Martin Schmucker is sitting on a brown plaid sofa at the front of his store, occasionally stroking his long, gray beard as he tells a story about a supplier from out of state.Things usually get their names for a reason.
Take the common plant called stinging nettle that grows wild in Indiana.
Its leaves have tiny hairs that act like needles when touched, injecting chemicals that cause a burning sensation on the skin.
Stinging nettle doesn’t sound like anything you’d want anywhere near your lips – let alone your tongue and throat. But Jim Meuninck has eaten it – “hundreds of times, if not thousands,” he says.
“Typically, what I’ll do is pinch off the top leaves – a little bud and five or six leaves. You can steam it, or just lay it in water and bring it to a boil, and that will weaken the chemicals. You’ll neutralize the sting,” he explains. “Then you can us it any way you want.”
Such as chopped and blended into a cream soup, spread on top of a homemade pizza or layered in lasagna as a substitute for spinach.
“It’s particularly good if you sauté it in olive oil with some wild leeks,” he says.
Yes, this is a man whose eating habits are just a little different from most people’s. Besides nettle, which he likes so much he grows it in his garden at his home in Edwardsburg, Mich., Meuninck eats cattail shoots and stirs their male reproductive tips into waffles. He likes to mix wild purslane and lamb’s quarters into salads, not to mention dandelion greens and wild cress.
Meuninck is a food forager, and in the Midwest, he’s known by some as chief of the tribe, says Shane Perfect, program coordinator for ACRES Land Trust outside Huntertown.
“He’s just a walking encyclopedia of wild edibles,” says Perfect, who invited the 68-year-old author and video producer to speak May 8 at ACRES’ Wing Haven Nature Preserve in Steuben County.
During the event, Meuninck shared some of his expertise, preparing some of his favorite wild plant recipes for tasting before leading participants on a nature walk to help them identify edible plants on sight.
He found more than a dozen within a quarter-mile of the visitors center – including the tree that bears the paw paw fruit, nettle, wild leeks, wild ginger and wild violets.
“These (edible) plants grow everywhere,” says the author of “Basic Essentials: Edible Wild Plants & Useful Herbs.”
“There’s probably 14 or 15 of them growing around your house right now. But you have to locate them before they disappear.”
Many of the wild edibles are in season for a short time. Wild leeks, for example, are through their season by mid-May, he says, while dandelions, whose leaves become too bitter for most palates by the time they flower, may be over by mid-April.
For that reason, Meuninck says, even those most devoted to eating wild plants use them more as an adjunct to their diet, not as the main course.
A general rule of thumb, he says, is to use the plants in recipes as substitutes for, or in addition to, similar plants – for example, garlic mustard, a leafy wild green with a slightly bitter and astringent taste, can be used in pesto and wild elderberries in jelly or syrup.
“The thing about these plants is that a lot of them are treats for a couple of days, and then they’re gone. But the good thing is that there’s always another one on the horizon,” says Meuninck, who cultivates 150 varieties of wild edibles for a steady supply throughout the spring, summer and early fall.
“Some of these garden plants are 50 years old. They’re perennials and come up every year,” he adds. “I keep them healthy, and they keep me healthy.”
Indeed, Meuninck has some unconventional – if folk-wisdom tested – ideas about the reason for eating wild plants.
He believes that phytochemicals – naturally occurring plant-based chemical compounds, including inflammation-reducing antioxidants – are what’s missing in many people’s modern diets.
“We’re all a plant on wheels,” he says. “What I mean by that is all our chemistry is made up of plant chemicals, either directly or indirectly through animal proteins that come about because the animals eat plants.
“We were engineered to eat these wild plants. … They tend to be aggressive and strong, and that’s what I want in me.”
Meuninck, who has a master’s degree in biology, says he’s been interested in plants and their properties since he was a child.
“My great-grandfather was an herbalist, and a lot of country people ate a lot of wild foods like dandelions back then, so I did (eat) a lot of them growing up,” he says.
When Meuninck was laid off in the early 1980s after a government grant ended, he took his first unemployment check and bought a professional video camera and set off to document edible plants in Indiana.
The footage became his first video, and from there, the work has mushroomed – and yes, he’s spent the last three years learning about edible wild mushrooms for an upcoming work.
He says popular interest in wild edibles waxes and wanes, but is in a waxing phase.
“There’s always a bigger interest in a recession because it’s free food,” he says. “And some people are interested because of (beliefs about) Armageddon or (fears of) natural disasters, and they want to be able to live off the land. And it’s become a chic thing to do at parties, have some wild food,” he says.
Because it takes commitment to be a food forager, Meuninck says he knows his is “not a field where there’s a lot of people out there who do what I do.”
Or who eat what he eats. Sometimes in the early springtime, he confesses, he’ll eat stinging nettle twice a day.
“It a mineral scourer (from the soil), so it’s like taking a mineral pill,” he says, adding that the green tastes pretty good.
“Nettle is very versatile. It’s kind of robust. It’s as close as you get in the plant kingdom to a meaty taste,” he explains. “There’s uniqueness to it. It’s a flavor all its own.”
