In the springtime, a special delicacy to be had is the emerging, curled frond of the fern, called a fiddlehead because of it’s resemblance to the scroll of a fiddle.
Consumption of undercooked fiddleheads has led to several outbreaks of foodbourne illness: they are difficult to clean, and therefore require a certain amount of heat before they are safe to ingest.
Despite all warnings, if properly identified and carefully-prepared, fiddleheads are a rich source of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, dietary fibre, iron, and potassium.
I am not a fan of the taste of fiddleheads, and they are what I would call “marginally edible” – like tulips, they have a place in my edible landscape essentially as a last resort, or famine food.
Others regard them as a delicacy, however, and globally, their consumption has a rich ethnobotanical history. They are certainly a lovely addition to the ecology of an edible forest understory. I regularly transplant offsets of the Ostrich fern to form dense colonies under newly-planted trees.
I feel compelled to add to this post, like any other conversation about foraging: be mindful of where and what you gather.
I’m not anti-foraging, in general. Ethnobotany is an awesome field of study and there is a lot of good that comes of people getting in touch with their local ecosystems on a foraging sort of level. I’ve taken and given classes on wild edibles. My boss wrote a book on them.
But right, ok, we get people poaching fiddleheads in the forest preserves where I work every year a little past this time, sometimes by the sackful. Yeah, it counts as poaching, even when it’s plants–and there’s some serious fines if you get caught. There are plenty of common ferns growing in our forest, and a lot more uncommon ones. They all get a lot more uncommon when the poachers come through.
The big bag-full-of-greens poachers are bad news. They wipe out native plant populations. They dig up rare flowers to sell for people’s gardens. Species that are nowhere near threatened or endangered on any list suddenly disappear from an area. There are supposed to be morels, in our woods. They’re supposed to be growing there and decomposing trees and leaves and everything else, to keep the nutrient cycle going. Every once in a while, one of our staff ecologists will see a small patch and keep it secret from everybody but the other ecologists. They’re always gone by the time anybody goes back.
If you care enough about native ecosystems and sustainability and so on to be really interested in ethnobotany and foraging, chances are you already know the big-bag-of-greens poachers are terrible. You already know it doesn’t make a big difference to local ecology, if one person takes a handful of fiddleheads for themselves out of a healthy ecosystem with a thriving fern population. That’s the kind of foraging humans have been doing for thousands of years. It’s sustainable. That would be fine. But you can’t have that, in a public nature preserve. Not even the small handful.
Think of it this way: nature preserves belong to whatever organization, usually governmental, that administers them, and in a roundabout way therefore belong collectively to the taxpayers as a whole. Which means that every single taxpayer, every kid who wants to go tromping through the woods and trampling over the trillium to get to the garlic mustard we’d honestly love to get rid of, and every high-end chef who just wants a couple of handfuls of wild ramps for a one-night special, and every single person who heard that wild ginseng is twice as potent as the cultivated stuff, and yeah, everybody who wants to try fiddlehead ferns–they all have the same rights to go out there and start grabbing stuff. Every single one of them.
In an ideal world, nobody would ever think of touching the endangered species and we’d be giving garlic mustard away by the sackful until we got rid of it all (it makes a really tasty pesto), but unfortunately we don’t live in one of those. The only way to make it work, and legal, and sustainable, and all of those other complicated-intertwined concepts that come up when the government is trying to preserve natural space, is to just say no. Don’t do it. Period.
So yeah. Go find native edibles! Plant native edibles! Enjoy them, forage for them, harvest them, go wild, just be mindful of where you’re grabbing from. Tragedy of the commons. Trust me, I can assure you, the beleaguered staff of whatever public preserve might be near you already have enough on their plate battling buckthorn and loosestrife and deer overpopulation and brand new highway development. Don’t do the thing.
This is very important info–reblogging for it.
As it happens, I was thinking about this the other day–I grow goldenseal in my garden (for no other reason than I think it’s neat) and it’s just coming up in the garden now. It’s one of the plants locally that’s massively under threat in the wild because people harvest goldenseal from the wild for use in alternative medicine. (And if it was just somebody going out and harvesting a couple roots for their own use, that would be one thing, but it’s usually people yanking it up in quantity to sell.)
There is nothing inherently wrong with foraging, but the line between foraging and poaching is one you always want to stay on the correct side of.
(As always, of course, the people who worry about this are probably not the ones who need to–if you’re panicking over picking a daisy, that’s one thing.* if you’re one of those bastards who shovel up Venus fly-traps by the hundreds to sell for a buck at the flea market, that’s quite another, and I hope that there is a suitably ironic punishment awaiting you in the afterlife.)
*But seriously, unless you know it’s a common plant, err on the side of caution. Stuff like lady’s slipper and trillium and jack-in-the-pulpit don’t just grow another flower.
