Our guest today is Clay Bowers of NoMiForager.com — Clay is a wild food enthusiast and educator in Northern Michigan, who teaches foraging classes and workshops, and writes about foraging on his blog and social media. He’s come on the show today to discuss the increasingly contentious issue of ramp foraging, or wild leeks as we like to say in our neck of the woods. This plant is probably one of the best-known wild edibles in the US, for both foragers but also culinary professionals, who pay top dollar to get them on their menus each spring.
In the commercial market, a ramp — a member of the alliums, or onion family — is a pungent bulb with two or three green leaf blades attached that when cooked are surprisingly sweet. They're wonderful sautéed, roasted, or grilled, and make incredible pesto-like oil preserves.
But their popularity has come at a cost, with the ever-present concern of over-harvest looming over this delicious spring ephemeral. As a result, a new ramp foraging ethic has emerged, which suggests harvesters take only “one leaf per plant” and leave the bulbs in the ground. This leaves another leaf or two for the plant to continue to photosynthesize, and the bulb to continue living in the ground.
But Clay — along with some other prominent foragers in the densest part of leek country — has been challenging this “only one leaf per plant” conservation ethic, suggesting that it's unnecessarily restrictive and might even be stymying the productiveness of ramp colonies.
Now, we want to say upfront, living in a place where ramps are scarce and colonies are small, we subscribe to — and even promote — the “one-leaf” idea. We take one leaf per plant because the stands of wild leeks we harvest from could easily and quickly be denuded by overzealous harvesters. And when they're found by commercial harvesters they are often over-exploited.
But not everyone lives at the extreme ends of this plant's range, and so for those in areas of greatest ramp density, this “rule” is not only unnecessary, it can seem like a pretentious encumbrance dreamt up by hall-monitoring ecological do-gooders.
Of course, like most conservation issues, there are a lot of nuances here to be unraveled.
So, as a “one leaf guy” Daniel thought it would be fun to talk to Clay, who’s more of a “bulb and all” kind of guy.
Not to determine who is right and who is wrong, because it's not that simple, but more to get a sense of when a one-leaf approach might be warranted, and also when taking the bulb-and-all might be more beneficial to a stand of plants.
Perhaps too, it’s worth mentioning that we are still foraging in a very unregulated environment. Hunting, by contrast, has become — and born out of necessity — a very controlled harvest, with each legally hunted species getting its own harvest regulations based on its unique life-cycle and population dynamics.
And while we suspect, we’ll see foraging regulated more broadly in our own lifetimes, at present we, as harvesters, are currently responsible for regulating our own harvests. It’s a big responsibility, and because personality types differ wildly, it’s unlikely that we will all reach a consensus about best practices.
So, for that reason, hearing all the sides of an argument in a dialectic manner, in other words, searching for what’s most true, vs what we want to be true, is a wise approach. While we won’t all arrive at the same conclusions, hopefully, our individual assessments will contribute not just to conservation, but to increasing our botanical resources.
One day we’ll tell the kids how we used to forage without a license and they’ll have a hard time imagining it, just like when we read about the unregulated days of the market hunts. For now, though, let’s all make wise decisions. The future of our unique — and ancient — passion depends on it.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/134