Wild Food Foraging on Maui

“You can eat that?”
David Bruce Leonard is holding a sprig of sow’s thistle in front of my nose. We are in a field of weeds, not a single familiar plant in sight. “It’s medicinal, too. Helps digestion.” He fired off the names in Hawaiian (pualele), Latin (Sonchus oleraceus L.) Common English (hare’s lettuce) and after a moment, Greek. It’s little overwhelming, but if I can trust anyone with wild food, it was David. And Sunny. Sunny Savage is picking in a patch nearby. “Check out these baby amaranth plants!” It might be a weed you find in a crack in the sidewalk. “That’s medicinal,” David said and launched into an herbal medicine diatribe only an acupuncturist could love.

These are the foothills of Haleakala, the dormant volcano on the East half of Maui. The farmland is a fallow part of a large organic farm, recently plowed and untouched by chemical sprays for some years. Sunny points across the weedy expanse with the ocean far in the distance. “These are agricultural weeds. They are place-holders in the soil when not cultivated. These just happen to be edible.”

This is not what I expected. I expected treacherous jungle hikes in a monsoon and rappelling down a cliff side to pluck a single, rare berry. This is more like a nature stroll you’d take your grandparents on. And I am terrible at it.

I’m incredibly concerned about our food security. Should zombies take over the Mainland, we will be short an estimated 85 percent of our food. Hawaii may not be able to feed the 1.4 million residents (and 4 million yearly visitors), even with every field planted. Wild food, foraged from the wilderness might be our only hope, and I want to know just how much is out there. Zombies or no, I want to know how the gourmet community can adapt to a growing desire for wild food. That’s why we were foraging for a chef named Peter Merriman.

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I had recruited two of the best wild food experts on Maui. Sunny Savage, fully lived up to her name when she cracked open a coconut with a machete saying, “I stopped carrying a water bottle.” She is so pie-eyed passionate about foraging that she penned a book on the subject. David, too. His book “Medicine at your Feet”, sat dog-eared in my backpack. His book is the product of his studies at the Earth Medicine Institute he founded. His teachings blend Hawaiian culture, Oriental medicine, Boy Scout ingenuity and what he refers to as MSU (making shit up). Luckily, I am quite familiar with the last two subjects.

A bit more up a weedy hillside, ginger stalks shoot out of at us, some festooned with yellow flowers. David pops a flower in his mouth without pause. “You can eat that?” became my catch phrase for this adventure. “You can eat that,” was the standard reply. Yellow ginger, I found out a moment later, has tender, mostly tasteless petals, but the stem is a shot of spicy ginger essence. Sunny loves sautéed unopened buds with olive oil and garlic. I later used it as vodka-soda water garnish (for, ya know, research). Using fresh roots in stirfrys, teas and candies goes without saying.

But, ginger is the standout. Handfuls of fresh-picked greens passed my nose and my mouth without much fanfare. Leafy greens taste like leafy greens, never too far from spinach or kale. The Chayote Squash looks like a deformed pear, with a taste between potato and bland apple. It grows on a mess of vines that would ensnare an industrial mower. Encouraged by my guides, I chewed the tender ends of the vine. Raw, they are crunchy and hearty.

Sunny feeds her boys (ages 1, 11, and 48) as much wild food as possible. “It’s local, organic and wild, as much as I can, all the time. I do it for taste, variety, nutrients and gentle medicinal effects.” Her yard is a mix of wild, cultivated and random plants that keeps her larder green. “I’m into tinctures right now. I distill essential oils and extracts, too.” The tinctures make a distasteful remedy go down quick. She passed me a mason jar of “bitters” (a hangover cure of vodka and my old friend the Sow’s Thistle).

David understands tinctures and extracts. Acupuncturists like him are schooled in herbal medicine. So are the Chinese. “The Chinese were one of the few cultures to rapidly urbanize while still using herbal remedies.” He told me they instituted an extremely complex catalogue system for medicinal herbs. Today, ginseng tinctures are marked the same from Guangzou to Macau. “We don’t need that in Hawaii. The basics grow everywhere.” Hawaii’s answer to herbal medicine is called La’au Laupa’au and it involves mostly fresh-picked herbs and nuts, mixed with coconut milk or poi for palatability.

Throughout our adventure the line between food and medicine became blurred. Western medicine holds them separate, but for the Eastern traditions, there is no distinction. “Let food be thy medicine” ___ said, which has seemingly been forgotten. We snacked constantly on our foraged goodies, and I expected something to disagree with me. Or turn me into a zombie.

A strange thing happens when I skip breakfast, then lunch- I pick up a mild nutrient buzz. Sunny and David are immune or at least accustomed to the feeling. My typical, modern American diet is nutrient-poor and calorie rich- I need a gut full of pasta to feel sated. When eating fresh-picked, uncultivated plants straight from the ‘aina, the nutrients quickly absorb. The nutrient buzz is the body’s way of saying “okay, enough” with a mild caffeine-like zing with no sense of fullness.

