Backyard Foraging
Pancho McFarland
The city as designed from the mechanical and authoritarian mind privileges the ruling classes and destroys biodiversity. The mechanical mind relies on the power of oil-based machines. The authoritarian mind controls the ability of subjects to eat. We should reclaim streets, parks and other urban common spaces and liberate them from elite control. Through an edible urban landscape design we can put these spaces to use for the good of everyone.
Roseland, Chicago, IL
June 10, 2011
June 10, 2011
Lunch:
Baby mustard greens, 2 handfuls
Mint, 2 handfuls
Basil, 1 handful
Rose petals, 2 roses
Baby green leaf lettuce, 5 leaves
Baby Georgia collard, 1 handful
Balsamic vinegar, 2 splashes
olive oil, splash
Pink Himalayan salt, pinch
Black pepper, dash
A lush backyard with very little grass makes for a perfect lunch for a forager. The rose and mint come back year after year providing part of a daily feast from the kitchen garden/yard. Mustard and collard greens add wonderful flavor to a salad or eaten straight off of the plant when young. Lettuce, planted early each year, rounds out any backyard salad from Spring through Fall. A light dressing of store-bought organic olive oil and vinegar mixed with fresh spices purchased from the Healthy Food Hub (something akin to a buyers’ co-op organized by the Black Oaks Center for Sustainable and Renewable Living) finishes off the foraged feast.
Encouraging biodiversity in the backyard through planting edible perennial plants, quick-growing and abundant greens, and flowers (perennials and annuals), and many different kinds of seedlings and seeds provides one with opportunities to eat. On a brief morning stroll in the yard I snatch leaves from the numerous greens, rinse them and pop them in my mouth. As I go to the spigot on the southside of the house, a wild mulberry bush obstructs my path. I take the opportunity it provides to pluck a couple handfuls of dark purple berries. Quick rinse. Devour the berries. Pick a few more. Repeat.
Daily grazing excursions such as these can be an important supplement to an urban dweller’s diet and lifestyle. Foraging the urban landscape and grazing in a semi-tended backyard as part of a strategy of community resilience and autonomy and lifestyle in a post-carbon age has many advantages. First, foraging does not rely on oil. Second, if done systematically, it can provide a family with all its sustenance. Combining foraging with other strategies of community control of its food supply can solve some of the problems of the current oil-based, unsustainable and undemocratic global corporate food system. These problems which have been well-covered on the ejfood blog include lack of food sovereignty, lack of access to healthy food and water, pollution, climate crisis, peak oil, violence and racism.
Grazing or foraging should be taught to members of our communities as a means of community survival. The young who will be even more impacted by the increasing food injustice should be a focus in this educational strategy. Along with community gardens, CSA’s and other strategies of a local food economy, those of us in the food justice movement need to learn techniques associated with foraging. Foraging and design techniques that increase the possibilities for foraging should be incorporated into our training. We might incorporate these practices in a design for a new city and new communities.
Eating the City
Through creating an edible urban landscape we can more easily provide for ourselves. This urban landscape would contain common spaces for fruit and nut orchards that belong to everyone. Large perennial gardens or farms are also be part of the urban commons. Fruit and nut trees line pedestrian, mass transit and bicycle roads. Private cars are non-existent. In between the trees we grow perennial herb gardens. Somewhere, perhaps on the sides of buildings and along fences, vining plants find the correct conditions to grow abundantly.
A city designed with common spaces providing numerous foraging opportunities could be democratic and sustainable. The city as designed from the mechanical and authoritarian mind privileges the ruling classes and destroys biodiversity. The mechanical mind relies on the power of oil-based machines. The authoritarian mind controls the ability of subjects to eat. We should reclaim streets, parks and other urban common spaces and liberate them from elite control. Through an edible urban landscape design we can put these spaces to use for the good of everyone.
Regardless of urban design, we should learn the techniques of foraging. Even while the city is not currently designed for easy access for foragers, there are many plants grown throughout urban environments that could provide us with sustenance. We need to be aware of how to forage in the city. Beyond learning what is and is not good to eat, we have to develop an ethic that sees foraging as a dignified and ethical behavior. Foraging is dignified, self-edifying labor. It is labor performed outside of the alienation and indignity of capitalist labor where one’s efforts go to enrich an owner. Instead, this labor directly benefits the worker and his family. It is also an ethical practice in that it does no harm to other species. Foraging does not use poisonous chemical inputs nor does it rely on cheap wage slavery in far-off places. It does not contribute to the exploitation of the Earth, human beings nor Earth’s non-human species.
European colonizers and their settlers viewed the foraging practices of indigenous peoples that they would eventually subjugate as lazy and therefore examples of their uncivilized nature. This view of foraging (and later even of farming and farmwork) has stayed with us as part of strategy to denigrate the laboring, especially peasant, classes. So, besides the difficulty of convincing a ruling elite to give up control of the city and its common spaces, we have the additional problem of convincing the subjugated working-class urban population that farm work, horticulture and foraging are valuable, ethical and honorable practices. The conflict-laden road to a community-controlled, democratic, and sovereign local food economy requires overcoming ideological and political obstacles to foraging. Regardless of the outcome of struggles over food justice and urban design, community, family and individual resilience will require this new urban foraging.
