Roadside Wild Vegetables: To Forage or Not to Forage?
Foodthink Says
In recent years, wild vegetables and wild mushrooms have become ever more fashionable. Not only are premium-priced foraged greens and fungi now appearing in supermarkets, wet markets and online fresh-food platforms, but “wild foraging” — the trendy term for picking wild vegetables and mushrooms out in the countryside — has swept through younger crowds, with quite a few tour operators riding the wave to offer “wild foraging” tour groups.
On the one hand, wild vegetables and mushrooms are highly sought after as pure, natural, pollution-free foods; on the other, stories of people being rushed to hospital after eating them appear all too regularly. Is it actually safe to dig up wild vegetables from urban green spaces for the kitchen? Where do the wild vegetables and mushrooms sold on the market and online really come from? Are wild vegetables and wild mushrooms genuinely healthier and more nutritious? Are matsutake’s much-vaunted “mysterious health benefits” credible? And what kind of natural history and nature education do we really need?
Recently, Foodthink and Tencent Science Channel’s programme Species on the Dining Table brought together four guests — a fellow farmer, a natural history writer, an anthropologist and an ecologist — for a chat about all the ins and outs of foraged food. For our earlier discussion on the biodiversity of wild vegetables and wild mushrooms, please see our previous issue, “All Green Is Vegetable, All That Moves Is Meat”.
Roundtable Guests
I. From Beijing to Canada: A Farm That Lets the Wild Grow
Sun Shan: I grew up in Beijing, and one childhood memory closely tied to wild vegetables is going out with my mum to dig up shepherd’s purse. We would bring it home, wrap it into dumplings, and the flavour was simply wonderful. I imagine quite a few of us born in the 1970s who grew up in northern China will have had much the same experience. Looking back now, digging wild vegetables is actually quite hard work — especially shepherd’s purse, which carries so much soil that you have to wash it bit by bit. And even after all that washing, you might still crunch on a grain of sand while eating.
Sun Shan: When I grew up, I studied ecology and went on to work in biodiversity conservation and biomedical research, but I had far fewer hands-on chances to go out and forage for wild vegetables the way I did as a child. It wasn’t until ten years ago, when I became a farmer, that I began growing vegetables in my own garden. Part of what we do is cultivate ordinary crops, but a defining feature of our ecological garden is that we let it grow wild — we allow the plants that farmers would usually call weeds to thrive, and a great many of those so-called weeds are wild vegetables we can actually eat. Take the nettles that have just sprung up this season, for instance — I absolutely love them. In truth, they’re a wonderfully nutritious vegetable too.
II. Is It Safe to Forage for Wild Vegetables in the City?
Tan Lingdi: I feel that digging wild vegetables and eating them is a way of forging a connection with nature and appreciating biodiversity. So when I see someone out foraging, as an environmental educator, I’m genuinely pleased.
Of course, cities vary from area to area. If it’s somewhere wilder with few people around, you can follow the principles of sustainable foraging — that is, there may be plenty of wild vegetables there, but you only take a very small amount, so the wild ecosystem is not affected.
In public green spaces where there are lots of people — Beijing’s Olympic Forest Park, for example — please don’t dig. For one thing, the Olympic Forest Park doesn’t permit it. For another, I think wild vegetables serve more than just a culinary function; they have ornamental value too, and for other plants and animals they may be an important food source. So in places where people congregate, please leave a little for others to admire, and leave some for the wildlife.
Then there’s another situation: if you dig in a managed space, what you find may actually have been planted by someone. So before you start digging, I think it’s worth checking whether you’re inside the boundaries of urban green-space management, or whether it’s somewhere crowded with people, or someone’s private land. In those places, please leave well alone.
The most important thing of all is not to pick anything poisonous. If you don’t recognise a plant, absolutely don’t touch it. When designing plantings for urban green spaces, many landscape architects actually try deliberately to avoid plants that are edible, while also steering clear of anything dangerously toxic — partly because they’re afraid you might dig it up and eat it, and partly because they’re afraid you might get poisoned doing so and hold them responsible.
As ecological conservation practitioners, from a biodiversity standpoint we certainly hope urban green spaces would use fewer insecticides and herbicides. But people actually have expectations of urban green spaces that far exceed what they can deliver naturally — we can’t tolerate any pest or disease, or we demand that one single species forms all the avenue trees, or creates a sea of flowers, or a perfectly neat lawn. If you let plants grow freely, none of that is achievable. So in practice, pesticide use — both insecticides and herbicides — remains widespread in urban green spaces. The pesticides used in cities are mainly of low toxicity, and generally quite mild, but they are certainly not meant to be eaten. It’s best not to take the risk.
