Wild Plants & Culinary Creativity

um well i don't know i'm impressed just state start by stating your basic fact which is that uh without plants men couldn't live what to say well we know that but something we don't always realize is that uh 90 of our food needs are covered by only 20 plant species and why not but the thing is that 80 000 wild plants have been recognized as being edible throughout the world all these plants have been used by men and the thing is that now they're pretty much all but forgotten and this is strange thank you why is it because they don't taste good or is it because they're not efficient as food i don't believe so i think it's based mostly on historical reasons one has to do with agriculture and what stefano said earlier is very interesting very few plants are domesticated but maybe it's because not so many plants wanted to be domesticated i don't know but the fact is that for a long time man has been um gathering plants as long as cultivating but now it's not it's not true anymore and um i think something very important happened in the middle ages which is that our society was divided into two very unequal parts and um the upper crust was nobility and clergy and the rich people and had to differentiate themselves from the massive people by way of habitat of um language of clothes you know they had the right to have bright colored clothes which the peasants didn't have the right to and food and as far as food goes they would eat meat a lot of meat i would find products including sugar which first came as a medicine and as far as fruits and vegetables go they would use the plant i mean the in thing to do was to eat the plants that were brought back from all over the world by the expeditions that they would launch because it was a sign of a high social status if you could eat something that was grown by somebody else that you could pay whereas the peasants um they need a lot of meat it was unrefined products and um as far as plants you know they would have to eat easy to grow vegetables and wild plants because white plants are delivered for free by nature so wild plants because became a sign of a low social status and it's become even more true when peasants came to the city became workers and wanted to adopt the bourgeois way of life which was based on the court way of life and way of eating so nowadays basically what we're eating is um something which proves that we have a high social status and wild plants are definitely out of the picture because of that and i think it's too bad because we've lost myriads of different tastes for one thing and also white plants have tremendous nutritional value actually men evolved eating white plants it's a normal food this is something that brings us everything that we need all the nutrients we need i think just the example of nettles nettles have about seven times more vitamin c than oranges they have as much calcium as cheese they have um three times more iron than spinach and they have proteins as many as maybe as much protein as soy beans except that these are balanced in essential amino acids um maybe it wouldn't be not too serious because we can live we can definitely live without eating wild plants we could live by eating only cultivated plants and other foods but one thing that we cannot avoid um facing now is that our society has created huge problems and i think these problems actually come from a separation from nature which i put all this in a nutshell you know it would take us a long time to discuss it but basically the big fracture happened 10 000 years ago with the beginning of agriculture and everything that it had to bring and that it did bring us which is not only nice things so i believe if we want to be realistic and act realistically um we have to change our point of view and acknowledging the existence of other being on earth you've seen that plants are intelligent it's not only that they are intelligence there are beings they are actually being and they're a good way to get started for us to recognize the existence of other beings on earth this is what i do in my seminar i bring people to develop a relationship with plants it's nothing esoteric it's nothing difficult to do it has to do with just um using at first just using our senses just observing the plants not only just passing by um touching smelling tasting and you'll you will realize a brand new world and a brand new way of relating to our world um i think we have to get to know nature that's the only way to develop the respect which is needed for us to go on and not and to stop destroying basically everything including ourselves like we're doing now so i think it's something very important foraging is not just gathering plants for making nettle soup and foraging something very important it raises consciousness it changes the way we look at the world i believe that postmodern living will be about cultivating about living living an urban life but also gathering plants whenever we can which is not always possible but the thing is to live life with a hunter-gatherer spirit which is made of respect for everything that lives in the world so to me it's something that's been always normal living with the plants has always been normal um eating white plants was just as normal as eating cultivated plants because i started picking gathering plants with my mother when i was two years old i was 60 years ago so it just was a normal thing to do and when uh when i was a teenager i decided that living in society was not for me it was it was too much pressure you know i had a much easier time relating to plants than relating to people as a matter of fact now i've learned to relate to both but still still i mean plants plants are nice