Confessions of an Urban Forager - Umberto Tosi
Me at Cape Cod, age 2 With spring, this old city boy’s life orbits back towards its perihelion with nature. Disintermediated greenery awaits just out my door again, no camping trips necessary. Time to walk the parks and explore a nearby riparian reserve, time to contemplate gnarled wild apples putting forth their pale green buds and lacy white blossoms. I sit in the sand of a Chicago beach and gaze at the vastness of water and sky where downtown’s skyscrapers – like a towering ship in the distance – meet mighty Lake Michigan dotted with sailboats, newly released from winter dry docks, yawing in the wind. I stroll to our neighborhood farmers markets, opening for the season. I’ll feast my eyes on the freshly picked fruits and vegetables that glisten in the fullness of outdoor light, unlike factory farmed produce embalmed in supermarket fluorescence. I’ll pick up a deep green, dewy bunch of rapini—“broccoli raabe” as my Rome-born mother called them—and smell its earthy Crucif...