The next step in cheap, local food: Eat your weeds

Ready for nettles and dandelions on your plate? Langdon Cook talks foraging, the next (cheap!) step in local food

It's been three decades since Alice Waters made microgreens a culinary cliché, and by now most diners take the lingo of local food for granted: chefs who raise their own heritage chickens, restaurants with hand-lettered blackboards that outline the lineage of every lamb chop, and salads that sport farmers' Christian names. But what if the next menu you picked up offered nettle pesto picked from the ditch next to Route 6? Or garlic-sautéed dandelion greens gathered from the overgrown lot behind the grocery store? As the meanings of "organic" and "local" grow ever more slippery -- and in lean times, when fewer folks than ever can afford to pay a premium for dinner -- are wild edibles poised to emerge as the next gastronomic zeitgeist?

Langdon Cook, the author of the new memoir-cum-cookbook "Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager," and a popular blog by the same name, might put money on it -- but he isn't waiting around for the masses to catch up. Cook, an outdoorsman, amateur naturalist and former editor at Amazon.com, first began foraging as a trailside diversion but has spent the better part of the last decade getting in touch with his inner hunter-gatherer, schooling himself in the art of "shooting" razor clams, mapping out burn sites for signs of morels, and cataloging a veritable crisper-full of delectable weeds. That education -- combined with a year spent living off the grid in southern Oregon with his wife and young child, growing and canning most of their food and foraging the surplus -- proved a transformative experience for Cook, and inspired him to bring the gospel of wild food (in all of its muddy, wet, prickly and, yes, tasty glory) to the wider world. His message: Foraging food will make you a healthier, happier eater, a more thoughtful consumer and a more adventurous cook. And his best evidence? Himself. This is, after all, the same guy who once, in order to woo a lady, bragged about making a killer Egg McMuffin.

Now settled in Seattle, Cook does most of his foraging in the mountains and waterways near Puget Sound, but sometimes even a stroll around his urban neighborhood leads to an unexpected edible encounter. (Case in point: The dried buds of the lowly pineapple weed, a common sidewalk crack-filler and relative of chamomile, makes excellent iced tea.) Salon spoke with him recently about recession-proof dining, the large-scale sustainability of foraging, the hidden charms of the stinging nettle, and why it's time we all got out there and started searching for our suppers.