Nature’s Nutrition

Mother’s Day may be the only time of year we think about feeding Mom--and perhaps acknowledge that she’s fed us for years.

So it is with Mother Nature. She feeds us, yet we usually take her for granted.

Kathryn James, a member of Cold Creek Docents, a group that conducts nature hikes in the Santa Monica Mountains, will hold a demonstration Sunday that could raise our consciousness about mother and nature.

She will lead a hike, which she calls a “shopping demonstration,” in Cold Creek Canyon Preserve to show how Native American mothers put together a meal. The hike will be in an area south of Calabasas owned by the Mountains Restoration Trust, a nonprofit organization.

Participants will spend three hours on an easy downhill trail, identifying native edibles such as toyon berries, rose hips, chia seeds, pine nuts, gooseberries, mushrooms and acorns.

“For the local Tongva tribe, ‘meat and potatoes’ was acorn soup and acorn flatbread,” supplemented by foods people will find on the hike, James said.

“I give a ‘plant card’ with a picture of a different edible to each person, even the kids, so everybody has a piece of the day’s shopping list,” she explained recently. “Whenever somebody identifies one of the plants [from the card], we stop and eat a sample.”

James will carry the samples in her backpack and pass them out because it’s illegal to pick anything there, she said.

Furthermore, some plants cannot be safely eaten until they have been ground up and boiled to remove tannin or other substances that could cause a stomachache.

“If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can get very sick,” she warned. “It happened to me when I was a beginner at a wild-food seminar three years ago.”

To allow hikers to “nosh all the way,” as she put it, she has gathered her samples legally on private property, prepared them, kept them fresh by freezing them and even bought some items, including chia seeds and rose hips, from a local health food store.

Besides leading these monthly hikes, James is active in a group called the Che-roo-ko Circle, which conducts monthly indigenous survival skills workshops.

The group recently prepared and ate an “indigenous dinner” with salmon, which was abundant in Malibu Creek until it was dammed up and became polluted.

There could be a lesson here: The nicer we are to mother and nature, the better it is for us.

The hike is free, but reservations are required.

Call (805) 482-6142 for reservations and directions to the trail head.