Eat Your Weeds @ Rutgers Day: How to Safely Savor Wild Edible Plants

Tomorrow, April 26, 2014 is Rutgers Day in New Brunswick, New Jersey! Every year about 70,000 people come to Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey's New Brunswick campus for a huge festival celebrating all that is our university.

The Struwe lab (i.e. the writers and creators of this blog) will host a public outreach and education table entitled "Eat Your Weeds!: How to Safely Savor Wild Edible Plants." We will provide information about weedy plants, advice on urban foraging, and free samples of some original recipes that incorporate weedy plants to everyone who stops by. It will be a lovely way to celebrate the start of the growing season - and the upcoming end of the semester - here on campus!

Here is some information about my current favorite weedy plant and a recipe for a snack that we'll be serving tomorrow, garlic mustard hummus:

Delicious garlic mustard hummus on cracker (with a hairy cress leaf on top). Photo L. Struwe (cc).

Information about garlic mustard, Alliaria petiolata (Brassicaceae), an invasive species.

Recipe for garlic mustard hummus, developed by Sara Morris-Marano.

You can download our recipe handouts at this link, or under Download in the right navigation bar on this blog. 

Recent weed-related articles in the media

Jane Kramer writes about her foraging adventures in Europe in The New Yorker article The Food at Our Feet.  On the New York Times blog City Room, they have a series in Urban Foraging by Ava Chin, writing about purslane picked from the sidewalks of the city, and much more.

Ecologists have started to argue scientifically about if alien species are necessarily bad or not. It started with an article in Nature (subscription only, so no link, but find it by googling 'doi:10.1038/474153a') by Mark Davis and 18 other ecologists.  This led to a bumper crop of protest letters from many other ecologists (see the issues afterwards in Nature), and it entered the popular media too.  Here is a podcast from Radio Australia about it. 

In an article in TIME magazine, Bryan Walsh ponders if 'In a Globalized World, Are Invasive Species a Thing of the Past?'

Wired adds to the pile, with 'Sometimes Invasive Species are Good'. Wired goes on to describe 9 invasive species worth admiring, including the dandelion weed.

Local Flowers for $7.41 per branch!

Local Flowers for $7.41 per branch!, a photo by Vilseskogen on Flickr.

The only problem here is that the local flowers are the invasive species Oriental bittersweet, Celastrus orbiculatus, which we rather get rid of. I bet the florist didn't know this. But this is a great use for an alien, invasive weed, don't you think? And to have some people pay over $7 for a branch of unwanted stuff, that is pretty good too. Of course most of them could have gone to any nearby place and cut this down themselves, since this species is omnipresent, fortunately.