Um, well, I don't know, I'm impressed.
Just start by stating a basic fact, which is that without plants, man couldn't live.
Well, we know that, but something we don't always realize is that 90% of our food needs
are covered by only 20 plant species.
And why not?
But the thing is that 80,000 wild plants have been recognized as being edible throughout
the world.
All these plants have been used by man, and the thing is that now they're pretty much
all but forgotten.
And this is strange.
Thank you.
Why?
Is it because they don't taste good or is it because they're not efficient as food?
I don't believe so.
I think it's based mostly on historical reasons.
One has to do with agriculture.
And what Stefano said earlier is very interesting.
Very few plants are domesticated, but maybe it's because not so many plants wanted to
be domesticated.
I don't know.
But the fact is that for a long time, man has been gathering plants as long as cultivating.
But now it's not true anymore.
And I think something very important happened in the Middle Ages, which is that society
was divided into two very unequal parts.
And the upper crust was nobility and clergy, and they reached people and had to differentiate
themselves from the mass of people by way of habitat, of language, of clothes.
You know, they had the right to have bright colored clothes, which the peasants didn't
have the right to, and food.
And as far as food goes, they would eat meat, a lot of meat, and would find products,
including sugar, which first came as a medicine.
And as far as fruits and vegetables go, they would use the plant.
I mean, the main thing to do was to eat the plants that were brought back from all over
the world by the expeditions that they would launch, because it was a sign of a high social
status, if you could eat something that was grown by somebody else that you could pay.
Whereas the peasants, they needed a lot of meat, it was unrefined products.
And as far as plants, you know, they would have to eat easy to grow vegetables and wild
plants, because wild plants are given for free by nature.
So wild plants became a sign of a low social status, and it's become even more true when
peasants came to the city, became workers, and wanted to adopt the bourgeois way of life,
which was based on the court way of life and way of eating.
So nowadays, basically what we're eating is something which proves that we have a high
social status, and wild plants are definitely out of the picture because of that.
And I think it's too bad because we've lost myriads of different tastes, for one thing.
And also, wild plants have tremendous nutritional value.
Actually, man evolved eating wild plants.
It's our normal food.
This is something that brings us everything that we need, all the nutrients we need.
I'll take just the example of nettles.
Nettles have about seven times more vitamin C than oranges.
They have as much calcium as cheese.
They have three times more iron than spinach.
And they have proteins, as many as much protein as soybeans, except that these are balanced
in essential amino acids.
Maybe it wouldn't be too serious because we can definitely live without eating wild plants.
We could live by eating only cultivated plants and other foods.
But one thing that we cannot avoid facing now is that our society has created huge problems.
And I think these problems actually come from our separation from nature, which I put all this
in a nutshell, you know, it would take us a long time to discuss it, but basically the
big fracture happened 10,000 years ago with the beginning of agriculture and everything
that it had to bring and that it did bring us, which is not only nice things.
So I believe if we want to be realistic and act realistically, we have to change our point
of view and acknowledging the existence of other beings on Earth.
You've seen that plants are intelligent.
It's not only that they are intelligent, they are beings.
They are actually being.
And there are good ways to get started for us to recognize the existence of other beings on Earth.
This is what I do in my seminar.
I bring people to develop a relationship with plants.
It's nothing esoteric, it's nothing difficult to do.
It has to do with just using, at first, just using our senses, just observing the plants,
not only just passing by, touching, smelling, tasting, and you will realize a brand new world
and a brand new way of relating to our world.
I think we have to get to the nature.
That's the only way to develop the respect which is needed for us to go on and to stop destroying
basically everything, including ourselves, like we're doing now.
So I think it's something very important.
Foraging is not just gathering plants for making nettles, foraging is something very important.
It raises consciousness.
It changes the way we look at the world.
I believe that post-modern living will be about cultivating, about living an urban life,
but also gathering plants whenever we can, which is not always possible.
But the thing is to live life with a hunter-gatherer spirit which is made of respect
for everything that lives in the world.
So to me, it's something that's been always normal.
Living with the plants has always been normal.
Eating wild plants was just as normal as eating cultivated plants
because starting picking, gathering plants with my mother when I was two years old, I was 60 years ago.
So it just was a normal thing to do.
And when I was a teenager, I decided that living society was not for me.
It was too much pressure.
I had a much easier time relating to plants than relating to people, as a matter of fact.
Well, now I've learned to relate to both, but still I mean, still I mean, plants are nice.
Yes, they are.
So one thing I had to find in order to be able to live away from society
was to define my basic needs and besides air to breathe, water to drink, then it was how to get food.
And knowing that plants could feed me was easy enough.
So I really dived into it, learned all the edible plants I could, and I took off to the woods.
