This Sunday walk your block. Look down. See what is growing up through the cracks and between the perfectly planted flowers. Take your time. Bend down. Get on your knees and look closely. Crawl a bit. Feel the damp earth and cool sidewalk. Observe those weeds: Dandelion, Chickweed, Plantain, Clover, Shepherd's Purse, Curly Dock, and so many others. They have been with us for so long that they are really part of you. They are your extended body. Just as billions of bacteria make up your internal microbiome, these plants, fungi, insects and bacteria communities underfoot make up your external distributed biome. These entangled multi-species communities have wandered the world with you on migration after migration. Some came from Asia...
Is Nature the thing that the Environmental Movement should defend? The major issues of the 21st century are environmental. Climate Change will have a significant impact on all aspects of our lives. We have to effectively imagine alternatives to rapid climate change and part of doing this is asking how we got to this point. This much is very clear. As we at SPURSE dug into our culture's deep underlying methods of perceiving and engaging with the world around us, while writing the Eat Your Sidewalk Cookbook, we came to be deeply troubled by the very idea of “Nature”. We began to be haunted by the question “Is the very idea of Nature part of the problem?” While the whole of the Eat Your...
How can you think of eating what is growing along the sidewalk? It is polluted! We in SPURSE get this comment every time we present our Eat Your Sidewalk project and advocate for urban foraging. Here is a excerpt from the second chapter of the cookbook about the first time we went foraging with a group in an urban environment. This takes place in the summer of 2011 in the Bronx: "After an hour of foraging along rail tracks and overgrown lots we were sitting down. Dandelion, Chicory, Chickweed, Poor-Man’s Pepper, Clover, Curly Dock, Pigweed, Shepherds Purse, Wood Sorrel, and Pokeweed. Our old wooden salad bowl was passed around and slowly—tentatively... Not surprisingly, as we sat on the water’s edge...
Why Eat Your Sidewalk? As we at SPURSE have been going around doing workshops and readings with the launch of the Eat Your Sidewalk Cookbook we get asked this quite a bit. For us it is in those three simple words: EAT YOUR SIDEWALK ! EAT: eating is what links us to all life -- when we eat a dandelion growing on our street what has happened to it now happens to us. Our health and its health are linked. Its concerns and ours meet. We can no longer separate our fates. Our big goal with this project is to foster a real interdependence between us and our environments. This all begins with eating what is underfoot. ...
Cooking vs Eating We at SPURSE have been watching Michael Pollan's Cooked series on Netflix as it has come up in a number of discussions of the Eat Your Sidewalk Cookbook. It is great to see another series by Pollan-- we are big fans of his book The Botany of Desire and the related series. There he presented a way to understand the agency of plants in shaping us, and in doing so overturned our comfortable sense of being the species that dominates and subjugates nature. So, Cooked: It is really worth watching as it covers many critical ecological and food topics in a compelling manner. His argument in a nutshell is that we have lost touch with cooking and...
