The tropical rainforest is a rich environment that provides abundant food, clothing and shelter for those who know how to navigate its depths. The urban jungle we occupy is no less generous, provided you know how to forage in it. There is no need to run to the backwoods to appease your inner huntergatherer. You can gather wild plants in the city, harvest fruit by the bucketful, and hunt down free food, clothing, and building supplies. And while you do so, you become more aware of your immediate environment, more present, more active, more alive. Open your eyes to the abundance around you.

In this chapter we cover three forms of urban foraging, practices that can augment your agricultural activities and fill your pantry. Foraging is a great way for people who do not have land to live off the land nonetheless. We’re going to look at harvesting wild plants (a.k.a. eating weeds), gathering neglected fruit, and last but by no means least, hooking into that bottomless reservoir of wealth — the American Dumpster.

Feral Edibles

Pot-herb is an old-fashioned term meaning leafy plant that can be cooked and eaten as a vegetable. Its existence seems to imply that at one time we considered more green things edible than we do now. Many of the plants which we now consider weeds were once considered edibles. In fact, some of our most common weeds here in the U.S. were brought over from Europe intentionally as pot-herbs, the much maligned dandelion among them.

The word weed means a plant growing where it is not wanted, particularly when it is competing with plants under cultivation. So to our way of thinking, weed control is not so much a matter of eradicating them, but of changing our attitude toward them. Consider these feral edibles low-maintenance crops. They taste good and are packed with the nutrition of wild things. Admittedly, some of them are strong flavored. A forager is not a culinary conservative. If you like arugula, kale, endive and other flavorful greens, you will love eating weeds.

The fun of weed eating is learning to hunt them. In the city, weeds are everywhere, growing in lawns, planter boxes, parkway strips, abandoned lots, city parks, and not least, in your own yard. They specialize in colonizing disturbed areas, so you’ll find them growing riotously around building sites. But once you learn to identify one or two, the urban landscape takes on new meaning, and once you develop a forager’s eye you never lose it.

Your best weed harvesting might happen in your own yard, or your neighbors’ yards. This makes sense in the city, because you don’t want to eat greens coated with diesel exhaust and the pee of 3000 dogs. Consider weeds a crop, a very casual crop. Let them grow here and there, harvesting them whenever you want some greens, or be a little eccentric and actively cultivate a patch of your favorites. If the greens you want don’t pop up voluntarily in your yard, wait until the ones you’ve noticed on your walks go to seed in the summer, collect the seed and throw it in your backyard. They’ll take it from there.

Whatever you do, a little love goes a long way with weeds. When the fussy heirloom vegetables let you down, the weeds are always there for you.

The Six Things To Know About Eating Wild

1. You need professional help. A good book is a great place to start, but a live teacher is invaluable. This is because plants are so darn variable. They don’t always look like the illustrations in books. They change a lot as they grow, and even on the same block one plant will vary from the next just because of specific growing conditions.

In most places you can find people offering wild food walks. See the resources below, or search under “wild food” and “survival skills” and your city name or area. You can also try local nature centers, anywhere that wildlife education is a theme. Check community college and university extension classes, too.

Your local chapter of the Sierra Club probably offers hikes that focus on identifying plants and wild foods. While it is true that you want to learn about city plants, the truth is that these weeds are everywhere — city, suburb, roadside, country and forest. Learning to identify common weeds is just as much wild food harvesting as learning to identify the lesser-known native plants.

2. Plants are best identified by scientific name. Common names are just not specific enough. There are about one hundred “chickweeds,” for instance, because the name just means a green chickens like to eat. Chickens like all sorts of greens. The chickweed you want to eat, though, is Stellaria media.

3. Start off easy. Lots of plants are easy to identify. Get to know a handful of plants very well and watch them over the course of a year to see how they change, then add to your repertoire one new plant at a time. Be cautious and sensible, but don’t be afraid. Considering how many plants there are in the world, few plants are poisonous, but even if they are, they may not be completely inedible. The tomato plant is poisonous, for instance — but luckily for us its fruit is not.

