Preserves: The Manitoba Food HIstory PODCAST

ANNA SIGRITHUR: Curly dock looks kind of like long spade shaped leaves, kind of a little bit curly and ruffled around the edges, and then sometimes there is a big flower stalk shooting up from the middle. But it’s a biennial so it takes two years to produce the flowers and it’s really nice, you can cook with it; I like to make a soup. You blend up the leaves with some buttermilk and you get some really nice, kind of tangy, great, cool summer soup that’s really green and pretty and refreshing.

KENT DAVIES: That’s Anna Sigrithur: chef, podcaster, artist, activist and food educator.¹ Sigrithur is known for her creative pop-up culinary events as well as her podcast, Ox Tales,² which explores food history based on interviews and articles produced at the world famous Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. One of her many passions is integrating wild foods into her culinary dishes. On this episode, Sigrithur will be cooking us crepes aboard the Manitoba Food History Truck and using a common wild plant with a not so common story as the main ingredient.

ANNA SIGRITHUR: Okay so, what we’re making today is some garlic lamb’s quarters crapes. So it’s kind of a two part recipe where we are going to make some crepes, crepe batter, and then we are going to fill it with these lamb’s quarters, which are these greens that we have right here – they’re kind of wilted right now but they’re still good. And we are going to sauté these up with garlic and butter and salt and lemon and we’re going to make a really nice filling for the crepes.

KENT DAVIES: Cool.

ANNA SIGRITHUR: So the first thing we are going to do is we just need to… I’m just sort of going to shuck, or strip off, the leaves from the stems because we don’t want to get too many of the big stems in here.

KENT DAVIES: So where does this usually grow?

ANNA SIGRITHUR: Well lamb’s quarters, they’re a wild cosmopolitan weed. So cosmopolitan weeds are plants that pretty much grow in sort of disturbed soil all around the world. So usually found in parking lots, or in back lanes, or in yards.

KENT DAVIES: Oh wow, so you can find these anywhere.

ANNA SIGRITHUR: Yeah, you can find these anywhere. It’s part of a really big family of plants called the Chenopodium family of which quinoa is also a member. So this is kind of a feral quinoa. It does produce seeds that look similar to quinoa; they’re really, really small. You can see they’re starting to grow there. There is just some little green kind of powdery seed heads on the top of this plant.

KENT DAVIES: Yes, Chenopodium album or Chenopodium berlandieri – I hope I got that right – also known as lamb’s quarters also also known as pitseed, pigweed, fat-hen, and goosefoot. So, there are a lot of names attached to this plant, but for this episode we’re just going to call it lamb’s quarters.

Lamb’s quarters grows mainly in disturbed areas such as yards and parking lots; it thrives around farm buildings near local concentrations of nitrogen and organic matter, like compost and manure.³ Lamb’s quarters is also well suited to thrive in nearly every environment across the country, despite harsh conditions. It may interest you to learn that this annual plant contains as much iron, protein, calcium and vitamins as you’ll find in cabbage and spinach.⁴ Not only that, it’s tasty – if you’re a spinach lover anyway. Cooked lamb’s quarters kind of tastes like tangy spinach. So, a nutritious, tasty, edible plant that grows in abundance almost everywhere yet it’s still just considered a weed here Manitoba. I’m wondering why no one has discovered this wonderful plant until now. We could be eating it instead of kale. Well, it turns out, it had been discovered, long ago. And not only that, at one point lamb's quarters was one of the most valued plants in the human diet.

