Le Sensorium Autumn Equinox Foraging Tour

Hunter or Gatherer? If only life choices were still that easy. Umm...Giver please...

We've come a long way from the hunt and its less glamorous friend. Up until this weekend, the foraging world was invisible to me, a part of that distant land known as romanticized exoticism, where you can also find the "greatest hits" of Africa and some heavily filtered (and perfumed) images of the Victorian era. 

I showed up to Parc Lhasa de Sela in Montreal on Saturday sans woven basket or arrowhead. Turns out everything a modern forager needs could be found in my apartment.

butter knife (for digging out roots)

sharp knife/scissors

water (to stay hydrated...how much depends on what texture you like your lips to be)

bags (for the loot)

gardening gloves
The tour, organized by Le Sensorium, took us around Montreal's Mile End. Our guide, Vanessa Waters, first began foraging at a young age with her grandmother. She opened our eyes to all the plants that grow in the city, whether planted there for aesthetic purposes or as part of a public garden. We were a mixed group from all over the world, from experienced foragers to those who were simply curious. Vanessa shared practical foraging tips, recipes, and plenty of botanical knowledge, but the tour also opened up a discussion about society's relationship to food as well as issues of food security.

We talked about how society is distancing itself from the natural origins of our food. How we're losing the foraging culture, just as we're losing thousands of languages from disuse. How so much food goes to waste because no one but the squirrels sees the greenery as a food source. How our taste buds have changed to prefer processed and sweetened foods, so that most of us would be unaccustomed to the raw taste of foraged fruits and vegetation. How foraging can be a means of attaining food security, taking advantage of a food source that goes unseen by so most, and becoming more in tune with the natural environment one lives in. I was so impressed by how knowledgeable Vanessa was about the defining traits and seasonal cycles of all the plants we came across.

For us novices, however, foraging can be quite daunting, so here are some tips I picked up along the tour.

Foraging Tips

1. Cover up! 

One thing I learned on this tour: food is everywhere! But so is itching and death.

Wear gloves, long sleeves, long pants, high boots. Flashing a bit of ankle would be ill-advised. Poison ivy is not fun, despite what Batman may have told you, and it only worsens each time you come into contact with it.

2. Be aware of your surroundings.

There it is: a whole patch of sumac bushes. Right there, beside the road. Just think of how it will taste: tangy yet sweet, with just a smoky hint of exhaust fuel. 

While plants on the side of the road are easy to get to, they are sprayed daily with car fumes and whatever else passersby leave in their wake. Try to find foraging spots that are out of the way, where there is less vehicle and pedestrian traffic. If you do find something by the road, only pick it if it's on an uphill slope.

3. Take only what you need.
It's important to remember that you are foraging in a public space, and that there are others (even if they are squirrels) who sustain themselves off the same vegetation. Leaving some of the fruit also helps to continue the growth cycle, which means you can keep coming back to the same spot later on. Vanessa's personal rule is only to take when there are 30 or more plants, and then to take 1/3 of it.



4. Rinse and repeat.
Wash what you forage, just as you would wash supermarket produce. It may be scary at first to think of all that could have contaminated what you find in the city, but as long as you are prudent about what you do pick (see #2), you can take the same precautions on your foraged goods as you do with the pesticides from supermarket produce.


Later this week I'll introduce some of the plants we came across and how you can use them in your cooking...Well guys, this is it. I'm ready for the zombie apocalypse.


#lesensorium #montrealtours&tasting #urbanforaging

Le Sensorium Autumn Equinox Foraging Tour

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Greasy Fingerprints on a Glass Case

Esmira had just written a paper on science fiction and 2001: A Space Odyssey for an English class this past semester and being in the presence of cameras makes my dopamine levels spike like Old Faithful, so we visited LACMA the other day to see the Kubrick retrospective. 

The whole way through, I was going through an internal battle between thinking of Kubrick as enigmatic cinema legend and as a guy who made movies. The exhibit lay everything before us - all evidence of the mechanisms behind the conceits - and yet enough of it remains in his mind alone that his process continues to elude us.

And that became, oddly enough, one of the flaws of the exhibit. So much of it remains in Kubrick's mind that I felt, after walking through the exhibit, like I was as much of a stranger to it all as I was when I pushed open the door. The curators relied heavily on script excerpts, correspondance, and props - all fascinating, but leaving me somehow wanting. 

A year or so ago I went to see the Tim Burton retrospective at LACMA. It felt more dynamic in a way, and I came to the conclusion it was because Burton is a very visual thinker in comparison. His imagination spilled out in a more accessible way, and even if his exact thoughts are not necessarily transmitted to the viewer their manifestation still invites personal interpretation.

