It’s green. A little at least. The first snowdrops appear, but I don’t keep an eye on them. I hallucinate wild garlic. It won’t be long before green carpets, with a mild onion scent, lie in the forests around Berlin. Then it’s spring. I’ll go collecting and I know I’ll take far too much with me again.
The wild garlic is a pioneer plant, in the botanical sense, but above all in the culinary context. Hardly anyone can imagine spring without asparagus, and the time before that without wild garlic – as pesto, risotto or dumplings. At the same time, the forest plant has opened our eyes to what else grows under the trees and can be eaten, beyond mushrooms and game.
It’s a surprising amount. The young leaves of the maple can be used like grape leaves and rolled up in rice or steamed fish. Maple blossoms can be used to make syrup. Likewise, of course, from fir and spruce sprouts. The young shoots taste slightly lemony and are edible. And, and, and: Every year new cookbooks on the subject come out, every year cooks who are regionally and seasonally oriented discover, above all, the forest as a food source. Deer and wild boar are interpreted in a modern way. Curly hen, black trumpet or parasol (all mushrooms) are on the menu. Birch water and birch sugar can be found in health food stores. And wild asparagus, dandelions and beechnuts conquer the kitchens in the wake of wild garlic.
Actually, it is downright absurd that the forest is becoming fashionable as a pantry right now. The forest is in crisis. An important CO₂ reservoir that is drying up, that is becoming more and more defenseless, that is burning. The whole ecosystem is out of joint. It is so bad that the federal and state governments have provided 1.5 billion euros for reforestation. And young climate protectors immediately organize nationwide when trees are to give way to opencast mines, highways and now also factories.
But eating from this forest, that’s okay? How does that fit together? One could now write a lot about the Germans, romanticism and the forest. It is interesting that in the 19th century the history of the forest, which had been “wilderness” and “economic space” until then, began as a cultural space. The fact that it had been used in the kitchen for centuries became less interesting with the industrialization of agriculture. The bourgeois cuisine that emerged in the century is extremely agricultural: the nobility should continue to pick the buck out of their teeth when pheasant was on the table. Industrialization took hold of forestry, at the end of which the roe deer is less a game and more a tree pest.
This has led to the precarious situation in which the forest is today. A new place of longing is created, other types of appropriation are developed.
Peter Wohlleben, Germany’s best-known forester, explained the social system of the forest to us in his bestsellers. People go for forest bathing as they used to listen to whale song CDs. The forest is no longer dangerous, but vulnerable – but still original. Not a cookbook, not a blog on the subject of forests that doesn’t point out that if farm animals live in a species-appropriate way, it’s wild animals. And what grows under trees is considered better organic, let’s forget Chernobyl for a moment. It’s really been a long time.
When people eat, they like to travel to better worlds. But eating from the forest doesn’t make him healthy. I’ll have to pull myself together gathering wild garlic.