I received an email recently regarding the Winter Buying club and the email contained this little snippet:

Sam Consylman, our ever-curious forager and grower of interesting vegetables (google Sam!) is offering to three and only three Winter Harvest members a root cluster of Jerusalem artichokes (a corruption of girasole: It. sunflower) as they come out of the ground, sans dirt. Quite a conversation piece and edible to boot. First come first serve.

I am interested in the art of foraging but am scared to do anything about it. When my husband and I go on long bike rides during the summer, he is always picking and eating berries we find along the way. I am always nervous wondering if I will be a widow at the end of the trip, but the idea of foraging fascinates me. I eventually did eat some berries last summer, and I didn’t die, so now my faith and confidence has soared. So I googled Sam Consylman and found a fun to read and informative article. An excerpt:

Ten years ago, Mr. Consylman had been diagnosed with colon cancer. After months of chemotherapy and three operations, one that left him living with a colostomy bag, a student doctor in Philadelphia performed an OMP (osteopathic manipulative procedure), a hands-on procedure that successfully revived Mr. Consylman’s intestines, precluding the need for any more surgeries.
The stress of the chemotherapy and previous operations, however, had left Mr. Consylman’s insides permanently weakened. He was given six months to live and instructed to do the things he loves - hunt, fish, work on cars. Mr. Consylman lived far longer than projected, his daily activities causing five hernias in the process, however, eventually leading doctors to tell him to take it easy: Mr. Consylman was going to live.
“You can’t take anything away from God,” says this cancer survivor, “but I like to think because I was eating the way I was, my body was more prepared to fight this stuff.” Raised by his grandparents, Mr. Consylman ate mostly foods grown locally or found in the wild - dandelion, poke, morels. “This stuff hasn’t been messed around with at all,” he said. “It’s not hybridized; it’s not modified.”