After we posted our weekend cartoon about ramps, that coveted wild leek so loved by the foodie crowd, Watershed Post reader Leigh Melander shared a link to a post on Chefs Collaborative on our Facebook page that is quite sobering on the subject.
The post, written by botanist Lawrence Davis-Hollander, sounds the alarm about over-harvesting ramps:
In recent years I became concerned when I noticed how much media coverage they were getting, how many restaurants were serving them, and food stores selling them. This was no longer the occasional expert forager gathering a few ramps for a meal or two, rather the equivalent of hundreds of people out digging in a patch of ramps. I knew enough about the ecology and botany of the rich woods in which ramps grow to know this was not a good trend.
Commercial foraged samples I saw showed me that they were being harvested carelessly—baby and immature ramps were being dug right along with mature plants. In the Berkshires, where live wild food specialist Russ Cohen lives, I noticed whole patches being decimated.
Davis-Hollander points out that if we're not careful, we could do to ramps what we've done to ginseng:
Unfortunately we have proved that as humans we are quite capable of over utilizing our natural resources for our own designs with too little understanding for the consequences of our actions. Our best example in the United States is ginseng. Botanists believe ginseng was just as common as ramps are today. Yet ginseng is now virtually extinct from many woods, and generally scarce or rare today.
Photo of ramps for sale by Flickr user Danielle Scott.
