Name: 【TEDx】How I Did Less and Ate Better, Thanks to Weeds: Tama Matsuoka Wong at TEDxManhattan
Uploaded: 2014-04-24T12:54:15.000Z
Duration: 12 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I thought I wouldn't be the first person, I thought for sure someone would be not standing

Adverbs of degree

behind that but I'm definitely too short so I don't think people can see me. I think I'm

supposed to stand on this side of this line but if you don't mind. I've also been loving

the presentations and drooling over people's slides. Like I notice Gary you have some nice

amaranth in that weed slide. And I also notice that in that clip they had some great lambs

quarters. To start, I thought I would start with a little bit about my story because people

laugh and they ask me how did you go from being a corporate attorney to a weed forager?

So I thought I would tell that because people are going to be wondering that if I don't

say. So actually I was born in New Jersey and I worked and lived in Hong Kong for about

12 years. And I met my husband there and had 3 daughters. As you heard before, my youngest

daughter had really bad allergies and so I was really concerned and they really couldn't

pinpoint what it was. It just was something in the food. That's when I started looking

at food packaging and trying to understand the ingredients. I realized I really couldn't

understand what all those things were any more. So we moved back to New Jersey. It was

a bit of a fixer upper house but it had fresh air and clean water and I wanted to have a

vegetable garden because I thought that way I would raise our food and I would know exactly

where it was coming from. The problem was that gardening was a lot harder. I am in such

awe of you who are farmers here because it's tough. It's a lot harder than I remembered

it. You have to do things like double digging and amending the soil and irrigation and all

this. Peas have to be planted at a certain time, you can't plant things next to...there

were a lot of rules. And then I had been away for a long time and there were things that

people had started doing since I was away, you know you see things much clearer, that

I didn't remember. Like this huge obsession with mulch, black dyed mulch. Do you notice?

People are putting that on all around and the trees look like these weird lollipops

but people think this looks nice. So I kind of had culture shock. But needless to say

I wasn't as you could tell very good at any of this. And then my mother actually - I'm

sort of in this sandwich class, my mother had a stroke and everything just kind of went

to seed that year. And the weeds - this is the #2 agricultural weeed, galinsoga - just

took over everything. And besides the fact when I tried having these little raised bed

gardens, most of the time when you're outside the agricultural season the weeds would be

growing. From March through December. So most of the time they were barren and desolate

and the only things that were growing there were weeds like dandelion and chickweed. So

then I found out there were these things called native plants and native plants had evolved

ecologically to be with the landscape, the local landscape, where they grew. You didn't

have to do all this stuff. You didn't have to amend the soil, you didn't have to water

them, so that suited me fine. Just my style. And they also helped with pollinators and

were part of the underlying ecology of the system. The problem was that the native plants

had their own weeds and these were even worse. These are called noxious weeds or invasive

weeds as so called by the U.S. government, which spends billions of dollars trying to

eradicate them. And so one of the worst ones in the world is called Japanese knotweed.

And it starts off like this and it ends up like this. And it can actually get under the

foundation in your house and start to ruin things. So I was battling all these different

weeds, that's what I ended up doing and it really happened when some professor friends

of my dad's from Japan were visiting. And I was telling them how I was battling the

chickweed and battling the knotweed and that's about all I was doing and they actually apologized.

'So sorry these things from Japan are coming here and causing you problems in this country.'

But then the younger professor said, wait I think the knotweed, we call that hidori,

the tiger stick in Japan. And it tastes like rhubarb. It's one of our great dishes. And

the chickweed, when we see that we have a little memory of the flowers like little stars,

we call it hakobe. It's one of the 7 treasures of spring that we eat. So for me that was

like, that was the moment, right, when the weeds that I've been trying to battle are

great food. So I just started on this kind of obsession of trying to find out all the

weeds that were around, going to other people's places and looking at their weeds, researching

where they came from and finding out how people ate them. So I could eat them that way too.

And then sometimes I think I was lucky because not only with the professors, my in-laws who

were Chinese would come and they'd see the day lilies, which people plant in their gardens

but they escape into the wild and they're, like, screaming, because this is a delicacy

in China because they have a subtropical climate. This is temperate. So it grows here like crazy

and in fact in some states it is invasive because it carries out so much. You may recognize

it in moo shu pork or hot and sour soup, those little dried things are the buds of the day

lily. So sometimes I think, well why is it that all this great food is around us and

we don't recognize it? And the only thing I can think is I was lucky because I had my

in-laws and the professors and that maybe it's because we're a nation of immigrants,

so we've lost the connection with our grandmothers and grandfathers who would know what these

things are and are still eating them in different places today. And that all we're really trying

to do is just connect us with our past, from where we came from. But of course I don't

mean connecting like with caveman days where you know you're walking along and taking a

branch and biting it off or grinding up acorns into flour and things like that. I wanted

to eat things that were not just edible but delicious. And that's how I thought about

taste and I started working with chefs. Because there is a peak season for weeds and there

are also parts and when they're good and how to prepare them. Are they better cooked or

raw, etc. etc. You could come up with some great recipes that you could have in the home

like a wild herb ravioli with chickweed, wild gress, wild garlic and some other things and

it has a flavor that's so much more complex than spinach. Or creepy jenny tips taste like

pea shoots. You can have an amazing tomato salad. Or the common dandelion. You can pick

it when it's very tender and young in the middle, it pairs very nicely with beef and

clear noodles. So anyway, this is really fun. I don't know, maybe you think my story's a

little bit wacky but I'm really here because you may ask what does this mean for us? Why

I try to share this with you is I think that weeds are a part of our future. An important

part of our future. How? Well I think as you could see from some of the things that people

have been talking about, weeds are the ultimate opportunistic, sustainable plants. All over

the world. They can grow in a crack in the sidewalk. This is pineapple weed growing in

an unused driveway. It has an amazing flavor. And how? Because they have survival strategies.

Sometimes they can have several generations in one year so that's why you can see them

when sometimes nothing else is growing. Also the seeds, we heard a little bit about seeds,

some of the seeds for weeds can last decades and they've even found some that was in a

1,000 year old stomach of some skeleton they dug up. But one of the most important reasons

I love weeds is because they're nutrient dense and flavor dense. And of course they're not

being bred for shelf life or yield. They are really offered to us from the bounty of nature.

But what does it really come down to? It really comes down to the soil. So we heard people

talking about monocultures of industrial agriculture and how that leads to a depleted soil. Well

if you have a square meter of wild meadow, 50 plants in a year can grow and there's a

huge diversity of micronutrients and organic matter there. So I don't think we can top

mother nature. The main thing also about that is that when you have this incredible nutrient

density it also means you have incredible flavor density and that's why chefs love it.

The other thing that you all probably know is about the problem of diversity of our food,

that we're really too dependent on maybe 4 crops: wheat, soybean, rice and corn, yes.

How could I forget corn? Tomatoes are one of the probably 25 vegetables that we use.

There are 6,000 edible wild plants. So there's all this stuff around us and a lot of it is

nothing new. We just have to realize it. This is all why I think weeds are really important