Foraging Adventures

An intimate look at how foraging restores our connection to the city’s forgotten ecologies and rewilds the urban palate.

In Coorg’s monsoon, the author encounters maddu thoppu — a rare “medicine leaf” that appears for only a few weeks. Foraged from shaded forest corners and boiled into a deep indigo liquid believed to heal, it’s folded into rice or sweet payasa. For the author, tasting it feels like the forest’s quiet permission to belong — a fleeting gift offered only at the wild peak of the rains.

Nisha Thomas, a city-dweller-turned-farmer, reflects on the fleeting joys of foraging wild kumm in Coorg and the deeper belonging she’s found in the mist and memory of monsoon rains.