Recognize Your Food

This is an exciting time of year. Just as so many of us are shivering under our down comforters wishing we didn't have to get up and meet the cold winter air for another day, there is all kinds of life waking up outside, beyond our sight. Unless you're looking for it, how would you see this little plant here that isn't even an inch tall and is still hidden by the brown dead uncleared summer growth? But even more interesting to me is: how many of you can tell me what this little specimen will grow up to be?

When I spy unfurling fronds and delicate tender new seedlings I feel the same kind of excitement that I feel when looking at a new human baby, still covered with animal down and wrinkled from it's trip through another dark body. My heart rate quickens and all the chemicals that signal me to protect make me immediately value the very fragile nature of this new being.

Yep, even though it's a plant. More twisted still? I have these feelings for plants I know I'm going to eat. This little bit of green, this emerging bit of downy green is something I will add mostly to quiches later in the spring. Know what it is?

The next three pictures are all the same thing. Do you know what this will grow up to be? Can you imagine how I will prepare this thing in the kitchen? Can you taste it in your mouth right now?

Do you recognize this plant that yields (hopefully) tender matter to be roasted and sprinkled with salt and pepper? I think it's funny how so few people know what their food looks like at different stages of it's life cycle. We mostly know it right before it gets to our plate.

For me that's what's wonderful about gardening: getting to know your food from seed to plate. From root to roasted pan of earthy dinner. I love it when I can recognize herbs in the wild and spot vegetables growing in funny places. It was complete love at first sight when, in my old neighborhood, I discovered that the streets were suddenly covered in real walnuts...edible, free, nuts. I gathered them like an overexcited chipmunk. What a surprise to find so many of them, right there at my feet. Everywhere. Every year we lived there I gathered enough to get us through a whole year of walnut eating.

Finding wild berries is such a bonus too. Or a rogue plum tree. Finding sage or mallow feels like spotting treasure. How many of us could survive by scavenging food in the wild if we had to?* How many of us can recognize wild leeks or know which mushrooms are edible?

Maybe we don't really need to. But doesn't it seem like the kind of thing everyone should know? Or shouldn't most of us at least be able to recognize the food we bring to our table when it's still in the field or the garden?

We scorn people who don't know where Israel is on a map and don't know you can't drive there from here. Well, we do, anyway.

Recognizing food and herbs at different stages of development seems way more elemental and basic than knowing where a country is on the globe thousands of miles away.

Next up? My good friend Nicole is going to show me where to find nettle and what to do with it.