With 40 YEARS’ experience, PETER HAR DWICK – forager at
HARVEST restaurant, Newrybar – knows his way around weeds.
Here he talks EARLY EPIPHANIES and stinking roger sorbet.
Every day I go into the kitchen to assess their
needs for the day. I see what they’ve run out of; if they’re
out of fermented products that I have in stock (we have a food lab
near the restaurant where we do fermenting), then I’ll supply it
immediately and if they’re products that need harvesting, I go
out that day or the next to keep the larder full.
Generally speaking, you have council parks where
fruit is just falling off the trees. There are special
licences you can get if you’re harvesting out of state forests, but
I don’t harvest there, so I don’t need one. No one seems to mind
you harvesting the fruit, and we’re reducing the fruit fly risk
or solving a messy fruit problem. In the case of harvesting weeds,
making people get a licence to harvest introduced weeds would
be silly. You’re turning what’s an environmental problem into a
positive by eating and reducing the impact of that weed.
What we’re doing is very benign; we’re not going
in there and ripping up whole plants. It’s very much
a pick-harvesting situation and we harvest fruit in a way that’s
quite sustainable and not damaging to plants. We also harvest some
native ingredients from people who cultivate ornamental plants.
A weed is a plant that’s not native and has gone
feral. We call it feral food and some of it’s quite nutritious.
It might sound strange but the reality is that some of these weeds
were eaten in Europe in ancient times; they’ve been found in clay
pots at archaeological sites. Those plants have been brought to
Australia and they’ve become weeds, but they have a heritage of
people eating them and they often have good health properties.
One classic weed everyone knows is dandelion.
It’s bitter and has medicinal properties. Another one that looks a
WHAT IT’S REALLY LIKE...
to be a food forager
bit like dandelion is called catsear (or flatweed). That’s eaten in
Greece, in a dish called ‘horta’. They eat a lot of weeds there,
traditionally in horta, which is blanched weeds with a dash of olive
oil and a little lemon juice. It’s incredibly healthy: very high in
wonderful, nutritious phytochemicals (natural plant chemicals).
So there are great traditions in eating these weeds.
Both Bret [cameron, Harvest chef] and I get equally
excited about working with new ingredients. Bret just
loves all the new flavours and we bounce off each other a lot. I joke
that I am throwing the curve balls and the chefs are grabbing them
and turning them into wonderful dishes. I love figuring out how to
turn these ingredients into something that becomes useful, or more
useful. That’s really exciting, transforming the ingredient.
I’ve built up my skill base on toxicology over 40
years. When I got into this at 18 years old, I had enough sense to
be cautious. I started off with the edible fruit then gradually moved
into the plant parts that required more caution. Some botanical
families are inherently more prone to containing toxic plants, so
you steer clear of those or treat them with respect. I also work
with biochemists and read a lot of scientific papers on toxicology.
In 1977, when I was about 18 years old, I had an
epiphany while listening to the radio. A forester was
being interviewed about why he was cutting down a beautiful patch
of old-growth forest in the Border Ranges (which is now World
Heritage listed). He said, “there’s nothing else of value in the forest
other than timber”. That seems such a silly thing to say now.CULTURE | People