A good beginner’s strategy is to focus on learning your local poisonous plants before anything else, preferably before you start tramping around in overgrown lots and by road sides. Can you identify poison ivy spring, summer, winter and fall? Because even in the winter, its dead stalks will give you a rash.

4. Seek out the best places to gather. You want to source your weeds from places that haven’t been sprayed with insecticides or chemical fertilizers, as plants suck up toxins. God bless them for doing it — but you don’t want to eat them. So a vacant lot is a better collection zone than the edge of a golf course, for instance, and the grounds of that old gas station might not be the best place, either. City parks, on the other hand, are great — just stay away from the areas with tended lawn.

5. Always gather respectfully. Unless you are dealing with prolific annual weeds like dandelions, treat wild plants with gentleness. Don’t pull up the whole plant unless you are harvesting the root. Try to harvest no more than a third of a plant at a time if you would like to come back and harvest from it again. Careful gathering pays off in another way — it ensures you only harvest what you mean to harvest. If you are going hog-wild and gathering greens by the fistful, you might be pulling in a few plants you don’t want to eat, and that could be downright dangerous, or at least leave you with a bellyache.

6. Trust your instincts. Even though we don’t use these instincts much anymore, we evolved to be clever omnivores. Our tongues and our guts are more savvy about food gathering than our higher faculties. If something tastes bitter, or smells bad, or turns your stomach, or repels you in any visceral way, just don’t eat it. Never force yourself to eat a weed. This should be fun, not a trial. You are not starving. You have nothing to prove. If it doesn’t taste pleasant or if your ID is not so positive that you would fist-fight with someone over it, just don’t eat it.

Along these lines, always proceed cautiously when eating new foods. If it passes the first taste test, go ahead and cook it up, but don’t eat more than a bite or two. Wait and see how it sits. It may not be poison, it might even be fine for other people, but it may not agree with you. After this trial period, you can up your quantities.

What follows is a list of some of the most liked, most widespread edible weeds in the continental U.S. We’re not telling you how to identify them here, because we are not set up to be a field guide. This is just to give you a sense of the variety of food that is out there for the gathering. See our resources section for a list of good wild food guides.

Amaranth or Pigweed (Amaranthus retroflexus): The low-class relative of the fancy grain-bearing amaranth. Unlike the rest of the weeds we’re talking about here, this one is a native to the Americas. This tough survivor doesn’t mind drought or heat. It has coarse stalks and leaves that can be steamed or boiled into a spinach-like green. This is what it is valued for most, but the seeds are also edible. Collect seed heads in the fall, and winnow them to separate the chaff from the seed. Add the seeds to hot cereal, or baked goods.

Chickweed

Chickweed (Stellaria media): An excellent starter weed. Easy to identify, tender and mild, and high in vitamin C, the tiny leaves of chickweed are great additions to salads. When it is taller and carries more of a stem, it can also be steamed or sautéed, just chop it up because the stem can be a little chewy.

In our local hills, chickweed almost always grows alongside another tender, innocent-looking plant: poison hemlock, the same plant that killed Socrates. Hemlock leaves look a little like carrot tops. You don’t want to eat even a bite of hemlock accidentally with your chickweed salad. This is an example of why you should always be careful when gathering, and also why you should know your local poisonous plants.

Dandelion (Taraxacum officinalis): This one you can probably identify without difficulty, particularly if your parents ever made you weed the lawn.

Dandelion is a bitter green, there is no getting around that, no matter how young the plant. That does not stop it from being one of the best known and loved wild edibles. Just think of the bitterness as being powerful medicine for your jaded urban liver. You should eat it when it is very young, just coming out of the ground. If it has flowered, it is too late. So you have to learn to identify it by its leaves alone.

