Happy May, food & foraging friends!

What’s more punk than the public library? Foraging.  We foragers have that anti-consumer, non-conformist thing down. We are often contrarian and like to question, if not break, the rules of life. Which is why I love me some poke.

Before we go further, I need you to put on some mood music: Tony Joe White’s Poke Sallet Annie. The reaction videos are pretty good too. I’ll wait.

Pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) is a “yes and” plant. Yes, pokeweed is poisonous, and it’s also delicious and nutritious, containing more than your recommended daily amount of vitamins C and A. Yes, it’s native, with myriad benefits for local wildlife, and it can also be a garden invader with a ginormous taproot you may fight your whole gardening existence.

I use pokeweed in my classes in contrast to the easy peasy dandelion, whose parts are all edible, all the time, raw or cooked. Pokeweed makes you ask all the questions: When can it be harvested? What parts are edible? And how do you need to cook it? With poke, those are all questions easier asked than answered.

If you look up 10 articles on how to harvest and prepare pokeweed, you’ll get 10 different answers. Some just don’t recommend it, others say to harvest at a certain size, yet others will say before the stalks redden or you have to peel it. This video is among the best I’ve found on the topic, and breaks down a lot of myths about the plant. Check out Alan Bergo’s cooking guide here too.

There is a distinction between deadly eats and merely poisonous. Fugu (pufferfish) kills at least a few people every year via improper preparation, whereas in this observational study looking at thousands of cases in Kentucky of people, largely toddlers, accidentally ingesting pokeweed (and often the decidedly more toxic berries), not a single case was fatal. There have been one or two fatalities reported in the past few hundred years, one being questionable, but again, that is against a backdrop of entire Southern communities relying on the plant for a traditional food source.  Meanwhile, contaminated lettuce killed at least one poor soul last month alone, and no one goes around putting a skull and crossbones on it.

By all means, we need to respect traditional plant knowledge, and the plant itself, which in this case does contain poisonous toxins that need to be removed through a careful preparation process. But as punk rock foragers, we can think critically and do the research before deciding to throw the baby out (pokeweed shoots and leaves, pre-flowering stage) with the bathwater (roots, flowers, stems and berries, where the toxic saponins are concentrated). And when we do that research, we discover that this plant was actually canned and commercialized until the turn of this century, and is the star of folk festivals that still continue to serve poke to the public.

Pokeweed sometimes gets labeled a “poverty food,” eaten by families like Annie’s (you listened to that song at the top, right?) when the cupboards run bare. My experience with pokeweed to date has been of it being a food I’d rather leave than take, just not a flavor profile that really did it for me.

This month, when pokeweed popped up again in my community garden bed, I decided to give it another try. My chosen cooking method for a rough chop of leaves and stalks, partially peeled: one change of water with around 7 minutes’ vigorous boil in between (ie, a total of roughly 15 minutes boil), then sautéing in miso butter, a riff off a Marie Viljoen recipe. I mentioned 10 out of 10 conflicting poke prep opinions – Marie, whom I know personally and trust, swears by a quick one-minute boil. This simple preparation yielded a smooth buttery texture, without feeling mushy. It tasted like part spinach, part asparagus. A real Southern comfort!