Dandelion Hunter

February 4, 2013
In 2007, after an epiphany while visiting upstate New York, Lerner cut loose from her newspaper reporter job in the urban wastelands of New Jersey to embark upon the “mysterious, powerful, and esoteric” work of herbalism and explore nature. This book relates her hunter-gatherer adventures through the streets, parks, yards, and environs of her new home in Portland, Ore., accompanied by her dog, Petunia, and a revolving cast of botanical experts and quirky friends: a wilderness survival teacher who introduces her to burdock-root and ant-egg cuisine; a “freegan” dumpster diver retrieving 50 pounds of gourmet ravioli and parmesan from a waste bin; an urban homesteader illegally but reverently butchering a roadkill deer. The book begins with Lerner exhausted and near starvation as she tries to fulfill her editor’s dare to live off wild plants for a week; she was unaware when she accepted the dare that in May, her chosen timeframe, plants are just waking up and pickings are slim. By the end of the book, she not only succeeds in a second wild-food challenge (culminating in a Thanksgiving feast that features venison, cattail, and rose-hip sauce), but she’s also become the neighborhood herbalist. Although Lerner’s occasional philosophizing suffers from oversimplification and recent-convert preachiness, this may be the funniest herbal adventure you’ll ever read, as she overcomes her naiveté with good humor and embraces the weedy wildness right outside her door.

February 15, 2013
Although the apocalypse didn't arrive on December 21 last year as predicted by fretful Mayan-calendar devotees, there are still plenty of reasons to have a fallback plan for securing your next meal. As the author of this autobiographical adventure in urban-wilderness foraging points out, hurricanes, tsunamis, and solar storms can strike without warning, triggering economic collapse and barren grocery shelves. In May 2009, Portland, Oregon, resident Lerner wanted to prove to herself that she could survive for a week strictly on plants growing in city parks and vacant lots; dumpster diving and community-garden raids were strictly off-limits. While her initial attempts to choke down burdock roots and dandelion greens failed, Lerner was determined to learn as much she could about the nutritional and medicinal value of local plant life by consulting journals and nutritional experts. This very readable, often amusing outcome of her research and experiments results in an uplifting story of contemporary self-sufficiency, as well as an inspiring guidebook that looks beyond farmer's markets to the living food in our own backyards.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)