Christopher Nyerges will teach you how to safely find (and eat) the local wild bounty.
I met up with botanist and survivalist Christopher Nyerges on a sunny afternoon in February in Highland Park for an in-person lesson on how to feed myself from the streets of LA.
Nyerges, 68, wore gray cargo pants with a long-sleeve button-down shirt, and his unruly locks spilled out of a wide-brimmed hat. He carried a small Swiss army knife in one of his many pockets and gathered plants with either it or his bare hands. We met at the overgrown property of White Tower, a nonprofit Nyerges works with that offers classes on spirituality and survival. It was here that we’d spend the afternoon foraging, and within minutes, Nyerges had plucked a leaf and offered it to me to eat. As he rattled off the plant’s taxonomy and nutritional benefits, I decided to trust him. Thankfully, my stomach didn’t regret it.
Nyerges, who grew up in Pasadena, first started teaching classes on foraging and survival skills in 1974. At the time, he said, people thought he was a bit strange for it, but today foraging has become more mainstream.
Humans have foraged, or collected wild-growing edible food, since the dawn of our existence. Now, social media is bringing this ancient practice into the spotlight. On TikTok, the hashtag #foraging has 1.1 billion views. Urban foraging appeals to citydwellers looking to better understand the plants that grow around them and connect with the natural world. Websites with maps of where to find edible resources in your city have cropped up, including one called Falling Fruit that maps out where people can find urban fruit trees; it now identifies 1.2 million fruit-bearing trees worldwide.
“I was fascinated that peoples of the past all did this routinely, and we modern people have almost lost it all,” Nyerges says about his initial interest in the practice. Nyerges sees foraging as a survival skill, but that’s not the main reason he does it. He values the health benefits of wild foods — they tend to contain greater concentrations of vitamins and minerals than farmed food.
The purpose, according to Nyerges, is not to live completely off the wild plants you scavenge. “You can’t possibly feed all of LA with weeds,” he says. Even for an individual or family, it would be prohibitively laborious to scavenge around the city for their entire food supply, not to mention troublesome when it comes to nutritional balance. But what you can do is supplement your diet, Nyerges says.
Foraging has given Nyerges a greater appreciation for Los Angeles’ flora. “It forces you to become more alert to the fact that these are valuable resources,” he says.
While Nyerges sometimes ventures into the wilderness to forage, he collects wild food right here in the city on a regular basis. “Why do you have to go so far into a pristine area when it’s probably growing in your backyard?” Nyerges asks.
TikTok videos might inspire hordes of eager foraging enthusiasts, but Nyerges cautions that in order to protect one’s own health and that of the environment, only those who are willing to put in time and effort to understand the practice deeply should forage. Some plants are deadly; others can make people sick. “I also don’t want to see the wild environment all ripped up from people trying to make money off of this,” Nyerges says, voicing concern about people selling what they forage. In his classes, Nyerges teaches students what they need to know to forage safely and thoughtfully.
As Nyerges led me through the hilly property of White Tower, he knelt down every few steps to show me a new plant. He was a walking encyclopedia of botany, listing a barrage of facts about each plant with the cool enthusiasm of someone who has been doing this for decades. Along the side of the driveway, Nyerges pointed out a cluster of leafy weeds dotted with dainty white flowers — chickweed, he told me, a non-native plant that comes from Eurasia. Nyerges notes that foraging for non-native plants helps keep invasive plant species in check, thereby protecting native plants. According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, California hosts about 1,100 non-native plant species.
I realized that chickweed was growing all over the property. Nyerges showed me its short leaves growing opposite each other and the five cleft petals on each flower, and he told me that chickweed is edible — rich in Vitamin C, iron, and calcium. He often uses it in salads. People say it tastes like spinach when cooked and like raw corn on the cob when eaten uncooked.
Many of the edible plants we saw looked like straggly weeds. I’ve passed by chickweed thousands of times during my years in California, and I never thought to throw it in a salad.
A few steps later Nyerges knelt down and picked up a nettle leaf. “I heard a lot of people who survived World War II used these,” he told me. “I collect it all the time, and I make it into tea, soup, and pesto.” Though the nettle is notorious for stinging when you touch it, the leaves are perfectly fine to consume if cooked or dried. Nyerges picked it quickly with his hands, but most people use gloves to avoid getting stung.
“You do need to take the time to learn the plants one by one,” Nyerges says. “Don’t be a dilettante and just look at a few pictures and go, ‘I think I know what that is.’”
Instead, he recommends, “talk to neighbors, gardeners, farmers; ask them to identify plants for you and tell you how they use them.” Then, he says, move on to books and other materials. Making yourself familiar with botanical families can be helpful.
