Foraging and Me

It began in my twenties with a day of household chores—vacuuming, laundry, and shopping. A girlfriend had promised me a sumptuous gourmet dinner in exchange for the work, but she changed her mind right after I had carried out the last load of garbage. Not unexpectedly, this relationship didn’t last long, but my appetite for gourmet food did.

Taking a break from my unsuccessful effort at becoming a world-class chess player, I made my first culinary attempt in the mid-1970s. I followed a cookie recipe from the side of an oatmeal box. The surprising success of this led me to send away for free recipe booklets, and then to experiment with library cookbooks. Chess fell by the wayside, and I was soon preparing delicious meals for more appreciative lady friends (although I have yet to entice anybody to help with household chores.)

Enter Carleton Fredricks, the granddaddy of radio health-show gurus, and I began applying the principals of alternative nutrition to my recipes. Interesting explorations of exotic ingredients from New York City's health stores and ethnic food stores soon followed.

I took a crucial step toward becoming hooked on wild foods when, while riding my bicycle in a local park in Hollis, Queens, I saw some Greek women in traditional black garb who were busily foraging for plants. I stopped to ask them what they were doing, but their answers were all Greek to me. Nevertheless, the ladies showed me how to recognize and collect delicious, fresh, organic wild grape leaves, which I stuffed when I got home. And they were great!

Using contemporary field guides to identify edible wild plants and avoid poisoning myself, I discovered some obstacles. The authors were botanists who wouldn’t recognize a kitchen if one fell on their heads. And wild food cookbooks offered recipes for death: Boil the nutrition out of your greens or cook them in enough bacon fat to induce cardiac arrest. Add refined sugar or white flour to everything else. So I sprang into the empty ecological niche and began creating healthful wild food recipes.

In 1982, the name "Wildman" came to me during a session of Transcendental Meditation, influenced by my long love of jazz and my familiarity with The Wild Man Blues by Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong. I let go of my current activities: unsuccessful struggles to cater healthy meals, teach cooking, or cook professionally, and started leading foraging tours in and around New York City.

My big break came at 4 PM, March 29, 1986, when two undercover park rangers who had infiltrated a Central Park tour arrested and handcuffed me for eating a dandelion. The police fingerprinted me and charged me with criminal mischief for removing vegetation from the park, but I had eaten all the evidence, so they released me with a desk appearance ticket pending trial.

I informed the press and immediately appeared on page 1 of The Chicago Sun Times courtesy of The Associated Press, page 2 of The New York Daily News, in The New York Times, on CBS-TV Evening News with Dan Rather, Kathie Lee and Regis’ TV talk show, and much more. The press ate up "Wildman’s" Five-Boro Salad (see page 178), served to reporters and passersby on the steps of the Manhattan Criminal Court House on the day of my arraignment. Because of all the publicity, Parks Commissioner Henry Stern turned over a new leaf. He dropped all charges and hired me to lead the same tours I was leading when he had had me arrested. Appearances on Eyewitness News, LateNight With David Letterman, MTV, The Joan Rivers Show, and The Today Show, followed, as did my first book contract.

I left the New York City Parks Dept. in 1990 when the administration changed, and these days I lead freelance tours throughout Greater New York every Saturday, Sunday, and holiday, spring through fall. Private tours and lectures for schools, museums, environmental groups, libraries, garden clubs, scout troops, Y's, and other organizations fill my weekdays. I've hosted local environmental cable TV and radio series, and dream of a national TV show. I'm still experimenting with wild plant recipes, and I’ve organized a collection of my best recipes with the ideas behind them. Here they are.