Jay:
All right. Well come on in. I got something for you to try real quick.

Dan:
Oh.

Jay:
Let's see. Potatoes with lamb's quarters and ramps, and acorn flour pancakes.

Dan:
Oh my God. Did you make this?

Jay:
Yes.

Dan:
And is this all this stuff you foraged?

Jay:
Some of it. Yeah. Some of it.

Dan:
This is Jay Marian. He lives in Verona, Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley. Jay's a forager. He searches the woods and fields for all kinds of wild ingredients to sell and to eat. I visited him recently at his home.

Dan:
I feel like there's a lot more going on here with the acorn flour than a typical plain old white pancake.

Jay:
Yeah. Yeah.

Dan:
Oh, that's really good.

Jay:
This is walnuts that came from local walnut trees.

Dan:
Oh, you get little formerly honey bear plastic jars that are filled with, what's that liquid in there?

Jay:
It is honeysuckle syrup.

Dan:
Wow.

Jay:
Now you can taste this. Now the flavor is very mild, but you can taste the honeysuckle flour in it. There you go.

Dan:
Should I just drink it straight?

Jay:
Yeah. Give that a whirl. See what you think.

Dan:
All right, honeysuckle syrup. Oh my gosh. Mm.

Jay:
Yeah, it's nice, huh?

Dan:
I liked that it's not so thick and syrupy. It's like sweet but sort of light.

Jay:
You can cook it down and make it thicker. But I like a little thin stuff for lots of different things. You can put it on ice cream. You can just make a drink out of it, put it in mixed drinks.

Dan:
Right. So your whole house here Jay, you got all kinds of jars and containers with all different liquids and all different herbs, in every which nook and cranny.

Jay:
Pretty much.

Dan:
It looks to me like a mad scientist laboratory.

Jay:
Almost. There's wine brewing somewhere all the time.

Dan:
This is The Sporkful. It's not for foodies. It's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people. We're spending the next two weeks of our show in Virginia. Next week we have an episode taped live on stage in Richmond that we're calling Virginia Is For Wine and Cheese Lovers.

Dan:
This week I'm talking with Jay Marian. As I said, he lives in Verona, Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley. He owns his own foraging business, Digger Jay's Wild Edibles. No, not that kind of edibles. Literally food growing wild in nature that he sells to chefs and other folks. Today we're going to hear the story of how Jay built that business and the struggles he's faced.

Dan:
In recent years, foraged ingredients had become all the rage in high end restaurants. You know the whole hyper-local farm to table thing. Of course, we humans have been foraged and pretty much forever. It's less common in America today, but Jay's family never really stopped. What he finds depends on the season, but he gets things like morel mushrooms, dandelion greens, truffles, berries, and ramps, which are wild onions that chefs really like. But they have a very short season. When Jay has the time, he'll go deep into the woods and spend 8 or 10 hours gathering wild edibles. Today we just had a couple of hours, so we hopped into Jay's van so he could take me to some of his favorite local spots.

Jay:
So there is goodies everywhere.

Dan:
So where are we headed, Jay?

Jay:
Well, we're going to go down here to an old, old, old farm, walk back in here and we'll get a few things. We're probably going to look and see-

Dan:
Jay's 63. He spent most of his life in this area. Driving around with him, it feels like he knows every bush and tree. And everywhere he looks he sees food.

Jay:
Like those trees right there are autumn olives, which is really invasive. That's not native to this country, but they're still here and they still produce a good food. Then there's cattails and more cattails, and cattails are nice and they're edible.

Dan:
Cattails are like reeds. They grow in wetlands and autumn olives I would learn, aren't olives at all. They're berries.

Jay:
Lots of people, believe it or not, don't use any of this fruit. It's just there and it produces fruit and falls on the ground and that's it.

Dan:
And just look across the street of this stop, I see a Dollar General over there. I was reading an article recently that more Americans get their groceries from dollar stores than from Whole Foods. You get a lot of your groceries from mother nature.

Jay:
Yes. And it's all seasonal. So nowadays we can get whatever we want whenever we want, so we overindulge most of the time. And we can see the results of that, of unhealthy America.

Dan:
And what do you make of that, that so many Americans are getting their groceries at dollar stores?

Jay:
Well, that I get because it's about money. It's cheaper there. I mean, in today's world, everything costs so much, it's tough for anybody to make a living or much less survive. People make choices all the time about, well, do I buy groceries, do I buy heat, or do I buy my medicines? And that's not a good choice. Nobody should have to make that choice. See those orange fruit on them trees right there?