I guess what this boils down to is that wild sketches hold attention better than script excerpts. I mean, I enjoyed the exhibit very much. It's just interesting to consider how and why things - even museum exhibits - work. 

Greasy Fingerprints on a Glass Case

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Spring Break in Barcelona

Driven by a vague desperation for summer, I flew to Barcelona after midterms and spent four gloriously stress-free days there. I didn't find sunshine until my last day, but it was wonderful nevertheless to let the foreignness of everything briefly sweep my worries away.

Our room at the hostel had five sets of bunk beds and a ledge at the window, five feet off the ground. We climbed up onto it and spent the first evening holed up five feet from the ground, scribbling in navy blue pocket notebooks and snapping pictures at nothing in particular, eager to document what little had happened. Come to think of it, it was something like this:

Our first night, we went to Nasty Monday and danced the night away, finally landing in our beds just before dawn. The next day, determined not to spend our vacation within the yellow walls of the hostel, we pulled ourselves out of bed and ventured into the city. 

She looks so beautiful draped in string and bathed in acidic erosion. Don't you love that humanity creates works of art in an attempt to beautify the world, but is also responsible for the destruction of that beauty?

Ah, the disembodied cherub - a reoccurring motif in European decor. 

The day brightened up significantly when we stumbled upon Happy Pills, a concept candy store. And then Casa Battlò, our first taste of Gaudi's imaginative brilliance.

Ancient Roman wall, meet tiny alleyway. 

This bizarre cross between an empty lot, construction site, and an archaeological dig was right next to the Roman wall. 

In a narrow street we came across this mask shop, with its windows full of all different kinds of puppets and masks. 

I was so pleased to see Jack Sparrow I didn't say a thing about the inaccuracies in his outfit or hair beads. Imposter.

Aside from Gaudi's architecture, my favorite thing about Barcelona was the food. We went to the same tapas place two nights in a row, which was awkward because they had the same two waiters running the place: the woman with the strong forearms (which proved to be not so strong at the end of the second night when she dropped some plates) and Paperman.  

Hello sir. Greetings! Can someone explain the shrimp with ridiculously large claws? Excuse me, I meant claw, because each shrimp had one normal size claw and then a huge one.

The waiters in this place near the Museo Picasso were so happy and they kept blasting We Are the Champions, each time louder than the next. Then one of the waitresses lost her earring on our table, and another waiter couldn't handle the calculations required to give us change. 

We played pool and foosball in the hostel game room until three in the morning. These guys have seen better days, but they don't call it armball for a reason. And culture shock of the week: a royal decree hanging in the hostel regulating the temperature and humidity in the building at different seasons. 

This boy was all over the metro, with his shirt photoshopped into two colors for use on different posters. The purpose is kind of defeated when the posters, often ten in a row, are placed right next to each other. 

On our last night, we went to the beach under the cover of fog and had fideua, serenaded by a jolly busker beneath the heat lamps while PSG played Nancy on a screen to our left. 

Spring Break in Barcelona

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Barcelona: Hilltop Wonderland

I absolutely loved Parc Guell. We hiked up other side of the hill and wandered back down through the park. Montmartre, Parc Guell...ever notice the prettiest places are always on hilltops?

Some colorful anarchy to the left of the messy sprawl of Barcelona. Let me never again refer to Los Angeles in the same way.

A grand boulevard showcasing the work of giant dung beetles. They take pride in their work. The juxtaposition of the sunshine struggling to break through the curtain of gloom and rain was beautiful. 

As we reached the top, the sunshine won and the skies finally cleared. I think rainbows are my favorite kinds of frowns. 

We spent a good half hour at the top, drinking surprisingly delicious cappucinos, watching pigeons, and noting other places we wanted to visit before our time in Europe was over in our notebooks and Museo Picasso maps.  

It was around this time that all the vendors suddenly wrapped up their goods and split to avoid arrest. This is also when I realized how clever it is to use an umbrella as a portable shop. I think for a moment I forgot I wasn't with my sisters and referred to the police as "po-po," and then all the other tourists around me started muttering "po-po," as well as an explanation for their sudden exodus. 

And then the sun came out in full force and I could feel its warmth on my face and shoulders. I squinted into the sky for the first time in too long.

This is the beauty of sunshine just after rain. 

One minute you're walking through endless greenery and the next you come across this monolith. 

I loved the surprise rocky peepholes and the black trees whose bark peeled away to reveal fiery skin underneath. 

I spy with my little eye a cat with a red collar slinking around the park. 

You almost expect a tiny person to peek their head out from behind that grass curtain. On the long walk back to the metro we took this narrow colorful street and stopped for churros. Parc Guell was my favorite part of the week and a wonderful ending to the trip. 

Barcelona: Hilltop Wonderland

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