Chef Alan Bergo Is Unlocking the Forgotten World of Wild Foods

Chef Alan Bergo Is Unlocking the Forgotten World of Wild Foods
Alan Bergo prepares a foraged feast on the beach. Courtesy of Alan Bergo
Crystal Shi
Updated:

When you work with wild food, says Alan Bergo, “you learn about a lot more than food.” For the Minnesota professional chef turned full-time forager, foraging expanded his horizons beyond what he even thought possible—and possibly saved his life.

Take the results of a recent rabbit hole of research: isirgan salatasi, a traditional Turkish salad made with raw stinging nettles (yes, those ubiquitous culprits of red, burning ankles). Though Bergo had long foraged the wild greens, he wasn’t convinced they were edible without cooking to neutralize the sting—until he found footage of Turkish grandmas harvesting them, simply bashing them with a rolling pin, and indeed, turning them into salad.

Or consider pansotti, a tortellini-like northern Italian stuffed pasta, made with a blend of wild greens and herbs known as preboggion. “Depending on which reference you look at—and this is where it gets so exciting—the mixture of wild plants could be anywhere from 4 to 18 different species,” Bergo said. It gets better: References he found for la minestrella, a Tuscan stew of beans, wild greens, and corn cakes, called for the inclusion of 20, 30, or more than 50 different species.

“We don’t even think these sorts of things are possible,” he said, “but it’s real. It’s a tradition. And you can go outside, and if you don’t harvest 60 plants you can harvest 4, and it’s still going to taste really good.”

Turkish stinging nettles. (Alan Bergo)
Turkish stinging nettles. Alan Bergo

Lost and Found

A business school graduate who turned cooking from a side hustle into a career, Bergo worked with wild foods in restaurant kitchens before he’d ever foraged them himself. After stumbling upon a chicken of the woods mushroom one day, he put the pieces together: The expensive ingredients he was serving on fancy tasting menus were literally within reach. Intrigued, he dived into the world of wild foods.

But his reality as a line cook was hardly glamorous. He was broke, in debt, hopping from friend’s basement to friend’s basement. Combined with a bout of Lyme disease that paralyzed half his face, among other crippling symptoms, he entered the lowest point of his life.

“Foraging was there for me when nothing else was,” he said. “I had absolutely nothing, but every day I could go to a park and get excited. … There’s a therapy to being able to forget about everything else and just be in the moment outside, breathing the fresh air.” At the encouragement of a friend, Bergo made a website to share his foraging and cooking adventures; a decade later, he’s grown ForagerChef.com into an expansive repository of guides and recipes.
Chanterelles and wild rice. (Alan Bergo)
Chanterelles and wild rice. Alan Bergo

By the time Bergo became executive chef of Lucia’s, a beloved Minneapolis farm-to-table restaurant, in 2016, he was building menus from his harvests. “I was just like, ‘What is the most awesome stuff that I can possibly find? It’s all going on the menu.’”

After Lucia’s closed, Bergo sold a book series—the first installment of three, “The Forager Chef’s Book of Flora,” was published in June 2021—and worked on various other projects, including filming a foraging and cooking show during the pandemic that won a 2022 James Beard Award. The journey of a lifetime was well underway. “I found that wild food was something I would never be able to master; it’s like a never-ending journey. That’s exciting.”

Hosta shoots, a popular ornamental plant, sautéed with ramp butter. (Alan Bergo)
Hosta shoots, a popular ornamental plant, sautéed with ramp butter. Alan Bergo

Wisdom From the Past

Bergo was taught to cook with classical French techniques, but bringing the best out of wild foods often requires looking elsewhere: at where they’re traditionally harvested and prepared. “That means stepping out of my comfort zone and learning about different cultures that I’d never thought I would,” he said. “I need to go back and learn about the history, the stories of things. Those really give a dish and an ingredient a soul.”

He consults academic texts, especially ethnobotanical resources, and, to a lesser degree, cookbooks; an Italian one he’s been translating has proved a treasure trove of new, old knowledge. His mentor chefs might have been aghast at the “cucina povera” practices he’s picked up, like cooking medleys of foraged weeds “until they’re not green anymore,” he said, but now, “I like to tell people I cook like an Italian grandmother and I’m making the best food of my life.”

He also draws upon a network of wild food experts and friends, in places from Alaska to India, to share their firsthand knowledge of regional specialties. Some are closer by, like Native American ethnobotanist Linda Black Elk, who once invited him to South Dakota to harvest timpsula (prairie turnips), a traditional staple food of the Lakota. Linda’s husband, Luke, taught Bergo the trick to finding them: Watch the wind. The dried plant blows across the prairie like a tumbleweed to spread its seeds, he explained, so intuiting the flight patterns of the previous year’s seedheads—“If I was a little tumbleweed, where would I fall?”—will lead you to this year’s growth. “There’s so much native knowledge tucked away in these oral traditions,” Bergo said.

A timpsila braid. (Courtesy of Alan Bergo)
A timpsila braid. Courtesy of Alan Bergo

And renewed interest in this traditional knowledge is higher than ever. Bergo points to growing website views—now millions a year—along with the 2022 James Beard wins for both him and fellow forager Alexis Nikole Nelson (aka breakout TikTok star BlackForager) as indications of this being wild foods’ “biggest year yet.” He’s not surprised.

“Every single person in the world is descended from a forager at one point or another,” he said. “All those instincts are still locked inside of you, like an ancestral bicycle you just need to hop on and knock the dust off.”

Alan Bergo

Location: Menomonie, Wis.
A Favorite Spring Edible: Stinging and wood nettles. “I could eat nettle soup every day for the rest of my life—and the awesome part is, now I have a whole list of different nettle soups from around the world, because they’re enjoyed around the world.”
=====

Expert Tips for Beginner Foragers

Ready to head into the field? Study these expert tips before you go.
Abide by the Golden Rule: Never eat anything from the wild unless you’re 100 percent certain what it is. Less than that? Don’t throw it out just yet, Alan Muskat advises—ask about it, and turn it into a learning experience.
Find a Local Expert: The absolute best way to learn is in person, with an experienced guide. Attend guided tours and classes and join local community groups, which now abound both in person and online, to maximize your exposure to what others are finding.
Round Out Your Toolbox: Get a solid set of guidebooks. Alan Bergo highly recommends all of his mentor Sam Thayer’s books on wild plants, and David Arora’s on mushrooms. He also recommends plant identification apps such as iNaturalist and PlantSnap—though he notes that others may not agree—as a tool not to rely upon, but to use in conjunction with guidebooks and expert advice.
Start Small: Learn to identify three plants in your own backyard or area where you live, Tama Matsuoka Wong suggests. It’s a great way to familiarize yourself with your home environs, and you’ll be aware of whether or not anything has been sprayed on the plants, legal permissions, and so on (be sure to research these if you’re looking elsewhere). Really get to know those plants, including at different stages of their life cycles and in different preparations, before you move on to others.
This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.
Crystal Shi
Crystal Shi
Food Editor
Crystal Shi is the food editor for The Epoch Times. She is a journalist based in New York City.
Related Topics