Incredible edibles

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Locavores often overlook the uncultivated plants and undomesticated creatures that share our cities
July 23, 2008
Kim Honey
Food Editor

HANOVER, ONT.–It was time to kill the fluffy bunny. Mine had blond fur and little black eyes. It was cute, but I wanted to eat it.

The cooking demonstration began with instructions on how to dispatch the rabbit with one humane blow to the skull. I gathered its back legs into my fist, turned it upside down and held it out to the side. It started to wiggle and Gino Ferri, an expert in wild food, had to help me regain my grip.

"The point is if you're a cook and a chef, you have to do it the whole way through," says Ferri, director of Survival in the Bush, a wilderness survival school in Hanover, 60 kilometres south of Owen Sound.

I had mentally prepared by thinking about the fish I had caught as a kid and how I bashed their heads on the side of the boat, slit open their glistening bellies and gutted them. Fish may not have faces, but they do bleed.

The bunny part didn't faze me because I had eaten rabbit in a tiny Greek village where it arrived on a platter along with the charred head. It was the first time I had seen the eye sockets of the animal I was about to eat.



I calmed the rabbit by putting it on my chest. Ferri, who has a PhD in psychology, has seen soldiers who served in Bosnia almost break into tears at this point – even battle-hardened men are unnerved by the death of a defenceless animal.

As my right arm began its downward arc, thick stick in my left hand, I hesitated. In an instant and without thought, my killer hit turned into a tap on the temple. The rabbit wasn't even stunned.

I lost my nerve and handed it over to Ferri, who killed it with three sharp hits.

"I'm still tied up in knots every time I dispatch an animal," said Ferri, who makes sure every bit of the animal is used.

But eat we must, and if we eat meat, there will be blood.

For most of his 63 years, Ferri has been hunting and gathering wild food. After he immigrated to Toronto from Italy, "Anglo-Saxon" kids made fun of his family for gathering dandelion and chicory for salad. The Don River Valley was his playground, where he hunted pheasant with bow and arrow, snared rabbits and fished.

Now it's illegal to trap, snare or shoot a wild animal in Toronto and the city is overrun with cottontail rabbits. You can't walk out the back door without staring down a couple of haughty raccoons, and Lake Shore Blvd. is like Canada's Wonderland for geese.

When I took the food editor's job earlier this year, "local" food had become a cliché and the 100-mile diet was a hackneyed phrase.

As I idly observed the scourge of the city waddling along the waterfront one day, it suddenly occurred to me that we could probably eat them.

I realized the so-called locavores had skipped over the most fundamental victuals: the uncultivated plants and undomesticated creatures that share our urban spaces. What could be more local than nature's bounty?

Eating wild in the city presents a modern conundrum. Canada geese are not poisonous, but no one would suggest a bird that has been snacking on Wonder Bread in water not fit for humans would be good eating. Ditto plants that grow in contaminated soil. As Michael Pollan, the latest philosopher-king of food, says: "You are what you eat eats."

I began at High Park Nature Centre, where I learn garlic mustard (Brassica spp.) is a highly invasive plant that crowds out native species such as the trillium. I make a pesto with it, which is pungent and a bit on the bitter side, but definitely novel and delicious on pasta.

A few days later, Ferri arrives in Toronto bearing garden snails, wild leeks and wild oregano. After a wash in the Toronto Star test kitchen, the mollusks slowly high-tailed it toward the walls of the sink. My stomach did a flip, but I boiled them for an hour and sautéed them in garlic and butter. It was hard to choke them down. The image of them strolling around my sink turned me off, to be honest.

We made a trip to Sunnybrook Park at Eglinton Ave. and Leslie St. Within 30 minutes, just a few hundred metres from the parking lot, Ferri identified 31 edible wild plants, including wild spinach, chicory and shepherd's purse, most of which we would consider weeds.

He pulled up a plant to show me a tiny root the diameter of a pencil. A millisecond after he sliced it open, the unmistakable smell of carrot hit my olfactory lobes. I had no idea Queen Anne's lace is also known as wild carrot. My mouth watered, but he could tell the place had been sprayed in the past 5 to 10 years so he warned me off.

Ferri sounded sad. "You see the irony: Here we have all this food and we can't eat it."

That's when I decided on a trip to the country. Since it wasn't rabbit-hunting season, we had to settle for a farm-raised stand-in.

The bunny's body was warm when I cut off the head and feet, peeled off the skin like a glove, and gutted it. Then I butchered that rabbit like a straight-A anatomy student.

The firepit Ferri had built for the cooking demonstration was ready. We cut the rabbit in quarters, added some to a stew pot and put the rest into a foil packet with potatoes, wild leeks, carrots and potatoes.

There was a rainbow trout to fillet and wild turkey to prepare. After burying it all underground for an hour, we dug it up for the feast, which we ate on the grounds of the Saugeen Valley Conservation Authority, just 10 metres from the killing field.

The firepit rabbit was moist and succulent. The wild leeks were roasted perfection and enhanced the meat's mild flavour. No visions of live rabbits hopped through my head.

Ferri said hunter-gatherer diets were 70 per cent plants. It is obvious the modern omnivore probably eats more meat than his forbears. I know we don't need to kill rabbits to eat, but why not eat rabbits?

As nutrition becomes a science, we continue to measure and analyze our diets. What we are missing is intangible. Food may fuel our bodies, but once energized, our ponderous brains will ruminate.

Eating is about what makes us feel good. Feeling good can be all about taste, but taste is heightened or depressed by what we think about food and why we feel the way we do.

I have learned it's a wild world out there.

Somewhere, not too far away, there's a pristine wild carrot with my name on it that would be sublime in a wild rabbit stew.