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" Foraging. The word probably makes you think of cavemen, or maybe a dirtier variety of hippies or even Nordic cuisine, with ingredients like juniper berries and wood sorrel. And, understandably, you may be dubious. What&amp;#039;s the point? The supermarket is around the corner. Who needs to sweat through raspberry brambles? Still, I was curious. Which is how I ended up on a recent foraging tour in New York City&amp;#039;s Central Park with Steve Brill. It was ninety degrees before noon on a Saturday. I had stuffed my backpack with empty Tupperware, a paper bag, and two bottles of water. Twelve adults were about to be led by a bearded man in a safari hat and head-to-toe khaki, handing out liability forms and clapping the George Gershwin tune &amp;quot;Summertime.&amp;quot; This was adult day camp. Steve Brill is a local legend. He made a name for himself in the &amp;#039;80s, when he was arrested for eating a dandelion green. He went on Letterman, and the parks department basically had no choice but to drop the charges and hire him instead. Now he&amp;#039;s in his 60s. He no longer works for the parks, but he still gives tours all over the city.  As we jumped low fences off the sidewalk, Brill described each plant in detail. When you forage, you have to look at every characteristic of the plant: color, smell, patterning of the leaves, their edges \u2014 smooth, toothed, scalloped. The slight variations divide edible from poisonous. Take the May Apple: small fruit about the size of an apricot, with waxy skin. They grow low to the ground, out of the crotch (botanical term \u2014 don&amp;#039;t ask) between two stems. Ripe, they&amp;#039;re yellow and taste like lemon custard. Green, they&amp;#039;ll give you a wicked case of the runs. Deeper into the park, we came across poor man&amp;#039;s pepper, sassafras (root beer flavor), wineberries, and hackberries, the same fruit discovered in the dwelling of the Homo erectus in Java. In Central Park. There were moments when I realized we&amp;#039;re not as far removed from our past as I&amp;#039;d imagined. I met one woman whose mother had foraged for fiddleheads in Korea before moving to the U.S. There&amp;#039;s a strange logic to the current foraging movement: In an age of so much we can&amp;#039;t hold in our hands, food has become one of our last enduring visceral experiences. But there&amp;#039;s a reason foraging has technically been outdated since the Neolithic Revolution (10,000 BCE). After four hours of walking, I had filled only one bag. My Tupperware was as empty as when I arrived. Yes, there&amp;#039;s a certain comfort in knowing a wild wineberry bush when you stumble on it, feeling confident as you pick and eat the fruit. But even wildlife scavenge through trashcans for our leftover pizza. At edge of the park, I saw a squirrel chewing on half a coconut \u2014 decidedly not a native New York plant. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/a15318/steve-brill-foraging-11644996/>