Urban Foraging

Here's a tip from an island girl: forage. Nothing tastes as good as the food you find lying on the ground. City dwellers can get in on this action, too, according to the New York Times, which I wouldn't have believed if I hadn't spied this baby on my morning walks to the office. As soon as these apples on Lexington and Classon are ripe, I'm'a gonna have me one. The immunity I'll get from ingesting whatever it's collected from the Brooklyn environment will probably cover my flu vaccination for the coming winter.

I never knew that I liked apples until I moved to New York. Hawaii has some fabulous fruits--mangos, papayas, lychee, bananas--but certain things need cold weather to thrive: tulips, apples, grunge rock, and Vikings all need a good, hard frost to function properly. The only apples we ever got in Hawaii when I was growing up were green ones, yellow ones, and red ones; or, if you want to get technical, Granny Smiths, Golden Deliciouses, and Red Deliciouses (Deliciai?). They were soft, dry, mealy, and if they came from the cafeteria at Naalehu Elementary, kinda salty, too. Don't ask me why.

But my first autumn here, I had a sample of a McIntosh apple from the Union Square Farmers Market. It was blissfully crispy and tasty and all other combinations of 's,' 't,' 'p,' and 'ee' you can string together. I was hooked, and also gainfully employed at the time, so I bought every kind of apple from Whole Foods that they offered: Honeycrisps, Paula Reds, Braeburns, Empires--you know what? Just go to the New York Apple Association website. That's what I eated.

I even wrote an article on the Plenty Magazine website about where to go apple picking during the fall, which I can't link to because Plenty folded and landed me in TempLand. Trust me, it was all kinds of awesome. In fact, since you'll never read it, I'll go ahead and say that it revealed the cure for the common cold, the location of the Lost Ark of the Covenant, and what REALLY happened to Mulder on the X-Files.

Prove me wrong. And have a Brooklyn apple.