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Puffball season is nearing its end, but some Quebecers will be eating their mushroom for daysMélanie Greffard and her husband usually head out to a nearby forest or the Eastern Townships to forage for mushrooms. So the pair had quite the surprise when they stumbled upon a Calvatia gigantea — a giant puffball the size of two basketballs in their backyard near downtown Quebec City last week. It weighed in at nearly six kilograms. "At first, it's almost kind of scary, like, 'What is this thing?'" Greffard said, laughing. "We were really impressed with how big it was." Giant...

Instead of bok choy, one woman opts for a weedy plant called amaranth. In fact, she has an entire list of edible weeds. Gaye Chan is into what’s known as urban foraging. The University of Hawaii at Manoa professor picks plants we see as unsightly weeds and adds them to her daily diet. “I started doing research on it and realized the things I had been yanking out for years, cursing them, are actually edible and delicious,” she said. Instead of bok choy, Chan opts for the weedy plant called amaranth. In fact, she has an entire list of edible...

Chefs and home cooks alike are renewing their passion for humanity’s oldest culinary pursuit.Danny Childs is offering pawpaws to a surprised couple in a park on an early afternoon in suburban New Jersey. "They're like a mix between a banana and a mango," he explains. "You just rip the skin open and eat the flesh." He demonstrates how by slurping the tender insides and handing each person one of the peanut-shaped fruits from his basket. They take them, dubious at first, their hesitancy quickly melting away as they take a taste, emboldened by his enthusiasm. Childs is used to this...

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain has taken a lot of flak for his assertion that "Americans should stop whining about supply chain problems and inflation" and his suggestion that "they could forage through dumpsters for edible food." This week a woman going by the name "Dumpster Diving Freegan" boasted she found $1,000 of free food in the trash bin behind a Whole Foods Market. In her post to Tik Tok she explained that "everything was still packaged and unopened and nothing was past its use by date – and it was all just one day's worth of waste."...

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain voiced his "impatience with complaints about rising prices for food, gasoline, and other stuff. The fact is the American people spend too much on a lot of junk. This behavior is only possible because they have more money than they really need to survive. Billions of people around the world live on just a few dollars a day." "How can they do this?" Klain rhetorically asked. "Well, they don't own expensive gadgets like most people in America do. They don't own motor vehicles. They do most of their traveling on foot to destinations...

"Wildman Steve Brill" served the audience dandelions, chickweed and onion grass during his presentation on edible weeds at the Scarsdale Public Library on March 31. Steve Brill has been foraging, or gathering wild foods, for over 35 years. Early on he was arrested and handcuffed by undercover park rangers for eating a dandelion in Central Park. Subsequently, after his educating the New York City Parks Department, they hired him to give public foraging tours in Central Park. We dipped corn chips into a delightful pesto made with garlic mustard. Garlic mustard (scientific name Alliaria petiolata) came from Europe and parts...

My wife and I went semi-nomadic in 2010, traveling the mountain West for almost two years. Not having a settled home was eye-opening, and taught me a lot about one of my perennial themes: how much humans lost when we became domesticated by agriculture. For a committed permaculturist to give up a home and yard seems almost hypocritical, since a core tenet of permaculture is to deeply know a place and community. But our nomadic yen was strong. We were ready to leave the buzz of Portland, and in that fiercely Greened city I was feeling redundant. Yet no other...

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...

For anyone who is hungry or eating poorly, I have a secret to share. Here is some advice for those who are hungry: My partner and I don't have enough money to eat well and neither do our friends. But we have a little secret I'd like to share with you--on one condition--you have to share the food you find with others and also use good judgment. This works best if you live in a suburb or a small city. (Those in NYC and LA might want to ignore this advice.) I live in a city of about a million...

On September 19, 1997, the New York Times announced the discovery of a group of earthen mounds in northeastern Louisiana. The site, known as Watson Brake, includes 11 mounds 26 feet high linked by low ridges into an oval 916 feet long. What is remarkable about this massive complex is that it was built around 3400 B.C., more than 3,000 years before the development of farming communities in eastern North America, by hunter-gatherers, at least partly mobile, who visited the site each spring and summer to fish, hunt, and collect freshwater mussels... Social complexity cannot exist unless I it...