Selling free food: entrepreneurial foraging is the next phase of greener than-thou eating.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Columns - Column

AMONG VAST FOOD outlets, giving away a free meal is an increasingly popular marketing gambit. But not even Col. Sanders can keep pace with the offerings of Mother Nature. Every day, in city parks and urban median strips, in backyards, on public beaches, and in your nearest stretch of federal wilderness, the earth serves up her bounty: snails, wild radish, miner's lettuce, stinging nettles, nasturtium, acorns, blackberries, loquats, lemons, sea asparagus, Dover sole, New Zealand spinach, chanterelles, morels, matsutake.

In an age when we've come to expect music, movies, news, used sofas, and so much other stuff to be free, this abundance has not passed unnoticed. Foraging isn't always legal. But just think of those huckleberries in your favorite state park as nature's MP3s: They are there for the taking if you are willing to risk the occasional stiff penalty.

It's not just the price that resonates so keenly with our current sensibilities. When Walmart carries organic frozen dinners and even your neighbor with the Hummer is touting the environmental efficacy and bonus deliciousness of peaches grown within a 50-mile radius of the neighborhood co-op, foraging represents the next link on the food chain of greener-than-thou eating. One consumes only what the earth yields naturally, without human coaxing of any kind. If Gala gives you blackberries, wild mushrooms, and fennel, you feast! If you're stuck with a briny mound of sea asparagus, well, at least it's free.

Though not always. All across America, enterprising eco-aggregators are engaged in the somewhat paradoxical pursuit of commercialized foraging, leading mushroom-hunting safaris in forests and selling wild-harvested dandelion roots in bulk on the Internet. Iso Rabins, a 28-year-old resident of San Francisco, joined their ranks two years ago, when he started organizing wild kitchens" paid events where diners enjoy "rambling dinner[s] of wild foraged foods" in private locales around the Bay Area. A few months later, Rabins added home delivery of food boxes to his menu of services. For $40 to $80 per box, subscribers get a steady supply of nettles, berries, and other wild foods without having to root around any further than their doorstep.

More recently, Rabins has been the driving force behind an increasingly popular Underground Farmer's Market. "To sell at a [typical] farmers market, you need to produce your wares in a commercial kitchen" he explained on his blog last December. "This is an...