Dan:
Oh yeah.

Jay:
Those are persimmons.

Dan:
Really?

Jay:
Yeah. Now those won't be ripe until after it gets cold. It's got a frost on them.

Dan:
Love persimmons.

Jay:
Because they're real astringent. But these are native and they are super, super sweet. They're one of my favorite fruits.

Dan:
Yeah, persimmons are great. I feel like when we're driving around here, I just see trees and I imagine that you have sort of like Terminator vision. Like you know ...

Jay:
I get what you're saying.

Dan:
Yeah, like you like zero in on a branch, like do, do, do, do, do, do, target acquired.

Jay:
Yeah, I have got one of my friends that rides with me, he's like, it's going to take me a while to get that filter like you got.

Dan:
Yeah, yeah.

Jay:
But I guess I've just been, you know, doing it all my life so I see everything.

Dan:
We turned into the driveway for an office park. This was not what I imagined when I pictured foraging. But the road took us past a big office building, past a factory, around a bend to a dead end. And there it all was. To one side was a big open field, with tufts of trees and bushes here and there. To the other side, woods as far as you could see.

Dan:
So Jay, while we're walking and foraging, can you also tell me your life story?

Jay:
Yeah. Let's see. My grandfather was born in 1895 ....

Dan:
Jay's grandfather grew up in West Virginia. His grandparents came to Virginia during the logging boom in the early 1900s.

Jay:
And he went off to war, fought in WWI. and when he came back he worked for the forest service over in West Virginia the rest of his life. And so when I knew him, he never worked. He had retired by then. And he was old enough to retire, so they took me everywhere and showed me all these cool things out here.

Dan:
When did you first start foraging?

Jay:
My grandparents started teaching me that before I was five years old. I started learning from them and I've learned all my life. Mainly when I was younger it was all about, hey you can eat this, you know, and it was cool because you could find stuff to eat and supplement your food with that, which we did. My grandmother was a great cook, so she'd make jams, jellies, homemade bread.

Dan:
Jay's grandmother canned berries and used them all winter long. Their family lived 40 miles away from the nearest grocery store so they couldn't get there very often. Foraging was a necessity.

Jay:
After a period of time then you know, the grocery stores and the markets and things started evolving, so it became less and less and less necessary. It's easier to go to the grocery store, a lot easier.

Dan:
So, I mean, you could go to the grocery store too, Jay. What do you like about doing this?

Jay:
I like getting out. I like seeing things and learning about new things. And then when I do, I can share it with people. The more people I can get the word out to, the more stuff I can get out to where they can taste it, they can realize that, hey, there is something out here, and it's good. It's not just about the rat race and going to the grocery store. There's more out here. Mother nature offers us a lot. God has put his stuff out here, and paradise is translated to garden, right? And the garden is here. It's everywhere. We just have to slow down enough to see it and enjoy it.

Jay:
There you go. Now here's your autumn olives. See these?

Dan:
These little red berries.

Jay:
There is not a lot on these, but some of these trees will be absolutely loaded. And they have little stickers on them, so you've got a watch, but you just slide your hand down and just work, like that, and you'll get the little berries will fall into the ...

Dan:
As soon as I saw these red berries I was like, oh, autumn olives. We had these where I grew up in New Jersey. These are the berries my mother told me never to eat.

Jay:
Taste it, try one. They're tart, but they're good. They're real good.

Dan:
Oh, they got a really interesting kind of mouthfeel. It's tart, but also kind of sticks in your mouth in a way that's kind of very-

Jay:
Tart and sweet kind of at the same time.

Dan:
There's a lot going on in one of those. What do you cook with an autumn olive? Anything you do with berries?

Jay:
Pretty much. They make an excellent little tart. So take one of those little ones about, I don't know what, three or four inches, small tart with a graham cracker crust, chop up and cook some apples. And it doesn't take much, maybe a quarter inch on the bottom of the pan, the pie shell. And then you cook these, and run them through a sieve, because you see they have seeds in them. And get that out, so all you have the pulp. And then you put that into your pie pan right over top of your apples, and cut three little apple pieces, kind of make it look like a leaf. And then you just bake it. And man, are they good? It's almost like strawberry rhubarb.

Dan:
Oh yes, yes. Yeah, maybe there's a little bit of rhubarb flavor with these. Yeah, I can see that.

