Wild Wisdom

Three perspectives on foraging, climate change, and the wonders of wild food
By James Norton
Photographs by Bill Phelps

The Great Northern partnered with food culture publication Meal Magazine on their second print issue, now available to order. Here we share with you a Great Northern-commissioned article, a conversation moderated by James Norton on foraging, wintertime food sourcing, and the impacts of climate change from three distinctly Northern food figures: chef Yia Vang (Hmong Union Kitchen, Vinai), Mikkel-Lau Mikkelsen (VILD MAD) and Wendy Geniusz (professor and editor of the book Plants Have So Much To Give Us, All We Have To Do Is Ask: Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings).

In April 2019, I took a short, cold walk through the woods near a lake in Northern Wisconsin with author Wendy Makoons Geniusz. The snow had only recently retreated from the still-feeble sunlight, and stubborn patches of it still clung to the ground. But even in a tattered brown landscape blasted by a frigid northwestern wind, the plants were there. Geniusz foraged Labrador tea plants (mashkiigobag) and brewed us hot mugs of “swamp tea;" she talked about how spruce trees can be tapped for their powerful reserves of scurvy-fighting Vitamin C; and she found patches of wintergreen, a plant that—and this was both viscerally shocking and stupidly obvious—tasted exactly like the chewing gum of the same name.

As modern people, most of us rarely pass through wild places, let alone interact with them in a meaningful fashion. And when you forage for wild food, you’re not merely passing through those places, you’re changing them. In the process, a persistent and observant forager can witness the progression of climate change, pull on threads woven into the story of class conflict, and tap into a living history that predates books and even words.

Meal Magazine wanted to tell some of the stories that begin to emerge when we collect wild foods, so on their behalf I reached out to three deeply knowledgeable people with remarkably different perspectives: Geniusz, with her academic training and American Indian heritage; Yia Vang, a prominent Minneapolis chef whose refugee upbringing is part of the immigration story of Southeast Asia’s Hmong people to the Upper Midwest; and Mikkel-Lau Mikkelson, a Dane whose work in wild foods education is a direct outgrowth of the remarkable restaurant Noma in Copenhagen.

All three have a lot on their respective plates. Geniusz worked with her (now deceased) mother Mary Siisip Geniusz to write the deep and engrossing Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do is Ask. Vang runs the popular Union Hmong Kitchen culinary pop-up in Minneapolis and is due to open his first brick-and-mortar restaurant, Vinai, in 2021. And Mikkelsen heads up VILD MAD (“Wild Food”), a Noma-directed organization focused on helping the public explore nature through foraging.

Vang and Geniusz joined me for a round-table Zoom conversation; due to scheduling conflicts, I spoke to Mikkelsen several days later. I’ve incorporated their words into one continuous story, organized thematically.