For thousands of years, lamb’s quarters or varietals of Chenopodium were a prominent dietary staple eaten by humans across the globe, mostly in North America, Europe, and Asia.⁵ Originally Chenopodium is from the Greek words "goose" and "little foot,” alluding to the shape of the plant’s leaves.⁶ Ancient Romans, probably relating it to the August harvest season lammas, knew it as lammas quarter, which in turn led to the name lamb’s quarter, which added an S at some point and now we have lamb’s quarters.⁷ From the Neolithic period on, lamb’s quarters were greens for humans and feed for animals, only losing favour in Europe once spinach and cabbage were introduced in the sixteenth century.⁸

On this side of the ocean, for centuries, Indigenous peoples of North America cultivated lamb’s quarters on an epic scale. Archaeological evidence shows the plant was extensively foraged in eastern North America as early as 6500 B.C.E.⁹ By 1700 B.C.E., the plant had been domesticated by Indigenous harvesters and remained a prominent part of their agricultural practices until sometime after European settlement.¹⁰ These plants played a big part in establishing the foundation of agriculture as we know it today in North America. That big shift over the centuries, from foraging to seed planting and harvesting, was done with lamb’s quarters.¹¹ Indigenous harvesters used lamb’s quarters in a bunch of ways; the young leafy parts were often used as a potherb that was boiled or cooked, while others boiled and ground the seeds into flower to make a variety of foods including meal and bread.¹²

There are a few reasons that would account for the decline of the use of lamb’s quarters over the past century. In North America, it’s theorized that the introduction of new crops like corn from Central and South America vastly changed the foods systems of Indigenous peoples leading to a transition away from domesticated native varieties like lamb’s quarters.¹³

KAREN FROMAN: And we did continue to grow it after corn was introduced in the region, but it did drop off in importance.

KENT DAVIES: That’s Karen Froman, Indigenous historian and instructor at the University of Winnipeg. She is Mohawk from Six-Nations of the Grand River territory in Ontario. Whether that be farming, gardening or wild plant systems, Froman has a passion for all things green. She’s a crucial voice in understanding how lamb’s quarters went from harvested to overlooked here in Manitoba.

KAREN FROMAN: We would have a number of fields, right? Our primary crops were the three sisters; most people are familiar with that: corn, beans and squash. So we practices companion planting and the three plants support each other. The corn takes the nitrogen, the beans put the nitrogen back in, and squashes retain the moisture in the soil and prevent the weeds from growing. When we would plant the three sisters, you know, we would have other fields with other plantings. On the edge of the fields is often where we would allow the so-called “weeds” to grow. So the purslane and the lamb’s quarters. You know we’d allow that to grow because both purslane and lamb’s quarter like disturbed soil. So they would just sort of grow naturally along the edges and we’d just leave it alone.

KENT DAVIES: While many Indigenous peoples continued to cultivate lamb’s quarters well after this transition,¹⁴ the majority of European and colonial farmers did not, regarding lamb’s quarters as primarily livestock fodder unfit for human consumption.¹⁵ Even the practice of using lamb’s quarters for feed was eventually dropped when farmers discovered that the plant could be toxic to livestock if ingested in large amounts.¹⁶ For farmers of popular crops like soybeans, sugar beets, potatoes and various grains, lamb’s quarters' invasive nature made it a number one threat to be reviled and removed.¹⁷ In some respects, the story of why lamb’s quarters and other nutritious wild plants are regarded primarily as weeds today has a lot to do with how traditional Indigenous foodways were affected by colonialism.

KAREN FROMAN: You know we now spray all sorts of horrible stuff on a plant that we should be really leaving alone, right, and probably looking at cultivating more. Because it is so rich in anti-oxidants, and vitamins and minerals and it’s really good for you and it’s super tasty. By eliminating the knowledge of these plants as having edible and/or medicinal purposes is just another way that settler colonialism erases Indigenous peoples, and superimposes that settler narrative of these plants being weeds, these plants being useless, these plants being detrimental to your financial end line is all part of that colonial settler process.

