In our search for more healthy, affordable and sustainable greens in our everyday meals, we should consider taking a second look at our weeds. After all, weeds are a little gift from nature’s garden that lie literally right under our feet. You can DIY without even needing to plant, water, fertilize, spray, or prune.

The only thing that holds us back from tapping in to this local food is our modern prejudices about what is food and what is a weed.

Why does good food have to come in a package or with a label? Why do sought after ingredients have to equate with ones that are rare and therefore expensive? 

I have been lucky to be able to work with some of the top chefs in this country who strive to find exquisite flavors from local, small-scale produced ingredients. And the result of this project with Chef Eddy Leroux at Restaurant Daniel in New York City has been weed know-how - which weeds taste good.  And even more, just as we wouldn’t bake a cantaloupe or eat green peaches, when is the peak season for harvesting, which parts to eat and how to prepare them (cooked, raw, stir fried, etc.)

Our cookbook Foraged Flavor is about turning wild “weeds” from edible in to delicious. Many of these weeds in fact came from other countries, such as
Europe or Asia where they are culinary delicacies. 

One example is gallant soldiers or galinsoga, one of the most dominant agricultural weeds in the country.  I first found this plant as I was foraging in between the vegetable rows of my neighboring Comeback Farm.  I couldn’t help but notice the tender young plants, already spreading out like a battalion over and above the inch high parsleys. And my farmer friend’s eyes lit up when I started taking away some of these weeds, after which I started to notice them in my neighbors’ vegetable gardens and even in the planters by the subway terminal.