Jay:
Yeah, it does.

Dan:
So Jay grew up foraging with his grandparents, but then he moved away from it. He went to college, studied global business management, got a series of jobs overseeing operations at factories and warehouses.

Jay:
Imports and exports, and law enforcement military-type gear.

Dan:
He got married, had a family, got divorced.

Jay:
My first marriage broke up and that was rough.

Dan:
What'd you learn from that experience?

Jay:
Everything has something good in it. Whether we see it or not, it does. But it's hard to go through. We just have to go through it and drive on. I thought, as I got older, life would get simpler and easier, but it doesn't, it gets more complicated.

Dan:
In 1992, Jay got remarried to his current wife, Pam. A few years later he was working for a military contractor. One random night he was watching TV.

Jay:
I was watching Andrew Zimmern, you know the Bizarre Foods guy.

Dan:
Right, traveled all over the world, eating all kinds of things.

Jay:
Yeah, and I'm looking at that, I'm like wait, I know some of that stuff, we can do this. And I was always wondering if there's a market for it. And all of a sudden I seen him, and it's like well yeah there is. So that's when I really started pushing it kind of passionately for to make extra money with, you know, to supplement my income.

Dan:
Because that was the first time you saw that it could be a business.

Jay:
Yeah. Yeah. I knew I could make some money, but you can make a good bit of money if you really do it right and have the time and the network so you can make that distribution.

Dan:
So you see this Bizarre Foods episode and kind of a light bulb goes off and you think there's a business here.

Jay:
Right.

Dan:
About when was that?

Jay:
That had to be in the late 90s.

Dan:
So what happens next?

Jay:
I actually start picking up the phone, calling any restaurant and asking, hey would you guys like whatever it might be. And a lot of chefs, believe it or not, don't know how to use this stuff. They go to culinary school, but they have no idea how to use some of our natural goodies. You know, it's a lost art. But some of them said yes because there's some creative chefs out there that like that stuff.

Dan:
In 2007, Jay officially set up his business, Digger Jay's Wild Edibles. He started selling to James Beard nominated chefs all over the region, in Stanton, Lexington and Charlottesville. In an article about Jay, one chef said, "When he shows up at the back door with a bag full of fresh morel mushrooms, as a chef, it's kind of like you start hearing bells." Jay can consistently find world-class ingredients just by going for a walk in the woods.

Dan:
What were some of the dishes that some of the high end chefs were making with your ingredients?

Jay:
I know there's one place over in Charlottesville that used ramps and morels and stuff like that, and the chanterelles in their pasta, because it's an Italian restaurant. So they would make dishes with that. And some of them would just put them on sandwiches. Some of them would make the traditional, you know like potatoes and ramps and stuff like that. Some people make apple pies and some cakes and stuff like that, some desserts with some of the stuff.

Dan:
But so late 90s, early 2000s, this is a time when organic food is starting to take off. Like you were early to this trend. What's the business in those early days?

Jay:
It was good. The demand was stronger than I can go do by myself. So I would say, hey guys, you live here. If you get me this and this and this, I'll buy it from you. And a lot of those people don't work very much. You know, they're mountain folk and they just work here and there, spotty jobs or you know, something like that. So it's a supplement to their income, you know, young families and stuff and yeah, they make pretty good money doing it.

Dan:
As the business grew, Jay's wife Pam helped out a lot too.

Jay:
She would clean and help prep and prepare and stuff like that too. There's some wild grapes. We've got plenty of grapes. I'm not going to harvest any of those. I don't need any of those right now. In the springtime, and if you had the people that could really get this stuff out, like ramps, I mean they love ramps, and you could sell hundreds of pounds of them easy in a day.

Dan:
Jay and Pam's business kept growing. Pretty soon they were shipping all over the country. Jay says they were making 20 or $25,000 a year foraging, about a quarter of their income. They both still had day jobs, but they were ready to take the foraging business to the next level.

Jay:
I was hoping to probably get a storefront and a finished product. We could do raw goods to those who wanted it and offer jars of jellies and syrups to those who would want that.

Dan:
So you'd have the fresh foraged wild edibles, you'd have some prepared foods. You have your little restaurant set up.

Jay:
Yep. Yep.

Dan:
That was the dream.

Jay:
That was the vision, yes.

Dan:
Coming up, everything changes. Stick around.