I’m trying to imagine my life without imported pasta, and I’m worried. With zombies on one side and a field of weeds on the other, what if I get it wrong? The key, David says, lies in knowing the taxonomic families. The wild fennel we find has that licorice taste, but David cautions us “it’s from a bad family.” Like human families, there are good ones and bad ones. But just like human families, aren’t there some black sheep? David nodded, “yes, always exceptions, so my advice is to stay away from bad families completely, and carefully experiment with the good.” Sunny has a different method of pattern recognition and rock-solid identification. “Before you try it, know exactly what it is and where it has been.” Good advice for wild food or finding a mate. More than once, Sunny waved us away from a bush because she couldn’t properly identify it or feared it had been sprayed with something. A few foraging sessions later, we had stocked coolers with wildness and were on the hunt for teas, garnishes and whatever else.

The mother lode comes in an unexpected place. Without rappelling or hiking farther than a hundred feet, I arrive at a shaded gully. I am off on my own, determined to find something without the help of my guides. I’m thinking the best way to find something is to look for something else entirely. I tell myself I’m looking for the odd bit of trash to pick up, but I am desperately scanning for wild edibles. I see nothing.

Suddenly comes simultaneous shouts from both guides. “Look at the New Zealand spinach! Here is the feral parsley we are looking for. Oh! Fennel! Tons of it.” They went on like that for 5 minutes. I had walked right over it.
When he calmed down, David told me I was doing it wrong. “Look for the margins. The change from hillside to streambed is right there, right where you walked over. In nature, the action happens in the transitions like freshwater to salt water, mountains to plains.”

Change happens in the margins of the human world, too. Technology, academia and politics are rocked by revelations from the margins of the respective institutions. Physics was rocked by an Austrian customs house clerk (Einstein) and the Russian monarchy fell because a Prussian novelist wrote a manifesto (Marx). If cuisine was to adopt wild food, we needed a mad genius in the kitchen.

Our bounty lands in the kitchen of Chef Merriman, our ringer. His restaurants, Monkeypod and Merriman’s Fish House, features local heroes like smoked taro hummus and rosemary chicken. I’m proud when he utters my catchphrase. “You can eat that? That’s growing out by my mailbox.” Sunny and David explain more and more, and I see delicious gears turning in his head. He leans back. “This is going to be something familiar. If we make a ‘green whatever flambe’, it won’t be approachable. This stuff is going on steak and prawns. And, I’m bringing in Mark.”

Chef Mark Arriola started his culinary foraging by shucking oysters and shooting fish with a speargun. Studying psychology before discovering his calling as a chef, he is head honcho at Merriman’s in Poipu, Kauai. In his (massive) hands, the New Zealand spinach is blanched, feral parsley chopped into a salad and Hawaiian moonshine flames atop beef tenderloin.

The dinner is breathtaking. What I once thought were weeds are now a bright, intensely flavorful salad. Mallow seeds are lightly toasted, reminding me of pine nuts. Green sprigs of fennel cover the tenderloin and prawns, with the seeds and even the flowers adding to the spicy punch. We eat fresh-picked hibiscus flowers and unopened ti shoots as intermezzos. Peter Merriman is most intrigued by the flowers, that not only add a stunning garnish to the custard but a light, floral flavor. The aperitif is a tea of steeped strawberry guava leaves and Job’s Tears (Coix lachrymal-jobi, if you were wondering). “This raises energy and helps with digestion,” David says.

If you find a Kiawe crusted dessert at Merriman’s or Monkeypod, here’s the story behind that. The least colorful offering to the chef was an unassuming bag of kiawe flour. Peter Merriman once hated the Kiawe tree as any barefoot kid would. Known on the mainland as Mesquite, he learned to accept the thorny twigs and would chew ripe seed pods for a sweet snack on the ranch. Sunny often picks and grinds the pods, seed and all, to make a sweet and crunchy flour. If you’ve smashed pretzels for pie crust, kiawe flour is a sweeter alternative that has Peter Merriman hooked. “It’s locally available, underused and environmentally responsible.” Kiawe grows well in most of the world, and is especially resistant to drought. A small mill on Oahu grinds and sells it to specialty food stores.

After dinner, the piece fall in to place. Just as the local food movement is limited by seasons, foraged foods are seasonal, specific to a certain climate and increasingly rare. Wild food involves much more than a trip to the farm’s market. You have to observe, hunt and keep a wild eye open. It’s meant to be an unexpected bonus to a normal meal. It’s more of a bite off a loved one’s plate or the incredible butter mochi you find in a rundown convenience store. It’s not a diet fad that will “change your life”. Even with the magic of Merriman, wild foods aren’t going to replace (Merrimans’ kale and whatever pizza) any time soon. There aren’t enough weird, wild places in Hawaii to sate the desire for wild salads.
But, when the zombies come, expect a nutrient buzz from sow’s thistle to keep your energy up.

This article originally appeared in HANA HOU! The Hawaiian Airlines Magazine and is reproduced with permission.
Photos by Sue Huddleston