Wild Foods

-There are those in this country raised close enough to the wild to still hear her speak.

But there soon may come a time when few will remember it.

Growing up in a place as rural as Vermont bestows one with a pride in their surroundings.

The same was true for my brother and I, as we spent our summers exploring our family's land and the 100,000-acre wood known as the Chateauguay.

Primitive skills and foraging began as a means to an end.

With them came the resilience to press further into the wild, chasing adventure, and often some story that had been shared.

Our favorite of these was the one of the old abandoned gold mine lost somewhere deep inside the Chateauguay.

Homer Perkins, the old farmer that lived up the valley, would often weave us a yarn about times long ago when Dad would bring us to fetch hay for the horses.

The thrill of adventure and the promise of riches was far more than any 10-year-old could bear, and I set out to discover just what may lay hidden in those hills.

How could I have known then that what I would find would be far more valuable than gold?

My name is Kevin Chap, and for me, wild foods aren't just a luxury.

They're a way of life.

As an environmentalist, educator, and professional forager, I know the best ingredients are still waiting to be discovered.

You just need to know where to look.

-"Wild Foods" is made possible by generous support from... And with support from... -The northeastern United States contains some of our most important and ecologically diverse environments.

And in this episode, we are exploring one of the best -- my home state of Vermont.

Its vast wildlands and rich agrarian history make it one of America's most hopeful landscapes.

And I'm gonna introduce you to some of my favorite places and people that are changing the way we eat and interact with the natural world.

I absolutely love living in a place like Vermont.

The rich biodiversity of this land offers such abundance of wild foods.

Last night's rain should have helped along several species of choice edible mushroom.

When you develop a personal relationship with nature, it changes how you see the landscape, seasons and even time.

Once you step out the back door, you never know what you're gonna find.

But because nature is so abundant, it's rare that I come home empty handed.

This is a fantastic find.

This is laetiporus sulphureus or sulfur shell, or better known locally as chicken of the woods.

This is one of my favorite ingredients, and it's actually the first ingredient that I ever harvested as a boy.

This is a great first-time foragers' mushroom, because it can't be confused with any poisonous doppelgangers, and it's super easily identifiable with its orange top and its yellow spore print.

It's called chicken of the woods, so therefore it can be used in dishes in substitute of chicken, and it looks absolutely beautiful and has similar nutritional value.

With only 33 calories per serving, chicken of the woods boasts 14 grams of protein, 10% of your daily potassium needs, and 5% of your vitamin C, so it's clearly a healthy option.

But it's not only delicious.

It can also help with hormonal balance, regulating blood sugar, and acts as an anti-inflammatory.

See, wild foods aren't just nutritious, they're medicinal.

These foods are packed with phytochemicals that scientists are just now beginning to understand.

So this is an amazing find.

This is grifola frondosa, also known as maitake or hen of the woods, one of the most choice wild edibles in the northeastern forest.

It has an amazing flavor profile, also has high concentrations of vitamin A and D, but the most important thing is it's absolutely delicious.

Wild foods like hen of the woods are coveted by chefs the world over because of the rich and distinctive flavor.

But where does that flavor come from?

It's in a species' nutrient density.

See, nutrients are flavor.

These mushrooms are working in concert with thousands of other species in a perfectly cyclical and beneficial way, and that adds to their nutrient profile.

Much like our own biosphere, the complexity of nature's biodiversity is still something we're just barely starting to understand.

Since the forest is being so generous today, I'm gonna take you on a hunt for one of my personal favorite ingredients of the northeastern woods.

And I'm gonna teach you how to cook with it right at home.

This part of the forest is my favorite Hericium hunting ground.

This is actually a beechwood forest, and that is one of the best hosts for the Hericium mushroom.

So we're gonna check around here and see.

Actually I see something up there.

We're gonna go check it out.

Now, this is one of my favorite wild foods in the northeastern woods.

This is Hericium americanum, better known as lion's mane or bear's head tooth.

They have the flavor profile of either lobster or crab, so it can be used in substitute of that.

One of the most amazing things about this mushroom is that it has pound for pound, the same protein as salmon.

So it's a great find.

And I'm gonna have a lot of fun cooking with it.

Lion's mane is an astonishing species.

It's classified as a saprophytic fungus, which means it doesn't harm the tree, rather only helps break down decaying wood.

Now, with our basket full, I'm gonna bring you back to camp and show you how to make one of my favorite meals over open fire.

I thought we'd put together a little dish with our lion's mane called Lion's Mane Crab Cakes.

This is one of my absolute favorites, and it's quite simple to make.

