Eating Wildly
Foraging for Life, Love and the Perfect Meal
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
In this touching and informative memoir about foraging for food in New York City, Ava Chin finds sustenance…and so much more.
Urban foraging is the new frontier of foraging for foods, and it’s all about eating better, healthier, and more sustainably, no matter where you live. Time named foraging the “latest obsession of haute cuisine.” And while foraging may be the latest foodie trend, the quest to connect with food and nature is timeless and universal.
Ava Chin, aka the “Urban Forager,” is an experienced master of the quest. Raised in Queens, New York, by a single mother and loving grandparents, Chin takes off on an emotional journey to make sense of her family ties and romantic failures when her beloved grandmother dies. She retreats into the urban wilds, where parks and backyards provide not only rare and delicious edible plants, but a wellspring of wisdom.
As the seasons turn, Chin begins to view her life with new “foraging eyes,” experiencing the world as a place of plenty and variety, where every element—from flora to fauna to fungi—is interconnected and interdependent. Her experiences in nature put her on a path to self-discovery, leading to reconciliation with her family and finding true love.
Divided into chapters devoted to a variety of edible/medicinal plants, with recipes and culinary information, Eating Wildly will stir your emotions and enliven your taste buds—a moving memoir about the importance of family, relationships, and food.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chin, who writes the "Wild Edibles" column for the New York Times, goes looking for love, blackberries, and wild garlic in this wildly uneven, yet warmly exhilarating memoir. Trekking through Central Park and other urban beaten paths and backyards, Chin leads us on a journey of discovery as she searches for the tender shoots poking through cement cracks and hardy wild plants resisting winter's bite. With wild-eyed wonder, she reveals the tastes of the plants she discovers on her expeditions: the burst of flavor of wood sorrel, the bitterness of the medicinal reishi mushroom, and the "benign sweetness" of mulberries. Sometimes she sounds like a teenaged cheerleader: "This was going to be the tastiest wild foods brunch ever." Yet, her rooting for fungi, tubers, and berries mostly prompts deeper reflections on the relation of food to life: "foraging had a way of doing that distracting me from the fact that I was single and in my late thirties, and feeling that I was running out of time." After she helps retrieve errant honeybees that had fallen from the hive, Chin ruminates as she watches "the frenetic activities of the honeybees, thought that even on our very worst days, none of us was acting alone." In the end, Chin's affectionate rummaging through the fields and forests of her life yields some tasty dishes.
