Pascal Baudar: An Intellectual in the Woods

Pascal Baudar is a professional wildcrafter, naturalist, writer, and self-proclaimed “culinary alchemist” mostly based in Los Angeles. As a wildcrafter, he does much more than harvest plants from their environment for culinary purposes, but has proposed ideas that have the potential to reshape the way we view the natural environment and make him worthy of being called an influential public intellectual.

Baudar’s passion for foraging began at a young age. He grew up in a very small agricultural town in Belgium in the 1970s and fondly remembers wandering the woods, picking nuts and berries to snack on. This instilled in him a “valuable lesson..that food and delicious flavors could be found everywhere and that foraging was a normal activity.”

Not realizing that foraging was something he could pursue a career in, Baudar pursued his second passion, which was art. He attended school at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tournai Belgium and worked as a graphic artist for many years. Art is still a huge part of his career, as he does his own photography for his books and website and uses art to aid his environmental activism.

Baudar’s passion for foraging was reignited when he started taking survival courses in the late 1990s, partially because he was concerned about the panic and food shortages that may occur due to the onset of the year 2000. At these courses, he learned about wild edible plants and how to make some simple dishes with them. However, the goal of these dishes was always eating as a means of survival, as opposed to taste or creativity. As he continued attending classes, “he became more intrigued by the possibility of using our local edible and aromatic plants beyond creating...survival food” (Baudar, 2016, p. 4). Pascal vividly recalls a time that he decided to experiment with black mustard flowers after a survivalist course. “I crushed the flowers with vinegar, white wine, salt, and a bit of honey...the end result was...the most delicious mustard I had ever eaten. A spark ignited at that moment - I think this was the first time I realized that wild food could be truly gourmet food and should be approached with that perspective” (Baudar, 2016, p. 5).

Eventually, Pascal founded a school called Urban Outdoor Skills, where he currently teaches students how to turn “weeds” into gourmet food. In previous years, these classes were taught in the Angeles National Forest. Some of these classes included plant identification, solar cooking, Introduction to Entomophagy and cooking insects, making primitive beers using wild yeast and local plants, cooking in clay, and wild fermentation. Now, he hosts classes via Zoom and travels the country collecting wild edibles. He is currently working to renovate a bus and turn it into a mobile foraging school, which would allow him to bring this knowledge to people across the country.

Baudar may seem to be an unusual choice for a public intellectual as he does not hold an advanced degree in the subject he teaches and does not teach in a traditional academic setting. Also, in the past and in many cultures today, knowledge of edible plants was seen as common and essential to survival. However, in the U.S. today, survival skills are no longer common knowledge. Very few people are able to walk through the forest and point out every single plant, detailing the name of it, where it is from, and what uses there are for it. While Baudar may be lacking in some of the traditional qualifications for being a public intellectual, such as an advanced degree, that does not disqualify him from being one. As Stephen Mack explains in his essay “The ‘Decline’ of Public Intellectuals?”: “our notions of the public intellectual need to focus less on who or what a public intellectual is—and by extension, the qualifications for getting and keeping the title. Instead, we need to be more concerned with the work public intellectuals must do, irrespective of who happens to be doing it.” Regardless of the titles he holds, Baudar is doing the work of a public intellectual by educating the public. I think the fact that he doesn’t present himself as an academic professional makes him more relatable and his teachings seem more accessible to the everyday person. He has extensive knowledge from years of research, classes, and practice. His knowledge can be clearly seen in the three books has written three books on wildcrafting - The New Wildcrafted Cuisine: Exploring the Exotic Gastronomy of Local Terroir, The Wildcrafting Brewer: Creating Unique Drinks and Boozy Concoctions from Nature’s Ingredients, and Wildcrafted Fermentation, Exploring, Transforming, and Preserving the Flavors of Your Local Terroir. He is currently working on his fourth book, which will be about his research on how to use foraging in order to help the environment.

Pascal’s work extends far beyond wandering in the woods. He is not just a forager, but an innovator and culinary explorer. He sees foraging as a means to truly capture the flavors of a place. He thinks that we can create a truly Californian cuisine, using our very terroir, rather than borrowing from the culinary inventions of others. He writes in his book The New Wildcrafted Cuisine, “We are missing a tremendous amount of cultural and culinary identity by not exploring and creating a cuisine that would integrate all the flavors our untamed terroir has to offer.” Baudar’s ideas show us a world in which unique foods with the tastes and smells of the Southern California landscape such as turkey tail Mushroom vinegar, mugwort-lemon beer, burr-chervil butter, pickled yucca fruits, and many others are possible.

The ideas of foragers like Baudar have been gaining popularity in recent years, with the rise of successful restaurants using wild food ingredients. Ironically, use of these primitive, wild ingredients seems to have found its place in fine dining. The Danish restaurant, Noma, which relies largely on local, foraged ingredients has four times been labeled the best restaurant in the world by the World’s 50 Best List. Baudar has worked in this industry as a forager and consultant for celebrity chefs “From 2011 to 2014, his truly unique preserves, drinks and various wildcrafted condiments made their way into the kitchens of such star chefs as Ludo Lefebvre, Josiah Citrin, Ari Taymor, Michael Voltaggio, Chris Jacobson, Matthew Biancaniello (Eat Your Drinks) and Niki Nakayama (N/Naka restaurant)” (Baudar, 2018). He has also been a wild food consultant for several shows, such as Top Chef Duels and Masterchef and was named “one of the 25 most influential tastemakers in L.A. by Los Angeles magazine in 2014” (Baudar, 2018). But according to Baudar, his days of working with celebrity chefs are behind him. He is much more interested in spreading his knowledge to the everyday person and using foraging as a means to help the environment, than in aiding in the creation of overpriced meals.