Eat the young leaves raw in a salad or cook them as you would any green. They are super-nutritious. You can reduce the bitterness in cooked dandelions by boiling them just until they wilt, changing the water, and cooking them again. You can eat the flowers, but only the yellow parts. The flowers are also used to make dandelion wine. The taproot is an edible root vegetable. It is, of course, bitter, so is best roasted along with sweeter vegetables.

Jumped Greens — a fast and easy way to cook any green, feral or not. Start by pre-cooking the greens, either steaming or boiling them briefly, until bright green and tender, then draining. Heat olive oil in a skillet and throw in some minced garlic and a pinch of red pepper flakes. Sauté just until the garlic softens. Throw in the greens and cook a little more, tossing them in the oil to distribute the flavor. Add salt to taste.

Lamb’s Quarters or Goosefoot (Chenopodium ssp.): A big favorite among weed eaters, due to its mild flavor reminiscent of spinach and pea shoots. It is also packed with vitamin C and minerals. Collect tender, low-growing young plants whole, or pinch off their tops. Older plants will grow into shrubs five feet tall. Use the leaves exactly as you would spinach.

Apparently some people dry the leaves and grind them into flour to stretch wheat flour when baking. We haven’t tried this yet, but will remember it when the zombies come. The seeds can be also be collected and used like poppy seeds.

Don’t confuse this plant with epazote, which it does resemble. Epazote is an edible herb, but should not be eaten in quantity. Just sniff to make the distinction between the two: lamb’s quarters is odorless, while epazote has a very distinct odor.

Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca): The principal food of the Monarch butterfly, and another big favorite among weed eaters. Unfortunately, milkweed is not found all over the U.S., but we felt its popularity merited its inclusion. Asclepias syriaca is not found in the West, or the dry plains. Other plants called “milkweed” might be available in these areas, but do not be tempted to eat them unless you have verified they are in fact an edible species.

It is a particularly good plant to know if it does grow in your area, because unlike some weeds that are only good in the first flush of spring, you can eat milkweed throughout the summer. You eat the tender milkweed shoots when they first come up, the flower pods when they first form, and the seed pods which are left when the flowers fade. Milkweed has uses beyond the culinary as well. The fluff that comes from its seed pods is highly insulating — it is a vegan down that can be used to stuff pillows or coats. Native Americans used the mature stalks to make rope. And its sap (the “milk” part) can be made into a kind of rubber. This is the kind of plant you want to know when the shit hits the fan.

There is a persistent myth that milkweed is bitter and toxic, and to be palatable must be boiled in several changes of boiling water before eating it — which makes it sound hardly worth the while. You’ll find this advice all over the Internet, passed about as common wisdom from one source to the next, but our favorite forager, Samuel Thayer, debunks that idea soundly in his book Edible Wild Plants.

Common Plantain (Plantago spp.): A handsome plant, a prolific lawn weed and the bane of the golf course. It is edible when the leaves are small and tender, but not worthwhile when they get bigger. We like to eat the little leaves on sandwiches, or toss them with other greens in salads. They are strong tasting — kind of like arugula. As the leaves get bigger, they get stringy and tough. But don’t give up on the plant yet — wait for the seeds to come.

The plantain sends up tall skinny seed stalks. It is easy to strip these seeds off their stalks when they are dry. The seeds come off along with their husks, which are very light. By blowing gently over the seeds, you can send the husks — or chafe — flying, and keep only the glossy little seeds. That is what you call winnowing. Seeds of the Plantago family are known as psyllium, which is an ingredient found in high-fiber cereals and in bulk laxatives. You can use these seeds like you would wheat germ, sprinkling them on cereal, stirring them into pancake batter or whatever you please, to up your daily fiber intake.

Another good use for plantain is as a salve. If you have an insect bite, or any skin irritation, even poison ivy, bruise or chew a plantain leaf and rub the mash on your skin. It does have soothing properties. It is most effective on mosquito bites if you rub it on when the bite is fresh.

Purslane (Portulacca oleracea): Sometimes this highly-prized weed is found in gourmet markets or farmers’ markets. The young fleshy leaves are used in salads — just strip them off the stem. This plant also cooks up well. It has a slight mucilaginous texture like okra, which adds thickness to soups. Think gumbo. Some people pickle purslane.

