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Urban Foragers Turn City Parks Into Produce
Aisles
By ERIC WAHLGREN
Posted 9:05 AM 05/01/10 Green
On a bright spring day, Iso Rabins wanders through the
brush atop one of San Francisco's highest peaks. "Wild
radish over there," says the 29-year-old, pointing to a leafy
plant with small purplish flowers. A few steps later, he
pauses in front of waist-high plant with silky green fronds.
"That's wild fennel. I use it a lot."
This is Rabins's foodie twist on the nature walk. To most of
us, his discoveries might look like weeds that we'd readily
douse with Roundup (if they were sprouting in our yard). But to this bearded hipster, they
are ingredients for his next meal. Actually, make that his next banquet: an eight-course, $75-
per-person affair called The Wild Kitchen that showcases all the edibles that can be found in
and around America's 12th largest city.
On the menu for a recent dinner was a soup made of wild onion, fiddleheads and heirloom
potatoes and desserts including a variation on the French mille feuille -- this one made with
flour from milled acorns gathered in the San Francisco Bay Area.
"Once you start to realize that the things you see around you every day are edible, it
changes your relationship with nature," says Rabins, a film major who moved to San
Francisco from Massachusetts in 2007. "It becomes even more important to protect it when
you really understand its real value in producing food."
'People Like the Idea of Eating Snails'
Rabins is considered a pioneer in the growing urban foraging movement. Foraging is an
offshoot of the locavore trend that has been sweeping the nation over the past decade. Only
instead of eating food from family-owned farms located within a day's drive, urban foragers
stay even closer to home, collecting and eating the fruits, vegetables and animals (snails,
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