Happy January, food & foraging friends!
Last Sunday, hanging with the women’s improv group I play with, I excitedly shared that a reporter is covering my next evergreen workshop (more on that later). “Oh, there was just a bit on eating evergreens on ‘Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me’ yesterday,” one of our organizers said. I was so psyched to hear the story I looked it up on the way home.
“Tannenbaum? More like Tasty-baum,” the bit went, but to my dismay, it was not a wild foods-positive piece about eating your evergreens. Rather, it was a controversy about Belgium’s food standards agency shutting down the city of Ghent’s call to literally go green by upcycling Christmas trees into spruce butter rather than pitching them on the streets.
In a formal statement, the agency’s spokesperson (probably donning pointy glasses and pursed lips), condemned the Ghent council, stating that “Christmas trees are not intended to end up in the food chain.” To its credit, the Climate City‘s council had already shared on social media that the trees were not safe if sprayed, and to avoid the toxic yew for your Yule dinner.
Now, if you’re at all familiar with improv, you’ll know the core principle of “yes and.” Your improv partner suggests you are a goofy hairy fairy with an iridescent butt battling an existential crisis, you say “yes, and” – yes I am a goofy hairy fairy and… you are my savior, handmaid, or however you want to take that suggestion and build on it.
Rather than taking Ghent’s happy holiday suggestion of a Christmas tree soup and adding the caveat that you need to make sure the trees weren’t sprayed with pesticides, the Belgian authorities shut it down entirely, dashing the dreams of a nation of would-be treecyclers.
I encounter this a lot in the conversation around foraging. People will hear something about the mild ginkgotoxins in ginkgo nuts or the oxalates in wood sorrel, and steer clear entirely rather than dig a little deeper. To that I say, “yes, and oxalates are also in spinach, and that didn’t stop Popeye.” There are issues with oxalates in higher doses and for certain individuals, but if you’re a healthy person eating high-oxalate veggies, wild or cultivated, in moderate proportions in a diversified diet, you need not count your grams.
Rather than react with fear, I encourage folks to ask questions when encountering potentially alarming information. Ask your Christmas tree farmer if they use pesticides. Consult a more experienced forager about for safety tips on a new-to-you wild food. And read food labels while you’re at it! At its best, foraging is an exercise in mindfulness, curiosity and discernment; Christmas tree eating isn’t a binary “yes or no” affair.
I for one have had evergreens on the menu all month long: piney potatoes with evergreen salt and vinegar, spruce sugar cookies, and vinegar-pickled beets, apples and sweet potatoes, thinly sliced on a mandolin and dosed with mixed evergreens.
Oh, yeah, about that WTOP story — I’m going to have a feature on foraging on Matt Kaufax’s “Matt about Town” segment. Please get the word out to fill up the January 26 Evergreens Foraging and Cocktails class he’ll be filming! Matt will be looking for a class participant or two to go on camera and share their thoughts about the experience.
See you next month, when I’ll surely have some fun food adventures to share from my first-ever trip to Japan. (Fun-gal fact: take (taKAY) means mushroom in Japanese, so maitake (hen of the woods) and matsutake mean dancing mushroom and pine tree mushroom, respectively But my favoritest Japanese mushroom name of all is waraitake, the laughing mushroom, given to the psychedelic gymnopilus I find in my neighborhood every November. Here’s a great 1971 read on Japan’s “laughing mushrooms.”)
Wildly yours,
April
PS: Speaking of mushrooms, if you haven’t joined the Mycological Association of Washington yet, this is your sign! We are bringing the fabulous Eugenia Bone to town February 2 to give a talk from her new book on psychedelic mushrooms, and we may have a keg of the mushroom beer (not that kind!) we made in the fall.
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