Koerth: We may not be able to get rid of invasive plants, but we can eat (some of) them

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We won’t eat our way out of an invasive species problem. It’s disappointing. But I want to be upfront and get that part out of the way because it was the first thing I thought of when I found out that creeping bellflower — that purple-flowered intruder trying to take over our Minnesota yards and parks — is 100% edible.

“The entire plant: root, stem, leaves and flowers,” said Tim Clemens, a nature educator and founder of Ironwood Foraging.

The whole thing can be eaten. And is, in fact, pretty good. The purple flowers are dainty bits of nothing — more about the lightly crisp texture than flavor. The seed buds have a crunchy, cucumber quality, and Clemens says they make a great pickled caper. The root tastes like a spicy turnip, he told me.

And the leaves … well, they were out of season when I tried them on a recent walk with Clemens around Lake Nokomis in Minneapolis. Dry and thick and a little rough, they were like trying to munch on the flap of a pasta box. But he said that, in spring, they’re soft, sweet and delicious. Almost all the greens he eats come from urban foraging, and creeping bellflower leaves are part of that.

Eating the bellflower will not get rid of it completely. Frankly, eradicating any invasive species as widely dispersed and numerous as the creeping bellflower is extremely difficult … if not outright impossible.

But eating the bellflower can help us chew through some other tough problems. That’s because foraging the city forces us to think differently, Clemens said. About nature, but also about ourselves and the way we interact with each other.

Invasive species are a great example of this. I don’t want to make it sound like removing invasives doesn’t matter — or, worse, that it’s somehow wrong. Creeping bellflower is a super fast-spreading plant. Each individual stalk can produce upwards of 15,000 seeds. Thrown aloft by the wind, they can easily out-compete slower-growing natives like wild ginger. And we get to decide that’s not what we want. We can take action, pull up the plants, and eat them if we so desire.

But that’s not the same thing as saying the creeping bellflower is bad. Eating creeping bellflower isn’t something American foragers like Clemens came up with. The plant grows natively from Eastern Europe to Siberia, and people have been eating it — and related species — for thousands of years. You can even buy the roots, fresh or dried, in some Korean grocery stores. Clemens has a recipe on his website for how to turn them into a popular Korean side dish.

Our culture shapes what we think about the value of this plant, just like culture shapes what we think about the idea of pulling a bellflower out of a public park and popping it into our mouths. If it seems weird or wrong or even gross … that’s your cultural norms talking, not objective reality.

Urban foraging ends up throwing you into a head-on collision with a bunch of things you thought were right and normal, Clemens told me. Here in the American Midwest, it challenges how we think about property, community and capitalist consumerism.

And what do you do when free food is growing in someone else’s yard? “This is really difficult for a lot of Minnesotans, but you can actually go up and knock on the house and meet a new person,” Clemens said. Food can be gifts, or part of a trade, and doesn’t have to have anything to do with money or profit.

We can eat our way out of cultural norms that harm us. And we can eat our way out of ignorance of the natural world we live in.

There’s no official certification in foraging. It’s a thing you learn by doing and reading and listening to knowledge handed down over time, Clemens said. And as you do that, you become more aware of what edible things look like, where they’re likely to grow, and what season they’re best in. You get to know the natural world of your city in a more intimate way and recognize plant friends you’d have previously overlooked — or just destroyed.

Like giant ragweed, a chest-high stem covered in green, slightly fuzzy leaves that Clemens showed me at Lake Nokomis. This looks like something you cut down with a weed whacker and stuff in a paper sack. But it is, in fact, a food crop domesticated by Native Americans for its oil-filled seeds before corn ever traveled this far north. Its leaves (while also not at their peak tenderness midsummer) taste amazing, with a sparkle of mintiness that would go great in a lemonade.

Asking questions about the beliefs you were raised on allows you to see the food everywhere you go. Even in the invasive bugs that ravage your lawn. Clemens makes flour from roasted, ground-up Japanese beetles. He turns them into high-protein scones that just taste of, well, scone. The only sign of their buggy origins are small black specs in the crumb, which sparkle just a little in the sunlight.