Looking Down: Urban Foraging and Historic Preservation

I’m a preservationist, an architectural historian by education and training and a lover of good buildings. By good, I mean interesting. By interesting, I mean provocative, generating curiosity and further research. For an architectural historian, “further research” may involve breaking and entering, that is, snooping around superficially abandoned buildings. Those of us who like to do this tell ourselves it’s fine. It can be like forensic vigilante history, and feels a little dangerous, even when investigation is a part of paid work.

Recent fire damage. Unheated, unventilated attics with unknown historic treasures and structural system insights. Large creepy historic industrial sites with great reuse potential. Natural disaster-damaged heartbreaks. Part of historic preservation is seeing through scary and envisioning amazing. We like challenges. We’re curious.

The impulse to find edible wild things in the city fits into this line of thinking. Or at least for me, at least in the beginning. I tend to look ahead, around, and up. I size up a building (nice cornice, good brickwork, lots of integrity, etc) and make judgments. Until recently, I’ve considered wild things weeds, something someone needs to take care of. Wild plants = neglect.

While this is often true, it isn’t the entire story. And stories are the life blood of the field, after all. I’ve found many stories about these wild things. Encyclopedias, field guides, web sites and blogs are dedicated to the topic, and many of this include the history of wild plant uses.

Chickweed is a good example. I’d never eaten it until I started research urban foraging. I am fairly picky about greens and found these above average. I later read that chickweed got its name because poultry like it. The English used to call it ‘hen’s inheritance.’ It resists the cold, so its been a winter green as far back as classical Greek and Roman times. It was also popular in ancient Japan. It grows wild in temperate regions all over the world. Now I look around for it everywhere, especially where my preservationist eyes tend to wander.

Interest in urban foraging tracks with urbanists’ reevaluation of solutions for good living in our cities. Euell Gibbons’ Stalking the Wild Asparagus was first published in 1962 and sparked interest in looking for natural food everywhere, even in vacant lots. Gibbons was a late night talk show regular. In the 1960s, vacant lots in most American cities were a lot scarier than they are today for a lot of reasons. While today, urban foraging seems a little contrary, within the context of American urban history in the 1960s and early 70s, recommending people eat wild plants in urban vacant lots seems downright revolutionary.

Both foragers and the historic preservation vanguard reasserted the value of what existed, the value of variety, and the importance of seeing through conventions.

I’ve spoken to a number of people who forage. We fall into a handful of potentially-overlapping categories. We forage because: we’re short on cash or enjoy the economy of free found food; we like diversity in our diet (In The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging and Love, “Susan Allport notes that of the approximately 50,000 edible species of plants in the world … the average American eats only 30.”); we believe in gleaning what is available and not wasting food opportunities; our cultural tradition or “foodways” include wild edible plants; we learned from our parents; we are into making statements about the food we eat and/or our urban environments; we are connected to nature everywhere; we are creative cooks; and/or we are simply curious.

I fall into the last category more than any of the others. I take great pleasure in seeing the outline of an oak leaf on the sidewalk and knowing what acorns from that particular variety of oak taste like, or what acorns roasting smell like, or all the different ways acorns have been processed into iconic dishes. It’s similar to the satisfaction I take in correctly dating a building based on visual cues. But unlike visual history work, this natural education taps smell and taste to make sense of things.

Combining foraging with historic preservation has also deepened my connection to other foragers who bring unique perspective to the experience. Walking with others, new friends who know more than me, or equally curious loved ones makes looking down that much more rewarding.