KENT DAVIES: For many Indigenous peoples, land displacement, coupled with laws banning Indigenous people from participating in food production, led to an increase of subsistence living and a reliance on practices like hunting and foraging.¹⁸ For centuries, Indigenous harvesters had foraged wild plants for food and medicine, accumulating knowledge of prime harvesting locations, picking times, and drying methods.¹⁹ However, these practices were also greatly impacted by laws suppressing the rights of Indigenous peoples to participate effectively in the stewardship of their traditional lands and resources.²⁰

KAREN FROMAN: The subsistence lifestyle has been forced by the State, you know, largely through the Indian Act. You know, putting people here in the west on very very marginal, very unproductive land that often doesn’t have the kinds of foods, plant foods, and plant medicines that was traditionally used out here by restricting our access to leave the reserve to access those kinds of foods through private property laws or through… You know, we’re not allowed to take plants or things out of federal parks right? You know, which again were traditional territories, right? So Riding Mountain National Park, for example, right, you know Indigenous peoples were kicked out of the park. This has really restricted and diminished our ability to hunt and to harvest wild edibles and the knowledge is not being passed down to the younger generation because of these kinds of restrictions, right? And that’s, I think, is really, really critical too.

KENT DAVIES: And while Indigenous peoples continued to struggle for their right to harvest wild food on traditional lands, the impacts of industrialization, migration, and lifestyle changes to the human diet left the practice of wild food cultivation largely inactive for much of the 20th century.²¹

KAREN FROMAN: It’s astonishing how quickly that kind of knowledge can get lost, right? Really, it’s a single generation. And that’s something that I’ve discovered myself. For my family growing up gardening, preserving, canning, knowing what was edible and what was edible when we were out in the bush, that was normal. The post-war period, I think not, only for Indigenous peoples but people in general, we lost the art of eating, and cooking, and what real food is, as things become codified as supermarkets and grocery stores became widespread, right. So the way that our food systems changed is profound for both Indigenous peoples and settlers.

KENT DAVIES: That is not to say the practice of harvesting wild plants was something settler populations didn’t engage in; residents in rural areas all over Canada and here in Manitoba would routinely gather wild food during lean times past the depression era.²² while novels like Euell Gibbon’s Stalking the Wild Asparagus helped revive some of the interest in foraging throughout the 1970s.²³ However, for the most part, wild foods remained largely ignored as a credible food source even by federal government nutritionists who didn’t consider wild berries, herbs, plants, and roots as legitimate medicinal or dietary choices even up until the 1980s.²⁴

These days, during the summer, it’s not uncommon to see cars on the side of highways as Manitobans take to the forest to forage for wild asparagus, berries, fiddleheads, and mushrooms. Foraging wild food is becoming increasingly popular amongst Manitobans who have an interest in eating locally and sustainably. Wild edible tours and workshops are now common in parks and nature centres like Fort Whyte Alive.²⁵ Wild edibles have also opened up a whole new palate of tastes for foodies. Today, serving foraged foods is a growing culinary trend amongst high-end restaurants across the globe and here in Winnipeg at establishments like at The Gates and Fusion Grill.²⁶ Wild edibles are in demand with companies like Forbes Wild Foods and Untamed Feast supplying foraged foods to restaurants and markets across Canada.²⁷ And like many burgeoning food trends, there is a fair share of questions and criticisms concerning wild edibles, especially in the context of Canada’s colonial legacy.

Through her work as a chef, podcaster, and educator, Anna Sigrithur has attempted to navigate some of these complexities of harvesting and serving wild food here in Manitoba. For Sigrithur, her attraction to wild edibles started at an early age.

ANNA SIGRITHUR: There’s like no good story moment about it, I just remember suddenly I was obsessed with food. Maybe when I was like eleven or twelve. I guess because I was such an outdoor kid I would always be like making potions and like making fake recipes outside using twigs and branches and herbs and mud and whatever – mud pies! A kid thing.

KENT DAVIES: You were foraging from the beginning.

