If you want to find the best food in Atlanta, then you might consider stopping by the West Midtown market Star Provisions, where you can scrounge for beef from Japan, olive oil from Portugal, oysters from Canada and the most beautiful spring onions from local Georgia farms.
But Hank Shaw and I are not going there.
We’re heading next door to the overgrown, weedy yard fronting an abandoned home-decor retailer. There, as a curious rat scurries by, we will look for good things to eat.
Shaw, a former political reporter, publishes the blog Hunter Angler Gardener Cook (honest-food.net) and has just released his first book, “Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast” (Rodale, $25.99). With its 50 or so appealing recipes for shad tempura, Sardinian hare stew and stinging nettle risotto, it qualifies as a cookbook. But, really, this text-heavy book is part primer, part memoir and part cri de coeur.
“We walk around as ghosts in nature,” Shaw says as we step over the Westside Urban Market’s parking lot fence and head off on the foraging expedition I had requested. Most people, he says, pay no attention to the plants and animals that share their habitat and have no notion of the myriad opportunities for harvesting wild foods. “Do you know that almost all common weeds are from Europe and we brought them over because we ate them?” he asks.
When the California-based author told me he was passing through Atlanta on a cross-country book tour (driving all the way in his pickup), I suggested a foraging expedition. “This is not the first time someone has asked me to forage in a strange place,” he says, warning me that the wild plants here are different from those in California, and we may spend some time looking.
I look over to tell Shaw that’s fine, and he’s not there. No, he’s squatting by the edge of the yard before we even get into it.
“Try this,” he says, holding up a plant that looks like clover with tiny yellow flowers. “Oxalis. It’s a sorrel, like lemonade on a leaf.” The flavor is tart, bright, delicious.
“Always look at the edges,” Shaw continues. “The diversity of life is always at the intersection of two different habitats.”
He finds prickly lettuce and what he thinks is edible wonderberry leaf but possibly deadly nightshade.
“Hunt, Gather, Cook” is filled with tales not only of deadly lookalikes, but also edible plants that must be handled with care. With some plants you eat only the roots or the tender shoots as the stalks and leaves can make you sick. Others cause some people upset stomachs.
“The rule of thumb is to only eat a little of a new plant,” Shaw advises, as he hands me some white yucca flowers from a blooming stalk that had been part of the store’s landscaping. It tastes beguilingly of artichoke, and then I feel like I’ve swallowed a tea bag.
“Is it drying up the back of your throat?” he asks. “Yeah, that happens to some people. It goes away if you cook it. They’re delicious fried.”
As we poke around we find mint, blackberry brambles, juniper berries, wild carrot (“it tastes more like a parsnip”) and wild garlic scapes.
We also find a dead rabbit, buzzing with flies, which brings the conversation to hunting. Shaw didn’t start hunting until he was well into his 30s, a story he recounts in the book. Disemboweling his first pheasant left him queasy, but with the help of a mentor he persevered.
Now that he and his girlfriend hunt large game, Shaw has lost the taste for fatty beef. He also feels that hunting has made them more resourceful cooks by learning how to use the whole animal. Here’s where he writes an appeal to those readers who had never considered hunting before:
“Hunting has given us a sense of self-sufficiency, a sense of honesty, and a clear-eyed understanding of exactly where our meat comes from. No factory farms, no hormones, antibiotics, and, arguably, no cruelty. Every animal we kill had been living the life God intended until it met us that one fateful day.”
Some people who buy “Hunt, Gather, Cook” to learn better how to forage for mushrooms and harvest those day lilies growing all over their gardens may end up rethinking their approach to consuming meat. If Mark Zuckerberg can ...
As Shaw and I get ready to leave, he shows me a cluster of leaves with parallel ribs along their surface. “This is plantain,” he explains, a food plant that European settlers introduced that spread faster than their settlements did.
“The Native Americans called it ‘White Man’s Foot’ because it always showed up first and warned them the white man was coming soon.”
“So, it’s edible?” I ask.
“It’s edible but it’s boring,” Shaw laughs. “There’s so much better out there.”
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