Sheep Sorrel (Rumex acetocella): Also known as sour grass. Sheep sorrel, like its larger domesticated cousin garden sorrel (R. acetosa) is sour in a lemony, mouth-puckering way. It is too sour to be eaten in quantity on its own, but it does great things in salads and soups and sandwiches. Look for its distinctive spade-shaped leaves in sunny places and in sandy soil. Also look for its tasty, yellow flowered relative, Oxalis acetosella or wood sorrel. It’s a common urban weed, and the flowers are as good as the leaves.

Stinging Nettle (Urtica dioica): The sting of this plant is strange and unpleasant. Woe to the forager who falls into a patch! But if you do get stung, no need to suffer. Smear the juice of plantain, or dock or jewelweed leaves on the rash. If you’re near home, use a paste of baking soda. Then take your revenge and eat the plant, because it is very good.

To be fair, nettles do seem to vary a bit in “stingyness” — it’s probably a regional and seasonal thing. Many foragers don’t even wear gloves while harvesting, trusting instead their calloused fingers and expert gathering technique. To start, you will want to wear gloves. Pinch strip or snip off the first few sets of leaves from the plants — taking only the newest growth. They are best early in the spring, and become tougher as the season wears on.

Cooking, even just a brief steaming, takes away the sting. The best way to cook nettles is to wash them, then put them dripping wet into a hot pan to steam. Then dress them as you like.

Nettles are full of iron and potassium and vitamin C. People make tea out of dried nettles that is hearty, almost like a broth, and said to have strengthening properties. Drying, by the way, takes away the sting too, so no worries there. Tea is a good way to use nettles later in the year when they’ve gone tough.

Invasive Edibles

While all of the plants listed above are found all over North America, the following are plants that may or may not be in your area, and may or may not be considered weeds, but if they are well adapted for your climate, then they are probably invasive. By eating them you will be doing your part toward keeping them under control.

Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare): Brought over by the Italians, no doubt, and we don’t blame them a bit for doing it. This delicious plant naturalizes and spreads like crazy. The foliage tastes like licorice, but even better, dig up the anise-flavored white bulbs and eat them raw to get the most out of their delicate flavor (try slicing them and pairing them with oranges in a salad). They roast nicely too.

Nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus, and others): A delicate flower in some places, a garden-swallowing monster in others. All parts of this plant are edible. The peppery leaves can be added to salads or sandwiches. They are reminiscent of watercress, which is a relative. The bright orange flowers are great in salads, or used as garnish. We’ve made orange pesto with the flowers. We’ve also stuffed the flowers with flavored cream cheese. The seed pods can be pickled to make poor man’s capers.

Blackberries (Rubus fruticosus): Mean, tough vines covered with scrumptious fruit for the taking in late summer. Blackberries are fast growing and will colonize any waste area, so look for it not only in the woods, but also in the aftermath of any construction or demolition. When out picking, be careful not to stumble into a poison ivy patch while looking for a berry patch. They look similar if you’re not paying attention.

Spearmint (Mentha spicata) or Peppermint (Mentha x piperita): Nothing is better than tea made with a handful of fresh mint. Like real eggs, real tomatoes and real bread, fresh mint tea is a revelation — delicate, slightly sweet, the color of spring. Once you get hooked, you will have no problem keeping on top of any mint outbreak in your yard. When dried, foraged or home-grown mint is better than store-bought mint tea, so be sure to pick some extra to dry so you will always have it on hand. To dry mint, just hang it upside down in bunches until the leaves crumble easily between your fingers. Then strip the branches, put the leaves in jars, and store in a dark place.

Kudzu (Pueraria lobata (syn. P. montana, P. thunbergiana): The scourge of the South, growing as fast as one foot a day, is said to taste like kale. The roots are high in calories, and if ground into powder make a cornstarch substitute — arrowroot powder. It is also plentiful and nutritious livestock fodder. We’ve never had it ourselves, but we say to our Southern brethren, “Soup’s on!”