And I lived there for a number of years, especially in Western America where you still have large woods.
But then at one point I was happy.
I mean, I was happy, it was great.
But at one point I realized that, well, the place where I was living,
I mean, even though I was going from place to place, the forest was all being destroyed.
I mean, it was just very bad.
I mean, I could go on living like this myself, but just for myself.
And I decided I had to do something.
So get out of the woods and pass on what I knew and get down to work.
So that's when I started giving seminars, writing books, getting my PhD and starting a school and all of this.
And going around the whole planet to explore the relationship between people and plants.
This is the job of an ethnobotanist, kind of a hybrid between ethnologist and botanist.
Basically, learning how people have been using plants from the very beginning until now and all over the planet.
And it's just amazing. It's just enormous.
And then at what point, chefs got into the picture, you know, the first one to introduce me to the world of gastronomy
with my white plant was Michel Brass, with his gargoyou.
His gargoyou, the petit légume with a chickweed, was playing a leading role in it.
And that was just mind blowing.
Then I worked very closely with Marc Vera and we've been doing a lot of things together, writing books and doing TV series.
And with other chefs in New York, in Switzerland, many places.
And I believe it's boosted their creativity, which is very good.
But this is not what's most important for me.
For me, chefs have a crucial role to play in making things move forward in the world.
See, plants were forgotten because they got very low social status, like I explained to you before.
And now that's the way people look at plants.
I mean, look down at plants. They despise plants. They crush plants.
I mean, they eradicate them. They kill them with chemicals and everything.
They hate plants, basically.
And it's, in my opinion, a cultural thing.
So if it's cultural, we can change the culture and make things be different.
And chefs, again, have a very important role because through the media,
with all the importance to give them, which is given to them, to the chefs.
See, when they use plants and they show plants, people start looking at these plants,
these formally despised plants, like something else.
Plants become stars.
And this is great. This is very important.
But anyway, I'd like to show you a few plants now.
I've classified the plants according to the way I did in this book, like Cuisine Sauvage,
which is according to the part which is used.
That's a good way, if you want, to start using plants, knowing how to do it,
which part to use and how.
Because it's, I mean, there are so many plants which nature offers us
that we have to find our way around and have some kind of logic.
So, you all know this.
Acorns. Yeah, okay.
Acorns.
They're one of the best source of glucids and proteins, carbohydrates and proteins.
And they have been used extensively by our ancestors in mesolithic time.
You find remnants of acorns all over the place.
Acorns were the basic food of California Indians.
Acorns contain tannins, so it has to be leached.
Once it's done, which is fairly easy to do with water,
it's a great base for many things.
So, this was for mealy seeds.
Now, oily seeds, we have corn poppy.
Oh, it's okay. It should be in this direction.
Romans used to use the seeds for food and they would even make oil out of it.
Like people are still doing with the opium poppy,
which yields a very good oil, will do yet.
Then, beech nuts, they were used as oil and for yielding oil all over central Europe.
It's been going on pretty much until World War II and now it's totally forgotten.
As far as roots go, this is pig nut.
It's a small plant that grows in western Europe
and the little tubers are just delicious.
Very good, small, but excellent.
Here we got rampion and other related species.
Some of them have been cultivated for their roots, but they're forgotten now.
The roots are very tasty, very crisp, excellent.
This is the survival plant.
If you find this, if you're lost in the woods and you have to survive,
try to find a patch of cattail because in the underground rhizomes,
you have pure starch that you can just eat like this and it will feed you.
On top of it, you can eat the base of the leaves, you can eat the young flower spikes,
you can eat the pollen, you can make a mat out of the leaves,
you can make rope with the fibers of the rhizome.
It's just the supermarket of the woods.
These are the roots of the cattail.
So if you open this, there's a core of pure starch, delicious.
Young linden leaves, you can make salads.
In terms of salads, you could feed the whole of the city with the linden trees that grow here.
This is a weed, this is just hated by gardeners.
It's one of the very best weeds there is.
It's gout weed.
And the young plants are just the most perfect salad with a taste of celery and incense.
And the older leaves are just a great vegetable.
And you can gather so much of it.
I mean, it's really plentiful.
You know, sometimes people think that plants are just not easy to gather,
that it's very tedious to get plants.
Well, it's not always true.
Same with plantain.
It has a very nice mushroom flavor, very nice.
And, well, this is again the best wild salad.
It's perennial lettuce or blue lettuce.
It's got a blue flower.
It grows in rocks, in a really dry environment.
And it's just sweet, crisp, just excellent.
And this is also the very best salad in the world.
I mean, there are a lot of very best salads in the world, in my opinion.
This one is not as common.
