Embracing the Wild

Berry hunting has always been one of my favourite summer activities: exploring roadsides matted with wild alpine strawberry, the burnt-off slopes of the Westbank fire scar resplendent with Oregon grape, or the rotting stumps of the big firs and hemlocks in Campbell Valley covered in a riot of wild huckleberries.

In June the banks of the salmon-bearing stream that flows across our property is dotted with salmonberries, which thrive along drainage ditches and stream-beds. Later there will be the huckleberries and thimbleberries in the low lands. On higher ground there are the less celebrated Oregon grape, salal berries and choke cherries that were staples for jams and jellies on the homesteads of early European settlers. I’m pretty busy most of the summer canning or freezing something.

On a very informal tour around the edges of Granville Island Lori Snyder is busy pointing out the wild sorrel, lambs quarters, and dandelion (all edible) poking up among the manicured gardens. She really lights up when we come across some salmonberry bushes nestled in a stand of birches. “I’m a big proponent of berries because they’re a superfood,” she says. Snyder is an educator and consultant who brings her First Nations perspective on wild and indigenous foods to her tours and walks in parks and wild areas, suburban neighborhoods, and classrooms in Vancouver, Burnaby and Richmond. “June is all about berries,” she says, “and that’s going to continue throughout the summer. Fruit is a summer food. It’s like your natural Gatorade.”

Evolutionary biologists speculate that human beings require a lot of calories to power our big brains and are therefore attracted to energy dense foods like fats, sugar, and complex carbohydrates. “We were all berry eaters,” Snyder insists. Berries were eaten fresh but also mixed with other foods, frequently eaten with meat or fish, and dried for winter food. Berries would be crushed, cooked and laid out in the sun until dry. “They probably would have eaten the dried berry cake with some kind of grease – here on the coast probably eulachon grease and in the interior probably bear or deer fat.”

Berries were so prized as food that they have been moved around the world and extensively cultivated. Snyder notes that, “While harvesting berries, [First Nations] people would have taken some of those berries and moved the seeds to start another patch.” Sometimes whole plants were dug up and moved to more convenient locations.

It’s rare to find wild, uncultivated berries at the market. Snyder feels this is unfortunate. “There’s something really rich about eating what’s in your region. For example, when I go to Italy I want to try the food produced there. But we don’t seem to have the same happening here [in British Columbia]. We don’t value our regional food heritage, what’s close to home. We’re buying beautiful foods from all over the world but, really, we have amazing super-foods that grow right here in our neighborhoods. We should be bringing the salal berries or the Oregon grape, maybe some saskatoon berries back to our landscape.”

With only 2% of the population engaged in primary agriculture, Snyder argues that we lose the connection to our food sources and, in essence, our environment. She believes this disconnect is the source of many of our societal issues, particularly amongst First Nations. “In our heart we know we’ve got this facade that never makes us feel good,” she says. “We have high depression, high suicide rates, we have a lot of addictions. We’re not being raised in a place where we understand who we are and what value we bring. Without a connection to place we don’t recognize ourselves.”

Our global agricultural system provides us with a sense of plenty, of abundance – tomatoes and strawberries from farms all over the world throughout the year. This abundance comes at a great cost to the environment – dead zones in the oceans caused by agricultural chemicals, depleted aquifers, and greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural activities and transportation.

While we can’t simply abandon agriculture and revert to feeding ourselves as hunter-gatherers, it’s important to understand that wild food plants are at the base of the food system for many species on the planet including us. Ultimately, all of our food comes from the environment. In this context the First Nations perspective is vital “First Nations sustained themselves on this land for a long time. They had to tend the plants to sustain themselves and they understood the need for stewardship of their food sources. I think we should look at these practices,” says Snyder. “It was not just sustainable but regenerative. That’s what we need to move to – regenerating what we had. I don’t discount our European perspective – it doesn’t really matter where we come from on the planet. There is incredible indigenous wisdom from all our cultures, recognizing that the Earth is our Mother. It’s not only First Nations, it’s all of us, all our cultures have this knowledge and we’ve all been colonized away from this model.”

Every ecosystem – the soil and water quality, the nighttime temperatures, the moisture in the wind – imparts unique properties, a terroir, to the plants and, by extension, the animals that inhabit it. Further, it is the harvesting, preserving, processing and preparation of these foods that shapes our cultures and traditions.

When I make time to get out and pick wild berries I immediately appreciate how our ecosystem is both delicate and resilient and I marvel at the complexity and subtlety of this living planet. Snyder ponders, “if we were eating more of the food that was local to the area, would we have more understanding for our ecology? Would we want to take care of it? Would it help us understand our responsibility to provide stewardship and help the system to be prosperous?” I think it would.

Michael Marrapese,
April 2017