We're gonna go ahead and shred our lion's mane into little sections, and it should resemble crab as we do that.

We want to go ahead and sweat some of the water out here so that the crab cakes stick together well.

While that's happening, we're gonna mix the rest of our ingredients here.

About 1/2 cup of panko breadcrumbs, just a little bit of Worcestershire sauce.

And add some diced yellow or red pepper.

I've got a little bit of chili powder and smoked paprika for flavor here and color.

Now here I have some fresh thyme, tarragon and basil.

Salt and pepper to taste.

And now finally aioli.

A couple tablespoons of that.

Go ahead and mix that all together.

And you're gonna create a nice paste with that.

It should look like a heavy pancake batter.

Okay.

Now you're gonna remove those from the fire and let them cool for just a minute.

And this is going right back on the grill with some nice oil.

And while that's coming to temperature, it should have cooled off enough to go right into your mixture.

You want to stir that all together.

Now, this would be fine, but you can actually let it sit in your refrigerator overnight.

Let all the flavors marry together.

And it will also harden just a little bit.

So it gives you a more compact cake.

But we're gonna go ahead and make these into cakes right now.

Those look great.

So it's been about 6 to 8 minutes on either side.

And those look fantastic.

In the meantime I've made just a little wild green salad here and that was made with dandelion greens, plantain and carrot top.

And then finally we've got just a little bit of avocado aioli, a little bit of fresh herb.

And I've actually taken a few nice aster florets from the field.

And there you have it.

It's lion's mane crab cakes direct from the field to your plate.

Enjoy.

Foraging may be trendy, but it isn't a new concept.

Indigenous cultures from around the world relied on wild foods for their survival, and the native peoples of this land have been cultivating them for millennia.

-When the Europeans came, they came to this land and they saw a forest that probably was fairly groomed.

So they say, "Wow, I'm gonna move in," not knowing that native people are nomadic and they create agroforestry.

So that way we don't use up all the resources and we promote it.

-To show me firsthand what European settlers would have seen when they first arrived here in America, I've joined my friend and Abenaki skills instructor, John Hunt, in a forest in Shelburne, Vermont.

John is an expert in agroforestry and a concept known as the Forest Garden.

-The forest garden is a way of being in relationship with the land that promotes food for us and for the animals, for all the life.

The earth, just like, is growing in a wild way.

It's just producing as much as it can.

It's sort of a belief that the human can be a steward.

The human can actually have a positive impact and increase the abundance of food.

In some ways, maybe just, you know, an excuse to get out into the woods, even if I don't find anything, just to spend some time with the land.

-It's only within the last 100 or 200 years that we've really started divorcing ourselves from this, right?

-Yeah, definitely.

Now we have to make an effort.

But it's worth the effort.

It's important to make the effort.

-When we look at things, we look at things like, how do we be stewards of the land, where a lot of times, Europeans adopted the mindset of being dominion over.

So how can you own something that you share with other living things like trees, animals, and ourselves?

And I think if people got away and started looking more at the connection to the source, whether it be their food sources, whether it be the land or the animals or other sources, I think we'd be in much better shape to save this planet for our future.

-Whoa!

-Oh, hey!

Beautiful.

Yeah, that's a nice-looking maitake there.

What a perfect example of the prolificness of nature, right?

-Yeah, yeah.

These old trees and mycelium is probably helping them out, and then they're just producing so much food.

-New England is gonna be more important as the climate changes.

And there's gonna be more and more fire seasons out west and less crops being grown.

If the priority is bringing new businesses to compete in the global market, maybe the focus should be more on agroforestry environment because New England is gonna be very important food sources.

So why not get ahead of the curve now and start teaching those things and also diversify to keep our farmers competitive?

-If agriculture is gonna play an integral role in the rewilding of our food system, we need to find a way to support the American farmer.

Nobody knows this better than my Uncle Peter, who stewards a 350-acre parcel in South Royalton, Vermont.

My uncle Peter has dedicated his life to regenerative farming and exposed me to some of the beauty and bitterness facing the small farm.

What's the biggest challenge facing a small farmer right now in modern American society?

-It's -- It's making a living.

The reason we lose all these little farms is because they can't compete with commercial fertilizer.

You can't compete with the price of the efficiency, they call it, of the cheap food.

-You start thinking about these huge farms, you know, the "get big, get out," and has created now an industry that was carbon negative for I mean, millennia, right?

-Yeah.

-And just in the past 100 years or less, really, a couple of generations, it's now become the third largest polluting industry in the world.

-There's an uneasiness in the land, and it comes from not being connected.