It grows in the Mediterranean area, not far from the seashore.
But I mean, it's so good.
I don't know what to say.
And, you know, the thing is, don't take my word for it.
Go out there and try it.
Amaranth, this is a weed.
I mean, it was introduced as vegetables, but it wasn't to the taste of the people.
So it was forgotten.
It's still with us.
It comes from America.
It's still with us.
If you have a garden, you have amaranths growing wide in there.
That's for sure.
And so with Kenoponium, it was introduced in Roman times, or probably even with the first cultivated plants.
It's been with us since.
It used to be used as a spinach, but as I said, it's too easy to grow, so it's been forgotten.
While it was still another weeds in fields with a very strong, very strong fragrance.
And this is hedge mustard, another one.
I mean, there could be so many.
This one is particular because this one is amazing.
That's one, it has a story.
It stinks.
It stinks really like an old rag, very much so.
And this is what I thought until I was working with Marc Vera.
And we're talking together, you know, I was bringing a lot of plants, including some which I thought were not really good.
And he just crushed the leaf between his fingers.
And at one point he thought, wow, this is politus mushroom.
And he made me consummate sept virtuels with that.
It's amazing.
I mean, it tastes of politus, and there's no mushroom in it.
This is another weed that comes from South America.
Here it's totally unknown in South America and Colombia.
It's part of the national dish, Ajaco.
Then we go on to young stems, young shoots, young shoots, hops, which we can eat raw.
These ones, they must be cooked.
This is old man's beer, clematis.
It grows all over the place.
It grows all over the place.
And nobody knows about using these plants except in some parts of Italy, but it has to be cooked.
This one is considered a toxic plant.
You'll see it in all toxic plant books.
It's briny, and okay, the fruits are toxic, but the young shoots are just delicious.
Excellent.
Same with asparagus.
You know, if you think of asparagus, you think of asparagus as a native plant.
But the fruits are toxic, just toxic, just the same as this one.
And asparagus is good, but wow, this is even better, I think.
No, it's tried.
Okay.
This is mugwort.
Mugwort is very chewy, but you can make fritters with it.
It's very flavorful and got a lot of body to it.
Black briny.
This is interesting because in southern France, southwestern France, there is a part of a population
who is still very attached to the tradition of gathering these plants.
And other people elsewhere just don't know it, although it grows all over Europe.
This is bath asparagus.
This is a wild plant which has been met with more success.
It's grown, well, it's picked from the wild, but it's sold on markets in France and some other places.
This is cow parsnip or hogweed.
I mean, it's a plant you can do everything with it, but the very best part is the young stem.
And inside this sheath with the leaves, you have a young inflorescence which is just like broccoli.
It's excellent, really, really very good.
I can't understand why people don't know this plant.
It's all over the world, I mean, at least all over Europe in the past.
There's just so much of it, and it's good, and it's reproductive.
So is this burdock.
Burdock is very common.
And if you taste burdock stems, it tastes like the artichoke hearts.
Except that all you have to do is cut the stem at the right stage, peel it and eat it.
That's it, not even cooking it.
It's just, well, why do people not know that?
So a few condiments.
This is garlic mustard.
It's mustard and garlic combined together.
This is cuckoo flour, ladies' mark.
It's very strong, extremely strong, extremely strong.
And this is wood avans.
My story about this plant yesterday, you can see the root.
The root smells like, as you said, about cloves.
It smells like, but more than cloves.
It has a lot of different, very subtle smells altogether, not only cloves.
It's one of the most beautiful wild condiment or condiment that I know of.
And it's just all over the place.
Again, grows all over.
This one is not so common.
It grows up in the mountains, but it smells like anise.
Except, I don't know, it's more subtle, like anise or fennel.
It's just more subtle, not as strong as anise.
Oregano.
Oregano in northern countries doesn't smell very much.
But I use the flowers to make a pesto.
Pesto of wild oregano is something else.
It tastes slightly of oregano, but a lot more of mushroom, actually.
It has an interesting combination in itself.
Some pickles.
This is known in quite a few places in Europe,
especially in the Mediterranean area.
Rocks have higher.
It's pickled.
It's very good.
Lactofermentation.
This is amaranth.
It's a good way of preserving wild plants.
It's not always that easy.
It doesn't work always, but when you get down to it, it's really great.
And these are European olives, northern European olives.
You can put them in brine and preserve them,
because they're very sour when you taste them like this.
But after three weeks in brine, they're just very good.
They're just excellent.
Flowers.
Sweet violet.
Not all violets are sweet, but they're all good.
Queen of the Meadow, which has a great fragrance.
And I'm done, because it says amaranth.
So I don't want to.
Thank you.
