A word from the author: Sometimes you write something you love that never finds a home, but you can’t bear to let it simply sit in a forgotten folder on your laptop. Crafted a couple years back, this piece was originally intended for a book that never materialized, but I think it stands well on its own and deserves to be read. I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to email me any thoughts.

The Way of the Forager

The car screeches to a halt. Iulian rips the keys from the ignition with jangly rattle, shoving open the door. A moment later, he’s standing behind the battered hatchback, its silver paint covered in a light film of dust and dirt. It’s his mom’s, his car is in the shop, something’s wrong with something. Slight and slender, he’s wearing skinny fit faded black jeans, a blue and white tie-dye t-shirt, and mirrored shades, his scruffy shoulder length walnut hair pulled back into a loose ponytail.

He pops the dusty windowed hatch, which wheezes open to reveal giant Ziplocs plump with greenery and a butcher style electric scale balancing on white cardboard produce boxes. With quick movements, he grabs a clear plastic bag and starts stuffing it with greens. After a moment, he drops it on the scale. A few more greens go in. He twirls the bag, tying it shut with a sharp twist. Into a small brown paper grocery bag it goes.

The scent sweeping out of the trunk is intense, instantly recognizable, but laced with mysterious undertones. I inhale deeply. It’s a rush of glittering green sparkles in my head. My taste buds do somersaults. My eyelids begin to drop, anticipating ecstasy.

An unreasonable craving takes hold. I want to devour everything in front of me in an orgy of next-level excess. Just let me have it all. I’m checking in, putting the “Do not disturb” sign on the door, and dropping out. I’ll call if I need anything. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. I’m just resetting my hard drive, squeegeeing my third eye, Marie Kondoing my soul.

Iulian shatters my Day-Glo daydream with a slam of the door. Without a word, he hustles over the curb towards a house a few doors down. I follow, practically at a jog. We’re in the Takoma neighborhood in northwest D.C. The street is line with tidy one- and two-story brick houses fronted with small, well-kept yards. They manage to all look slightly different, yet the same. 

I’m tagging along today because Iulian is being generous enough to let me shadow him for a while. It’s a win-win for me: I’ll get to write some stories about our adventures while getting a front row foraging education from one of the region’s most eminent experts. In the two years of the pandemic, since finding my life-changing morel, I have diligently applied myself, learning how find, identify, and prepare a couple dozen wild foods I am comfortable serving my family.

But I know this is just the beginning. In and around D.C., there are dozens of edible wild plants: a panoply of mushrooms and berries to stinging nettles, fiddlehead ferns, pokeweed, black walnuts, persimmons, pawpaws, and much more. Across United States and Canada, there are roughly 4,000 edible wild plants, according to François Couplan, author of the aptly titled The Encyclopedia of Edible Wild Plants of North America.

Countless Americans across socio-economic and racial boundaries forage in one way, shape, or form. Some for subsistence, others just to add rare flavors of the season to their cooking; some continue cultural traditions; some seek health or medical benefits; some just want to get fucked up on magic mushrooms. And then there are the professional foragers, like Iulian, who make their living harvesting and selling wild goods.  

It's now a highly modernized craft in terms of its tools, technology, and education. There are satellite maps to plot where coveted wild plants grow, apps to identify them, cameras to document them, specialized equipment to gather and store them. On TikTok, videos with #foraging have accumulated 500 million views, while Instagram is littered with high-profile accounts with millions of followers who like and comment on every fresh foraging find that’s posted. A lot of people find Iulian through his Instagram posts or from being tagged by chefs in their posts.

Business is bonkers for Iulian Fortu, a slender 26-year-old, who could pass for a college freshman without missing a beat. For the last three years, he has been foraging for wild foods, selling his finds to some of the best restaurants in the city and a growing cadre of adventurous homes chefs. Iulian works under the moniker Arcadia Venture. The name comes from the region in Greece on the southern peninsula, which myth claims was the home of the Greek god of nature, Pan. “I wanted to emphasize the idea of wild,” he says.

