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