My sister, Robin, is examining a round, bright orange fruit with four evenly spaced rows of blunt spines sculpted longitudinally along the rind. She is looking for bugs or evidence of larval infestation. I watch her fearfully.

She pinches the fruit with her thumb and forefinger, splitting the rind. A translucent red jelly brimming with black seeds oozes over her upright fingers.

I thrust my hands out and cry, “Don’t eat that!”

She pops the pulp into her mouth, swallows, grins at me and smacks her lips dramatically. “You don’t know what you’re missing,” she taunts, turning on her heels to continue our stomp through the boonies.

I follow, observing her and my youngest sister, Linda, alert for signs of impending death.

Everyone ate these refreshing fruits as we trudged through jungle thickets in our play. No one got sick or died. No one worried about eating them. Except me.

During my childhood I was a coward about everything, including wild foods. I don’t know what those little orange fruits were called or how they tasted. I haven’t seen them since, or met anyone, except people raised on Guam, who knew of them. I wish, now, I had tried them.

I learned my lesson, which wasn’t hard, on Guam. A lot of common food was harvested from the wild.

We savored the light-sweet tastiness of hibiscus flower butts and the mildly robust, sticky leaves, eaten off the bush. I remembered them the other day when I was making a mixed dark green salad with curry dressing. Torn bits of hibiscus leaves would’ve tasted great in there.

We harvested mangoes, green (which we pickled) and ripe; papaya; coconuts; small bananas with a powerful sweet/tart flavor and a hardy pulp that withstands frying.

Once-domestic sugar cane grew feral in several areas of the island that had been abandoned and taken back by the opportunistic jungle of “native” plants referred to as the boonies. Lots of kids snacked on it.

There was a delectable red (actually a deep, translucent salmon) rice steamed in achote water, the product of local horticulture and gathering. The achote seed leaches subtle color and flavor into the rice, which is a standard side dish at fiestas and fandangos.

My father cultivated a small bush of tiny, red, very hot chili peppers he transplanted from the boonies close to our house. These peppers were used by everyone, in everything, island-wide.

Local breadfruit was a plentiful, gathered crop. Breadfruit trees grow in the boonies and grace lawns, providing superb shelter from the daily showers of liquid sunshine. The fruit is baked, served and tastes something like squash.

I miss all of them here in the U.S., but my life on Guam prepared me for the possibility of reaping wild food. It’s part of playing with food.

In Seattle I gathered wild blackberries every spring and early summer. I not only ate them like grapes, I made several simple cobblers that required very little added sweetening. I also made a dark green salad with chopped Bermuda onions, crumbled, herbed feta, a very tart (absolutely no sugar) oil/cider vinegar/dried herb (no sweet basil) dressing and, as an afterthought, threw in some peak-of-ripeness wild blackberries from the patch out back. The crowd went wild.

In a curious turnabout, most residents of Seattle don’t harvest these berries. The bushes are considered a thorny, prolific nuisance, barely tolerable as boulevard blockades. Their fruit is ignored as food, unless it is sold at market. People avoid them the way I avoided those little orange fruits. Sometimes I speculate that we shun wild food because we are no longer used to it. If it’s wild and harvested without government surveillance, something might be wrong with it, never mind that there is much wrong with food we cultivate.

“Too bad,” I say, older and wiser, “more for me,” echoing my sisters’ sentiments from years before.

Text, Recipes & Graphics ©1999 by Gail Rae Hudson

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