Dan:
Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman. We have one more live show this year. It's in New York and it's next week. My guest will be chef Angie Mar of the Beatrice Inn. She says she hates the term female chef. I'll ask her why. This is a special show at Trunk Club. It's a personal styling service that has like a lounge space in the Palace Hotel. Now, seating is limited, and beer and wine on the house. It's going to be really cool. Get tickets now at sporkful.com/live.

Dan:
Now, back to the show, back to Virginia's Shenandoah Valley and Jay Marion. As you heard, Jay had the foraging knowledge he got from his grandparents, and the business sense to get in early on a growing trend. Digger Jay's Wild Edibles was not yet at the point where it could support Jay and his wife, Pam. But it was a growing side business. The goal was that one day it would become their full time work. In the fall of 2017, Jay was profiled by the website, Gastro Obscura with the headline, The Mountain Man Who Makes Chef's Wild Dreams Come True. But even as that piece came out, things were starting to come apart.

Jay:
It could have grown a lot more, but I don't have the money or the time to drive it.

Dan:
Why isn't Jay able to drive it? The answer has to do with Pam, his wife of 27 years.

Jay:
I guess the big part was when she finally got sick enough where she couldn't work and then didn't have an income.

Dan:
Pam developed an autoimmune disease in 2017. She couldn't help with the foraging business and had to leave her day job, so the couple lost her salary. There was no way Jay could run the foraging business and hold down a day job on his own.

Jay:
We've kind of struggled all our lives, working together and trying to both go towards the same goal of success, whatever that success might've been. Then when she got sick enough where she was in the hospital and had to move out, and then that loss of income was really pretty much the devastating point. You know, that was the part that like, okay, now there is no money from nothing but just trying to survive.

Dan:
Meanwhile, Pam's health kept getting worse.

Jay:
She had so much pain in the back of her head, like right in here, that she couldn't function without heavy narcotics. It's all of a sudden it's like she really got sick, and she really lost a lot of weight. She wasn't eating or nothing, and it almost took her away.

Dan:
This past spring in the middle of this struggle, Jay got the opportunity he had dreamed of. Remember how he wanted to open his own place, where he could sell foraged ingredients, prepared foods, make it a little restaurant. Well, the owner of a nearby cafe came to Jay with an offer.

Jay:
She's like, well, I'm closing it. I'd rather see you do it than anybody else. And I told them, I was like, man, I don't have any money to do this, no investors, no backup money, or nothing like that. It's got to pay for itself.

Dan:
And at that point, it's been almost 20 years since you saw that Bizarre Foods episode.

Jay:
Yeah, probably.

Dan:
And you've been working towards this goal of having your own shop.

Jay:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like, well, okay, here's an opportunity. Maybe it's meant to be.

Dan:
Most restaurants don't turn a profit right off the bat. You need a loan or an investor or money in the bank when you start, to give you time to build a following. Jay didn't have that.

Jay:
So I knew, unless it really got busy, it wasn't going to do it.

Dan:
In April, Jay reopened the restaurant in downtown Verona, serving Appalachian comfort food, things like a country ham sandwich using local pork, and dandelion soup. People came in and things were going pretty well. But not well enough. Four months after opening, the cafe closed for good. Jay didn't even have time to start selling his own wild edibles there.

Jay:
I think if I had the money to invest in it and keep it going, it would be good, because the potential's there. I just didn't have the money to take out of my pocket and put into it to keep it going. So I was chasing my tail with payroll, so I couldn't do it. To be honest with you, it was a relief. It was a financial burden. The work burden, work is easy. But the financial part and the risk was greater than the pay out. So I'm like, eh, okay, I'm done. We got to be done.

Dan:
Pam's illness and her missing income had already emptied their savings. The restaurant left Jay buried in bills. Today, Pam is living at her dad's house, 10 miles away, because he's able to take care of her while Jay works. Pam and Jay don't get to see each other that often.

Jay:
I talk to her, but I usually work, come home, and go to bed, work, come home, and go to bed. And every once in a while I get to go out and do stuff like this.

Dan:
Pam's condition is stable, but she has flare-ups that put her back in the hospital. Jay's working at Lowe's Hardware as much as he can, sometimes six or seven days a week to pay the bills. And as he explained, when we got back in the van, that doesn't leave much time for foraging trips like this one.

Jay:
Logistically, right now, with just me and my hours that I work at Lowe's, it's almost impossible to do this, because this takes a certain amount of time to do it right and keep the quality level up. Man, without anybody to help you, it makes a difference.

