foragers

Couple a nationwide recession with a burgeoning food movement and you're bound to wind up with some foraging. Stylish foraging. News outlets have picked up on the trend (right behind the urban chicken coops craze), and they've raised its caché, even labeling it "the underground fruit economy." But these make-do tendencies have been around for a long time. Just think of old-school gleaners. Hell, foraging has even had indie cred for a long time.

Take LA's radical artist collective Fallen Fruit and their anarcho-ecological, Marxist guerrilla gardening. They started out by collecting the ignored produce of Los Angelenos' yards on nocturnal fruit walks, which have in turn become popular art scene happenings. The group recognized unused fruits and unplanted lots across the city, and have set out to expose the urban potential for food sovereignty.

Closer to home, Portland boasts the less-radical, but still exceptional Portland Fruit Tree Project and the community-generated wiki, Urban Edibles. The former is practically a fresh-fruit food bank, while the latter is much more DIY and under-the-radar. A and I have long thought about joining up on a Fruit Tree Project picking party or skipping the u-pick farm and gathering cherries on the streets. And yet, apart from some furtive handfuls of blackberries as we walk down an alley, we've always copped out.

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I remember when we lived in Northwest Portland, I'd pass a Chinese couple in the mornings on my way to work. Both elderly, they'd be bent over collecting gigko nuts from the sidewalk. Others would pass by holding their noses against the sour odor of the trees, but the two people would stay crouched to the pavement with their bulging plastic bags. It was always jarring to see the two of them actually putting the wasted bounty to use.

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Each year, A and I talk about all of the foods we'd like to experiment with preserving, usually after their seasons have passed. This summer, however, we had a seredipitous chance to both cross a new recipe off of our list and to scout out some neighborhood edibles. I can't remember when I'd first read about nocino, the Italian walnut liqueur, but something about it stuck with me. Ever since then, I've talked wistfully about tracking down green walnuts, but have never followed through. I'd thought this year's season had passed me by again, only to see a macerating jar of walnut fruits on the bar counter at Laurelhurst Market. While the tight-lipped bartender wouldn't reveal his walnut source, he did let us know that we probably had a few remaining days when the walnuts would still be soft enough to use.

That weekend, A and I fired up the Urban Edibles database and found a few clusters of trees in our neighborhood. On an early Saturday morning, we went out with grocery bags in hand and managed (after a lot of leaping and stretching) to knock down enough pounds of the hard green fruits to steep. We even found a few nut-bearing trees that we later added to the map.

At home, we chopped the nuts (which leak a thin liquid that stains everything it touches golden to green to inky black) and mixed them with a liter of cheap vodka according to David Lebovitz' simple recipe. The stuff smells high-test, and it's beginning to look potent; we have a few weeks left, and the brew already resembles motor oil. I suppose that's a fitting use for some walnuts we picked above our neighbor's parked cars.