Prickly Pear Cactus: The young, skinny pads are nopalitos, prized in Mexican cuisine. Wearing gloves, use a paring knife or a vegetable peeler to scrape off the thorns and “eyes.” They taste a little like green pepper — slimy green pepper. Chop them up for salsa, or scramble them in eggs to reduce the slime factor. Eaten raw, they are reported by Mexican folk medicine to have numerous health benefits. The fruits, or tunas, are delicious, tasting a little like watermelon, but be sure to skin them, or singe them for a few seconds over a flame, before you eat them, or their tiny pricklers will get under your skin and torment you. And just FYI, if you are ever in some kind of grim outdoor survival situation, the big, unpalatable cactus pads are a good source of water.

Fruit Foraging

One day the branch of a fruit tree is covered with pretty blossoms, and then the next time you look at it, the branch is groaning under the weight of more fruit than you can eat or give away. And as with all homegrown food, this fruit is of better quality than anything you can find in the supermarket: plums running over with juice, crisp apples full of subtle flavors, honeyed apricots that have nothing to do with mealy things offered in stores — fruit that would be pesticide soaked if you bought it in the supermarket, or expensive coming from the organic stall at the farmers’ market. Despite this fact, a lot of neighborhood fruit goes unpicked, and ends up rotting at the base of the tree.

Why? Anyone who has tried to grow their own food knows there is nothing inconvenient about a plant that needs little care and yet produces bushels of food without prompting each year. Every home should have at least one. If you know some basic preservation techniques, dealing with that bounty does not need to be daunting. All it takes is a day or two to harvest the tree and preserve the fruit — whether that be by drying, canning, fermenting, making jam or even making cider.

It goes against homestead principles to let food go to waste — whether it be on your land, or someone else’s. A homesteader keeps their eye open for food-gathering opportunities at home and abroad, because any food you find is food you do not have to grow, and this includes other people’s trees. The law states that any fruit growing in a parkway strip, or on branches hanging over a sidewalk or alley is in public space and therefore fair game for you to pick. Of course it is better to ask permission when you can, and of course we don’t need to tell you not to break branches, climb on fences, or otherwise behave like a hooligan when you are picking fruit.

If you spot an overloaded tree in someone’s yard on your wanderings, and if your surreptitious sampling proves it to be tasty, inquire with the owner and see if they’ll let you harvest the whole thing. Odds are they will be grateful to you if you would relieve them of this burden, and will just tell you to take what you want.

As far as we are concerned, there cannot be too many fruit trees in any neighborhood. Unfortunately they are not as common as they should be, perhaps for the aforementioned “messy” reason, or because a couple of generations of bad supermarket fruit has made us suspicious of fruit eating on the whole. With any luck this will change as a new wave of homesteaders, community activists, permaculturists and forward-thinking landscapers begin to transform the urban landscape with food-bearing trees.

No one voices the importance of fruit trees in the urban landscape better than the activist art collective Fallen Fruit. They encourage both fruit foraging and the planting of more fruit trees in public spaces for shared use. We offer you their manifesto for your consideration.

A SPECTER is haunting our cities: barren landscapes with foliage and flowers, but nothing to eat. Fruit can grow almost anywhere, and can be harvested by everyone. Our cities are planted with frivolous and ugly landscaping, sad shrubs and neglected trees, whereas they should burst with ripe produce. Great sums of money are spent on young trees, water and maintenance. While these trees are beautiful, they could be healthy, fruitful and beautiful.

WE ASK all of you to petition your cities and towns to support community gardens and only plant fruit-bearing trees in public parks. Let our streets be lined with apples and pears! Demand that all parking lots be landscaped with fruit trees which provide shade, clean the air and feed the people.

