An inductee into the National Wild Foods Hall of Fame, Thayer, who was born in Wausau, Wisconsin, and raised in Madison, took to foraging at a very early age. “I had a couple parents who didn’t really want to be parents. The more I could parent myself, the better—from their perspective and mine.” Often left to fend for themselves, he and his three siblings quickly learned to be independent. When he was four, his older sister showed him wood sorrel growing under the front porch, a common lawn “weed” but edible and rich in vitamin C. And so began his lifelong fascination with what he could eat in the natural world.
Thayer is self-taught, as are many foragers, relying on tracking down information one plant at a time. “I started out learning things that were not particularly difficult or hard to find. My neighbor had a black walnut tree and told me what it was. You could eat black walnuts. Lots of people know that. I just never forgot that and I started eating black walnuts.” He’d add perhaps half a dozen items each year, just by asking people. “There’s a lot of knowledge floating around, but people just aren’t picking it up and using it.” When he was 10, he discovered books on edible wild plants, which rapidly sped up the learning process.
Teaching the Trade
In a typical year, Thayer hosts 10 to 15 workshops. “If I have 100 people and I say, ‘Who here gathers wild food?’ 30 hands will go up. And if I say, ‘Who here gathers wild blackberries?’ 90 hands go up. As soon as people eat something, they don’t think of it as wild anymore. It really helps them accept that [foraging] really is a normal activity.”Thayer has seen his audience change over time. “Twenty years ago, a big part of my audience and people coming to my classes was fundamentalist Christians preparing for the collapse of civilization,” he says, a reaction to Y2K. “That demographic has almost totally disappeared from my classes.” Today, his “prototypical” attendee is slightly more than 50 percent likely to be female—often a rural or urban housewife between the ages of 35 and 60 who has a garden and likes to cook. But he sees a wide variety of backgrounds from the others, all of them tending toward middle class who are more likely to pay money for a workshop.
Some are a bit leery of wild plants, especially their perceived risk of poisoning the eater, but Thayer dispels the myths. “Practically every person I know who is an avid bicyclist has been hospitalized.” Foraging, on the other hand, “is statistically so safe, when you actually look at it, it’s almost ridiculous. The big safety rule is: Don’t eat something unless you are positive what it is.” He jokes that no one fears that they are eating a deadly false blackberry. “You know what a blackberry is, so that means you are ready to eat it. All the plants we eat, all of them, are equally distinct. But you have to work to get to that point of familiarity, and you do that one plant at a time. Once you’re there, you have it for the rest of your life.”
“Here’s the thing that people don’t quite grasp about foraging: People imagine this food isn’t as good and that that’s why you can’t buy it at the store,” says Thayer. Thistle stalk tastes “like a honeydew melon but in the shape of a broccoli stalk.” Shelf life is two to three days; pick it a week late and it’s too tough. If someone “got asparagus and it was 4 feet high and it had already branched out and they grilled it, they aren’t going to think it’s delicious.” Learning the timing is also key.
