BYOF (Bring you own food)

Are you ready for the next food trend? First it was organic, then local. Now, a new culinary movement is sprouting: urban foraging. As expected, this trend has been hot among foodies in California and New York City for years. (New York you ask? Check out naturalist and environmental educator “Wildman” Steve Brill, who’s been foraging for decades). 

Foraging–the act of looking or searching for food–is what humans used to do to survive before agriculture was introduced. Foraging is the new organic in the culinary world. In fact, “searching the woods or parks or even cracks in the pavement for edible plants has become the latest culinary obsession,” according to an article in this week’s issue of Time magazine.

In San Francisco, forageSF hosts the monthly Underground Market, a venue for tasting and purchasing the food that is being produced in backyards and home kitchens in the Bay Area.

A restaurant in Los Angeles called Forage lets people bring in the stuff they find in exchange for credit toward dinner.

There’s even a company, Mikuni Wild Harvest, which is “committed to exploration of nature’s greatest bounty: food”–especially food found in the wild.

You can also check out Ava Chin’s blog posts about her urban foraging adventures in The New York Times.

And, two cookbooks on foraging are coming out this fall: Noma, by Rene Redzepi of Copenhagen’s restaurant Noma (first on the list for the 2010 S. Pelligrino World’s 50  Best Restaurant Awards); and The Wild Table  from Northern Californian forager, Connie Green.

If you’d like to give foraging a try, check out Foraging.com for resources to help you find edible plants where you live.