Rewilding the Urban Palate
- Bhavna Bhasin
- Dec 8
- 5 min read
Updated: Dec 9
The urban palate is richer than ever. Sitting here in Bangalore, I can have a katsu curry, a matcha tea, a poke bowl, all within a single afternoon, in a five-kilometre radius. But something in this abundance feels unmoored, as if flavour has travelled farther than our sense of where it comes from. When I moved to this city in 2023, the first thing that struck me was how the main roads looked like unfinished paths, how the city seemed slightly undone at the edges, as if always mid-breath.
The second thing was the odd pattern you noticed when crossing neighbourhoods: everywhere you look there is either a brewer or a fertility clinic each promising its own version of cloud 9. But what surprised me most was how green the city still felt. Not ornamental, manicured or ancestral. Bangalore’s green was different: stubborn, liminal, half-feral.
Like many of us who grew up touching more cement than soil, my idea of nature was once something that lived elsewhere, far from bus stands, apartment balconies, and grocery deliveries.
As a writer, I’ve always had a compulsive need to find the names of things, to give language to the world around me. Naming is how I pay attention. Naming is how I learn to stay. So when I arrived here, I felt that old tug— the desire to know its trees, its birds, even its weeds. A writer’s GPS, if you will.
Feet that see the forest
Even the sensory rituals that once guided us through markets: choosing okra by its snap, smelling a papaya for ripeness, reading the year through what the kirana placed in front have slowly been erased. And with this erasure, we seem to have lost a vital language, one that taught us how to live with the land’s rhythms.
Fortunately, amidst this widespread erasure, a growing movement in Bangalore is pulling attention back toward the land.They are not leaving the city to find nature. They are finding nature in the city's very fragments.
When I spoke to Subhashini and Archana, co-founders of Foraging Trails and Tales, they both mentioned a Kannada expression that guides their work: kaadu noduva kaalu (feet that know how to see the forest).
For them, foraging begins in the body. The feet learn the terrain through patience long before the mind identifies a plant. The fingers learn tenderness from touching leaves. The nose registers the sharpness of a medicinal stem, and the palate understands the bitterness and astringency. The senses gather knowledge slowly, through repeated contact with a place.
Subhashini’s foraging journey began during the early days of the pandemic.
Subhashini’s own journey illustrates this deeply rooted knowledge. Hers began during the early days of the pandemic, when uncertainty around food supplies prompted her to revisit older stories. Uncertainty around food supplies pushed her back to older stories: families surviving on keerai kadaisal (mashed greens), elders gathering what sprouted after the rains, and witnessing the resilience of leaves that grew without human intervention. She began learning from people who still knew how to read the land.
Archana’s story begins even earlier. As a child, she watched her mother gather wild greens from their own garden. Chutneys, home remedies, and simple snacks made from leaves that grew uninvited. Through her mother, she learned a quiet truth: nourishment sometimes grows without cost, waiting only for recognition.
In contrast to Subhashini’s path, Archana’s story begins earlier, in generational knowledge. As a child, she watched her mother gather wild greens from their own garden. Chutneys, home remedies, simple snacks all made from leaves that grew uninvited. Through her mother, she learned a quiet truth: nourishment sometimes grows without cost, waiting only for recognition.
Their stories come from different histories but lead to the same transformation. Once you begin to see the edible life around you, the city rearranges itself.
The world beneath our feet
As they deepened their practice, both women began noticing edible plants in places most of us overlook: roadside cracks, abandoned plots, shaded corners under electricity poles, the margins of construction sites. These plants thrive without care. They carry a wildness that resists conformity.
Subhashini pointed out that even today, women forage from the edges of lakes and open commons. Archana observed how the same species changes its appearance depending on how much sunlight or water it receives. These details shift the city’s texture. What once appeared barren becomes a place of study.
Foraging softens the boundary between nature and city. It reveals their entanglement.
Tasting the Earth
Urban palates often prefer uniform mildness. Wild greens ask for more openness. They carry bitterness, sharpness, a mineral depth that cultivated greens rarely hold.
Subhashini believes the best way to introduce someone to wild flavours is the traditional Kannada practice of berike soppu (mixed greens). Combining several species balances their intensity and creates a complex, rounded taste.
Archana suggests beginning with Thumba (Leucas aspera). The flowers offer a hint of sweetness. The leaves are bitter and pungent. When cooked with tamarind or kokum, the flavour becomes layered and approachable. She grew up using the plant medicinally as well — for bruises, headaches, and colds — a reminder that wild plants once lived at the center of daily life. Both women describe the same foundational flavour: earth.
The Ethics of Gathering
Foraging carries responsibility. Subhashini follows what she calls mannu maryade (soil respect). This is a simple code: Take only a third for yourself. Leave the rest for other creatures and for the plant to regenerate. Pick gently. Do not uproot. Avoid harvesting once a plant flowers.
Archana frames it as a cycle. The plant grows from soil that nourishes microbes, insects, birds, animals, humans. And it eventually returns to that soil. A forager steps into that cycle with care.
This ethic becomes especially important in a city, where fear and misinformation about wild plants circulate easily. Many assume wild greens are unsafe or unsanitary. Foraging invites us to unlearn these assumptions.
Returning to the City with New Eyes
As I listened to them, I understood something I had been observing. Cities contain more nature than we allow ourselves to see. The seasons still speak, even through narrow strips of land. The first rains coax out tender shoots. Mushrooms appear overnight. Certain leaves arrive only after three showers. Plants come and go according to rhythms that still exist beneath our schedules.
Urban foragers are rebuilding this literacy.
Foraging is a way of returning to the land beneath the city. It helps us remember that soil continues to shape our lives. It brings us back into contact with cycles that hold more depth than convenience ever can.
To forage is to participate in this remembering. It is a small act, but it makes the world feel textured again. One that restores relationship, scale, and attention.
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