In the bag he’s clutching are a pound of ramps – wild alliums that look like oversize scallions boasting a flavor intertwining garlic with sweet onion. Both the marble-sized bulb and the vibrant leaves are edible. They make punchy pesto, really take a frittata up a notch, and, when pickled, a nice alternative to a cocktail onion in a Gibson.

Ramps are one of the first spring harvests for foragers, a signal that winter is on the way out. The season of greens and growing is arriving. For Iulian, it’s time to go into overdrive, to start earning money again. On this sunny Wednesday in mid-April, he is starting off his morning with a few home deliveries.

Iulian is bounding towards the house when he comes to such a sudden halt; I almost crash into him. “You know what, we’re going to pick some of these,” he says, pointing up at the soft pink flowers covering a 20-foot-tall tree planted on the thin strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street.

“These are the good cherry blossoms,” he proclaims, after making his drop-off and retrieving a 5-gallon white plastic bucket from the car. “They always bloom last. Everyone wants them, but I’m the only one who picks them.

Nonchalantly pulling down a long branch, he starts plucking the blossoms, urging me to sniff one. It smells like a cherry creamsicle: sweet, milky, faintly floral. There’s a childishness to the scent, whisking me back to joyful summer visits to ice cream trucks.

Iulian is pleased with his find. Scoring them doesn’t happen every year, since the season is only about two weeks long, arriving and departing with frustrating mercuriality.

Better still, he already got a customer. Jeremiah Langhorne, James Beard Award winning chef of the Dabney – his Michelin starred homage to seasonally slanted, historically inspired Mid-Atlantic cuisine – has a standing order for 10 pounds of the blossoms. What Langhorne will do them comes down to his whim and how they interplay with whatever else is coming from his purveyors, getting harvested from his rooftop garden, and being pulled off the shelves of his larder. Though the blossoms can be eaten fresh – adding a princess-y pop of color to dishes and drinks – Langhorne might salt cure or pickle them for future use.

Iulian usually doesn’t get a chance to taste what happens to his finds. Sometimes the chef will tell him, often he’ll see it while scrolling through Instagram. Though his foraged ingredients power some of the most interesting compositions at his restaurant clients, he hasn’t eaten at many of them. The prices are too high, the experiences too rarified for a guy who likes to dress jeans-and-a-t-shirt chic and spend most of his time in the woods.

He's cagey when asked how lucrative the foraging can be. “Everything is financially viable or non-viable; it’s how you do it,” he evades before fully diverting. “I like the flexibility. I don’t have to sit at a desk for 8 hours a day or work in a kitchen for 12 hours a day.”

His career started in the kitchen. While attending high school at Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax, Virginia, he concurrently began his formal culinary training at its sister school, Chantilly Academy. During the same time period, he picked up a part-time job at a local fine dining restaurant. Those experiences fired up his interest in a culinary career.

He enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. The summer after his first year, he obtained an internship at chef René Redzepi’s world renowned, boundary pushing Noma in Copenhagen, Denmark. His time there was intense and transformative. He would wake up at 5 a.m. to be at the restaurant by 6:30, working until midnight or later. Six or seven days a week. No letting up, always pushing.

On a few rare occasions, he had the chance to forage with some colleagues. They sometimes hunted for ramson – wild garlic similar to ramps – other times they were looking for obscure lichens or wild mushrooms. The backwoods rambles were intoxicating. Just to be outdoors, away from the heat and the pressure of the kitchen. These excursions unleashed a rush of knowledge; a feeling like finding long lost secrets. There were all these new flavors, their exciting potential. By the time Iulian returned to the States, he was hooked on foraging.

After graduating from the C.I.A. in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in business management with a specialty in Italian cuisine, he moved back to Fairfax. He began going out into the woods to see what edible wild foods he could find. “There are so many things growing around here all the time, and before working at Noma, I didn’t even realize it,” he says, “But I never thought of foraging as a profession.”  

