Urban Foraging

Flirting with the life of a hunter/gatherer in Los Angeles.
by L.J. Williamson

Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is one of those books that will get under your skin. Unlike the many other “Here’s what you should and shouldn’t be eating” books that seem informed by belief systems first and research second, Pollan takes readers on a expedition to the deepest roots of the American food chain. Normally I despise having my consciousness raised, but I was suddenly stricken by an intense desire to have a closer relationship with my food; a relationship that went beyond just shoving it into my cart and my craw.

Choosing grass-fed beef and locally, sustainably produced foods was just the beginning. Would I, a highly domesticated urbanite, also be able to procure my own food from the source? Could I live as a city girl and as a hunter/gatherer? I needed to reconcile my back-to-the-land food fantasies with the fact that I live in the middle of the tar-paved sprawl that is Los Angeles. So I worked to create a new archetype: The Urban Forager.

My first stop: Whole Foods, where I hunted the aisles and gathered some free samples of bread, cheese, olives, orange and apple slices without giving a dime to the food-industrial complex. So far, this was easy! (If only they gave out samples of wine, I sighed, and made a mental note to attend more art openings.)

The harvest I reaped was bountiful, but it wasn’t the communing-with-nature, off-the-grid eating experience I was looking for. So I made for a more fertile hunting ground: the Internet. There, on the message board of FallenFruit.org—a web site devoted to mapping L.A.’s many neighborhood fruit trees—I found this shocking entry:

“Soon I will have more avocados than I know what to do with… you can use avocado for facials and hair conditioner. Just mash and apply.”

The thought of people mashing something that delicious, caloric and expensive onto their faces was astonishing, yet it was happening right in my own backyard. Neighborhood fruit trees present a wealth of calories for the urban forager, as well as a wealth of opportunities to enrage your neighbors if you don’t approach it right. During my search, one man cheerfully handed me a bag of exquisite apricots from his yard as he indignantly told me about the nervy poachers who once leaned a ladder against his fence and picked his tree clean. That he was happy to share his apricots with me and appalled at the idea of letting them be taken by strangers was telling. Asking permission—or operating under cover of darkness—is the safest approach.

I’d had appetizers at Whole Foods, obtained a dessert of apricots and figs, but my meal was still missing a few courses. Enter Christopher Nyerges with the salad. Nyerges, a Pasadena resident, leads weekly nature walks in the Arroyo Seco area where he teaches survival skills like fire-making and edible plant gathering. He gave me a long list of edible plants that can be found in almost any vacant lot in town: Lambsquarter, Mallow and Sowthistle (a tall version of Dandelion) are among the most common; also easy to find are epazote, filaree, purslane, sweet alyssum, mustard, fennel, plantain, Russian thistle, oxalis (a clover look-alike) and black nightshade, which has a tomato-like fruit. Lambsquarter is especially prolific, and can be used cooked or raw anywhere you might use spinach.

But you don’t need much taxonomical knowledge to know when you’ve caught a living creature. If he were in a survival situation, Nyerges said, he wouldn’t bother with hunting but would instead choose the more “low tech” option of snaring and trapping the abundant small animals in L.A. neighborhoods. Fortunately, the edition of The Joy of Cooking in my kitchen cabinet has, on page 514, gripping illustrations of the proper way to skin a squirrel. They make it look as easy as slipping off a sweater. Joy also provides tips on how to prepare small birds, raccoon, and opossum (a dish best accompanied by turnip greens, it turns out).

As a dedicated flesh-eater, I felt compelled to, at least one time, eat something I had killed myself. To “pay the full karmic price” for a meal, as Pollan puts it. I considered a quail and dove hunt in Frasier Park, until I learned that hunting season isn’t until fall. Phew. That left fishing. And worms. And hooks. And fish guts.

I’ve been fishing on several occasions, but rarely caught anything. I’m usually relieved that I don’t have to wrap up a pleasant day on the water by plunging a knife into the belly of a large, cold-blooded animal. Then I had it: I’d do a grunion run! On a grunion run, there’d be no equipment to deal with; no rods, no bait, no hooks. It would be easy, as, say, shooting fish in a barrel. But minus the gun. And the barrel.

If fishing is like hunting, then a grunion run is more like gathering, with a touch of voyeurism thrown in for spice. I wasn’t sure I wanted to touch a slimy fish with my bare hands, so I brought my Playtex Living gloves, thinking they would make things a bit easier. They didn’t. Because if you’re the kind of girl who can’t take the way the worm flails in response to having a barbed hook stuck through it, then grunion running is no solution to your problem. Grunion are a lot more muscular than worms, and their powerful writhing sent me cringing and squealing like a cartoon housewife who’s just seen a mouse. But I knew I couldn’t go home empty-bucketed, so I kept trying to work up the nerve to grab a grunion. I never did, but I realized that if you hold your bucket downstream from them when they tried to flip themselves back into the ocean, they’d instead flip themselves right into your bucket. Wily they ain’t.

Gradually, as the fish in my dry bucket flailed less and less and finally stopped, I was obligated to eat them. Gutting them wasn’t as bad as I imagined because they were so small, and the second their heads were gone, they looked a lot less like animals and a lot more like food. I plunged them into hot oil, salted them and drained them on a paper towel. I’d been so simultaneously fascinated and grossed out by these fish on the beach, and now I was putting one of them in my mouth. Slowly, hesitatingly, I took a bite. It tasted like a piece of fried fish. Nothing more, nothing less. I took another bite. And another. I ate the whole fish. And another whole fish. And then I was done. I’d accomplished my goal of killing my own meal in the city, and now that it was well past 1:00 a.m., it was time to wander back to my neighborhood. I had some fruit picking to do. LAA