When you work with wild food, says Alan Bergo, “you learn about a lot more than food.” For the Minnesota professional chef turned full-time forager, foraging expanded his horizons beyond what he even thought possible—and possibly saved his life.
Take the results of a recent rabbit hole of research: isirgan salatasi, a traditional Turkish salad made with raw stinging nettles (yes, those ubiquitous culprits of red, burning ankles). Though Bergo had long foraged the wild greens, he wasn’t convinced they were edible without cooking to neutralize the sting—until he found footage of Turkish grandmas harvesting them, simply bashing them with a rolling pin, and indeed, turning them into salad.
Or consider pansotti, a tortellini-like northern Italian stuffed pasta, made with a blend of wild greens and herbs known as preboggion. “Depending on which reference you look at—and this is where it gets so exciting—the mixture of wild plants could be anywhere from 4 to 18 different species,” Bergo said. It gets better: References he found for la minestrella, a Tuscan stew of beans, wild greens, and corn cakes, called for the inclusion of 20, 30, or more than 50 different species.
“We don’t even think these sorts of things are possible,” he said, “but it’s real. It’s a tradition. And you can go outside, and if you don’t harvest 60 plants you can harvest 4, and it’s still going to taste really good.”
Lost and Found
A business school graduate who turned cooking from a side hustle into a career, Bergo worked with wild foods in restaurant kitchens before he’d ever foraged them himself. After stumbling upon a chicken of the woods mushroom one day, he put the pieces together: The expensive ingredients he was serving on fancy tasting menus were literally within reach. Intrigued, he dived into the world of wild foods.But his reality as a line cook was hardly glamorous. He was broke, in debt, hopping from friend’s basement to friend’s basement. Combined with a bout of Lyme disease that paralyzed half his face, among other crippling symptoms, he entered the lowest point of his life.
By the time Bergo became executive chef of Lucia’s, a beloved Minneapolis farm-to-table restaurant, in 2016, he was building menus from his harvests. “I was just like, ‘What is the most awesome stuff that I can possibly find? It’s all going on the menu.’”
After Lucia’s closed, Bergo sold a book series—the first installment of three, “The Forager Chef’s Book of Flora,” was published in June 2021—and worked on various other projects, including filming a foraging and cooking show during the pandemic that won a 2022 James Beard Award. The journey of a lifetime was well underway. “I found that wild food was something I would never be able to master; it’s like a never-ending journey. That’s exciting.”
Wisdom From the Past
Bergo was taught to cook with classical French techniques, but bringing the best out of wild foods often requires looking elsewhere: at where they’re traditionally harvested and prepared. “That means stepping out of my comfort zone and learning about different cultures that I’d never thought I would,” he said. “I need to go back and learn about the history, the stories of things. Those really give a dish and an ingredient a soul.”He consults academic texts, especially ethnobotanical resources, and, to a lesser degree, cookbooks; an Italian one he’s been translating has proved a treasure trove of new, old knowledge. His mentor chefs might have been aghast at the “cucina povera” practices he’s picked up, like cooking medleys of foraged weeds “until they’re not green anymore,” he said, but now, “I like to tell people I cook like an Italian grandmother and I’m making the best food of my life.”
He also draws upon a network of wild food experts and friends, in places from Alaska to India, to share their firsthand knowledge of regional specialties. Some are closer by, like Native American ethnobotanist Linda Black Elk, who once invited him to South Dakota to harvest timpsula (prairie turnips), a traditional staple food of the Lakota. Linda’s husband, Luke, taught Bergo the trick to finding them: Watch the wind. The dried plant blows across the prairie like a tumbleweed to spread its seeds, he explained, so intuiting the flight patterns of the previous year’s seedheads—“If I was a little tumbleweed, where would I fall?”—will lead you to this year’s growth. “There’s so much native knowledge tucked away in these oral traditions,” Bergo said.
And renewed interest in this traditional knowledge is higher than ever. Bergo points to growing website views—now millions a year—along with the 2022 James Beard wins for both him and fellow forager Alexis Nikole Nelson (aka breakout TikTok star BlackForager) as indications of this being wild foods’ “biggest year yet.” He’s not surprised.
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