While he learned wildcraft, he worked as a sous chef at District Winery in D.C.’s trendy Navy Yard district running along the Anacostia River. Part of his job was to purchase ingredients. He noticed most wild products were either coming from the West Coast or being imported. There was a smattering of locally foraged products, mostly mushrooms, provided by an informal, unreliable patchwork of suppliers. Seeing the potential, he founded Arcadia Venture the next year, joining a small, but ever growing, legion of professional foragers across the country who can make a living selling their finds to restaurants.

Iulian has been hustling hard ever since he started his LLC, cultivating honey spots for harvesting and honey pots for purchasing. The job is non-stop. He never knows when he might spot something that might make a chef happy while bolstering his bottom line.

Which brings us back to these pretty pink blossoms, which are fast filling his bucket. His is intently focused on his work. I might as well not be here, though I can’t forget where we are or what he is doing.

Though happy for his windfall, I’m confused. Picking flowers off a public tree like this seems, well, illegal. The kind of thing that would land you in trouble with the police, who probably don’t care that these blossoms would otherwise just fall to the sidewalk if they weren’t being gathered for a rarefied meal at an award-winning restaurant. Methinks they would take a more-than-dim view of the whole situation. I keep looking around, just waiting for a squad car to come roaring up, lights blazing and sirens blaring. I’m on pickup duty today; my son is expecting me after school. I want to be there and not getting fingerprinted and mug shotted at a precinct.

“Are you allowed to pick them?” I finally venture, having edged a few feet away, as if those few feet would give me plausible deniability if the cops do make an appearance.

Iulian is unperturbed as he mumbles a few vague assurances. According to him, this tree – in fact the whole row of them – is on public land in the District of Columbia, where there’s no law against harvesting wild foods.

How could he be certain this slender strip of land wasn’t privately owned? And if it was owned by the government, how was he so sure it was owned by the District of Columbia in particular? The city controls just over 70 percent of the land in the District. The motley patchwork of remaining spaces are mostly overseen by the National Park Service, the miliary, and other elements of the federal government; each has its own rules regarding the harvesting of wild edibles. It can be a bureaucratic, red tape crisscrossed shitshow trying to determine who owns what and what you’re allowed to do there.

Not wanting to prolong the conversation, thereby prolonging our time out on the sidewalk in plain view of anyone passing by or taking a moment to stare out their window, I respond with a noncommittal grunt. But I’m not sold.  

In this way, Iulian is like almost every forager I’ve ever met. They all claim to know where they are allowed to be and what they’re allowed to take, as well as the places they legally shouldn’t be, but where the chances of getting caught are relatively low and the foraging possibilities are too good to pass up. On an earlier trip with Iulian into a county park in the Maryland suburbs, he told me most parks are so understaffed these days he probably would never face any meaningful consequences even if he were apprehended. (I’m no angel either; I’ve been foraging in numerous spots where I conveniently didn’t look up the rules beforehand or consciously decided to break them, because the potential finds were just too tempting.). 

In the mid-Atlantic, the police only intervene on rare occasion, and only for the most valuable wild goods, usually those with a medical or narcotic component. In 2014, in nearby West Virginia, a ring of 11 prescription drug dealers was busted for digging up $180,000 worth of wild ginseng, prized across Asia as a health and wellness supplement. “These roots are almost like carrying cash now days,” a law enforcement agent told The Charleston Gazette-Mail at the time. “Ginseng has a higher value than the pills, and it is less traceable.”

Otherwise, law enforcement generally doesn’t have the time or inclination to bother with foragers, like one plucking blossoms off a cherry tree in a quiet D.C. neighborhood.

However, as Iulian moves around the tree, tossing the puffy blooms into the bucket, a man comes scurrying down the sidewalk carrying on an urgent phone conversation through his earbuds. Spotting Iulian, he screeches to a halt about 10 feet away with the intensity of the roadrunner reaching the edge of a cliff. Like Wile E. Coyote, Iulian keeps going, not even looking over at his new audience. It’s like he’s in the middle of the forest all alone, just him and the tree.

This is exactly what I was worried might happen. Today is not a good day for me to go to jail, not that there’s any good day for that. I don’t know what to say. I freeze in place wishing I could just flip a switch, become invisible, not be a part of this moment.  