FALLEN FRUIT is a mapping and manifesto for all the free fruit we can find. Every day there is food somewhere going to waste. We encourage you to find it, tend and harvest it. If you own property, plant food on your perimeter. Share with the world and the world will share with you. Barter, don’t buy! Give things away! You have nothing to lose but your hunger!

Read more about fruit foraging, the practice of fruit-mapping, and Fallen Fruit’s other projects at fallenfruit.org.

Tools For The Fruit Harvester

Properly managed fruit trees are pruned so that their branches do not grow out of easy reach. But the truth is very few trees are managed so well, so when you go foraging (or when you face up to that tree in your own backyard) you are confronted with clusters of tempting fruit dangling just out of reach. A ladder is not convenient to carry around when you are foraging, and even in your own backyard it can be a little perilous swaying around on the top rung trying to reach every last fruit. Far better to stay on solid ground and use a couple of clever tools to bring the fruit to you.

Fruit Picker

This is basically a long hand on a pole that you can stick up into the tree. The business end is a wire cage with claws at the opening. It looks like the skeleton of a catcher’s mitt, or maybe like a particularly aggressive light bulb cage. The claws dislodge the fruit and the basket catches it. Fruit pickers are easy to find in garden centers, and you can get one for under 20 dollars.

Berry Hook

This is a more obscure tool, one used for wrestling fruit out of monster bushes or trees with soft, bending branches. We know of it from Samuel Thayer’s Forager’s Harvest. It is simply a stick with a hook on one end and a rope on the other end. Using the hook, you catch a flexible branch and draw it down gently to your level. So you can have your hands free to pick the fruit, you stand on the tail of the rope. You could make one of these easily out of just about anything: wood, bamboo, wire, metal. For instance, you could bend an old ski pole sharply at the tip, and then tie a rope to the handle. Or you could screw a big hook onto a broomstick — then it would be very much like a dive hook you use in dumpster diving. In fact, you might be able to use the same pole for both purposes.

Collecting Bin

For efficiency and safety you want both of your hands free as you work, and you don’t want to be running back and forth to a stationary container. So you need to either use a shoulder bag — an old messenger bag would work well — or tie a light tub or basket around your waist. A smallish tub is the ideal collection device for berry picking.

How To Eat Acorns

Why should the squirrels have all the fun?

To our way of thinking, acorns fall between wild food gathering and neighborhood fruit foraging. Unlike most fruit trees, acorns grow in the wilderness, and the semi-wilderness, but you are also going to find plenty of them in the city.

They are so ubiquitous, so easy to identify, and so bountiful come fall, that we thought we had to give them their own section.

Acorns have a bad reputation as being inedible, or fit only for animal fodder. This is not so. Acorns were among the primary staples of the Native American tribes. They are an excellent survival food, being rich in calories, complex carbohydrates, good fats, and a fair amount of protein. All you have to do make acorns edible is process them to remove the tannin, which makes them very bitter. Actually, ingesting too much tannin can cause kidney failure, but tannins are so darn bitter you’d be hard pressed to eat enough to kill you. Acorns are not a nut to be eaten out of hand, but they can be made into a nutritious mush or flour.

All varieties of acorns are edible, but some are better than others. It cannot hurt to try any acorns that you can find growing near you, but in general acorns from white oaks, which are the kind with rounded leaves, are preferable to red oaks, the kind with pointy-tipped, many-lobed leaves, because white oak acorns are larger and sweeter. If you are presented with the choice of a few different kinds of oak trees, open up a few nuts. You’re looking for big nuts with plump, pale meat showing no sign of bugs. Taste the raw acorns — a little nibble won’t kill you. All will be bitter, but choose the tree that produces the least bitter nuts.

Preparing Acorn Mash And Flour

Harvest the nuts in September. If they’ve been on the ground, they may have bugs in them. Look for tiny boreholes in the shell and discard those. When you bring your acorns home, put them in a bucket of water and discard any that float.

You can let your acorns sit out in the hot sun a few days to dry, and then you can store them out of the way of rodents until you need them. Or you can process them right away.

