I thought I wouldn't be the first person, I thought for sure someone would be not standing
behind that but I'm definitely too short so I don't think people can see me.
I think I'm supposed to stand on this side of this line but if you don't mind.
I've also been loving the presentations and drooling over people's slides.
Like I notice Gary you have some nice amaranth in that weed slide.
And I also notice that in that clip they had some great lambs quarters.
To start, I thought I would start with a little bit about my story because people laugh and
they ask me how did you go from being a corporate attorney to a weed forager?
So I thought I would tell that because people are going to be wondering that if I don't
say.
So actually I was born in New Jersey and I worked and lived in Hong Kong for about 12
years.
And I met my husband there and had 3 daughters.
As you heard before, my youngest daughter had really bad allergies and so I was really
concerned and they really couldn't pinpoint what it was.
It just was something in the food.
That's when I started looking at food packaging and trying to understand the ingredients.
I realized I really couldn't understand what all those things were any more.
So we moved back to New Jersey.
It was a bit of a fixer upper house but it had fresh air and clean water and I wanted
to have a vegetable garden because I thought that way I would raise our food and I would
know exactly where it was coming from.
The problem was that gardening was a lot harder.
I am in such awe of you who are farmers here because it's tough.
It's a lot harder than I remembered it.
You have to do things like double digging and amending the soil and irrigation and all
this.
Peas have to be planted at a certain time, you can't plant things next to...there were
a lot of rules.
And then I had been away for a long time and there were things that people had started
doing since I was away, you know you see things much clearer, that I didn't remember.
Like this huge obsession with mulch, black dyed mulch.
Do you notice?
People are putting that on all around and the trees look like these weird lollipops
but people think this looks nice.
So I kind of had culture shock.
But needless to say I wasn't as you could tell very good at any of this.
And then my mother actually - I'm sort of in this sandwich class, my mother had a stroke
and everything just kind of went to seed that year.
And the weeds - this is the #2 agricultural weeed, galinsoga - just took over everything.
And besides the fact when I tried having these little raised bed gardens, most of the time
when you're outside the agricultural season the weeds would be growing.
From March through December.
So most of the time they were barren and desolate and the only things that were growing there
were weeds like dandelion and chickweed.
So then I found out there were these things called native plants and native plants had
evolved ecologically to be with the landscape, the local landscape, where they grew.
You didn't have to do all this stuff.
You didn't have to amend the soil, you didn't have to water them, so that suited me fine.
Just my style.
And they also helped with pollinators and were part of the underlying ecology of the
system.
The problem was that the native plants had their own weeds and these were even worse.
These are called noxious weeds or invasive weeds as so called by the U.S. government,
which spends billions of dollars trying to eradicate them.
And so one of the worst ones in the world is called Japanese knotweed.
And it starts off like this and it ends up like this.
And it can actually get under the foundation in your house and start to ruin things.
So I was battling all these different weeds, that's what I ended up doing and it really
happened when some professor friends of my dad's from Japan were visiting.
And I was telling them how I was battling the chickweed and battling the knotweed and
that's about all I was doing and they actually apologized.
'So sorry these things from Japan are coming here and causing you problems in this country.'
But then the younger professor said, wait I think the knotweed, we call that hidori,
the tiger stick in Japan.
And it tastes like rhubarb.
It's one of our great dishes.
And the chickweed, when we see that we have a little memory of the flowers like little
stars, we call it hakobe.
It's one of the 7 treasures of spring that we eat.
So for me that was like, that was the moment, right, when the weeds that I've been trying
to battle are great food.
So I just started on this kind of obsession of trying to find out all the weeds that were
around, going to other people's places and looking at their weeds, researching where
they came from and finding out how people ate them.
So I could eat them that way too.
And then sometimes I think I was lucky because not only with the professors, my in-laws who
were Chinese would come and they'd see the day lilies, which people plant in their gardens
but they escape into the wild and they're, like, screaming, because this is a delicacy
in China because they have a subtropical climate.
This is temperate.
So it grows here like crazy and in fact in some states it is invasive because it carries
out so much.
You may recognize it in moo shu pork or hot and sour soup, those little dried things are
the buds of the day lily.
So sometimes I think, well why is it that all this great food is around us and we don't
recognize it?
And the only thing I can think is I was lucky because I had my in-laws and the professors
and that maybe it's because we're a nation of immigrants, so we've lost the connection
with our grandmothers and grandfathers who would know what these things are and are still
eating them in different places today.
And that all we're really trying to do is just connect us with our past, from where
we came from.
