SPRINGTIME IN MILAN

Meeting the “other”, the “exotic” and then return to oneself to establish one’s own identity as a diversity.

This is the the central thesis of Nicolas Bourriaud’s (Palais De Tokyo, now Tate Britain) latest book, The Radicant. The Radicant is not a cool urban condition but a family of plants that develop their roots as they go, like ivy, adapting themselves to the soil and surfaces they can hang onto. Roots that actively shape themselves according to specific conditions. Out of the metaphor, he is talking of an identity that results from a constant re-elaboration of oneself and one’s past. Another way of saying that identity is not a definitive “given”, immutable and stable, but that it is something alive, something that needs to be re-cognized because it is like a gap (a loop of desire?) that opens within oneself and which one needs to bridge, temporarily, by saying “this is me”.

An old friend recently reminded of something that deeply shocked her, namely the day when I told her on the phone the pleasure with which I had devoured a rabbit after 5 years of radical veganism. She was shocked because she interpreted my decision as a definitive one and she believed that change would be a threat to the “identity” I had so forcefully embraced. She expected some kind of embarrassment on my part. Instead, I was adamant in saying that “in life, one changes” and stressing that change (including the weft of “coherence” that each weaves according to one’s personal narrative) is more important than an identity which remains forever identical with oneself. Cynics will cite Tomasi di Lampedusa saying “that everything must change in order for everything to remain the same”. By the same token and without the negative political connotations, identity can be seen as the result of constant change, like the trajectory of a surfer on the brim of waves.

Back to our radicant plants, it is springtime in Milan, the sky is blue and in the periphery where I live, the very few patches of free, empty land that are left on the side of roads or in between building sites, are blessed by a whole host of newly born vegetable creatures. Or should I say weed? The varieties are the result of traffic (human and automobile), nearby gardening efforts, etc. etc. The phenomenon of weeds growing goes on un-noticed, except for those very few old people who still venture out to the “fields” in search for the leaves of dandelions and other delights unknown to digital men. It is unfortunate to have to venture out on the side of speeding lorries. One feels like a reject of society or a specimen from a decimated tribe. People still pick wild herbs in more rural areas, in the mountains or at the seaside. Only a few farmers, hunters and grandmothers know how to recognize them. But looking for wild edible plants in the outskirts of Milan is a whole other business. These secondary roads traversing the few fields still left are the main arteries of illegal prostitution, with young women dotting them like living signposts. Alternatively, they turn into improvised skips, full of every kind of trash, from plastic bottles to empty cans of paint. This is brutal evidence of what “free land” has come to signify, namely a passive receptacle for abuse. In such a situation, the bucolic act of looking for edible weeds becomes a precious act of resistance, against the insensitivity to seasons and vegetable species and as the political affirmation of one of the most ancient ways in which men survived on the planet: by picking what was spontaneously growing around them.

I began picking wild plants only a couple of years ago. As the result of a trip to Japan and more specifically to a famous shinto shrine. There, the priests have a long tradition of plant picking. They search the local woods in search of a variety of tasty buds. It’s there that I learnt how delicious the burgeons of royal ferns can be (zenmai). So, once back in Italy and Belgium, I began opening my eyes. Was all this great stuff growing only in Japanese forests or could I find some along the canals and in my own local fields? I found out that I could. 

 

Nicolas Leveaux is a chef who uses wild plants in his own cuisine. Simon Beugnies is a wild plant expert collecting around up to 60 varieties of weeds that can be used for cooking. We have been picking together, using wild pepper leaves, wild watercress, borrage, burdock roots, young plants of poppy, plantain leaves to be used in many culinary preparations. 

Last week I went looking for hop sprouts in my local Italian town. The bushes along the canal had been cleared and it was hard to find any at all. In the end, I stopped on a piece of no man’s land and, with my boots deep into an unspecified mound of plastic material that had been dumped on the ground and covered by vegetation, I moved about and grabbed a pretty quantity of hop (duvertim). As my bunch grew thicker and my feet made another plastic bottle crack, I really asked myself what we have come to, letting this vegetable heritage fall into oblivion and, literally, under our trash. These are edible plants that nobody uses. Furthermore, the fact that they are wild, means that they are richer in nutrients than cultivated varieties. Picking wild plants creates a bond with one’s surroundings. One also realizes the importance of picking what one needs and in preparing it on the same day. One cannot keep wild plants for a long time in the fridge. They wilt. And this points to another silly automatism of our feeding practices, that of procuring more than we need and storing it in a sort of morgue of forgotten cadavers…
link to Japanese wild plants