Picking Wild Plants and Eating Them in Hong Kong’s Countryside

Goldthread

Wanda Huang is a forager for high-end Hong Kong restaurants and spends her days roaming abandoned farmland and paths to pick delicious plants. We hung out with her for an afternoon and learned about the world of wild, edible plants.   If you’re interested in more videos about foraging, we have more stories on our channel, including:  The Gold Rush for Mushrooms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNFo0A_qOLo  More episodes from our Wild series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkjgPQdtag4&list=PL92YWp8gq03FM7Nyqjv-3gDXSj_UjmMYo  **FOLLOW US ON IG, TWITTER, AND FACEBOOK: http://instagram.com/goldthread2 http://twitter.com/goldthread2 http://facebook.com/goldthread2  Producer: Clarissa Wei Videographer: Nicholas Ko and Joel Roche Editor: Nicholas Ko  Mastering: Joel Roche  Music: Audio Network

Transcript

00:00This is called prickly ash.

00:02It’s [like] Sichuan pepper,

00:04except it's got more of a lime flavor.

00:08It is really numbing.

00:09Wild chrysanthemum.

00:11We pick the flowers, which are really aromatic, and we dry them,

00:15and we make tea from them.

00:16These are so beautiful. Lots of chefs love them.

00:19Wood sorrel. They’re nice and tart.

00:21And the entire plant is edible.

00:25I love this.

00:32Welcome to Hong Kong.

00:34Population: 7.4 million.

00:37It’s one of the most densely populated cities in the world.

00:42Yet 75 percent of the land is countryside,

00:45a mixture of farmland and protected parks.

00:48So if you look at pictures of Hong Kong in the ’30s up to the ’50s,

00:53you'll see pictures of Victoria Harbor

00:56with a beautiful Chinese junk ship.

00:57In the background of it is the Peak.

01:00And it's completely bald and denuded of vegetation.

01:04The government started to replant in the 1970s,

01:07and a lot of the woodland that you see around us

01:09is actually secondary growth.

01:11It's green all year round,

01:13so there are plants and herbs that grow all seasons.

01:19My name is Wanda. I'm Chinese-Canadian,

01:21and I'm an educator and forager.

01:24On my father's side, they're all Chinese herbalists

01:26for four to five generations already.

01:29And my maternal grandparents in Canada, they have a farm.

01:33They have a small farmstead.

01:34So I never thought that it was something that I picked up

01:38because I had to learn it, but it was sort of just everyday life.

01:41I hung out with Wanda for a day

01:43and learned about some edible wild plants,

01:45like this mimosa bean, with its savory delicious pods.

01:49I think it’s actually really aromatic.

01:53And you can kind of taste that with the curry.

01:56Yeah, it brings out the taste of the curry.

01:59And there was the malabar spinach,

02:01which had a texture similar to okra.

02:04Yeah, it is like okra.

02:05The Indians used this instead of spinach sometimes

02:08to make palak paneer.

02:10This is in the nightshade family, so it’s really edible.

02:14I’ve made pies out of this instead of using spinach.

02:21When I started working in Hong Kong, I would just do hikes,

02:23and it wasn't really forage-oriented.

02:26And I would go into these villages.

02:28I would pick up some vegetables or herbs that I recognized,

02:32and elderlies would come up to me and say,

02:34“Oh, how do you know that’s edible?”

02:35or “What are you using that for?”

02:36And we would have these conversations.

02:38One woman told me that

02:40her family survived the Japanese invasion

02:42by eating wild herbs,

02:44and some of it they didn't even know it was fully edible.

02:48It was trial and error,

02:49and so I learned a lot from that as well.

02:52There are over 3,300 plant species in Hong Kong,

02:56and while not all of them are edible,

02:58a great handful of them are.

03:00Yes, there are certain ones that are poisonous.

03:02But I would say 2,600 of them are edible.

03:05And the other ones are slightly toxic,

03:07and then you've got maybe five that's poisonous.

03:09It's really important that just because you recognize something,

03:12it doesn't mean that you know you can put it in your mouth.

03:14Especially in the parks and in the areas around Hong Kong,

03:18it's really heavily sprayed.

03:21Especially with the last case of dengue,

03:23there's, you know, mosquito sprays, pesticide, and all of that.

03:26I think environmentally,

03:28it's just far better for the environment

03:29if we can just have a range of plants in our diet,

03:32as well as not having to actually grow them,

03:35but just letting them grow on the side of hills.

03:37To top it off,

03:38many wild plants are actually more nutritious

03:41than their domesticated counterparts.

03:43Consider the dandelion.

03:44Found all over the world, it’s from the same family as lettuce

03:47but contains much more Vitamin A, C, and K.

03:53So why don’t we eat it?

03:55Because many people see it as a weed,

03:57and from a culinary standpoint,

03:59it can be, well, quite bitter.

04:03So I think that our palate is

04:06sort of tampered with.

04:07We have lost the taste for things that are bitter

04:12or that’s more tart or that is slightly astringent.

04:16This is aicao. It’s bitter.

04:18I love that taste

04:20The locals actually will pick this during April,

04:23and then they will grind it into pulp and then just take the juice.

04:27And they knead that with dough,

04:29and they will actually make pastry from that.

04:31I actually use it as a mosquito coil.

04:33I just get lots of them,

04:35and then I just wrap it up, and I just light it.

04:37So here’s the shell ginger leaf.

04:40The leaves can be used to wrap Chinese dumplings.

04:43You just turn them in like this.

04:46And you put rice in them, and you can wrap them up.

04:49In the summer, one of my favorites is the bur marigold.

04:52Because it's so abundant.

04:53I can chop it up in the stir-fry.

04:55I can make scrambled eggs with it.

04:58The tribal people in China—the minorities—

05:00as well as throughout Indonesia and Thailand,

05:03they know so much of this sort of organic herbal knowledge

05:07and what is edible and what is not.

05:09Yet when you speak to them,

05:10a lot of them don't value this knowledge.

05:13One of the most common sayings is that, well, this is for the poor.

05:17Whereas in the West, I think there is a whole renaissance

05:20of people going back to foraging.

05:24The little that I can do is actually to take people out

05:27and actually talk a little bit about this.

05:29And somehow this that's been passed down to me,

05:33that gets passed down to someone else.

05:35Hey guys, thanks for watching, subscribe to Goldthread for more.

05:43Ugh, it's kind of bitter.

05:44Say that one more time.

05:45I just ate it.

05:49Hey everyone, we are really interested in your feedback.

05:51If you like this video or want to know more about foraging,

05:54please leave your comments below.

05:57Hey Nick,

05:58Are you done with the video yet?

Transcript

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