But of course I don't mean connecting like with caveman days where you know you're walking
along and taking a branch and biting it off or grinding up acorns into flour and things
like that.
I wanted to eat things that were not just edible but delicious.
And that's how I thought about taste and I started working with chefs.
Because there is a peak season for weeds and there are also parts and when they're good
and how to prepare them.
Are they better cooked or raw, etc. etc.
You could come up with some great recipes that you could have in the home like a wild
herb ravioli with chickweed, wild gress, wild garlic and some other things and it has a
flavor that's so much more complex than spinach.
Or creepy jenny tips taste like pea shoots.
You can have an amazing tomato salad.
Or the common dandelion.
You can pick it when it's very tender and young in the middle, it pairs very nicely
with beef and clear noodles.
So anyway, this is really fun.
I don't know, maybe you think my story's a little bit wacky but I'm really here because
you may ask what does this mean for us?
Why I try to share this with you is I think that weeds are a part of our future.
An important part of our future.
How?
Well I think as you could see from some of the things that people have been talking about,
weeds are the ultimate opportunistic, sustainable plants.
All over the world.
They can grow in a crack in the sidewalk.
This is pineapple weed growing in an unused driveway.
It has an amazing flavor.
And how?
Because they have survival strategies.
Sometimes they can have several generations in one year so that's why you can see them
when sometimes nothing else is growing.
Also the seeds, we heard a little bit about seeds, some of the seeds for weeds can last
decades and they've even found some that was in a 1,000 year old stomach of some skeleton
they dug up.
But one of the most important reasons I love weeds is because they're nutrient dense and
flavor dense.
And of course they're not being bred for shelf life or yield.
They are really offered to us from the bounty of nature.
But what does it really come down to?
It really comes down to the soil.
So we heard people talking about monocultures of industrial agriculture and how that leads
to a depleted soil.
Well if you have a square meter of wild meadow, 50 plants in a year can grow and there's a
huge diversity of micronutrients and organic matter there.
So I don't think we can top mother nature.
The main thing also about that is that when you have this incredible nutrient density
it also means you have incredible flavor density and that's why chefs love it.
The other thing that you all probably know is about the problem of diversity of our food,
that we're really too dependent on maybe 4 crops: wheat, soybean, rice and corn, yes.
How could I forget corn?
Tomatoes are one of the probably 25 vegetables that we use.
There are 6,000 edible wild plants.
So there's all this stuff around us and a lot of it is nothing new.
We just have to realize it.
This is all why I think weeds are really important but why I'm really passionate about it is
because you don't have to build a million green roofs and you don't have to do so much.
All it means to start doing this is to change the way we're thinking.
We have to change the way we think about what is a weed and what is food.
And the second thing is to stop doing some of the things we're doing.
Like what?
A lot of the pesticide things we're doing.
Or all the fertilizing we're doing.
Because a lot of the things we're doing are just what?
To get rid of weeds.
One of the things I also want to talk about is about lawns.
We spend so much - a lot of our herbicides are spent on getting rid of weeds in the lawn.
Just for purely cosmetic purposes.
And we spend about 10,000 gallons of water a year just on watering lawns for every 100
square feet of lawn.
And for me from a forager's point of view, this is just a complete - this is my monoculture
of wasted space.
There's nothing to eat here.
And actually they do say that lawns cover 3 times the amount of space in this country
as corn.
So we talk about waste.
And I think, how did we get here?
How did we get to this point?
And I think it's because the way that we're looking at nature, nature is something that
we have to control.
And it has to be orderly, in orderly rows, to an extreme.
We can't see one little out of place weed.
So I think we forget that actually we are part of nature.
It's not something separate that we're supposed to control and I say why don't we be a little
more messy.
Be a little less tidy and more humble in the face of nature.
Leave a fallow field.
Have a hedgerow.
Have a little weedy patch in your vegetable garden or lawn.
The Japanese actually call this wabisabi, which is a celebration of that which is asymmetrical
and impermanent.
So I would urge you next time you see a weed like chickweed in the planter next to your
cafe or in your vegetable garden or your farm or any place, why not look at it again and
consider trying to get to know it, maybe try and eat it.
But I have to pre-warn you that once you embark on this path, you will notice things that
are beautiful that you never noticed before.
And in the morning when you feel the texture of the herbs and the dew on your hands and
the thin rays of the sunlight slant in your eyes, you will feel amazing.
We spend our lives chasing after fulfillment and we can find it right all around us, literally
under our feet.
Thank you.