ANNA SIGRITHUR: Yeah, I guess so [laughs]. That’s funny. Yeah, and then I just started… I don’t know, I also, I think, have a pretty strong creative urge. So, when I realized that I could make recipes, I started making recipes, started learning recipes, and started cooking probably pretty like adult meals when I was maybe eleven or twelve. I think… Well the first recipe that I ever made, and I remember this, was called “peanut salad” and it was: iceberg lettuce, lemon juice, peanuts and then… I was very specific that you had to take… you had to shell peanuts, you had to get the peanuts from the shells, and then you had to separate the peanuts from that inner little husk. And then I was very… I really liked that husk, so you had to make sure that you took the husk separately, and then you sprinkle it as a garnish on top of the salad [laughs]. And that was my like… I think I was about five when I made that recipe, or six. When I first started really getting into cooking, looking at websites for recipes and stuff, I wanted to learn kind of the standard European fare, the basics. Sauces, whatever. And I think as I got older I got more interested in like, learning foods outside of sort of that European canon. I got really interested in Indian foods. Then, more recently, I've much more interested in kind of like, land-based food traditions and recipes from them.

KENT DAVIES: As Sigrithur’s food education grew, so did her interest towards bio-regionalism. Sometimes called "living in place," bioregionalism often refers to an awareness of the ecology, economy, and culture of the place where you live. In terms of food, bio-regionalism usually means making use of the ingredients from the local region, with the ultimate goal of eating more thoughtfully and sustainably.²⁸ The movement has led to more and more people discovering the utility of wild plants. Back on the truck, we’re starting to make the crepes for our recipe.

ANNA SIGRITHUR: So what is next… Um, I think what we’ll do next is we will make the crepe batter, because that is going to just take a few seconds.

KENT DAVIES: So what ingredients do you need?

ANNA SIGRITHUR: I need flour, I need milk, I need eggs, and I need butter, and salt. Okay so we’re going to measure out one and a half cups of milk. So this is just a really standard crepe recipe. Pretty easy, pretty simple. We are going to take the one and a half cups of milk, we’ll crack two eggs into that.

KENT DAVIES: I’ll get you a whisk.

ANNA SIGRITHUR: Yeah. So we just melted about a tablespoon of butter here on the pan. Okay, so now we need one cup of flour, can you measure that?

KENT DAVIES: Yes.

ANNA SIGRITHUR: Thank you. So we’ll just whisk this in. And just whisking in that flour. Whisk it a while to make sure to get out all those lumps. And then we can add about, you know, a half teaspoon of salt if we wanted. The thing about crepes is that they’re nice, you can make them salty or sweet, so…

KENT DAVIES: A pinch?

ANNA SIGRITHUR: This how I measure at home anyways, I don’t use… A three finger pinch is about a half a teaspoon. If you could chop up about three cloves of garlic there, that would be awesome.

KENT DAVIES: Yep.

ANNA SIGRITHUR: And then we’ll get that on the pan. The first pancake of the batch is always the worst, and the last one is always the best, that’s just how it goes. It’s looking pretty good. So when you’re cooking a crepe you just want to wait… Basically you just wait until it’s cooked through from one side, and then when it’s pretty much cooked through you flip it, just toast the other side really quickly. This is going to make a lot of crepes, I hope you guys are hungry. We have so much to make! Oh yeah, those are coming out nice.

SARAH STORY: Have you cooked on a food truck before?

ANNA SIGRITHUR: Never, no.

SARAH STORY: This is your first time?

ANNA SIGRITHUR: I’ve always wanted to cook on a food truck.

KENT DAVIES: While this may be the first time cooking on a food truck for Sigrithur, the concept of a moveable kitchen is something she’s used to. In past years, Sigrithur co-hosted many pop-up dinners across Winnipeg under the moniker the “Clandess Diner, the Moveable Feast.” These pop-up dinners for 30 to 40 people were staged at various venues in the city, with the secret location revealed the day before via email. While the pop-up dining experience may be something you’re already familiar with, Sigrithur’s approach to cuisine is fairly unique. Her signature dishes often utilize wild edibles and even invasive species.

ANNA SIGRITHUR: So yeah I ran Clandess Diner from 2013 to 2016. It was kind of a pop-up dinner thing. It was just basically a venue to showcase or sort of share the culinary research I was doing, often around like foraged things or just kind of like interesting and offbeat experiments with ingredients. And also a way to get paid for it. So yeah I would just cook food for people and they would come, and go to a secret location, eat an interesting dinner and go home.

