Foraging Texas; Interview with Mark “Merriwether” Vorderbruggen

What’s the rarest or craziest thing you’ve ever found while out foraging Texas?

A stolen police SUV! I was out in Spring Creek, which is the dividing line between Harris County and Montgomery County down here in Houston, and years ago it was just kind of this wild area people that go to ride 4-Wheelers and stuff like that. You could get off the Hardy toll road real easily onto this little back road, and then go tearing through the woods, so it became a fairly common dumping ground for vehicles that had been stolen for joyriding. It was, also, a great place to go looking at plants, because it had a very diverse ecosystem.

I was out one morning just photographing (I don’t know if I was writing my book then or just building my website) but up ahead I see a police cruiser, you know, normally where you would not find one. I got closer, and it was very obvious that it had been stolen. They drove it wildly through the trees—it  had been stripped of the radios and anything inside. The hard part then—it was a Harris County police cruiser—was calling them and convincing them that one of their cruisers is out on the Montgomery County side of Spring Creek. They said I should call Montgomery, and to make a long story short, it basically took about four hours to get cops out there to finally take care of their cruiser.

Have you had any interesting encounters with wildlife while foraging Texas?

OK, this is funny. People always ask if I’ve ever poisoned myself with eating a plant or mushroom, and the answer is N.O,  I’ve always been very, very, very careful on properly identifying things. But…

I was on a canoe trip with a buddy of mine, and we came ashore to have lunch. Well, we saw these large, slow moving, easy to catch grasshoppers just everywhere, and so we caught up a bunch—and we said, well, you know what— people eat crickets and grasshoppers all over the world!

So, we roasted them up. They actually tasted really good— like steak. It was wonderful. Now uh, 2-3 days later, I’m feeling really funky. Long story short—and retrospect I was a complete idiot, these grasshoppers were very brightly colored, slow moving, very big chunks of protein—we ate the Eastern lubber grasshopper, whose main source of food is poison ivy. I basically gave myself a (mild) case of poison ivy on my gastrointestinal tract, which my doctor found absolutely hysterical.

But what’s the saying? Comedy is just tragedy plus time, so now it’s funny. We all make mistakes; I’m a plant guy, not a grasshopper guy.

Ultimately, how has foraging Texas enriched your life?

Well, it allowed me to leave corporate America! Haha, yeah, I mean that’s pretty good but—okay, I’m an older man, and I am way healthier than anybody of my age that I know. I’m out getting my vitamin D, I’m bending and stretching and occasionally I’m running really fast.

And one of the things foraging has lead me to is thinking of wild edibles as how our ancestors used them, like, how did they live and why are humans so sickly now? Back then we conquered the world with a rock on a stick, and foraging is what led me to really understand that our bodies are designed for a very different world than what we live in now, and that this disconnection between our bodies and our world is what is causing a lot of our health issues.

It’s led me to become what people call an ‘ancestral eater,’ you know, nose to tail. I hunt and I find things, which is something our bodies are really designed to do, so foraging has led me back to health. My mission in life now is basically to save the people, and save the planet, all by connecting the two.