Christopher Nyerges picks white sage on a class hike in Hahamongna Watershed Park in Pasadena. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
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Posted on 07/31/2010 1:49:49 PM PDT by thecodont
On an overcast Saturday morning, Christopher Nyerges — the head of Eagle Rock's School of Self-Reliance — gingerly skirts a feral clump of bright green weeds.
"Always watch where you're stepping 'cause you might be stepping on our lunch," he says to the 17 students following him. Resembling troops in an outdoorsy New Age army, the group wanders through Pasadena's Hahamongna Watershed Park, scouring the dirt hills, shallow valleys and parched riverbeds of the land for edible plants as part of a wild food outing that Nyerges regularly teaches.
Nyerges knows what most urbanites don't: that food is in the eye of the beholder. He scans the foliage around him with sharp, knowing eyes, recognizing the shape and veins of a leaf; the texture of bark on a tree; the color of a berry; the gentle slope of a stem crowned with flowers. It's all salad to him.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Christopher Nyerges picks white sage on a class hike in Hahamongna Watershed Park in Pasadena. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
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Free, my ass. You can drop a lot of money hunting legally.
Ping.
I did Nyerges’s class once. It was OK.
And if you live by the freeway, it's even ...well, free-er.
Who is Jess Gelt?
Preparedness/Survival ping!
I hope he takes more time than he needs to, when telling them about the free mushrooms they find, and the dangers in sampling them.
It seems to me a good supplement but man does not live by wild salad alone.
Any foragers out there who find differently? Are you able to forage enough to actually live on?
If the SHTF.....foragers might live a little longer but those in the cities won’t have much to forage on after a month.....BUT, it would reduce the OVERWEIGHT problem in the U.S.
No doubt - I read the hunting/sports catalogs a lot. You can drop a ton of dough on those toys. You probably don't need 90% of them, but they are SO cool - LOL!
If you don't like "wild salad" you can always find a good "public" fruit tree.
http://www.fallenfruit.org/index.php/about/
FALLEN FRUIT
Using fruit as our lens, Fallen Fruit investigates urban space, ideas of neighborhood and new forms of located citizenship and community. From protests to proposals for new urban green spaces, we aim to reconfigure the relation between those who have resources and those who do not, to examine the nature of & in the city, and to investigate new, shared forms of land use and property. Fallen Fruit is an art collaboration that began with creating maps of public fruit: the fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles.
Over time our interests have expanded from mapping public fruit to include Public Fruit Jams in which we invite the citizens to bring homegrown or public fruit and join in communal jam-making; Nocturnal Fruit Forages, nighttime neighborhood fruit tours; Community Fruit Tree Plantings on the margins of private property and in community gardens; Public Fruit Park proposals in Hollywood, Los Feliz and downtown LA; and Neighborhood Infusions, taking the fruit found on one street and infusing it in alcohol to capture the spirit of the place.
and
http://forageoaklandmanifesto.blogspot.com/
Forage Oakland is a project that- at its core- works to address how we eat everyday, and how everyone can benefit from viewing their neighborhood as a veritable edible map, considering what is cultivated in any given neighborhood and why, and what histories influence those choices. The gleaning of unharvested fruits; the meeting of new neighbors; the joy of the season's first hachiya persimmon (straight from your neighbor's backyard, no less); the gathering and redistribution of fruits that would otherwise be wasted- can be powerful and can work to create a new paradigm around how we presently think about food in our collective consciousness. Imagine gathering several friends for morning, midday, evening or weekend foraged city bicycle rides through your neighborhood. Rough maps are drawn, noting the forage-ables that can be found at each location and 'cold calls' are made to your neighbors asking if you can sample a fruit from their backyard tree. You have the courage to introduce yourself (despite the pervasiveness and acceptance of urban anomie) and they reward your neighborliness with a sample of Santa Rosa plums, for example. Later, when you find yourself with a surplus of Persian mulberries, you- in turn- deliver a small basket to said neighbor. With time and in this fashion, a community of people who care for and know one another is built, and rather than being the exception, this could be the norm. This is not idealistic, rather it is necessary, pragmatic, and creative-- especially in times when much of the world is suffering from lack of access to healthful and satisfying fresh food. Forage Oakland is a project that works to construct a new model-- and is one of many neighborhood projects that will eventually create a network of local resources that address the need and desire for neighborhoods to be more self-sustaining in meeting their food needs.
This project is about viewing food as a shared pleasure and a shared resource, redistributing it to those who will enjoy it. Invite your neighbors to exchange their surplus peaches for their neighbor's surplus blackberries. Fruit baskets are left on doorsteps: apples by the pound, Santa Rosa plums, sour cherries, persimmons, pineapple guava, and apricots. New associations are formed, and new geographies are created. The street corner where Ashby Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way meet is no longer marked by its corner store, rather it is defined by the prolific fig tree on the northeast corner. Encourage your neighbors to share their backyard bounty and barter what they don't intend to use. Hop on your bicycle and redistribute the surplus to another neighbor, making a note of the location of the harvested bounty. An edible landscape can be formed that is interactive, a bit different every day as fruit ripens and falls and as the seasons change. The barter can translate to other areas of urban living, and can create a community of people who'd rather do it for themselves and play an active role in their consumerism. When there are plums in your neighbor's backyard, enjoy them with your neighbor.
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This is another weird political estuary: where the survivalists and preppers meet the "freegans" and environmentalists.
I’d love to take a hike with a guy like this.
Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he spends a fortune on rod, reel, tackle, tackle boxes, depth finders, charts, boats, air fair, hotel rooms, guides, fishing magazines . . . :P
Teach a man to fish and he’ll sit in your boat and drink beer all day.
You *can* drop a lot of money on anything. But a hunting license with an upland bird stamp costs you something like $45/yr, and you don't have to have very expensive gear to hunt. In fact my own house hunted three quails yesterday and today, by just being there while quails were flying quickly and randomly, as they love to do. I collected two of them within 30 seconds of impact, they were still hot. Plenty more are just trotting around the house; but it's too early to legally hunt them.
You probably don't need 90% of them, but they are SO cool - LOL!
Yes, and that's we buy those toys - because we like them, and we want to enjoy our days on Earth while they last. It doesn't mean that we have to have expensive electronic decoys, rifles of every caliber under the Sun, ammo for them from every manufacturer, fancy GPS, etc. etc. In need you will do well with just a stone. A simple air rifle, a can of pellets, and one bird per day will keep you alive with minimum required skills.
Watch "SurvivorMan" on TV or youtube.. he knows what to scavenge, and still goes days w/o eating.
Illegal, where I live. But I get your point, and will hunt outside the law to subsist, if necessary.
That said, Oregon is in the grips of the enviros, and hunting opportunities dwindle as fees for licenses and tags climb. Drew a doe tag this year. After four unsuccessful years, at $4.50 per application, I couldn't see not applying this year, even though they raised the fee to $8. So, now, after dumping $26 into it, I've earned the right to spend $20 on a doe tag. That's out of line, in my book.
All you can drink, too, thanks to those "truckers bombs"....
My grandma gave me a book about wild foods with several chapters written by Gibbons, With recipes that include roasted ground hog with cattail roots.
Surviving completely on wild foods would probably depend mostly on where you live, and of course your ability to identify and collect them.
http://www.wildfoodadventures.com/euellgibbons.html
Gibbons was born about one hundred years ago. That was before there was radio, television, talking films, commercially available sliced bread, antibiotics, the Vietnamese war, the Korean war, World war II, and even World war I. He died before the personal computer was invented, before Walkmans, and before Jimmy Carter was president. Euell's generation had different perceptions than we do today.
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