I got really interested in invasive species. I decided I was going to try to go catch some rusty crayfish, which are an invasive crayfish to Falcon Lake and the eastern waterways. So I went to Falcon and put in some crayfish traps and then Manitoba Conservation pulled them out, and they were like, staking it out. So I had to go back another day and got some crayfish and then me and my collaborator Nathan, we made a soup that had rusty crayfish in it. But it was very illegal. There are places that you are allowed to eat invasive species as like a thing. There’s this cool sushi place in, I think, Connecticut somewhere that uses invasive species fish in their menu. So yeah, it seems brilliant to me but Manitoba Conservation has laws against it currently.²⁹

KENT DAVIES: Regardless of the hurdles, Sigrithur really wanted to push culinary innovation through bio-regionalism here in Manitoba. At the same time, she was also curious about some of the food traditions of her Scandinavian ancestry. And in 2015, both of these interests led her to a major centre of the bio-regional movement.

ANNA SIGRITHUR: Yeah and I just got really interested in why… What were some of the traditions from the lands that my ancestry came from? Because you know, the foods that I ate growing up that were Norwegian, and Swedish, and Icelandic, and whatever. They were all recipes that pretty much were – in the last two hundred years they were created, you know. Scandinavian cuisine… Most world cuisines have changed a lot in the past couple hundred years with industrialization, and increased availability of trade, and all the adjacent technologies to cooking. I was just kind of curious to see what more a like land-based food tradition would be.

So I went up to northern Sweden, and went to go stay in a Sámi community. Sámi Indigenous peoples of the Northern Scandinavian Peninsula and Kola Peninsula in Russia. They’re semi-nomadic reindeer herders and they’ve been living in that region for a really long time. So I though it would just be really amazing to go and find a little bit more of a connection, because I think what the Sámi people are presently practicing, who are practicing their more traditional livelihood, is probably very similar to what a lot of what my ancestors were practicing you know 500 years ago, kind of thing.

I was up there in 2015 for about three months. I lived in a small village called Saltoluokta. And I found this woman… It was actually kind of crazy. I found her through this book I had on boreal herbal, it was called The Boreal Herbal and it’s written by this woman Beverly Grey. And I found Laila – her name’s Laila – I found her in this book, contacted her, and she agreed I could come up there so I could help her cook and clean, and in exchange she would like teach me about some of the traditional Sámi foods and practices.³⁰

So it was, yeah, it was really beautiful. It was on this big lake kind of nestled in these low mountains. It’s about twenty-four hours straight north of Stockholm, so it’s pretty far. If you go to the same parallel in Canada it’s like Baffin Island. So I was there for the summer and the sun never set while I was there; it was just completely bright. Laila has this cool camp where she has these big traditional Sámi… They look like tipis but they’re called Lavvu, and they’re made out of birch poles and canvas. Laila was pretty amazing. We would chop wood for her, and haul some water, and make fires and cook and clean. But she would tell us lots of hilarious stories in her heavily accented English, about growing up in a very nomadic traditional family; her parents were both very traditional people, they passed on to her the fire of keeping her culture alive and that’s why she does what she does today, educating.

She and her parents would move from the south in the winter, up to the mountain highlands in the summer with the reindeer herds and followed them as they grazed. She would ride a reindeer as a little kid; they would pack her on the back of a reindeer with all of their gear. And it was just so amazing learning about the food, you know, like: milking the reindeer, the reindeer meat, smoking the reindeer meat, all of the sort of processes around slaughter time, and harvesting the blood and the organs, and not a single thing, really, was ever wasted – which Laila really carries into the present. There was quite a few things that I learned that I’ve maintained. Obviously it is pretty hard to translate reindeer to here, so I think a lot of things I brought back have been like more herbal and plant knowledge. The Sámi use pine bark as a flour; they dry the pine bark and then they powder it and use it as a, kind of like half flour half seasoning in different flat breads that they make which is really cool. So I’ve done a bit of work with that here, harvesting pine bark and trying to make my own pine bark flours. They also use birch bark flour. There’s a certain kind of lichen that is used as a sort of flavouring, and that grown around here, so I’ve harvested it; it’s called reindeer lichen, funnily enough. So I’ve been working a lot with that; it’s one of my favourite flavours, it’s really musty and rich.