Your sense of smell is also important in identifying safe plants. Leaving the nettles behind us, Nyerges picked a leaf from a nearby tree, crushed it in his hand and passed it to me. The odor was nauseating.
This was an elder tree. Elderflower (a common ingredient in teas) and cooked elderberries are edible, but other parts of the plant are poisonous. The leaves of this tree won’t kill you, Nyerges said, but they will induce vomiting.
His key point: “If you don’t know what it is, don’t eat it.”
Nyerges’ students often ask him to tell them which plants are poisonous so they can avoid them. You don’t need to know which plants are poisonous, he replies. Just pick the edible plants you are exceedingly familiar with.
But after reiterating this lesson a couple of times, Nyerges agreed to appease my curiosity and name a few common plants to avoid: poison hemlock (should’ve known!), tree tobacco, and castor bean leaves.
While Christopher Nyerges sometimes ventures into the wilderness to forage, he collects wild food right here in the city on a regular basis: “Why do you have to go so far into a pristine area when it’s probably growing in your backyard?”
Nyerges has little time for fad-seekers who lack the patience to become responsible foragers. “Next week they’ll be learning how to be cowboys at the rodeo,” he says.
We continued our stroll through the yard, and I began to realize it was a cornucopia of edible ingredients.
A stately bodhi tree (fig tree), native to southeast Asia, stood to our left as we trudged uphill towards the back of the property. This was the kind of tree the Buddha sat under when he reached enlightenment, Nyerges pointed out.
When I walk under these massive fig trees here in Southern California, I normally have to tiptoe around dozens of crushed, rotting figs. But Nyerges finds a use for this fruit that often goes to waste: he bakes them into pastry shells to make fig tarts.
A bit further into the garden, we reached a prickly pear cactus, a common, wild-growing succulent in this region. It’s not just the fruit that is nutritious, Nyerges said. He pulled out his knife and cut off a cactus pad, shaving the needles off of it and skinning it.
“These are good for diabetes,” he explained. “You can cook with this and put it in salads.” Nyerges also makes it into juice.
We walked along the street to see which wild plants were growing beyond the property. Chickweed sprouted up in the patches of grass between the road and sidewalk. These patches do not belong to the city and, while you can ask the homeowner for permission to pick from them, they might not be the most appealing foraging locations due to pollution from nearby cars, not to mention that they’re prime bathroom spots for neighborhood dogs.
If you’re wondering where you can forage, you should keep in mind that, according to LA County ordinances, it is illegal to remove, cut, or damage any plant in any LA County park. But foraging for certain types of plants — primarily non-native — is legal in the Angeles National Forest with a permit.
If you don’t want to go through the hassle of obtaining a permit and trekking all the way into the Angeles National Forest, Nyerges has a couple suggestions:
Ideally, allow wild plants to grow in your yard — if you have one, that is.
You can also forage on other people’s properties, with permission, of course. And you might even be doing them a favor.
Sometimes, if Nyerges spots wild, edible plants in a neighbor’s yard, he’ll knock on their door and ask to pick them. “It takes people a while to figure out why I want to pick their weeds and remove them and I’m not charging them,” he says. That there are people who would want to eat these plants is an entirely new concept to them. Sometimes, Nyerges catches a glimpse of the curious onlookers laughing from their windows as he gathers their weeds.
Nyerges’ students often ask him to tell them which plants are poisonous so they can avoid them. You don’t need to know which plants are poisonous, he replies. Just pick the edible plants you are exceedingly familiar with.
Beyond gaining the knowledge necessary to forage responsibly for one’s own health, Nyerges suggests that people learn to forage in a sustainable way.
“The last thing I would personally ever do is post publicly here’s where you go to get such and such,” Nyerges says. If you post about a good foraging spot, Nyerges says, you risk too many people visiting that spot and overpicking. “The adventure is to find your own,” he adds.
Nyerges suggests even organizing an edible plant swap in your neighborhood, in which everyone brings something to share from their yard.
Regardless of where you forage, and even if you just want to learn a bit more about the plants that grow wild around Los Angeles, the learning curve might be steep, but Nyerges insists that the payoff is worth it. Soon enough, those weeds you used to curse for persistently cropping up in your garden might start to look appetizing.
Good to know
- Foraging for certain types of plants — primarily non-native — is legal in the Angeles National Forest with a permit.
- If you don’t want to go through the hassle of obtaining a permit and trekking all the way into the Angeles National Forest, Nyerges has a couple suggestions:
- Ideally, allow wild plants to grow in your yard — if you have one, that is.
- You can also forage on other people’s properties, with permission, of course. And you might even be doing them a favor.