Acorns have soft shells. Rather then cracking them, you pop off their little hats and then peel them. A pair of pliers helps. As you work, discard any that look dark or dusty inside. The next step is to grind them up. Unless Armageddon is upon us and you have to use two rocks, the easiest way to do this is in a blender. Fill it with whole acorns then add water. Buzz it to form a creamy mash.

This mash needs to be leached to rinse away the bitter tannins. The original method for doing this would be to put the mash in a running stream. Instead, you are going to line a colander with an old dishtowel or a piece of cheesecloth, pour the mash in and let the excess liquid drain away. Tie up the corners of the cloth, and transfer the bundle of mash to a big bowl of water. Let it sit a while until the water goes cloudy/dark, then dump that water and refill the bowl. Put the mash through several changes of water over the course of the day. How many changes depends upon how much tannin was in your acorns.

It is okay to let the mash sit in a bowl of water overnight, and then continue the changing in the morning. Some sources will tell you to put the mash through several changes of boiling water. This is not necessary, and it may lessen the nutrient qualities of the mash, so don’t bother.

The mash is done when the water in the bowl no longer goes cloudy, and when the bitter taste is gone. Tannin has a particular mouthfeel that is quite recognizable — it sort of puckers the tongue. When it tastes clear, squeeze all the excess water from the bundle with your hands. It’s ready to use.

After processing, the mash can be used right away, frozen for future use, or you can spread it on cookie sheets and dry it in a low oven or dehydrator until it resembles corn meal. Once it is dry, you can whirl it in a food processor for a finer texture.

Acorn meal/flour does not keep as well as normal flour, so keep it in the fridge and use it fairly soon. Try substituting or blending with corn meal in any corn bread/corn muffin recipe. Toss a little acorn flour into any baked good — cookies, bread, pancakes — to improve the nutritional profile of whatever you are baking.

Using The Mash

Acorn mash can be cooked up with water like you would oatmeal. Just add a little more water to your freshly strained mash and simmer it over low heat until it is at a consistency you like. This is a traditional Native American way of eating acorns. The porridge will be on the bland side, and will need to be tricked up either into the sweet realm with fruit and sugar, or the savory realm with salt and butter. Or perhaps toss in parmesan cheese to make a wild polenta. Another traditional use is to stir the mash into meat stews at the very end of cooking to thicken them.

Dumpster Diving

We live in a land of plenty — and in a land of great waste — as any peek in a dumpster will tell you. Behind every apartment building and retail business in this country sits a harvesting opportunity. Dumpster diving is a class of urban foraging akin to fruit gathering. You are simply taking advantage of what others would let go to waste. It combines the thrill of poaching with the heady satisfaction of finding a really great sale. If you like hunting in thrift stores, it is only one small step from that pastime to diving, since dumpsters are full of stuff that people are too lazy to drop off at Goodwill. Selective diving will yield selective results, whether your scavenging interest is food, building materials, books, clothing, or furniture, you can find dumpsters to serve your needs. On top of all these personal benefits, you will also be lessening the load on the landfills. And that is a very good thing.

The Legality Of It

Dumpster diving is not illegal except where is it specifically prohibited. In 1988, the Supreme Court ruled in California vs. Greenwood that there is no common-law expectation for privacy of discarded materials. Your local laws may be different, and you do have to pay attention to obvious things like “No Trespassing” signs and locks. These things indicate that the owners are likely to be irate to find you poking around. Never break a lock or jump a fence to get into a dumpster — that is definitely illegal.

Keep it in mind that building owners fear dumping more than diving. They pay to have their dumpsters emptied, and hate when people fill their dumpsters with trash. They also hate people strewing trash when picking through the dumpster. As a sophisticated diver you’ll want to give them no cause for concern.

If you dive retail, your first decision is food or not-food. If it is food you are after, then bakeries and markets are your best bets. Bakeries unload day-old bread and pastries every day. Slightly past-prime baked goods can be revived, or used in many ways.