KENT DAVIES: During the same trip Sigrithur got a chance to intern at the world famous Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen, Denmark.³¹ In the early 2000s the chefs of the Danish Michelin-starred restaurant Noma, René Redzepi and Claus Meyer, released their book Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine, dedicated to improving food culture in Nordic countries through bio-regionalism.³² The book is credited as starting the New Nordic food movement. Following its publication, chefs from around the world started to forego classical culinary staples in search of local alternatives, integrating wild edibles into everyday cuisine.³³ Over the past decade, the restaurant industry has significantly progressed towards bio-regionalism and gastronomic experimentation. In 2008, the chefs at Noma also established the Nordic Food Lab, a non-profit culinary organization that investigates food diversity, exploring the possibilities of bio-regional foods through both modern and traditional methods. While interning at the Nordic Food Lab, Sigrithur discovered an interesting way to change the flavour and structure of wild grains, a practice she is now applying here in Manitoba.

ANNA SIGRITHUR: Well, I think one of the things that I was the most satisfied about was when I was at the Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen, a co-intern of mine – a guy by the name of Santiago Lastre – he was doing research on nixtamalization, which is the process of cooking corn with an alkaline substance that changes the chemical structure, gives it that characteristic corn chip flavour. So he was nixtamalizing other grains, Nordic grains and I was like, “Oh, I wonder if anybody’s ever tried nixtamalizing wild rice?” So when I got home I tried that, and it actually really worked. I got some calcium hydroxide from the El Izalco Salvadoran market and boiled it with the wild rice and it worked; the colour changed, it got a little bit more yellow, and the flavour changed, it got a bit more nutty. And then you could make like a masa dough from it. It got chewy and sticky and you could like form it into tortillas. So I ended up making wild rice tortillas, and we served that at a Clandess Diner with pulled bison in the middle and some really nice stuff. And then I felt this is neither my food or my like practice also, so I went to this Indigenous food summit in Michigan and did like a demonstration and was there for a couple days teaching folks how to nixtamalize wild rice. It was so satisfying. I just remember being like, “Woah, this works!” You know that feeling of like, “Wow, I don’t know if anybody has done this before.”

KENT DAVIES: Back on the food truck, we’re eating our lamb’s quarters crepes.

ANNA SIGRITHUR: All right, so now this is the best part [eating]. Well, there’s more! Here. Well the taste is pretty… It’s nice, and rich, and sort of like minerally from the greens. You get that little bit of bitterness from lamb's quarters – although they’re not a very bitter green. And then, of course, you have that nice, rich mouth-feel from the butter, you have that nice tang from the lemon, and little bit of pungency from the garlic.

KENT DAVIES: It comes together so nicely.

ANNA SIGRITHUR: Yeah, it’s really one of my favourite things because it kind of encompasses all that you want from a nice bite of food. You know, you could serve this as a little appetizer.

KENT DAVIES: While the result is very delicious, the chance of picking up lamb’s quarters at a local farmers market remains very slim. For one thing, wild edibles like lamb's quarters are still considered nuisance weeds, according to the Manitoba Government website.³⁴ But an even greater barrier facing locally based harvesters is the cost associated with bringing foraged foods from the field to the table. In the early 2000s, the Northern Forest Diversification Centre at Keewatin Community College (now University College of the North) in the Pas attempted to establish a wild edible market here in Manitoba. The program provided training and marketing for mainly Indigenous and Métis harvesters working in the boreal forest. While the centre trained dozens of harvesters and recorded sales in the hundreds of thousands, the centre ultimately closed from lack of grant support and investment.³⁵ If you ask any chef, restaurateur, or food provider in Manitoba, they will say the same thing: when it comes to serving food, especially locally sourced food, cost is a significant limitation.