The man cocks his head, confused and hoping this angle will right this perceived wrong. His eyes twitch back and forth, like a nervous chickadee at the feeder. He keeps talking, though I can’t hear what he’s saying. He’s clearly becoming upset, punctuating sentences with a bobbing thrust of his neck.

With the righteousness of a citizen activist, he points his phone toward Iulian, either taking photos or a video. Iulian is unperturbed. Flowers keep mostly sailing into the bucket, though some end up on the ground. 

I’m concerned. I have no interest in winding up in a viral video. Trying not to be too obvious, I take a few steps back, hopefully out of frame.

My movement catches our observer’s attention. He whips his phone towards me. Fuck.

Rather than put up my hands up to cover my face – always a sure sign of guilt in a gotcha video – I offer a reassuring smile, the same I utilize when sidestepping a sidewalk fundraiser seeking a donation. I’m acting like it’s the most normal thing in the world for a guy to be picking cherry blossoms while the guy with him scribbles notes on a pad.

“Getting some pictures?” I ask, trying to sound conversational, my voice slightly raised to compensate for the distance between us. I feel on edge, unsure where this is going. Pickup for my son is in a few hours; I’d prefer to be there as a dependable dad rather than explaining myself down at the police station.

I take a couple of steps towards our unwanted visitor, not menacingly, just trying to get closer so I can speak in a normal tone of voice. “Getting some pictures?” I ask again, gesturing towards his phone.

The man seems surprised to be addressed but doesn’t respond. Instead, he swivels towards Iulian, glaring. “Please know you’re picking flowers off my tree.”

Iulian doesn’t say anything, but let’s go of the branch he’s holding. It whips back up with a swish, a rapier slashing through the air. The man is still staring at him, expecting a response, his phone now fixed at an arm’s length.

“Your tree?” Iulian mutters in a low voice, the kind you use for talking back when you don’t want to be fully heard so you can avoid consequences.

He shakes his head as he picks up the bucket, now three quarters full of puffy pink blossoms. Now that I’m attune to their beguiling cherry creamsicle aroma, it’s all I can smell. Oddly, my mouth waters. There’s a moment of daydreaming. I imagine the soda fountain that would serve such a delightful concoction. It would be dainty AF; perfect for all the Instagrams; the place everyone wanted to be. Unlike this stretch of street in Takoma, which I really want to leave.

Thankfully, Iulian decides it’s time to exit. Walking out into the street so he doesn’t have to pass the man on the sidewalk, he moves at a normal, not-feeling-guilty-at-all-because-I-believe-I-should-be-here pace. I follow, trying to exude similar confidence, though I don’t feel it. I think it’s a coin toss whether this guy tries to tackle one of us to perform a citizen’s arrest.  

The man trails after us. “That tree is in front of my house,” he asserts, his phone still held towards us like it’s a silver cross and we’re vampires. “It’s weird.”

Iulian doesn’t answer. I just smile, tight lipped, totally fake.  

He is still documenting us as we pile into the faded silver hatchback. Iulian pulls out, hunched forward to check his blind spot in the side view.

For a minute, neither one of us speaks as Iulian alternates between driving and punching the next delivery address into his phone’s GPS, charmingly set to speak with the voice of British woman who sounds like a soothing and sexy British academic. “Proceed straight for one mile, then turn left,” she instructs with gentle insistence.  

Soon we are heading south on Rock Creek Parkway, a twisting, turning snake of a road slithering up the center of the city’s greenway. As he takes the curves at a pell-mell pace, the loose sheaf of papers on the dashboard slides one way then the other. Whenever we hit a brief straightaway, he punches the accelerator, though there’s no passing, and gets so close to the car in front of us I can see the finer points of the dust spotting its rear window. Just when I think we’re about to end up with our hood in its trunk, he jams on the brakes.

“That’s the first time something like that has ever happened to me,” he says, letting up on the brakes to hit the gas as we go around a turn, making me feel like a pinball shot up a twisting, turning ramp.

“Unh-hunh,” I say, keeping my eyes on the road, avoiding any glance he might give me to read my expression.

