For the Love of Foraging
Gabrielle Cerberville on living and eating with the seasons
Foraging has been part of the human story forever, and its post-pandemic resurgence is a return to ways of living with the natural world that have only recently been forgotten. Gabrielle Cerberville, or the Chaotic Forager, as she’s known online, is one of the voices championing the practice on social media. Her videos distill the beauty of living with the seasons into bite-size videos, many of them including recipes, from pine-syrup mugolio to simple dry-sauteed mushrooms. Her new book, Gathered: On Foraging, Feasting, and the Seasonal Life, combines personal essays with a kind of narrative field guide, along with—of course—dozens of wildly creative recipes, making for the book version of walking through the woods with a friend.
Go beyond the episode:
- Gabrielle Cerberville’s Gathered: On Foraging, Feasting, and the Seasonal Life
- Find foraging workshops and videos on her website, TikTok, and Instagram
- Read Michael Autrey’s account of foraging for mushrooms, or Matthew Desmond’s reporting on the wild ginseng trade in Appalachia
Want to learn how to identify plants and fungi? Start with some of these books:
- Wildflowers of the Eastern United States by Wilbur H. Duncan and Marion B. Duncan
- Sam Thayer’s Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants
- Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places by “Wildman” Steve Brill with Evelyn Dean
- Or join a foraging meetup in your own neighborhood!
For recipes:
- The Forager Chef’s Book of Flora by Alan Bergo (whose website is a goldmine!)
- The Forager’s Feast by Leda Meredith
- The Forager’s Harvest by Samuel Thayer
- The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart covers plants both wild and cultivated
Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
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