III. I Was Poisoned Eating Wild Vegetables
Li Ruijun: Whenever people hear that I study wild mushrooms, many friends ask me whether I’ve ever been poisoned. I used to joke, “I’ve never been poisoned, but I’ve been toeing the line right on the edge of poisoning, round and round.”
Then last year, I actually did get poisoned by eating wild vegetables. It was broom blossoms — those yellow flowers from the legume family that we eat all the time. You can simmer them in soup or fry them with eggs. My whole family loves them, and every year, as soon as broom blossoms come to market, we buy some. Because we’ve all been eating them for years without a problem, a lot of people assume they’re completely harmless. Well, last year I poisoned myself. I probably ate a bit too much — an overdose, really. I felt dizzy and nauseous, my heart started racing, because broom blossoms do carry a mild toxicity. But none of my family thought it was anything much, and in the end I just lay down for an afternoon and the symptoms passed. So, you really do need to be cautious with wild vegetables. We so easily file the things we eat regularly under “no risk”, but quite a few wild vegetables still carry a genuine dietary risk.
IV. Foraging for Wild Vegetables on Campus to Treat Constipation in a Time of Crisis
Li Ruijun: It was actually quite a funny episode. During the Shanghai lockdown, a few friends and I were living in the school’s offices. Conditions were such that every day we ate the same few things, with very little fresh vegetable. And so, something very embarrassing happened — we all got constipated. I’m someone who never gets constipated, and yet even I couldn’t escape it, probably because we simply weren’t eating enough vegetables each day.
To eat more greens and sort out the constipation, my Yunnanese instincts kicked in, and I thought I’d head into the school’s green spaces to find some wild vegetables that could cool me down. I found quite a lot of dandelions. At first I was a bit wary, because the groundskeepers sometimes spray pesticides or spread fertiliser there. So initially I only dug up some dandelion roots, washed them clean, dried them in the sun, and used them to brew an infusion to drink.
Li Ruijun: At that time the school was almost deserted, and nobody was watching. The lawns that were normally kept neat were overrun with wild grass growing like mad. My constipation was getting worse and worse, so I decided I had to find something green to eat. Eventually I discovered a great deal of wild Indian aster along the river running through campus — very plump and tender. That river is actually right beside one of the department laboratories at our school, so I was a little uneasy about it. But the situation was too extraordinary — eat or stay constipated — so in the end I ate it anyway. I knew from experience that the risk of poisoning is really dose-dependent, so I’d forage a small amount by the river each day and keep my portions modest.
Li Ruijun: The school was in complete shutdown mode, and social time seemed to have ground to a halt, which made my own biological clock all the more pronounced. I had never been so acutely aware of phenology — after Qingming came Grain Rain, and the growth of all living things was perfectly in step with the solar terms. And so, whatever wild vegetable was coming up, I started foraging for exactly that.
By mid-April, when I began eating Indian aster, it was still very tender. I’d pick it, blanch it, toss it in a cold dressing or simply boil it into soup — every way was a delight. From then on I was hooked, scouring the entire campus for anything else edible. By that point the shepherd’s purse had already gone tough, and the lucerne had flowered and gone stringy. Then I spotted white and purple blossoms among the flower beds — wild vetch — and I knew it was certainly edible, so I treated it like pea shoots. But within two or three days, it too had gone too far past tender.
Li Ruijun: What helped me most during those weeks was a plant-ID app. I was also genuinely rather fearless — I’d see something, run it through the app, then scroll straight down to the last line to check whether it was edible or not. If edible, I’d pull it up, taste it first, and if the flavour was all right, take it home and look up how to cook it. Over time, I also found and ate wild onion, Chinese toon, Nostoc and bamboo shoots around the school. For the first time, I felt a completely different kind of taste sensation strike me — the sheer freshness of spring.
V. Cultivated “Wild Vegetables” Are Gaining Ground
We also find that many things we once assumed were wild have now become cultivated. Banxia, have you noticed this phenomenon in Yunnan’s markets? How do you view it?
Banxia: In Yunnan there is a saying — shān máo yěcài, “mountain treasures and wild greens.” Shān means mountain delicacies, máo means wild grass, and together they refer to things that grow entirely untended. But even those are becoming gradually tamed. As early as November I can already buy Chinese toon shipped in from Xishuangbanna. But to my palate the Chinese toon that comes all the way from Xishuangbanna does not taste quite the same as the kind that grows on trees in the villages around Kunming. At present, Yunnan is vigorously developing its under-forest economy, and more and more of these things are being cultivated. Nowadays even termite mushrooms and lingzhi can be grown artificially — so much so for the woody wild vegetables. Plants like huolian greens and Liangwang tea are all emerging woody vegetables, and most of what you see in shops and at market stalls is cultivated stock.