yes they are so so one thing i had to find in order to be able to live away from society was to define my basic needs and besides air to breathe water to drink then it was how to get food and knowing that plants could feed me was easy enough so i really dived into it learnt all the edible plants i could and i took off to the woods and i lived there for a number of years um especially in western america where you still have large woods but then at one point and i was happy i mean i was happy it was great but at one point i realized that well my the the place where i was living i mean even though i was going from place to place the forest all being destroyed and it was just very bad i mean i could go on living like this myself but just for myself and as i said i decided i had to do something so get out of the woods and pass on what i knew and and get down to work so that's when i started giving seminars writing books um getting my phd and starting your school and all of this um and going around the whole planet to explore the relationship between people and plants this is the job of next no button is you know kind of a hybrid between ethnologist and botanist um basically learning how people have been using plants are you know from from the very beginning until now and all over the planet and it's just amazing it's just enormous and then at what point chefs got into the picture you know the first one to interest to introduce me to the world of gastronomy with my wild plant was michel brass with his garguyu his gargoyle the pretty legume with her chickweed was playing a leading role in it and that was just mind-blowing um and then that's i worked very closely with mark vera and we've been doing a lot of things together writing books and doing tv series and with other chefs in new york in switzerland many places and i believe it's it's it's boosted their creativity which is very good but this is not what's most most important for me for me chefs have a crucial role to play in making things move forward in the world um see plants were forgotten because they got a very low social status like i explained to you before and now that's the way people look at planet i mean look down at plants they despise plants they crush plants i mean they they eradicate them they they they kill them with chemicals and everything they hate plants basically and it's in my opinion a cultural thing so if it's culture we can change the culture and make things be different and chefs again have a very important role because through the media with all the um the importance to to given them which is given to them to the chefs i mean when they use plants and they show plants and people start looking at these plants this formerly despised plants like something else plants become stars and this is this is great this is very important but um anyway um i'd like to show you a few plants now um here i classified the plants according to the way i did in this book like cuisine sauvage which is according to the part which is used that's uh um a good way if you want to start using plants knowing how to do it which part to use and how because it's we i mean there are so many it's only plants which nature offers us that we have to find our way around and have some kind of a logic so you all know this acorns yeah okay acorns um they're one of the best source of glucids and proteins carbohydrates and proteins and they have been used extensively by our ancestors in mesolithic time you find remnants of acorns all over the place and aircons were the basic fruit of california indians air-cons contain tannins so it has to be leached when it's once it's done which is fairly easy to do with water it's a great base for many things so this was for um mealy seeds now oily seeds we have um corn puppy oh it's okay should be in this direction um romans used to use the seeds for food and they would even make oil out of it like people are still doing with the opium poppy which is a very good oil wilder yet then beach beech nuts they were used as oil and for yielding oil all over um central europe it's been going on pretty much until world war ii and now it's totally forgotten as far as the roots go this is pig nut it's it's a small plant that grows in western europe and the little tubers are just delicious very good small but excellent and here we got rambion rampion and other related species some of them have been cultivated for their roots but they're forgotten now the roots are very tasty very crisp excellent and this is this is the survival plant if you find this if you're lost in the woods and you have to survive try to find a patch of cattail because in the in the underground rhizomes you have pure starch that you can just eat like this it will feed you on top of it you can eat the base of the leaves you can eat the young flower spikes you can eat the pollen you can make a mat out of the leaves you can make rope with the fibers in the rhizome it's just uh the supermarket of the of the woods these are the roots of the cattails so if you open this there's a core of pure starch delicious linden leaves young linder leaves you can make salads i mean tons of salad you could feed the whole of the city with the the linden trees that grow here you know this is a weed this is just hated by gardeners it's one of the very best weed there is it's gout weed and the young plants are just the most perfect salad with a taste of celery and incense and the older leaves just a great vegetable and you can gather so much of it i mean it's really plentiful you know if people sometimes people think that um plants are just not easy to gather that it's very tedious to to get plants well it's not always true same with plantain it has a very nice