The Community Wild Foraging Project

Modern-Day Hunter-Gatherers

Flagstaff, Arizona · By Gary Paul Nabhan and Rose Houk

Patty West and Teresa DeKoker may be the only university employees in the United States to boast job descriptions as “hunter-gatherers.” As coordinators of the country’s first community wild foraging project, they gather wild foods from farms, ranches, and public lands on the Colorado Plateau, and assess the productivity and sustainability of harvesting such foods from different patches.

Their work does not stop there, however. The two are also documenting the best ways to clean, preserve, and prepare these foods, along with finding the most effective means of marketing their harvest.

Based at Northern Arizona University(NAU) in Flagstaff, the project has a stated mission: “to support regional collectors, farmers, and foragers through a collector-consumer organization… to build enduring relationships that will nourish us with great-tasting, regionally collected, and sustainably harvested food.”
Patty West puts it in a more personal way: “Our project began almost as a dream in the winter of 2002. I realized I wanted to use my botany skills for more than esoteric research. I wanted to be involved in something that would benefit our community.”

With staff from NAU’s Center for Sustainable Environments, Patty came up with a plan to enroll Flagstaff residents as “member-shareholders” in the project. With the help of volunteers, she and Teresa roam the riparian corridors of the Verde Valley, the piñon-juniper woodlands of the mesas, and the ponderosa pine forests of the San Francisco Peaks region to locate harvestable stands of delicious, nutritious wild foods. They are always discovering innovative ways to gather and process them, and also put out a regular newsletter documenting their trials as well as their successes in finding and fixing wild foods.

Nature’s greens and fruits provide a cornucopia of food and drink. Depending on the season, something is almost always ready for picking in the region’s deserts and mountains. Foraged products include blackberry and grape leaves, plantain, yucca blossoms, pine needles, and horehound; cholla cactus buds, prickly-pear fruit, purslane, lambsquarters, mesquite beans, and amaranth; and acorns, walnuts, crabapples, and rosehips.

Teaming up with master chef Francisco Perez, Patty and Teresa held a “coming out” event in the summer of 2003 to introduce the Flagstaff community to some sophisticated dishes using locally gathered foods. The menu featured stuffed grape leaves, empañadas, pestos, and wild spinach pies. More than 200 curious folks sampled the feast and were won over by the extraordinary flavors and fragrances of the region’s native edible plants. In that summer the wild foraging project was able to tally twenty-one member households who were delighted to receive six to eight wild foodstuff deliveries each month as the bounty of the season unfolded.

Although the foods come from wild (undomesticated) native and naturalized plants, they are collected most often from “working” landscapes – the agricultural fields, hedgerows, pasturelands, orchards, and woodlots that form a large percentage of the plateau’s rural landscapes. Patty and Teresa are excited to be introduced to an organic orchardist in the Verde Valley who is thrilled to have them take all the purslane they want from between the rows. Otherwise, he’d be hoeing it out himself on a hot summer day. Private property furnishes a good harvest of prickly-pear cactus pads, and a few months later cactus fruits are collected on state land. In the fall, foragers gain permission from a private landowner to gather mesquite pods. A few trees provide pounds of beans that can be dried and milled into a protein-rich flour, which has been a staple of the diets of southwestern peoples for thousands of years.

Foraging undeniably requires a commitment to lots of manual labor. It often means down-on-hands-and-knees positions, pulling, clipping, and carefully avoiding thorns and spines. Because some of the harvested parts are perishable, a method of cooling is required. And with some financial risk involved, having subscribers pay ahead of time means the economic risk of the foraging enterprise is spread out, Patty says. The pilot project got off the ground with outside funding, but the ultimate hope, she adds, is to create an ongoing business.

Foraging wild foods carries a broader responsibility as well. Certain rules are observed, Patty explains, to assure sustainability of natural “crops.” Foragers gather only what nature can afford to supply, don’t compete with the foods wildlife need or that native people traditionally take, and harvest only fruits, leaves and other parts of plants that will regrow.

There are a host of good reasons to gather and eat foraged foods. Foraging establishes a connection with place, encourages restoration, supports local economies, reduces reliance on water and fossil fuels, protects wildlife habitat and sustains native species diversity, celebrates the region’s unique food traditions, and contributes to health. Workshops and plant walks are also part of the project’s efforts to educate consumers and would-be foragers. In the summer Patty and Teresa can be found at the Flagstaff Community Market, and they also want to publish a training manual and possibly a cookbook.

Because people are understandably challenged in preparing unfamiliar wild foods, each delivery comes with recipes that will work in any modern kitchen. Here’s one for using eggs and nopales, the green pads of prickly-pear cactus: Singe the spines off one or two cactus pads. Slice into bite-size pieces, and sauté in butter. Stir up eight eggs and add a quarter-pound of shredded cheese and the sautéed cactus pieces. Scramble it all together in a skillet and salt and pepper as desired.

Each delivery basket brings a new surprise of “old friends” – plants of our neighborhoods that we often view as common weeds. These plants remind us that the value of farms and ranchlands can be measured not only in crops sown and livestock tended, but also in habitats suitable for native plants and animals.