Want to get to know your neighborhood flora? Try foraging

Happy Snacking, Don’t Die!
Alexis Nikole Nelson
Simon & Schuster, $35.00

I used to think that foraging for food would involve schlepping myself to a forest far from my urban home, a task that would demand an unpleasant car trip, practical shoes and insect repellent. But when I flipped through forager Alexis Nikole Nelson’s new book Happy Snacking, Don’t Die!, I discovered edible plants right in my neighborhood.

Awareness of local edible plants helps combat the “plant blindness” that pervades modern society. For many people, plants are a pleasant afterthought rather than a focal point of daily life. “Taking the time to get to know your plant neighbors helps even the most urban neighborhood … seem full of nature and whimsy, even if you have to look close to find it,” she writes.

The book’s cheeky title is a tagline Nelson uses in popular videos posted to her social media accounts, where she sometimes goes by “Black Forager.” (She uses humor to help viewers learn which plants are good for snacking and which ones might make you, uh, “unalive.”) Likewise, the joy Nelson injects into the book makes foraging approachable.

I was nervous about picking unfamiliar fruits from trees in public. Wouldn’t everyone think I was weird? But with Nelson’s encouragement I felt emboldened. While collecting my bounty of linden fruits, I had a few friendly conversations with passersby and had the opportunity to educate neighbors about the tree.

Linden is in the same family as cacao and it can serve as a chocolate substitute, Nelson explains. Following her recipe for linden ice cream, I roasted, ground and sifted my linden fruits. Then, I combined them with sugar, soy milk, vanilla and cornstarch and cooked and froze the mixture. The ice cream tasted like an earthier version of chocolate. Taste testers — some of my Science News colleagues — compared it to brownie batter, cereal milk and tea. But in fact, linden fruits are their own thing with their own incomparable flavor.

It was a fascinating project, but not a complete success. I collected just a fifth of the amount of fruit that Nelson suggested in her recipe, so I was able to make only about a cup of ice cream. And it had an unpleasantly grainy texture despite my best attempts at grinding and sifting.

But at least now I will never overlook a linden tree.

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