Deep Dive from The Japan Times cover image

117: Where the wild things grow — foraging in Japan w/ Winifred Bird

Deep Dive from The Japan Times

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The Delicacy of Bracken in Japan

Bracken used to be eaten by the dinosaurs, but once the dinosaurs went extinct, bracken had free rome to colonize all the different corners of the earth. It was used both as a famine food and a food that poor farmers would eat when their rice and other harvests didn't go well. People traditionally dug up the ris s in fall and pounded them to extract a starch, and then kind of purified the starch. The variations on this same food are both kind of the height of elegance and luxury and the depths of poverty and starvation.

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