mushroom flavor very nice and well this is again the best um best wild salad it's perennial lettuce or blue lettuce it's got a blue flower it grows in rocks in really dry environment and it's just sweet crisp just excellent and this is also the very best salad in the world i mean there are a lot of very best salads in my opinion this one is not as common it grows in the mediterranean area not far from the seashore but i mean it's so good and i i don't know i don't know what to say i mean you know the thing is don't take my word for it go go out there and um and try it amaranth this is a weed i mean it was introduced as a vegetables but it wasn't to the taste of the people so it was forgotten it's still with us comes from america still with us if you have a garden you have amaranth growing wide in there that's for sure and so with kenopodium it was introduced uh in roman times or probably even with the first cultivated plants it's been with us since it used to be used as a spinach but as i said it's too easy to grow so it's been forgotten white mustard another weed in fields with a very strong very strong fragrance and this is hedge mustard another one i mean there could be so many this one is particular because this one is amazing that's one it it has a story um it stinks it stinks really like an old rag very much so and this is this is what i thought um until i was working with mark vera and we were talking together you know i was um bringing in a lot of plants including some which i thought were not really good and just crushed the leaf between his fingers and at one point told wow this is politis mushroom sausage duseb and he made me uh consummate sev virtual with that it's amazing i mean it tastes of polidas and there's no mushroom in it this is another weed that comes from south america here it's totally unknown in south america and colombia it's part of the um the national dish a jackal then we go on to young stems young shoots young shoots hops which you can eat raw and these ones um they must be cooked this is um old man's beer clematis it grows all over the place it grows all over the place and nobody knows about using these plants except in some parts of italy but it has to be cooked this one is considered a toxic plant you see it in all toxic plant books it's briny and okay the um the fruits are toxic but the young shoots are just delicious excellent same with asparagus you know if you think of asparagus you think of asparagus as a as an edible plant but the fruits are just toxic just the same as this one and asparagus is good but wow this is even better i think no it's try it try it okay oh this is mugwort mugwort is very very um chewy but you can make fritos with it it's very flavorful and got a lot of body to it black brownie this is interesting because um in southern france southwestern france um there is a part of the population who is still very attached to the tradition of gathering this planet and other people elsewhere just don't know it although it grows all over europe um this is bad asparagus this is a wild plant which has been met with more success um it's grown well it's picked from the wild but it's sold on markets in in france and some other places um this is cow parsnip or hogweed i mean it's a plant you can do everything with it but the very best part is the young the young stem and inside this sheath with the with the leaves um you have a young inflorescence which is just like broccoli it's excellent really really very good i can't understand why people don't know this plant it's all over the world i mean at least all over europe in pasture there's just so much of it and it's it's good it's reproductive so is this burdock burdock is very common and if you taste um this word that stamps it tastes like artichoke hearts except that you do all you have to do is cut the stem at the right stage peel it and eat it that's it not even cooking it it's just well why do people not know that so a few a few condiments this is garlic mustard it's mustard and garlic combined together this is cuckoo flower or ladies mark it's very strong extremely strong extremely strong and this is wood havens um mice told us about this planet yesterday you can see the root the root smells like um as he said about cloves it smells like but more than than clothes it has a lot of different very subtle smells all together not only clothes it's one of the most beautiful um wild condiment or condiment that i know of and it's just all over the place again grows all over this one is not so common it grows up in the mountains but it smells like anise except i don't know it's more subtle like anise or fennel it's just more subtle you know not as strong as um as annie's um oregano oregano in northern countries doesn't smell very very much but i use the flowers to make a pesto pesto of wild oregano is something else it's it tastes slightly of oregano but a lot more of mushroom actually it's it has a interesting combination in itself some pickles this is known in quite a few places in europe especially the mediterranean area rock stamp higher it's pickled and it's very good lacto fermentation this is amaranth it's a good way of preserving wild plants it's not always that easy it doesn't work always but when you get down to it it's really great um and this this is used these are european olives not your european olives you can put them in brine and preserve them because they're very sour when you taste them like this but after three weeks in brine they're just very good they're just um excellent um flowers sweet violet not all violets are sweet but they're all good queen of the meadow which has a great fragrance and i'm done because it says so so i don't want to no okay thank you no