Dan:
These days, jay says he manages to go foraging maybe once or twice a month. He's not selling to anyone now. He rents a room of his house on Airbnb, and when people stay there, he cooks for them using his wild edibles. The rest of what he finds, he eats himself. After a bit more driving, we turned down a dirt road. We were arriving at one of Jay's favorite spots.

Jay:
So the pear tree, up til last year, nobody's got the pears off of it but me. My goodness, look at them. There's bushels and bushels and bushels on there. And they are really good pears. And the persimmons. Look at the persimmons up on that tree.

Dan:
Oh my. There must be a thousand persimmons in that tree.

Jay:
Probably so. Isn't that crazy?

Dan:
It looks almost like it's lit up with Christmas lights.

Jay:
Yeah. Yeah it does. And nobody uses them. That thing is just drooping with fruit.

Dan:
Yeah, this whole pear tree is sagging over it because it's got so many pears on it.

Jay:
It's nuts, isn't it?

Dan:
Yeah.

Jay:
Yeah. So you can get bushels and bushels and bushels of pears right here. And you know, otherwise, nobody would use them or enjoy them.

Dan:
Right.

Jay:
When they fall, they usually are so heavy.

Dan:
Oh, look at that there. It's raining pears.

Jay:
They bust. See that?

Dan:
Oh yeah.

Jay:
But that would make good pear wine. There's a bakery over in Charlottesville, that she takes them, and she makes some nice stuff with them.

Dan:
I can't help but notice a certain irony Jay, because it's like your grandparents foraged out of necessity. For your parents, it was a little more of a hobby. So they loved, but they didn't need to do it, because they were moving up the socioeconomic ladder, they went to college, they worked in science.

Jay:
Right.

Dan:
And then you end up in a situation where you have to forage partly for necessity.

Jay:
Correct. Yeah.

Dan:
How did that feel?

Jay:
Oh, it's okay. It feels okay. I like doing it, so it's not bad. It's a nice office, you know? Right?

Dan:
Yeah. It is gorgeous out here.

Jay:
Yeah, And it does help pay the bills. I guess it'll get better. I think, you know, some day it'll get better. Sometimes you're in the mud and sometimes you're up on top of the wheel, and it just keeps going. When they fall they usually ...

Dan:
Despite all those pears in the tree, Jay only took maybe 10 of them. He doesn't have time to sell bushels and bushels. He's too busy working. I asked him what kind of future he sees for his foraging business.

Jay:
I'm not a hundred percent sure. I've tried to teach my son, try to teach my grandsons about it, so maybe they'll step up and try to make something. It's not about the money. I mean you got to make money, because you got to pay your bills. I get that. That's not what I'm saying. But if it's totally money driven, then you're going to miss the part of the goodness of it.

Dan:
And so what is that for you? What is the service? What's the goodness of this work for you?

Jay:
To have people enjoy it. That they can take it from that tree to a chef or a pastry maker, or somebody can make jams and jellies, and then they can do their thing and get it out to other people who would never, ever tasted what come off of that tree. That's the pay out.

Dan:
That's Jay Marion. His company is Digger Jay's Wild Edibles. Find them on Facebook. In case you missed it, make sure you check out last week's episode featuring indigenous poet Tommy Pico. A few years ago he set out to learn to cook, but rather than turn to the past to find an indigenous food history, he turned to friends to build his own. His new book, Feed, is an epic poem that chronicles that journey.

Tommy:
I don't have a food history. Whatever the military would throw away, came canned on the back of trucks, the commodities, the powdered milk, worms in the oatmeal, corn syrup, canned peaches, food stripped of its nutrients.

Tommy:
I says to them around the table, I says, "I don't have food stories. With you, I say, I'm cooking new ones."

Dan:
That episode is called My Food History Wasn't Lost, It Was Stolen. It's up now. Check it out. Remember to get tickets for our last live show of the year in New York next week. Go to sporkful.com/live.

Dan:
This show is produced by me along with-

Ngofeen:
Ngofeen Mputubwele.

Dan:
And-

Harry:
Harry Huggins.

Dan:
The show was edited by Tracy Samuelson and Haley Bay Ramdee. Our engineer is.

Jared:
Jared O'Connell.

Dan:
Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher. Our executive producers are Chris Bannon and Daisy Rosario. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

Suzanne:
This is Suzanne Bukush from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Remember to eat more, eat better, eat more better.

Speaker 8:
Stitcher.