Unless you had Paddy’s palate, that is. “He hated horta,” says Artemis Cooper—but he had to respect it.
Oddly, I’d discovered a living handbook of the ancient Cretan eating arts in the form of a ballerina prowling Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. When she’s not teaching dance in Manhattan or choreographing new pieces, Leda Meredith likes to walk the park in both winter and summer and stuff her backpack with foraged findings: garlic mustard and pepper grass, lemony sorrel and asparagus-like pokeberry shoots, gummy mallow leaf and tangy lamb’s-quarter and delectable ginkgo—yes, ginkgo, those horrific gooey globules that litter city sidewalks every spring and stink up the bottom of your shoes.
“I have to race Koreans for the ginkgo,” Leda mentioned when we set off into the park one September morning. “If I’m too slow, all I’ll find is the remains where they field-dressed a pile. You take the fruit, squeeze off the yellow squishy part, and save the kernels for roasting. Delicious.” I figured the early autumn cold snap meant we’d come home empty-handed, but within four feet Leda had already spotted prey. “Lamb’s-quarter!” she exulted, easing a leafy clump out of the lawn. She singled out a strand and pointed to the powdery coating on the arrowhead leaves.
“They look dusty, right? That’s your identifier.”
“I’ve seen this all over every lawn I’ve ever mowed,” I said. “It’s edible?”
“It’s like kale and chard,” Leda said. “It sells for seven-fifty a pound in the Park Slope Coop, but guess what? It’s growing in the sidewalk right out front.” Leda squatted and came up with a fistful of another weed I’d seen forever. She pointed out its tiny pink flowers and the dark smudge on a slender droopy leaf which resembles the smudge of an inky thumb. “Lady’s Thumb. It’s a little bitter, but chop it into a salad with some sorrel and it’s wonderful. It’s from the buckwheat family, so it’s packed with nutrients.”
As a girl, Leda learned the art of foraging from her Greek immigrant family in San Francisco. Leda’s mother was a ballerina with a Los Angeles ballet company, so Leda was raised mostly by her grandmother. “Every spring, there came a moment when Yia-Yia Lopi, my great-grandmother, stubbed out her Kool menthol cigarette and declared that it was the right day to gather horta in the park,” Leda explains. “The timing had to be just right: too soon and the leaves would be too small, too late and they’d be too bitter. Yia-Yia was the expert on when to go because she’d grown up picking wild edibles in Greece.” Back in the kitchen, the women steamed the greens and mixed them with olive oil and chopped garlic. “Their eyes would gleam,” Leda notes. “The first wild greens of spring were better to them than chocolate.”
Leda followed her mother into dance, winning a full scholarship to the American Ballet Theatre and later signing with the Manhattan Ballet. But she still kept roaming the parks for feral foods, once shocking prima ballerina Cynthia Gregory by sliding in next to her at a dinner party with her arms covered with raw scratches from reaching between thorny branches. During downtime between dance tours, Leda would spend months harvesting olives with her relatives in Greece or traveling Europe and California as a seasonal fruit picker, happy to be surrounded by fragrant, pluckable, biteable life. She began taking classes in ethnobotany at the New York Botanical Garden and studying with the yup-that’s-her-real-name herbalist Susan Weed. Leda would lead her friends and fellow dancers on all-day hunt-and-picks, then bring the famished hikers back to her apartment and teach them how to cook their haul. As her performance career came to an end, Leda realized she’d been working on her new calling since she was six years old.
“The parks department has a limited weed-control budget, which is great for me,” she says. Leda now leads foraging tours and teaches classes at both the New York and Brooklyn botanical gardens. “People have no idea what’s right here,” she adds. Streams and ponds all over the Northeast are thick with watercress, a leafy green “superfood” that outscores spinach and chard as the most nutritionally dense of all vegetables. Often, however, wild watercress is mistaken as a nuisance weed and either discarded or ignored.
“Like this—” Leda points to a cabbagey mess I’ve grown to hate on sight. As a kid, I scraped my knuckles bloody every summer trying to dig those things out of sidewalk cracks in front of the house. “That’s burdock,” Leda explains. “It grows in cities where nothing else will, and it’s fabulous.” Burdock has a long, thick taproot that’s a bear to unearth, but take it home and slice into a stir-fry and you’ve got a plateful of the Japanese delicacy gobo.
The challenge for beginners is knowing what you’re yanking. Crete alone has more than a hundred varieties of wild edible greens. Many look identical but have different flavors and aromas, not to mention nutritional and medicinal benefits. “Stomach problems, skin disorders, breathing difficulties, even emotional uneasiness—you can treat them all with so-called weeds,” Leda explains. “It’s too bad we’ve developed this mentality that if it’s free and natural, it can’t be good.”
Actually, a closer look shows that this Cretan snack stuffed with wild greens packs more nutritional punch than just about any fruit or vegetable you can buy. When scientists from Austria and Greece performed a chemical analysis of a Cretan fried pie in 2006, they were struck by two things: the sheer variety of the filling and the sky-high levels of vitamins, antioxidants, and essential fatty acids. The bitesize crescents, called kalitsounia, are typically packed with a combination of fennel, wild leeks, sow thistle, hartwort, corn poppy, sorrel, and Queen Anne’s lace, all of it growing wild and calorically dense. “In most cases,” the researchers found, “the wild greens had higher micronutrient content than those cultivated.”
Even more intriguing: greens keep Cretans in harmony with two million years of human history. For most of our ancestral existence, humans maintained a healthy balance between omega-6 fatty acids—which provide a healthy amount of protective inflammation—and omega-3’s, which keep inflammation in check. Overdo it with omega-6 and you become high-risk for heart disease and neurological disorders. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had a one-to-one ratio. Today, ours is more like sixteen to one. Since the proliferation of vegetable and soybean oils in processed foods, omega-6 consumption has been through the roof. Instead of a small fire to warm the house, we’ve created an inferno that’s burning it down.
Except on Crete. “By including daily wild greens in their diet, the population of Crete was able to supplement their diet not only with vitamins and antioxidants but also with essential fatty acids in a ratio similar to that kept by the local Minoan population 4,500 years ago,” the researchers found. “The traditional diet of Crete,” they add, “is similar to the ratio kept during human evolution.”
But for beginners, foraging is bewildering. Books aren’t much help: greens all kind of look the same on the page, and they’re usually photographed in blossom, when the pictures are prettiest but the prime plucking period has already passed. Luckily, Leda came up with a genius solution: let hatred be your guide.
“Do you have something around your house you can’t stand?” she asked.
“Nettles,” I immediately replied. “Burn nettles. I can’t get rid of it.”
“Stop trying. You’re lucky. Nettles are free spinach.” Cooking or drying neutralizes the sting, and what you’re left with is a tasty, leafy green that makes a great lasagna, pesto, soup, or pizza topping.
“If you hate it, you’ll recognize it,” Leda explains. “Start with two or three things you see all the time—like dandelions and Lady’s Thumb—and add things you hate, like nettles, and that’s plenty to keep you busy as you expand your visual vocabulary.” And like the “Evaders” on Crete, who scrabbled to feed themselves from the harsh stones of the Samaría Gorge, it won’t be long before you realize that everything you need to survive—and thrive—is right at your feet.