When I meet Johl Whiteduck Ringuette, we are dwarfed by twenty-foot-tall plants.
Well, a mural depicting giant plants.
Stems of gziib’nushk (a.k.a. scouring rush) and stalks of manoomin (wild rice) rise high as an apartment building.
“We think that we are on the top of the food chain, so we can do whatever we want,” Whiteduck Ringuette says to me, craning his neck to the sky. “But we’re the smallest part of a macrocosm.”
On the side of the Bickford Centre, a school at Bloor and Christie, Whiteduck Ringuette and other artists from the Red Urban Nation Arts Collective are painting a mural about Indigenous food sovereignty.
The plants in it are traditional foods and medicines of Indigenous Peoples whose land is now called Southern Ontario. They are painted to be larger than life, he explains, because in the Anishinaabe creation story, plants were created long before humans appeared on the scene.
You used to be able to find Whiteduck Ringuette at NishDish, his restaurant on Bloor near Christie, serving Anishinaabe fare like white corn soup, bison sausage and sweetgrass tea. Today, he runs NishDish as a catering company, while teaching about Indigenous food sovereignty.
Much of the food he cooks with and educates about grows wild around Southern Ontario. “I can walk you over there and find you that scouring rush,” he says. “We can make tea from it.”
For Anishinaabeg, these wild foods are crucial to their health. Scouring rush tea, for one, helps build strong bones because it contains high levels of calcium and vitamins.
Whiteduck Ringuette tells me that around Toronto, he likes to search out sunchokes (aka. Jerusalem artichokes), which are the potato-like roots of tall species of sunflower, as well as white goosefoot, a gangly plant with leaves that taste like spinach and seeds similar to quinoa.
“That one’s almost in everybody’s yard. You can put it in a salad and eat it,” he explains.
Next, I bike to Forbes Wild Foods on the Danforth to talk to Jonathan Forbes. His store sells edible plants foraged from all over Canada: seaweeds from the Atlantic, rosehips from Saskatchewan.
But the foods close to his heart are the ones close to home. Now white-haired and with a big laugh, Forbes grew up foraging for cattail hearts and mushrooms on the still-wild east end of Toronto.
These days, a Torontonian’s best bet for foraging is to get out of the city. It’s not impossible to forage in the city, and some do. But plants growing near main roads are too polluted, and it’s technically illegal to forage in city parks and ravines. On Crown land, where foraging is allowed, Forbes tells me what I might look for: spruce tips that taste as lime-green as they look, wild strawberries sweet and small as my fingernail, and lacy heads of elderflower to steep into syrup.
The next week, I drive an hour north-east to gather some delicacies with a couple friends. Moving slowly, we snack on the promised spruce tips and find baby pinecones we plan to pickle in sugar.
Most of us are forced into a terrible relationship with our food: we are price-gouged by billionaires for sad produce picked and shipped around the world, all at great cost to human lives and the environment. Responsible foraging can mean taking our food system literally into our own hands.
Whiteduck Ringuette reminds me that Indigenous people were deliberately cut off from their traditional food. Cultural knowledge was suppressed when kids were sent to residential schools, and species like plains bison were wiped out by colonizers. He says people and the land made an ancient agreement to keep each other healthy. He plans to honour it.
“Just watching all the development that’s taking place [around Toronto], it’s just wiped out so, so much,” Forbes muses. “The people will never know what they lost. So I thought if we started selling the foods, maybe people would take notice and realize that if they had something like a chokecherry bush in their backyard, they would take care of it rather than just pulling it up.”
Five Rules for Foraging
To learn to forage responsibly and safely, consult experts and field guides, or go out with a foraging group. Sam Thayer’s Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants of Eastern and Central North America offers maps, photos and descriptions to help you tell the difference between a snack and a stomachache. Mushroom identification walks led by the Ontario Mushroom Hunters And Foragers ($60/person) will teach you about the wide world of edible fungi. And here are five basic reminders:
Take only what you’ll use, use what you take. Make sure that what you’re foraging is plentiful. “If it’s something fairly rare, like wild leeks, we recommend that people don’t take any more than five per cent of a patch,” Forbes says. Some things – like anything listed under the Ontario Species at Risk Act – are too rare to harvest at all.
Tread lightly. Don’t stomp on other plants in a hurry to get to what you’re gathering. They may be crucial for insects and animals. As Forbes says, “everything is food for something.”
Get out of town. With some exceptions, avoid foraging in front yards or near main roads in the city, since many plants suck up pollution.
Make sure it’s safe. Only eat plants you can positively identify as edible. Ingesting a lot of an unknown plant can make you very sick, and even kill you.
Check the rules. Foraging is allowed on Crown land, but is prohibited in Ontario provincial parks, conservation areas and City of Toronto parks. Ask permission before harvesting on private land or a First Nation. If you are Indigenous, you can exercise your Aboriginal and Treaty rights to harvest for food, social, or ceremonial purposes in your traditional territories, including provincial parks.
Masterclass and Indigenous Food Lab
Forbes Wild Foods is putting on a masterclass on discovering wild foods, on June 26 at The Depanneur, but it’s already sold out. Look out for the next one! You can still try some of the foraged ingredients though at the Indigenous Food Lab supper club, hosted by chef Taylor Parker, happening at The Depanneur on June 28 (192 Spadina, 5th floor, $99). The Indigenous Food Lab happens at The Depanneur every month.
This article appeared in the 2025 Summer issue.
