Among some of the world's top chefs, there's a funky trend underway.
It's called foraging. They harvest edible ingredients growing wild in their community and use them in their cooking.
Here's my question, can the rest of us actually eat food that we find? For answers, I called in Daniel Cunningham. He’s a horticulturalist with Texas A&M AgriLife Research, also known as the TX Plant Guy.
Together, we went foraging at two locations. The first was the Dogwood Canyon Audubon Center and the other was Reverchon Park, close to downtown Dallas.
We also decided the only food we would eat all day was food we could find. That made things interesting.
While we were out, Daniel showed me there are apps and books that can help teach you what's safe to eat but not to rely on them.
“It's definitely better to go out with experts," he said. "But you can become your own expert, it just takes some time."
“What I think you're saying is, ‘Don't go out hungry and just start picking things based on if an app said it was OK, or a book said it's OK,'" I said. "It's really a learning process. You don't just jump out in to the forest and eat some food."
“Never eat anything that you can't 100 percent identify,” Daniel added.
At the end of the day, we brought our foraged food to Chef Josh Farrell, who’s behind a group called Nameless Chefs. From what looked like a bunch of green weeds he created something amazing.
In the end, I decided most of us can’t really eat the things we find. We don’t know the difference between delicious and dangerous. And we don’t have Daniel on speed dial to help us navigate.
But, I can tell you, I was pretty hungry by the time Josh finished cooking, and it was delicious.
