Eating Wildly

February 10, 2014
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.

April 1, 2014
A few dandelion greens here, some wood sorrel there, perhaps some daylily shoots thrown in for color and tang. Creating a meal from what some would call weeds was Chin's specialty. The Urban Forager columnist for the New York Times, Chin happily spent her days like a rabbit, nibbling her way around the city streets and urban parks of her native Brooklyn. She did this not out of necessity due to impoverished circumstances but out of a passion for the healthy, diverse cuisine and healing properties native plants provide. She also did it out of a sense of loss and discovery. Abandoned by her father before she was born, Chin was raised by an embittered single mother and doting grandparents. Although she ultimately achieved professional success, her personal relationships failed miserably. Foraging helped her understand loss and rejection, and her poignantly candid memoir illustrates that one sometimes has to veer from the beaten path to find what one needs in life and in love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)