I don’t believe him. He’s been foraging for five years, doing it hardcore as a business for the last three. No one is that lucky, especially someone who doesn’t hesitate to publicly harvest a plant because he knows there’s a willing buyer for it.

Seasons for wild goods are short. You must get stuff when the getting’s good or you’re SOL until next year. Though some wild mushrooms command astronomical prices – Iulian just made a run out to the Inn at Little Washington to sell them morels at $58 a pound; “They didn’t even blink,” he says. “I should have charged more” – most wild edibles go for far less and require serious sweat equity to harvest. But he keeps his overhead low by living with his parents, which he sees as the pragmatic thing to do rather than a sign of failing to launch.  

I turn the conversation to other matters as we careen through the park, Iulian cursing the traffic with every twist of the wheel, every slamming of the brakes. I cling to the side of my seat, white knuckled, questioning some of the choices I’d made in life.

A few hair-rising, spine shocking minutes later, we are off the parkway and into the bustle of Georgetown, one of D.C.’s richest neighborhoods, a tourist trap I usually avoid at all costs. The streets are jammed with people moving between the name brand flagship stores, one-off boutiques, and restaurants, though many storefronts remain boarded up and covered with lease signs, casualties of the pandemic. Parking was always challenging. Now it’s nearly impossible. Streeteries consumed many parking spaces; the few remaining ones are fiercely competed for by the non-stop torrent of DoorDash and UberEats drivers.  

It takes us a couple of spins around the block before Iulian decides to illegally park while he makes a drop off at Reverie, modernist chic tasting menu restaurant by chef Johnny Spero, onetime executive chef of José Andrés’s exclusive gastronomical wonderland Minibar, and a veteran of Noma and Mugaritz. Hidden down a cobblestone alley off a slender side street, the low-ceilinged, minimalist space is built around an open kitchen banded by a blue-tiled bar. A Nordic-meets-oceanic sensibility pervades the design throughout.

Spero’s food is hyper seasonal, technically driven, whimsically wonky. The off-the-radar wild ingredients Iulian brings into the kitchen play a big role. “He’s helped us create Reverie’s identity, which is freeform jazz,” says the chef. “It comes as it feels right. There’s not always a straight methodology; it’s intuition.”

Today Iulian is dropping off a couple of samples. In one bag is a sheaf of herbs boasting jagged edged leaves at the ends of slender stalks, mitsuba, a close relative of parsley that tastes like its cousin crossed with carrot greens. The other plastic bag contains miniature spruce pollen pinecones, blush red and plump, often used to make sweet syrup, jam, and vinegar. 

These tasters are the forager’s version of “The first hit’s always free.” Often there’s not an existing market for the wild goods Iulian finds, so he must create one by introducing chefs to them then demonstrating their culinary and financial worth.

Spero is game to try whatever Iulian brings him. When a new ingredient enters Reverie’s kitchen, it undergoes a series of culinary experiments, roasting, grilling, steaming, frying, and prepared raw. Spero and his team try preserving it: curing it in different percentages of sugar and salt; turning it into vinegars, pickling it, making syrup, cooking it into a jam. There are no limits. The goal is to see how the ingredient reacts, how it tastes, how it might be utilized.

“If you have an end result in mind, you’re going to limit the creative process,” says Spero. “If you want a rosehip to taste like cotton candy – and that’s all you’re focusing on – you may fail, but at best that is the only result you’ll ever achieve. You’re limiting what it’s capable of being because you’re forcing it to be something. I don’t want to dictate what it is. Try it a million different ways, see what works, and document it.”

With his culinary background, Iulian is happy to offer preparation suggestions. But he would rather let the chefs figure out what works best for themselves. His goal is to bring them previously unknown wild foods that sparks their creative process in new ways.

Spero is clearly sparked. A few weeks after our visit, Reverie is awarded its first Michelin star, the guide noting “a laser-focus on seasonality and inspired flavors.”

