Foraging in Bengaluru: A source of sustenance, flavour

Sarjapura, a small town in the suburbs of Bengaluru city, was once a green, harmonious belt – over 150 years ago, it sat as a long stretch dotted with small villages of the erstwhile Sarjapur Taluk, an area now called Anekal. Small as it was, this town hummed with activity; it was a trade centre for cloth, most famous for its muslin and variety of silks. Every Sunday, the Sarjapura town would hold a fair to display its linens, muslin, silks and even cotton carpets. 

The town thrived, away from Bengaluru city’s clamour–until private institutions started setting up tents. Brutal concrete buildings cropped up in open spaces, followed by sprawling closed gate townships. As the area developed, the monetary value of the land shot up. One by one, the local residents decided to put their land up for sale. It was lucrative, with Sarjapura being eyed as a prime location, until the government put a cap on the market price–a move that upset the farming land-owners, who could not earn as much on their prized patches. The erstwhile ragi fields of Sarjapura were followed by greenhouse sheds, and finally by tall, grey buildings that remained under construction for years.

And so, the green treasures of Sarjapura have quickly turned into a buzzing concrete jungle. This had ripple effects on the local residents. Their entire lifestyle changed–including their eating habits. One of these habits, lost in this gentrification, was foraging in the wild for plants like Arru Nela Danthu (a type of Amaranth), sweet potato, Gongura, and Garganakka (a local variety of Bhringraj). “Traditional lake beds used to be the most interesting places for foraging. The water brought a lot of seeds and vegetation diversity,” recalls Suresh Kumar G., an artist-cum-farmer from Sarjapura who loves food and finding it in the wild. Conditioned to say ‘I am going to the city’ while travelling to central Bengaluru, Kumar believes that if you stay in a village or in a forest and a city comes to you, you still have to call it a forest.

Six years ago, he realised that somewhere between his ancestors and him, he had forgotten how to identify plants by their names, their distinctive smells, or discern which parts of them can be used as food or medicine. To relearn the art of gathering the food at his feet, Kumar moved back to Sarjapura after living in central Bengaluru during his childhood years. Thus began his engagement with the local women here, who forage regularly. 

Typically, foraging is seen as an activity exclusive to forests and green pastures. Kumar sternly disagrees with the notion. In the countryside, a lot of the land is used for cultivation, which means that the soil is disturbed every now and then. Conservationists are also focused on saving the tree canopy, an approach that disregards grasslands and their biodiversity. Urban areas, thus, offer an environment that the countryside doesn’t.

Kumar has seen the rarest of things — such as red manathakkali (nightshade) and Kuppamenia (Indian Nettle) — while foraging for plants in urban areas. “Some of them survive on the highways because they are hardly disturbed,” he explains. “Six years on, I am still learning. Every time I step out to forage, I am surprised by something new,” remarks Kumar.

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Back to roots

Foraging, which started out merely as a quest, has turned into a purpose for Kumar. To impart this knowledge further–especially to the younger generation, whom he believes to be the torchbearers of food’s future–Kumar has started conducting a course on foraging at Azim Premji University. During a recent session, Kumar and his students harvested and cooked rice with wild greens to serve to roughly a hundred people. Some greens left from the batch were packed and delivered to customers who buy produce from Kumar’s own farm as well as other nearby farms.

He points to the remnants: a mix of Gongura, spinach, mustard leaves, sweet potato creeper and manathakkali (black nightshade), noting that during monsoon, the variety of produce increases by a number of times. These are called wild edible plants or WEPs–plants with at least one edible component that grow in their natural environments without any human intervention. While Kumar and others like him forage for these plants on the side, WEPs are actually the primary source of sustenance for people in many regions of the world.

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Kumar’s consumers often send him screenshots scanned by Google Lens claiming some of the plants – like Nightshades – he sent to them are poisonous. “That’s in the European context,” he clarifies, “Traditionally, Indians have been eating these species for a long time.” The absence of this traditional knowledge on the internet as well as among urban dwellers is the gap Kumar is hoping to narrow.

Alongside the packets of foraged plants, Kumar takes an extra step to share recipes on WhatsApp groups that champion these plants. The idea behind his work is to change people’s larger perspective on these wild edible plants. He refrains from seeing them as merely medicinal; instead, he wants people to inculcate the habit of foraging and eating wild plants in their daily lives. Just like their usual veggie fare.

The urbanscape

Bengaluru is rich with diverse botany, and many of the city’s residents have joyfully learnt to sift through it to gather food. One of them is Janet Orlene, a climate crisis documenter, who has been experimenting with foraging since she was a very young child. “In my mind, there's no clear beginning to this journey. From hunting for Singapore cherries to climbing star gooseberry trees or mango trees in the summer, my childhood was filled with adventures in foraging throughout,” she recalls.

I'm always fascinated by exotic garden plants whose edibility is often overlooked. It brings a smile to my face to see people hurriedly buying vegetables while their well-tended gardens are full of edible bounty.

During the pandemic, she experienced a more formal reintroduction to this way of collecting naturally growing foods around: something she now understands as "foraging”. The pandemic months were brutal on most, and boring on others. Orlene, like many, started exploring a new hobby. She embarked on a quest to understand edible flora in metropolitan cities. “I quickly compiled a database of over 500 species, researching their edibility through academic papers, ancient manuscripts, renowned encyclopedias from various eras – and, of course, (understood) the associated risks,” she elaborates. She wanted to learn about the taste profiles of the plants and their cooking possibilities, rather than the recipes themselves. “I'm always fascinated by exotic garden plants whose edibility is often overlooked. It brings a smile to my face to see people hurriedly buying vegetables while their well-tended gardens are full of edible bounty,” she says.

