One February afternoon, I pulled on rubber boots and followed the writer and photographer Prairie Stuart-Wolff into a weed-choked gully not far from her rural home in northern Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands. "The inoshishi got here first," Prairie said, using the Japanese word for wild boar. She pointed to an area of uprooted soil. Our porcine friends were after grubs, but we were hunting for fukinoto, or butterbur, a bitter leafy perennial and early harbinger of seasonal change. Clambering around a thickety slope, we picked our fill of vibrantly green fukinoto buds; the best would be set aside for tempura, while the others would be blanched and chopped into miso paste to make a relish. "Fukinoto is considered the first taste of spring," Prairie said. "There might still be snow on the ground, and the wind may still be blowing, but the earth is waking up. When I moved here, it was the first thing I ever foraged. I feel in a way that fukinoto is a symbol of my life in Japan."
This story is from the July - August 2023 edition of Condé Nast Traveler US.
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This story is from the July - August 2023 edition of Condé Nast Traveler US.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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