That trickles down to every walk of life.

First of all, you should redefine what progress is, what you want to call modernization of farming.

What does it really mean?

A bigger farm, you look at them and you'd say, "How many species live in that?"

There's not very much... -No.

-...biodiversity there.

That connectedness is really an important part of a farm, I think.

-What's scary is that there's a massive extinction happening, but that we're also losing hundreds of crops out of our food system every year because of monoculture.

-Also, you're getting rid of a lot of diversity in your insect population.

The organisms in the soil are more complicated than our lives or our bodies are.

-Yeah.

-It's depleting, and that makes it not sustainable.

And we know that.

We've got to build the groundwork so that people have a way and an understanding of what these connections are, and that they're important for a lot of different reasons.

-If we can find a way to keep regenerative farmers on their land, we preserve the nutrients they provide and their wisdom that bridges the gap between food and nature.

With this in mind, I'm traveling to Sterling College in Craftsbury Commons to meet with Tiana Baca, who is helping cultivate the next generation of farmers in a collaborative project called The Seeds of Renewal.

Are you gonna seed-bank these or are you gonna use these for food or what?

-Yeah.

So this particular variety, these are speckled Algonquian beans and these are seeds that are being grown specifically for the Seeds of Renewal project.

So we are in the Dawnland Heritage Garden, and this garden is a beautiful, like, mound and Three Sisters, Milpa, plot.

And we are growing Abenaki varieties to share back with the Seeds of Renewal project.

-Can you talk a little bit about what Three Sisters is?

-Yeah.

So the Three Sisters is a companion planting group of corn, beans and squash.

They're plants that grow together and support each other.

So the corn is growing up.

It's providing this living trellis.

The beans use that to climb on.

The beans are then fixing nitrogen and supporting the growth of the corn.

And then the squash plant kind of sprawls out and provides this living mulch.

So all of them working together makes all of them produce better.

-This is an actual project that you're using to reintroduce some of these crops back into the food system.

-Right.

This is a project we are collaborating with Seeds of Renewal and Abenaki Helping Abenaki.

And our role at Sterling is to be stewarding these seeds, growing them out and really being conscientious of, like, the genetic integrity of these seeds.

Sterling is kind of this intermediary steward that is supporting these bigger endeavors.

-Sterling College is on the cutting edge of how we approach our food system and the environment.

They've partnered with the Wendell Berry Farm to develop a national curriculum for more regenerative approaches to food cultivation.

These crops haven't been widely distributed for quite some time, but these would have been prolific several hundred years ago.

Is that right?

-Right.

Yeah.

So these are very old, traditional crops that have been lost in numbers.

As folks came in, like, traditional foods were displaced, but it's a process of re-finding them.

And so there may only be a handful of seeds that we start with.

And so by planting them out, even in just a plot like this size, over one season, we're able to double or quadruple the amount of seed that was there, right?

-Yeah.

Amazing.

Can you tell me why that's important?

-Nature doesn't grow in monocrops.

It's polyculture.

It's diversity.

And so using that as a model just in this space, right, where we're building on those collaborations, we are very much thinking about the biodiversity and the genetic integrity of these plants, but we're also thinking about the relationships to people and place.

So we're not just having a huge field of this particular corn, but they are being cultivated in traditional fashion, right, in this mound system together, and that is supporting the plants.

But it's also supporting community and tradition and history and heritage.

-As Sterling College continues their amazing work, we're heading to Burlington to meet with Travis Marcotte, the executive director of the Intervale.

This is a beautiful tract of farmland in downtown Burlington that's producing local and organic foods for Vermont's largest city and surrounding area.

Their approach to regeneration has restored a once-depleted area of the city and is helping to train new farmers, acting as a farm incubator and hub for local food access.

Agriculture has become the third largest polluting industry in the world.

-I think this is one of the biggest things that we have to solve on our planet is sort of, how do we feed ourselves and everybody on the planet without degrading the environment?

Where we're really approaching it is how do you balance sort of that regeneration of soils?

How do you make sure that your wildlife and hedgerows are intact?

How do you sort of think about bird habitat and sort of all of the biodiversity that can be in and around a farm?

We've learned a lot from indigenous practices or food production in other countries around the world.

And so we haven't had an industrial food system model really for that long.

So I think we have a real opportunity in front of us to not only grow more amazing food, but do it in ways that's really good for people and the planet.

-If all of us committed to buying just 10% of our food from local regenerative farms, we could significantly cut down on our carbon emissions and the chemicals in our food.

Add to that the influx of capital into local economies and you have a recipe for long-term sustainability.