ANNA SIGRITHUR: I feel the hardest challenge for me has been: if the cost of starting a restaurant, or if the cost of doing food in the most 100% legitimate way, if that wasn’t so difficult, I probably would like, maybe have had a restaurant by now, or done something like that. I face some barriers to doing what I want to do. I think a lot of people who work with more wild food have also felt that. I know a lot of Indigenous people, Indigenous cooks and chefs across Turtle Island are like, "Yo, this wild meat rule needs to change,” because you’re not allowed to serve wild meat to a paying public. I’ve always struggled with legalities because I’m always doing something that’s a little bit weird, so that’s what’s kept me from maybe being able to pursue it full-time. I think we’re slowly working towards a more realistic policy approach to food in Manitoba. I mean the whole thing of like not having farmers markets within the city limits for how many years, and then that changing, and now you see all the farmers markets that are happening. Yeah, there’s certainly a huge, a gigantic push for more local, more craft or artisanal foods. Hopefully in time that’s going to yield some really great local products and then the imperative to make more realistic policies around them.

KENT DAVIES: Groups like the Woodlot Association of Manitoba are pushing for a wild food industry here in the province.³⁶ They claim that many of the challenges of wild food harvesting are amplified by the ambiguity regarding statutes dealing with the serving and distribution of foraged foods.

With the exception of the Wild Rice Act, which oversees the transportation and sale of wild rice, there is not much legislation regarding wild edibles. The Crown Lands Act and the Forest Health Protection Act don’t address harvesting or foraging of wild foods on public lands in provincial forests. The Organic Agricultural Products Act regulates the certification packaging and labeling of organic farm products but does not cover wild foods. The Fruit and Vegetable Sales Act covers the inspection, grading, packaging, marking, shipping, advertising, and selling of produce in the province but the listed fruits and vegetables don’t include wild foods. The Farm Products Marketing Act may be the only act to cover wild foods, but only because it defines a “farm product” as a product of agriculture, or of a forest, or lake, or river. While the Government of Manitoba has cautiously approved the selling of wild herbal products, like St. John’s wort, feverfew, and milk thistle, they also insist that the herbs be stringently cultivated and not harvested in the wild, as “most species could not withstand the environmental impact of large scale gathering.”¹³⁷ So where does that leave wild food? I ask Karen Froman if this kind of lack of regulation should be a concern for Indigenous harvesters.

KAREN FROMAN: I mean it’s a two-edged sword here, right? So I mean, on the one hand does that mean as Indigenous people we’re “Yay! Free for all.,” we can go out and harvest the stuff without interference – which is great, right, which is what it should be. But at the same time, does that also mean that settler populations also have free and unrestricted and uncontrolled access to these traditional food stuffs and traditional medicines. Because both foods and medicines have teachings that go with them in terms of how, and when, and where you harvest. People are now being really secretive about where they go picking because they don’t want people to know, because it’s getting over-harvested. So, I mean… I don’t really know what the answer to that would be. Do we regulate? Do we not regulate? You know, how do we deal with this? Do we have a massive education campaign, and if we do, how do we do that? So there are a lot of questions surrounding all of this. To me, in term of food sovereignty, I think that regulation and rules around harvesting and things like that should also be Indigenous led.

KENT DAVIES: While this ambiguity surrounding the cultivation and distribution of wild food may stifle the economic interests of those who wish to harvest, the lack of regulation also doesn’t protect wild food from being over-harvested. As we’re wrapping up on the food truck, I ask Anna Sigrithur what her take is on the renewed interest towards foraging.