Banxia: Cultivated wild vegetables are multiplying fast. If you want truly wild, authentic foraged greens, my advice is not to buy them from the big markets. At weekends I head to Yi villages around Kunming to pick things up. I tasted hairy vetch shoots for the very first time at one of these rural street markets. For instance, in the market there are both wild and semi-domesticated shepherd’s purse, and it is always the wild variety that tastes richer, more intense. I think when we eat wild vegetables, the whole point is exactly that — the fullness of flavour.
Banxia: At present the most expensive wild vegetable in Yunnan is bamboo-leaf vegetable, a member of the lily family. A market vendor recommended it to me — I had never seen it before. From a distance it looks rather like a tiny bamboo shoot, and the leaves resemble bamboo leaves. Foraging for bamboo-leaf vegetable is extraordinarily demanding: its habitat conditions are very strict, and it only grows above the 2,800-metre snow line. Because it goes woody and tough so quickly, it needs a very strong cold-chain logistics operation to get it to market. Harvesters, racing against the clock, often have to head into the mountains by torchlight while it is still dark. But because the margins on bamboo-leaf vegetable are high, whether people will one day recreate or simulate the right conditions to grow it — well, who can say.
Now that the under-forest economy is in full swing, everyone is investing in research and cultivation. My father is a true devotee of China’s edible fungi. In the early 1980s he subscribed to the journal Edible Fungi of China — quite possibly the only person on the whole mining site to do so. Back in the 1970s we already ate matsutake at home. My father once bought a book called Edible Fungi of Yunnan that had colour plates in it; he identified matsutake from one of those illustrations and the accompanying text. At that time no one was buying matsutake for export, and where we lived everyone simply called it da huā jùn, “big-flower fungus,” because once the cap cracked open, the markings looked just like a flower. Once my father was confident that da huā jùn was indeed matsutake, he told the children in the mountain villages: if you find one of these, bring it to our house. We ate it for years — terribly cheap, five fēn for a big cap. Then, after I finished my studies and came back home, we never saw it again. My father told me people had already started buying them up.
Li Ruijun: Whether a food is healthy or natural is, in truth, a concept we impose on it; it reflects how we perceive our environment. Take the termite mushroom, for instance. It has a symbiotic relationship with termites and can only grow on termite nests. So everyone assumes it must be a precious, untouched thing — surely no one could tamper with it, no one would spray pesticides on it, so it must be purely natural and wholesome. But termite mushrooms can actually be cultivated artificially. Though commercial-scale production has not yet been achieved, successful trials have already been completed.
Another species that has been successfully domesticated is the black-capped “termite mushroom.” It is a fungus in the genus Oudemansiella, a saprotrophic species that grows on decaying matter — entirely different from the termite mushroom proper, which is a symbiotic member of Termitomyces. Yet on the market, the black-capped “termite mushroom” has happily absorbed all the consumers’ romantic imaginings of the termite mushroom — natural, healthy — and sells extremely well.
VI. Nature Education Begins at the Dining Table
Banxia: Liu Huajie, a leading advocate of natural history culture in China, once unpacked the meaning of BOWU — the Chinese word for natural history — through four English words: “Beauty” (there is great beauty in the natural world), “Observation” (careful looking, recording, classifying and inquiry), “Wonder” (a childlike sense of amazement — all things are miracles), and “Understanding” (seeking to comprehend, and coexisting sustainably).
Recently he offered a revised take. The B became body — your physical self — because we are increasingly discovering that nature can heal us; so the body matters, health matters, and stepping into the outdoors is a wholesome way to live. The O became open — opening the body, opening the mind. The W became wild — wildness. And the U became usually — ordinary, everyday.
Banxia: What is natural history, then? Whatever stirs your interest in the living world, you go and learn about it, observe it, classify it, describe it, and ultimately invest your feelings in it. It means you carry an emotional bond with nature. I am myself an independent volunteer for ecological conservation and biodiversity protection. When apple snails invaded Yunnan’s Fuxian Lake and Erhai Lake, I used my own media channels to call for a people’s war against unwelcome invasive species. Eventually the local government issued an official notice, publicly “declaring war” on the apple snails.
This article first appeared in Tencent News’s programme Yi Qilai Laoke (Science Chat)
Reprinted on Foodthink’s WeChat official account by permission
Transcript by: Muye
Edited by: Tianle