A guide to wild ingredients, Indigenous voices and dishes worth foraging for
interview by Cathy Carroll | photography by Katherine Jane Palmer and Jennifer Hahn
Jennifer Hahn has spent a lifetime foraging and kayaking–including a solo journey from Ketchikan, Alaska, to Washington–during which tribes and First Nations shared their wild foods and knowledge with her. She later collaborated on scientific research projects with those communities and has been teaching others how to forage responsibly ever since. Now we get to join the Bellingham-based, award-winning author in experiencing these sensory-filled adventures with her latest book, Pacific Harvest: A Northwest Coast Foraging Guide.
This thick, glossy and story-filled guide details more than seventy edible species–from seaweeds, beach vegetables and shellfish to mushrooms, berries and ferns–with eye-popping color photos and easy tips for harvesting and eating them. Along the way, Hahn engages readers by introducing them to Indigenous leaders in the traditional foods movement and tempting us with more than sixty recipes, from multigrain nett le pancakes, fiddlehead quiche and sea urchin pizza with nori sea bacon to evergreen tree cookies and cocoa truffles with roasted dandelion root.
What prompted you to write your second book on foraging?
To be the voice for the voiceless, all the plants and animals. I talked quite a bit to the editor and to my friends, rare plant specialists and whale researchers, and we all said it’s really important to have a voice out there that talks about not just that foraging is connection, but foraging is stewardship. How do we, in times of great change, still connect to the plants and the animals by foraging? But how do we also do it in a way that is respectful?
What are some memorable foraging moments?
We had been at a local park walking around Lake Padden, and it was just stocked with fish–you could see fisher folk all the way around, on every beach between the trees. We came home, and there was a trout flopping around in front of the gate, and it had two holes in it, one on each side, and I heard an osprey calling, and I thought, That osprey just dropped this trout.’ We picked it up, looked it over … it was a perfectly good trout, and we cleaned it up and ate it for dinner. We called it ‘talon to table.’
Did you forage as a child?
When I was probably 3 years old, we did a big trip out west from Wisconsin, and we camped all the way. When we got to Washington, we were digging razor clams–we got the recipe from a gas station attendant, I remember–and I ate my first buttery, gritty razor clams out there in the Hoh Rain Forest at our picnic table. It was being stirred in a big pot on a Coleman stove, and I thought, ‘I am in love with this place, these big trees–the clams, the grittiness, the butteriness. I just want to be a coastal forager forever.
How did you manage to remain true to that vision?
I almost went to law school, but professors talked me out of it, and I came back to what I really loved, which was to be outside and in nature, and teaching how to see and how to experience it in a way that’s really nourishing. I’ve been so lucky to have so many encounters with people who really read the lands and the waters in a way that they know them seasonally. They know them over many, many years and decades, and they may be First Nation members or tribal members, or they might be from Europe and they’ve been mushroom foragers since they were a little child–all of these different caretakers. I’ve just been so lucky to walk the path with them for a time.