Another first-time star goes to Oyster Oyster, another of Iulian’s clients and next on our punch list for deliveries. Chef Rob Rubba’s micro-seasonal, plant-based tasting menu restaurant – they make an exception for oysters because they don’t feel any pain; a longer story for another time – is tucked into a cozy, minimalist space in the buzzy Shaw neighborhood.

The menu always celebrates mushrooms (the restaurant’s name nods to oyster mushrooms), so having a guy like Iulian on the payroll is a necessity. When the restaurant debuted in the summer of 2021, the chef created a dish with more than a dozen species: horse, indigo, stinky cap, bolete, porcini, yellowfoot, hedgehog, lion’s mane, chanterelle, morel, hen of the woods, chicken of the woods. Many of the wild ones came from Iulian.

Rubba wasn’t just interested in fungi. “I told him, ‘Bring me whatever you have, and I’ll figure out a way to use it,’” he says. “I like a challenge.”

Iulian obliged. He brought tender young spruce tips, which Rubba made into a syrup to glaze a peach dessert. Lipstick red spicebush berries were dried and ground into a mix of warming spices that perked up pecan mousse accompanying reimagined carrot cake. A recent batch of knotweed, zinging with a lemon-rhubarb acidity, is being divided. Some is pickled for an oyster mignonette; the other half will be made into a sweet preserve when strawberries come into season.

Each delivery comes with a few factoids. “He’ll always throw in some Native knowledge, like ‘This tribe used to use it for that,’ and I love that,” says Rubba. “There’s so much information that was lost through awful shit. There are all these things we should have been cooking with forever but got pushed aside for European ingredients.” 

There’s one category of wild foods Rubba avoids sourcing from Iulian: those that are mildly toxic if prepared incorrectly. We aren’t talking poisonous mushrooms that will kill you, these are the ingredients that will only make you retch your innards out and shit your pants, often in the same instant.

Rubba learned this lesson the hard way early in his career at a D.C. restaurant he refuses to name. He was cleaning up after service, around midnight. The phone began ringing off the hook. Guest after guest reported violently vomiting after their meal that evening. It was a code red scramble in the kitchen. The chef reamed out his entire team. Screaming was involved. Things may have been thrown. The walk-in was purged of fresh ingredient featured on that night’s menu. Every bit went into the dumpster. Every surface was scrubbed with bleach. All the equipment was cleaned. 

It was three in the morning by the time Rubba finished up, right about the time the source of contamination was identified. It wasn’t him or one of his colleague’s on the savory side of the operation after all. The pastry chef made sorbet with raw pawpaw, a regional fruit that tastes like a tropical transplant, rich with banana, mango, and avocado vibes. Though it’s not noxious to everyone, it hits the wrong notes for some folks, incurring the kind of side effects a chef would never want a guest to experience, not even their most annoying Yelp reviewer.

With that in mind, now seems like a good time to add a few words of caution.  

If you’re reading this and thinking, “It would be so cool to wander into the forest and pick up dinner; I think I’m going to give this foraging thing a whirl,” don’t do it. A single misidentification can kill you or generally screw up your health and wellbeing. According to the National Poison Data System, which has been tracking cases for three decades, every year three people die from eating toxic mushrooms and another 40 suffer major harm, resulting in extended hospital stays, organ transplants, and permanent neurological damage.

Mushrooms aren’t the only killers. In recent years, ignorant foragers have died eating foxgloves flowers, candlenuts, and aconitum napellus, commonly known as wolfsbane. In the case of the latter, the poisoning manifests itself in a cascade of increasingly painful symptoms: gastrointestinal distress with end-to-end consequences; an intense burning sensation in the mouth and abdomen, like you just swallowed a handful of ghost chilies; numbness of the limbs so you lose control of your movements; jackhammer heartrates as if you’d just snorted a pile of cocaine worthy of Scarface; gasping for breath; brain pounding, head exploding headaches; extreme confusion. Finally, your lungs or heart become paralyzed. By that point, death feels like a welcome respite.

Iulian had his own close call. He promises to tell me all about it the next time we go out foraging, sometime soon, maybe for morels, maybe. I hope this journey will take us into the woods, not another urban neighborhood. There’s no need to push our luck again.