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Orlene finds Bengaluru's edible landscape fascinating, with plants like Rosella (Hibiscus sabdariffa) that bloom in slightly unmanicured areas, Sessile Weed (Alternanthera sessilis) carpeting most of the city, and various floral varieties like marigolds, roses, and jasmines; there are even old recipes for rasam made with fragrant jasmine blossoms (the full recipe can be found at the end of this article). Other edible ornamental varieties include the rhizomes of the Canna indica. “And of course… where this ends, begin the various soppus,” she rightly states.

Chasing soppus

Normally, we may think of nature as a distant escape from cities. Seema Mundoli and Harini Nagendra, faculty at Azim Premji University, disagree. The duo decided to take an interest in the nature present right here in urban India and study the way people engage with it. Along the course, they discovered that many locals use a lot of resources that are found in public spaces–like lakes, empty plots of land, or parks. In Bengaluru, the sprawling Lal Bagh or Cubbon Park host green pastures as well as lakes to forage from.

The pair then published Chasing Soppu, a wild plant guide of 52 species that are used for food, medicinal and cosmetic purposes–that we often categorise as weeds. People are also known to collect viable firewood for heating water, because LPG can be expensive.

Mundoli pointed out these local foragers are most predominantly women from highly marginalised communities who reside in slums or in small huts. They have ties to the local lake and grazing areas, and when they see some soppu, they collect it. The authors found that these women collect the leaves and pods of the drumstick tree, so that on days when they can’t afford to buy vegetables from the market, they can swirl the foraged produce into their sambars, adding great nutritional value to their meals.

Similarly, they collect Onagana Soppu or Alternanthera sessilis from lake beds (which is used in sambar as well) instead of buying spinach. “The choice between both of these is made based on their needs. If you have no food to eat that day, then you will collect, clean and use the soppu. Since space is congested, people are looking at other options like rooftop gardens where one can grow creepers and wines,” explains Mundoli. 

Nature is not wild and food is not something that only a farm grows.

Foraging requires a certain level of expertise, as many distinct leaves can end up looking quite similar. It's important to be cautious–the wrong ones could be poisonous. Mundoli advised that this practice often comes naturally to grandmothers, who have a knack for identifying and gathering plants. "I used to forage with my grandmother," she adds. However, in cities, people no longer engage in foraging as much. While they may recognise certain plants, they often don’t know where to find them.

Passing on this knowledge can be difficult, since foraging as a ritualistic part of one’s daily life goes back a few generations. Mundoli mentions that the university has consciously included the intersection of sociology and ecology in its courses. “Science is necessary, but it is not sufficient enough to know about things like foraging,” says the researcher. “The kids who come here never knew of it as a practice unless they had a grandparent who took them foraging.”

She believes that children need to be taught early in their lives that “nature is not wild and food is not something that only a farm grows.”

Food sovereignty 

It wasn’t until her late twenties, while working in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, that Shruti Tharayil felt a missing link to nature. As she spent more and more time with farmers from rural communities, she began to develop a connection with the land.  “During my time with women farmers, I became fascinated by how they interacted with the plants in their ecosystem, especially the uncultivated ones,” Tharayil recalls. “It was then that I began documenting how they cooked these so-called weeds, exploring the realities of food sovereignty that played out in their daily lives.”

After six years, Tharayil returned to the city, wanting to reconnect with nature in an urban context—having realised that nature wasn’t confined to rural landscapes. “I started paying close attention to my surroundings,” she says. “Patches of wild greens and shrubs were growing along roadsides, footpaths, even on road dividers. Nature finds its way, no matter how much we try to concretise our landscapes.” 

This led Tharayil to begin foraging in urban settings, a practice that took shape as Forgotten Greens in 2018. What began as a Facebook page to share wild plant knowledge and recipes, evolved into a larger platform encompassing urban foraging, decolonising food systems, and traditional knowledge.

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The reality of Indian cities is that foraging along roadsides isn’t rewarding. There’s so much garbage, that you can’t forage freely. When I visited Cape Town, I was struck by how clean the roadsides were—clean enough to pluck and eat greens without hesitation.

Her work highlights another aspect of foraging: wild foods represent food sovereignty–the right to control what we eat and where it comes from. 

At a recent foraging walk in Bengaluru’s Lalbagh Gardens, a small patch of land yielded 15 edible plants, which were enough to feed 25 people. We underestimate the abundance around us, she believes. But she’s quick to clarify: “The reality of Indian cities is that foraging along roadsides isn’t rewarding. There’s so much garbage, that you can’t forage freely. When I visited Cape Town, I was struck by how clean the roadsides were—clean enough to pluck and eat greens without hesitation.”

Tharayil’s foraging has dramatically transformed her relationship with food. “I’ve become more mindful about what I eat and where it comes from,” she says. “Living in the city no longer feels like a barrier to connecting with nature. I hear people say they need to drive to a forest or trek on weekends, but I don’t feel that way. For me, nature is not ‘out there.’ It’s an integral part of our cities.”

Mallipoo rasam recipe:

Steam jasmine buds (preferably unopened ones) in an idli pot. Strain and reserve the water used for steaming. Soak tamarind in warm water and extract pulp-less juice from it. In a mortar and pestle, lightly mash whole peppercorn, cumin seeds, garlic cloves, green chilies, tomatoes, turmeric, salt, and herbs (coriander and curry leaves) by hand. Heat ghee in a pot/pan, temper mustard seeds in it, and add chili powder and crushed ginger. Stir in the tamarind mix and bring to a boil. Add the prepared jasmine water, boil briefly, and turn off the heat. Garnish with coriander leaves and serve.

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Read more:

Suresh Kumar G.’s farming project, Sarjapura Curries

Seema Mundoli and Harini Nagendra’s Chasing Soppu

The Forgotten Greens community on Facebook and Instagram, hosted by Shruti Tharayil