I find Vermont extremely inspiring because I think it's leading the way for the rest of the country in how we can reinvent our food system, but Intervale plays such an important part.

This is acting as a hub for so many local food purveyors, restaurants, and even the community to come in and access local foods in a large city.

-And I think this is, like, a big piece of the puzzle for the farms here.

So not only do you have, like, this amazing soil resource to work from, but you also have this proximity to the eater.

And that in an urban area changes, I think, the way that that whole urban area functions and operates.

So we need to keep farmers, you know, successful in rural areas and not have everybody move to the urban areas.

-The Intervale is providing a roadmap for the potential of urban gardening across the country and giving even major metro areas access to both local and organic foods.

Just around the corner, Chef Cara Tobin is inspiring chefs and eaters alike at her restaurant, Honey Road.

Cara is using over 90% local ingredients, much of which she sources from the Intervale.

But the story of how she came to be in Vermont is even more inspiring.

You could be doing this in any part of the country or really the world that you wanted to.

Why Vermont?

-It felt like something that was supposed to happen.

I was working in Boston at a restaurant called Oleana, and we were getting a lot of our ingredients from Vermont.

And I kept thinking, like, "Wow, these things are being driven down here every week."

And I was thinking like, "Whoa, we could just cut all those trucks out and have the food in the place where it is, you know, where it's growing."

As soon as I got up here, I was like, "Hey, everybody!"

Like, "I'm here, so you don't have to, like, send it there anymore."

So... -It's so inspiring to be here because you're using primarily local ingredients, but you're cooking international food.

-Yeah.

My food is inspired by the flavors of the Middle East, the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, but using as much local stuff as we possibly can.

I think it's really important to say that I am not Middle Eastern, I am Italian.

But the thing that really drives what I do here at this point is to try to educate and introduce people to flavor profiles that we don't see very often, and bring those traditions and ideas here to really showcase how beautiful the cultures are.

And it just so happens that there is this parallel that runs between eastern Mediterranean or Middle Eastern culture and Vermont culture.

It's this very, like, uber-local.

You cook what you have, you work with your neighbors.

It's all about community.

And so it felt really natural to sort of make this food here and easy because I am using what's local and I am using what's available to us.

-And when you get it fresh and local, you keep more of the nutrients in it and you get this beautiful relationship to a taste of place, even if you're eating internationally.

-Yeah, yeah.

-So what do we have here?

-This is based on a traditional dish in Lebanon called samkeh harra, and traditionally it is fish baked in tahini sauce.

But the way that I do it is I use wild mushrooms because I love the texture of them.

I love the meatiness of them, the flavor of them.

The sort of earthy nuttiness of mushrooms works so well with the earthy nuttiness of tahini.

-Yeah.

-[ Chuckles ] -[ Speaks indistinctly ] -I will try this one.

-Yeah, you've caramelized those mushrooms just perfectly.

It's so fun to see foods that I interacted with in the forest on an international plate.

-This dish in particular is, like, one that I was so proud of, because I feel like it's the perfect example of what I'm talking about.

It's locally foraged mushrooms in a preparation that is a really classic Lebanese dish, and it works beautifully.

I think that people don't love mushrooms because they're used to, like, white button mushrooms that they see in the store.

-With no flavor.

-With no flavor.

Make it crispy.

People love crispy.

You can't argue with crispy.

-No.

Totally.

-So... -With chefs like Cara leading the way as change makers in our global food system, I feel a tremendous amount of hope and pride.

Vermont may be a small state, but it's one of the most exciting and inspiring landscapes in the country.

With the highest access to local, organic and wild foods, there's just so much we can learn from this quirky little state.

See, wild foods aren't just a luxury.

They can be instrumental in helping address some of the challenges facing our food system and our environment.

-We need to get people connected to their wild foods.

There's really no excuse for someone not to be able to get connected to their food source, even if it's a little fraction.

If you think about the history of Vermont that this was deforested, there wasn't a lot of forest left at one point, and then Vermont switched, and now we're mostly forested.

Right?

So there is hope.

There is a way to reconnect and change the outcomes of what is happening.

The forest and the wild foods sustained our people for thousands of years.

Why would we think it wouldn't do that now?

-I've now come to believe I was never really looking for a gold mine after all.

But what I did find was a deeper connection to the earth and the vast intricacy and balance that occurs right before our eyes.

And maybe that's what the old farmer knew all along.

If we can find a closer connection to nature, she'll provide all the answers we need.

We just need to know where to look.

-"Wild Foods" is made possible by generous support from... And with support from...