armchair. We need to be out there interacting with the environment. When you have connection to nature and become more grounded in the understanding of what's going on — when you're participating in your environment as well as reading about it — you become more committed.
I love doing this. It's a lot of fun. I seem to be one of the few people who really enjoy their work.
Paula: That's wonderful. You're doing a marvelous service. Thank you so much for sharing with us.
Wildman Five-Borough Salad
2 cups cattail shoots, sliced
1-1/2 cups young greenbriar leaves, shoots, and tendrils
1 cup violet leaves, chopped
1 cup curly dock leaves, chopped
1 cup wild leek leaves, chopped
1/2 cup sheep sorrel leaves, chopped
1/4 cup dandelion flowers, all green parts removed, chopped
1/4 cup violet flowers
1/4 cup black locust flowers
Just toss all these ingredients together. Serves 6
Of the dressing, Brill says, "This is a recipe I made for a cooking class in 1981, before I became the 'Wildman,' using commercial mint. With slight modifications and the option of wild spearmint, it's just as good today. Add one or two tablespoons of this to a serving of any tossed salad."
Fresh Mint Dressing
1 cup olive oil
1 cup canola oil, walnut oil, sunflower seed oil,
or any vegetable oil
6 Tbs. lemon juice
1 small white onion
1/4 cup mellow miso
2 cloves of garlic
2 Tbs. fresh (or 2 tsps. dried) wild or commercial
spearmint leaves
2 Tbs. fresh (or 2 tsps. dried) basil
4 tsps. paprika
2 tsps. yellow mustard seed, ground
1/8 tsp. liquid stevia or 2 tsps. honey, barley malt,
or rice syrup
Purée all ingredients in a blender. Makes 2-3/4 cups.
Both of these recipes are from Brill's Wild Vegetarian Cookbook (Harvard Common Press, 2002), used with permission.
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Wildman Steve Brill, B.A., is a naturalist, environmental educator, author, artist and wild foods cook. He is author of Shoots and Greens of Early Spring (1986), Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medical Plants in Wild (and Not-So-Wild) Places, (1994) and The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook (2002).
For a list of books and tours, some great recipes, a country-wide list of instructors, and finding out more about Wildman and wild edibles, please visit WildmanSteveBrill.com or VegWeb.com. Brill's phone number is 914-835-2153, and you can reach him by email at .
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