ANNA SIGRITHUR: In and of itself, it’s a really great approach; it’s a great way to think. But, you know, within capitalism, and within elite restaurant culture, I think things do get fetishized and it’s just kind of like… It doesn’t end up benefiting too many people. So I know here, in Turtle Island, where suddenly it’s really trendy to like forage white sage, or like traditional Indigenous medicines that usually grow wild, yeah I’ve heard lots of stories where people who have been picking these plants for generations are suddenly finding, maybe people who shouldn’t be there, out in their harvesting areas, going and just like, harvesting and not understanding how much they need to harvest or how much they should leave. So there’s problems that way, and I’m sure ecologically as well. You don’t want to… When you are foraging something – especially when you’re are foraging something that is a native plant – you don’t want to take all of it. You want to leave some so it will regenerate. If you’re foraging weeds like this lamb’s quarters, there is no worries; that thing is going to regenerate, so I don’t need to worry about how much to take.

KENT DAVIES: While Sigrithur sees herself as an advocate for bio-regionalism, she is also critical of the limitations of the movement.

ANNA SIGRITHUR: I’m obviously interested in bioregional food and the human history and sort of the set of skills and practices that comes from that. But I would also consider myself a critic of it in a lot of ways. I think that it’s too easy to simplify our approach to food and we’re always looking for the next salvation, the next fad thing, you know. The world’s been globalized for a really long time, like since the first spice trade routes. So the idea that we’re going to go back to not having any trade is simply insane, and also I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no trade, and I don’t want to live in a world where bio-regionalism is like exploitative to marginalized peoples in those areas.

KENT DAVIES: Karen Froman also sees the potential in bio-regionalism, but only if includes Indigenous communities.

KAREN FROMAN: You know, we’ve got a good opportunity here right because this is all still fairly new. I can see the potential for bio-regionalism to support local Indigenous foodways, Indigenous food sovereignty, and Indigenous food industry, if it’s done right: with Indigenous voices, and with Indigenous peoples being active participants in this process.

KENT DAVIES: Recently, groups like the National Indigenous Economic Development Board are recommending changes to how wild foods are exchanged in Canada. They recommend establishing a framework to regulate the selling and marketing of wild food, along with a Wild Food Inspection Act to oversee sales and safety inspections co-managed by local Indigenous governments.³⁸ Meanwhile, in British Columbia, the Secwépemc Nation has introduced a permit system to oversee morel picking on their traditional territory, hoping to encourage more Indigenous communities to follow suit.³⁹

While the practice of foraging continues to grow, it’s unknown if a wild food market will ever be viable here in Manitoba, or even desired if it leads to habitual over-harvesting and the disruption of the cultural practices of Indigenous harvesters. New foragers have an obligation to respect the traditions of multi-generational foragers while learning new ways on how to eat foods in more ecological and sustainable ways. Before we pack it in and head out to our next location aboard the Manitoba Food History Truck, I ask Anna Sigrithur what her advice is for new foragers.

ANNA SIGRITHUR: Foraging advice, foraging 101, is know where you are, know where you are going to go, know what that place is – not just to yourself, but to other people. Make sure that you’re going to be foraging in a place that’s respectful to forage, first of all. Try to have a relationship with whoever owns that land, if somebody owns it, you know, so you can get the all-clear about the soil quality, about soil contamination, and make sure that it’s safe, and that nobody is spraying pesticides. And then the last thing is: you’re foraging, especially native plants, be respectful and don’t take very many of them; let them regenerate. Learn about plant biology and learn about when it’s the best time to forage them rather than… You know, forage them maybe after they’ve been able to reproduce, and if that doesn’t matter if you’re foraging leaves or something. Yeah, just try to be respectful and consider all the relationships involved. Try not to do it in a commodified way, where you are just going and like getting something. Because it’s… In order for… Wild food has potential to be paradigm shifting in how we consider food and relationships.

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⁷ Mitich, “Common Lambsquarters,” 550–552.

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⁹ Daniel Shelton Robinson, "Chenopodium berlandieri and the Cultural Origins of Agriculture in the Eastern Woodlands," (master’s thesis, University of Tennessee, 2012): 64; I. J. Bassett and C. W. Crompton, "The Biology of Canadian Weeds: 32 Chenopodium album L." Canadian Journal of Plant Science 58, 4 (1978): 1061-1072.

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