The idea of using foraging to help the environment may seem somewhat paradoxical, as concerns of unsustainability are one of the largest reasons for the anti-foraging sentiment today. In many instances, foraging isn’t even legal. Foraging in most designated wilderness areas is illegal and in national forests, you generally need a permit. Critics of Baudar and the growing popularity of foraging often envision barren landscapes, stripped clean by people eager to collect food. This is even more of an issue when there is a large financial gain connected to the plant. For instance, when burning white sage for incense grew in popularity, this led to the plant disappearing in areas where it once was plentiful. According to an article on EcoWatch, “Poaching white sage for commercial sale, mostly bundled in smudge sticks or distilled into essential oils, has threatened the plant's survival in recent years. Police estimate the plant sells for around $30 per pound wholesale — and the industry is booming.” Another critic of foraging points out that foraging often encourages people to go off trail, and trails are there for a reason. “Mushrooms and plants don’t grow in the middle of well-trodden routes. For a neophyte forager, the temptation to go off-trail can be overwhelming. Walking into the meadow or forest can mean damaging delicate topsoil, disturbing wildlife and damaging vegetation that seems unimportant, but is vital to the ecosystem” (“Foraging Isn’t Actually that Cool, 2014).

While there may be instances in which people have damaged the natural environment in the name of foraging, this is far from the kind of action that Baudar promotes. It is also interesting that people are quick to criticize foragers for taking plants from the environment, when large scale farming and agribusiness has degraded the environment and destroyed habitats on a much grander scale. Furthermore, Baudar is the opposite of these money-hungry sage-hunters, as he believes that wildcrafting should not only be sustainable, but actually done in a way that is beneficial to the environment. He explains, “factually in California and many other states, the vast majority of what people will find as wild edibles are non natives and invasive plants such as European stinging nettles, curly dock, many types of mustard, figs, chervil, fennel, horehound, mallow...In fact many of these plants have effectively destroyed some parts of our environment...I believe conscious wildcrafting can help the environment by removing non-native plants and help restoring it by sowing native plants to replace them or creating your own garden” (Baudar, 2018).

Baudar’s wildcrafting focuses on invasive plants and he believes that as a society, we should reassess the way we view weeds. When we dismiss these plants as weeds and allow them to be destroyed, we are destroying food. In fact, wild food is the biggest form of food waste. He explains, “We are surrounded by food. Most of it is non-native and invasive, but locally either we are going to spray chemicals or we are going to show up and throw everything away. Why are we throwing away the resource when we have people who can not afford food in LA?” (Priebe, 2020).

Foraging can teach us a lot about the natural environment and help us build our relationship with it. When you gather ingredients directly from the source, it creates a deeper connection to your food and a larger respect for the environment around you. Fellow forager Mark Williams writes that “foraging faces us to confront the immediate impact of our food choices - not defer and hide their consequences'' (Williams, 2019). I think that Baudar’s teachings are a powerful means by which to connect people with their natural environment and see the infinite culinary possibilities that lie within it.

As Stephen Mack writes in his essay “The ‘Decline’ of Public Intellectuals?”: “Trained to it or not, all participants in self-government are duty-bound to prod, poke, and pester the powerful institutions that would shape their lives. And so if public intellectuals have any role to play in a democracy—and they do—it’s simply to keep the pot boiling. The measure of public intellectual work is not whether the people are listening, but whether they’re hearing things worth talking about.” This is exactly what Pascal Baudar is doing. He claims that his job is not to solve the food waste crisis, but to raise ideas that “plant seeds in people’s heads.” Although his culinary innovations and ideas about food waste have yet to take root in the general public, they are definitely worth hearing and provide powerful insight into our relationship with the natural environment.

Works Cited

Baudar , Pascal. “Biography.” Urban Outdoor Skills, www.urbanoutdoorskills.com/bio.html. 2018.

Baudar, Pascal. The New Wildcrafted Cuisine: Exploring the Exotic Gastronomy of Local Terroir. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2016.

“Foraging Isn't Actually That Cool.” Modern Farmer, 15 Dec. 2014, modernfarmer.com/2014/12/tk-reasons-foraging-sucks/.

Mack, Stephen. “The ‘Decline’ of Public Intellectuals?” The New Democratic Review: August 2016 Archives, Aug. 2007, www.stephenmack.com/blog/archives/2016/08/index.html.

Priebe, Rachel, director. Forest Flavors. Vimeo, 17 Aug. 2020, vimeo.com/manage/videos/448759950.

Sullivan, Kaitlin. “That Sage Smudge Stick Probably Came from Stolen Plants.” EcoWatch, EcoWatch, 5 Aug. 2021, www.ecowatch.com/white-sage-poaching-2654463355.html.

Williams, Mark. “The Case Against Foraging - A Big Read.” The Botanist Gin, 10 May 2019, www.thebotanist.com/news/sustainability/the-case-against-foraging-a-big-read/.