Markets unload food in huge quantities. If you are diving markets, your food preservation skills will come in handy, as markets throw out ripe/bruised/ just-expired foods in bulk. Not a single bunch of grapes, but a whole crate of them. Not a quart of milk, but several gallons at a time, a bounty if you know how to process it. Dry the grapes into raisins. Make fruit butter out of a box of apples or peaches that are slightly bruised or past their prime. Make sauce out of soft tomatoes. Make yogurt out of milk that has just hit its expiry date. Yogurt keeps for a long time in the fridge.

Nursery dumpsters are full of perfectly good bags of soil (they can’t sell ripped bags, after all). Candy store dumpsters are filled with heart-shaped boxes of candy on February 15th. Any time a product line is discontinued it ends in the trash, whether this be canned soup, shampoo, or a type of wrapping paper. Waste is built into the cost of doing business.

To start, we recommend you read The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving by John Hoffman, which not only lucidly explains everything you need to know about this species of urban foraging, but is also so engaging and passionate that even if you are skeptical, it will make a diver out of you. There are few “how-to” books which are so persuasive that they will change the way you think forever. This is one of them.

Revive Day-Old Bread

Our ancestors knew what to do with stale bread, and we should too. Sliced bread does not revive well, but loaves, pastries and bagels can all be revived if they are a day or two old. Wet the bread just little. Dip a loaf under a running tap for just one second, or wet your hands and rub the loaf. A pastry or seedy bagel might have to be misted with a spray bottle so as not to lose the toppings. Pop the bread into a pre-heated 350°F oven. Smaller things will warm in about five minutes, a big loaf will take ten minutes. The bread will be best while warm.

The Classics

There are plenty of recipes out in the world for these things, we just thought we’d remind you of all the dishes that demand stale bread for best results.

• Consider the humble crouton, which is best made with stale bread, as is stuffing, which should not be limited to Thanksgiving, or to meat eaters.

• Never forget that stale bread is ideal for French toast, as well as its more decadent cousin, pain perdu.

• Bread pudding is made with stale bread, but it truly is spectacular (if artery-clogging) when made with croissants or cinnamon rolls.

• Bread crumbs, toasted and spiced with whatever you like (hot pepper flakes? lemon zest? basil?), are a largely forgotten but amazing addition on top of cooked vegetables, casseroles and even pasta, as a Parmesan cheese substitute. Frugal Italians have been doing this forever.

Bruschetta

Stale bread is perfect for bruschetta because it makes sturdier toast. Slice up that dumpster loaf and toast the slices in the toaster, under the broiler or on the grill. Drizzle them with olive oil and rub the surface of the bread with a raw clove of garlic. Then add any topping you like: olive paste, pesto, sautéed mushrooms, chopped tomatoes and basil, herbed goat cheese, etc.

Panzanella

In the summer when the tomatoes are in the garden, use stale bread to make a classic summer dish, a bread and tomato salad called panzanella. Being a salad, there is no real set recipe for panzanella beyond the essential combination of bread and tomatoes and basil. Some people make it more substantial by adding hardboiled eggs or tuna. And additional vegetables, like cucumbers or olives. You can rub the bowl with a garlic clove if you want a little flavor kick.

There are no quantities here, because you should just use whatever you have on hand.

Stale bread cut in one-inch cubes

Ripe, delicious tomatoes chopped up

Sweet red onion, sliced or diced

Chopped parsley

Torn-up basil leaves

Red wine vinegar and/or lemon juice

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

Some people like to dip the bread in cold water to soften it up a bit before it goes in the bowl. Others go the other way and toast it until it is crunchy. You might want to leave it as it is, stale and dry, the first time.

Toss together the bread, tomatoes, onions, parsley and basil. Whip up a vinaigrette by mixing the one part vinegar or lemon juice with three parts olive oil. Drizzle this over the salad, add salt and pepper to taste, toss again, and let it rest for 10 minutes so the bread has time to soak up the flavor. Toss once more and serve.