Cottage Book Shop features author of Midwest Foraging

From staff reports

Join forager and author Lisa Rose at the Cottage Book Shop in Glen Arbor on Aug. 8. Rose will lead a guided nature walk at 10 a.m., then return to the bookshop for foraged refreshments and a book signing of her latest title, Midwest Foraging: 115 Wild and Flavorful Edibles from Burdock to Wild Peach. Discover what you might be missing right outside your front door. Foraging ethics, safety and sustainability will also be discussed. The event is open to ages 8 and over, with a focus for adults. Free, but RSVP requested by calling 231-334-4223.

Lisa Rose knows food. Not just the kind in the grocery store. Or from the farmer’s market or garden. She knows about the wild weeds growing in the hedgerows, fields and forests. And she eats them.

In Midwest Foraging, Rose writes about the plants familiar to her that grow wildly across the Midwest — native and invasive, various edible landscaping and those plants escaped from cultivation from the garden spaces. The book is part botanical field guide, culinary treatise, local food system op-ed and Rose’s personal memoir.

Rose’s book aims to take the mystery out of foraging with plant descriptions and photographs of 115 edible plants that can be found across the Midwest. Midwest Foraging is one of the regional guides in a national foraging series published by Timber Press, laid out with a seasonal chart, a section on how to identify plants and their culinary uses. Particular about safety and sustainability, Rose also includes tips on how to safely forage and what to be mindful of to ensure healthy plant communities.

With Midwest Foraging, Rose hopes to inspire more people to learn about the wild weeds around them, to view the edible plants as an important part of the local food system as the organic foods being grown by local farmers.

“Wild foods are nutrient dense,” said Rose. “Wild foods are a source for unprocessed minerals, an alternative to commercial supplements. They are plants local to our bio-region and grow naturally. This is especially relevant with today’s concerns around water conservation in agriculture. Wild plants are part of our local food system.”

Wild plants are everywhere, said Rose. “Even if you are a city-dweller, wild foods are all around us: dandelions in the park, basswood flowers on the trees lining the streets, nettles growing in the rose garden beds.” The key is to know how to forage safely — from plant identification to knowing the plant’s soils.

“Once you find those sweet harvesting spots to pick fresh nettles in the cool, spring air, you most certainly won’t want to return to the eating pallid lettuce and spinach leaves sitting ensconced in plastic on the grocery store shelves,” said Rose.

“You might find yourself craving the bitter flavors of the wild chicory and will cherish finding the smaller, but more flavor-packed wild strawberries you discover in the open fields of early summer.”

From the standpoint of community health, society is finally making the connection between healthy soil, healthy foods, and healthy people. “This is significant,” said Rose. “The food on our plate has — or should have — roots in the earth.”

George Aquino, a food writer, restaurateur and general manager of the J.W. Marriott in Grand Rapids, said of Rose’s latest book, “Midwest Foraging is more than a practical guidebook to foraging. It is the story of Lisa Rose’s lifelong journey of ‘sucking the marrow’ out of the earth’s bounty — from her childhood days tending her mother’s garden to her foraging field trips with her children in the woods of Michigan.”

Rose’s professional career has included food work in the Napa Valley, Leelanau County and Grand Rapids. She has been part of growing the local food movement in West Michigan from the ground up. Rose’s first book, Grand Rapids Food: A Culinary Revolution, (History Press, 2013) masterfully details the seeds and growth of the players that helped the local food movement take root in Grand Rapids.

When she is not in her own gardens or kitchen, Rose can be found in the fields and forests, leading foraging plant walks and teaching classes on edible and medicinal wild plants. Beyond the Great Lakes, Rose’s interest in ethnobotany and herbal medicine have taken her across the United States and into the Yucatan, mainland Mexico, Nicaragua, and Brazil to study plants, people, health, and their connection to place.

If you miss Lisa Rose at the Cottage Book Shop on Aug. 8, she will also be a keynote speaker at the Glen Arbor Women’s Club on September 8. Stay tuned for details about that event.