New York's abundance lingers on as rumor and memory, but the city's ground is intrinsically fertile, and I decided next to get a sense of the natural wealth of New York by eating things that are growing here by accident. "Why don't you try foraging Central Park with 'Wildman' Steve Brill?" Gabrielle suggested. Steve, she explained, could point to everything sauvage that there was to eat in the city. I was taken with the idea of using the Park as a kitchen garden, like those country friends who scamper into the yard for fresh-cut basil.

A Sunday or two later, I found myself, with my children, following Steve on one of his encyclopedic tours of New York's edible nature. The children had been ornery when I announced my local eating plan.

"I'll eat New York food," Olivia, my seven-year-old, said. "But pigeons I will not eat. Squirrels I will not eat."

"Squirrels make a very delicious dish, called Brunswick stew," I offered. "And pigeons are squab. You see them on the best menus."

"Anything city-colored, that looks like it could actually live in New York, is being thrown out," Luke, the twelve-year-old, said. "Gray things. Brown things. We don't eat anything that blends in with the sidewalk. It needs to stand out from its surroundings." The strictures seemed daunting but the possibilities fresh.

"Now, this is wood sorrel," Brill was saying, bending over a little patch of weeds at the edge of the path that led toward the Park entrance at West 107th Street. "These are completely delicious! They taste just like lemonade!"

Everyone knelt down to taste them. A few meditative moments, ready to spit it out. Then: "Hey, this is good! It does taste like lemonade."

"Wildman" Steve Brill looked pleased, but unsurprised. He has had the fortitude to eat out of the Park for decades. Mushrooms and black cherries, field garlic and sassafras—he can construct entire meals around things he finds growing ferally near West Seventy-second Street. He is known for his Smokey Bear hat, his baggy pants, his Borscht Belt jokes.

"This is lamb's-quarter," Steve was saying, clearing a path to what, to the unknowing eye, looked just like the desultory weeds where the softball ends up after the fat kid with glasses you've stowed in right field watches it go by. Lamb's-quarter turned out to be a matte-green plant with arrow-shaped leaves.

"But now you have to be careful," he went on. "You see this?" He picked through the underbrush and found, alongside the lamb's-quarter, another, equally agreeable-looking weed. He held it up. "This is white snakeroot," he explained. "White snakeroot is completely poisonous. In the early days of the country, cows would eat it and it would get into their milk, creating what's called milk sickness. A fatal disease. Who knows how this changed American history?" No hands went up. "Abraham Lincoln, that's how. Abraham Lincoln's mother died of milk sickness caused by this very root. So you have to be careful to distinguish between lamb's-quarter, which is good, and white snakeroot, which, if you eat it. . ." He paused and then played Chopin's Funeral March on an improvised kazoo made of his lips and his right hand.

The children looked dubiously at the plastic bags they carried, stuffed with purslane and wood sorrel and lamb's-quarter. New York kids, they had learned the logic of safe and shaky blocks, but the logic of poisonous plants alongside wholesome ones was outside their experience.

"Wildman" Steve Brill went on to show us an almost unbelievable variety of edibles in Central Park—those purslane leaves, the Asiatic dayflower ("tastes like string beans"), poor man's pepper ("tastes like radish"), sassafras ("tastes like root beer—you can actually make root beer out of it!"), field garlic, even a kind of "artist's mushroom," which you can't eat but makes a wonderful sketchbook if scratched on.

"We should ask him what pigeon tastes like," Olivia said. "He looks like a pigeon-eater."

"He'd probably say it tastes like chicken," Luke told her. "That's what they always say."

Finally, it was time for a lunch break, and Steve and his dutiftil followers settled down on the rocks and the lawn near the 107th Street entrance to eat what they had gathered plus a few slices of healthy-looking whole-grain bread. Luke stood up. He pointed with the urgency of a shipwrecked sailor spotting a sail. Just visible at the edge of the Park was a sign reading 'West Side Deli." The Deli in the Distance! While our wholesome fellow-scavengers were looking elsewhere, we sneaked out of the Park and returned to hide in a small copse, so that the kids could gorge on a turkey hero with mayonnaise and potato chips and Snapple drinks. Then they returned to the group, a smear of orange around the mouth the only sign of their impiety.