Never growing larger than the fingernail on our pinky finger and ranging in color for ruby red to purple, we're not completely sure if these are raspberries or unripe blackberries.
In either case, there are bushes and bushes of them along a quarter-mile stretch in a park near our house. About this time of year, we see kids and adults like huddle around them, covertly gathering handfuls as if someone might catch them.
We have to admit that we've never picked any ourselves. Why not? Read on...
Foraging for food isn't new of course. Folks have been picking greens in Central Park and gathering mushrooms outside San Francisco for years, after all!
But we've never felt comfortable doing this. It's not so much because of any social stigmas about rooting for produce in public places.
It's more about health concerns.
The raspberry (blackberry?!) bushes in our park share a border with a fairly busy roadway. Whenever we see people--especially kids--picking berries there, we can't help but imagine the noxious cloud of fumes from all those cars settling over the area, seeping into soil, roots, and eventually, the berries themselves.
The same concept goes for foraging things like dandelion greens and wild onions. Without definite information on what heavy minerals might be lurking in our urban soil, we just don't feel safe eating these things.
Of course, the argument can be made that we don't really know might be in the soil at big farms either--not to mention the pesticides and whatnot that get sprayed on a lot of our supermarket produce. And that's a big reason why we buy organic, locally-grown produce as much as possible.
What do you think: are we just being paranoid? Does anyone have experience with foraging?
P.S. For the sake of this post, we gathered our gumption and nibbled a few ripe berries ourselves. How were they? Sweet and tart, just like a berry should be. No ill-effects to report so far!
Related: How to Find a Pick-Your-Own Strawberry Farm
(Image: Emma Christensen for the Kitchn)
Copyright © 2008 Apartment Therapy
The berries pictured are unripe blackberries.
view L1bby's profile
not the same thing as a raspberry, by the way.
view L1bby's profile
Urban foraging seems to be a hot topic these days!
I'm going to be involved with a video podcast on the subject soon.
Just yesterday, Chicagomag.com linked to a story on someone who cooked oyster mushrooms that were growing in his Chicago alley.
My wife and I are big fans of the idea and have created a couple of recipes based on urban-foraged ingredients:
Lilac sorbet
http://thepleasanthouse.wordpress.com/recipes/lilac-sorbet/
Mulberry-orange muffins:
http://thepleasanthouse.wordpress.com/recipes/lilac-sorbet/
Just outside my door I have huge patches of lambs quarters, chicory, thistles and dandelions. Sunday, I found purslane growing on the sidewalk near a restaurant we were headed to.
Even if one doesn't choose to eat the produce that may be growing around them I think it is interesting to learn about it. Maybe in the future more people will become comfortable with eating the things that grow in abundance all around them.
view art's profile
link to mushroom post:
http://cakeandcommerce.typepad.com/cake_and_commerce/2008/06/foraging-for-mushrooms---in-my-chicago-alley.html
view art's profile
Those are black raspberries! We had them going wild in our backyard growing up and when we moved to Ohio my father brought cuttings with him. Here's a bit more information:
http://wildmanstevebrill.com/Plants.Folder/BlackRaspberry.html
I love them much more than red raspberries -- the taste is incredible!
view thesweetavenue's profile
When foraging it is best to avoid stuff directly at roadside for the reasons you mention. You may also want to check out what kind of spraying your city does... sometimes roadsides and parks are sprayed for weeds or pests.
You would probably enjoy Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's Cook on the Wildside series which was all about foraged food (though much of it not urban).
view angorian's profile
@thesweetanenue,
did the cuttings take well?
I too grew up picking these berries in the woods behind my house. I'm sure they must still be there in abundance (I just have to be careful not to get shot by bullet or arrow these days).
My best memory of putting them to good use was turning a huge bag of them into a quick jam and swirling it into the richest vanilla ice cream straight from the machine and into the bucket.
view art's profile
They did very well! Even just from this summer's growth, the plants themselves have gone mad.
Problem is, our area's been pretty badly hit with the honeybee problem, so most of the flowers weren't pollinated.....::sigh::
view thesweetavenue's profile
I haven't really tried foraging yet, but for anyone in the LA area, check out this very cool group, called Fallen Fruit: www.fallenfruit.org. Given the fruit-friendly climate down here, there are lots of public spaces with healthy fruit trees, and the group has maps of where the fruit trees are, gather extra fruit and donate it, and have public fruit-related events as well. They'll also help you collect extra or unwanted fruit from your own yard and donate it (I have friends with a large loquat tree; they don't like loquats and Fallen Fruit helped them out).
view jooleeyet's profile
I love foraging, and even roadside stuff if the traffic on the road is relatively low.
We harvest all sorts of weeds in our yard, and have collected almost 2 *gallons* of black raspberries so far this year. Mulberries are good too.
view samaritan's profile
We always picked blackberries around the neighborhood because they were in a very low-traffic area. And for a while we picked at the park until they started spraying there. The goal was always to get enough to make a pie, and then eat them all before we got home.
view Anne (in Reno)'s profile
Wow! fallenfruit.org, what an amazing program.
I could see this philosophy being adopted in state like FL as well.
This just made me think about lobster of all things. Lobster was once called the cockroach of the sea. It was served to prisoners as cheap food. I guess it just made me think about perceptions when it comes to food. Today, of course, we perceive lobster as a luxury in most places. Lobster is not quite sustainable but fruits and vegetables that grow all around us are. If we could change our perception about some of these "weeds" fruits and vegetables we may make some positive changes in our economy and eating habits.
view art's profile
We found wild strawberries while birdwatching through meadows in N. MN a couple of weeks ago. Yes, I ate them. I've also foraged berries off bushes while hiking in Glacier Nat'l Park.
view ah-ha's profile
I doubt you could eat enough of those berries to hurt you in a roadside fume kind of way, unless you live in the pacific northwest where the berries are really abundant. Most people take a handful of the ripest which are not so many if there are birds around. Of course people around here sit in traffic for like an hour just to get to work so maybe I have different standards.
view sally599's profile
Gosh, we forage all of the time. Mostly while hiking, but I love pulling off nasturtiums wherever (as long as they're high enough up to not have pee on them). When we're hiking, my favorite find is huckleberries, but this weekend we got some great hazlenuts. Watercress is a good one, and blackberries are in abundance, but watch out for the poison oak! I love showing my son that you don't always have to buy food, or even grow it, that it's just there naturally!
view SFGail's profile
Just a few days a go I was on a walk with my little girls and we stumbled upon some blackberry bushes. I had to restrain my 2 year old from running into the thorny thicket to shove berries in her face. They were pretty far off the beaten path (we have been inspired to take more "off-road" hikes since reading Last Child in the Woods) so I wasn't worried about them being sprayed.
view sar3j's profile
generally i would not pick and eat anything within cat-pee height... there is a tree along my walk to work that is fruiting with god knows what - i am hoping it turns into something good. right now it has a bunch of unrecognizable round green things.
view akostalas's profile
There are so many mulberry trees in New York and I'm always somewhat shocked that more people aren't out there gathering the fruit and eating it.
Back in Philly, I remember older Chinese people gathering ginkgo fruit in the fall.
I grew up stealing apples from the random apple trees on a nearby college campus, as well going into the woods and eating blackberries, raspberries, wintergreen berries, blueberries and whatever else we could find. Chew on a twig of black birch. Nibble on the shockingly robin's egg blue seeds of the touch-me-nots after removing the outer part of the seed. Suck the nectar out of honeysuckle and lilacs in the back yard.
And then there was the neighbor who planted strawberries too close to the wrought iron fence at the edge of his yard...
view sciencegeek's profile