These Ramps Lead to Madness

A complicated love affair with my favorite seasonal vegetable

To navigate the amount of passive aggressive shoppers with poor spatial awareness patrolling the aisles of Berkeley Bowl, I believe that proper physical fitness is essential. It would be helpful to do some agility ladders first. Fast feet, a low, athletic stance and a neutral spine can help you adjust your shopping path laterally, slaloming down the otherwise congested and impassible aisles towards your objective. You should also be able to hold the bottom of a squat while holding your basket in a goblet position for at least five seconds. How else do you dodge the death stare from the immovable woman you just unsuccessfully tried to sneak around while she was blocking an entire aisle while overthinking which type of vegan marshmallows to buy? Being able to accomplish certain compound movements or “bowl complexes” is ideal. For example, you’ll need good glute activation and core stability to be able push off your left foot, letting the intense bearded man with a cart full of kombucha, IPAs, Bobs Red Mill Oats, and Dr Bronners head to check out as you then clean and press your basket up and overhead to permit an elderly woman to swing past on your right so she can peruse the newly arrived crop of persimmons. In my decade of shopping there, being in good physical and mental shape is truly the only way to get in and out of that bustling Mecca of fresh produce in less than 45 minutes, without spending more than $100, and with your sanity and faith in humanity intact. Your mileage may very on that last one.

Like many parts of Berkeley, where I’ve lived almost uninterrupted since I was six, I have a love-hate relationship with the Berkeley Bowl. However, I brave those congested aisles religiously for two months each spring. That’s when I’ll voluntarily swim upstream against the claustrophobic crush of uppity NIMBYs like a horny salmon on a mission. It’s the only way to reliably get my fill of my absolute favorite seasonal vegetable: ramps.

Ramps are wild leeks native to North America. A member of the onion family (Allium tricoccum), they have green, sword-shaped leaves and slender stalks with a reddish tint that form oval shaped bulbs later in the season. Their flavor is hard to describe but is essentially an earthy, savory hybrid of garlic, leeks, and onions. Imagine the texture of a scallion, the bite of garlic, the elegance of a leek, and the indescribable earthy funk of a truffle and you’re in the right ballpark.

I first learned to appreciate ramps thanks to Jesse Koide, my chef and mentor at Mission Chinese Food. I still remember when our vegetable purveyor dropped off a special delivery of them in spring of 2013. For the next hour in between my prep tasks I’d steal glances of him carefully cleaning an entire case of these mysterious, expensive, wild leeks. As he gingerly washed the dirt and leaves off of their stems and carefully trimmed their little roots with a paring knife I absorbed his reverence for this magical plant. A decade later I still remember the profound depth of the smoked ramp Tonkatsu sauce he made out of them to accompany a fried pork cutlet special. When him and I collaborated on a tasting menu dinner a year later, it was smoked ramps that stole the show in his savory take on “smoky gnocchi.”

After seeking them out for myself, my own experimentation taught me that ramps can be enjoyed in a staggering, “Bubba Gump-esque” number of ways: sautéed, grilled, fried, pickled, smoked, seared, poached. I embrace all of these to make the most of ramp season. Since their season is a few weeks per region and only a few months nationwide, you need to act fast and embrace your inner homesteader to preserve your harvest.

I’ll pickle ramps in white vinegar with mustard and coriander seeds to serve as an appetizer or hot dog garnish later in the summer. I’ll poach ramps in butter or olive oil and then freeze that to have an infused ramp butter to baste on vegetables, meat, and potatoes. I’ll slice ramps into coins and sweat them off in olive oil for pasta. I’ll add them to my eggs alongside lardons of smoky bacon. Ramps and eggs are made for each other. In honor of Jesse, I’ll smoke ramps in my stovetop smoker, then blend these into a homemade barbecue sauce for extra depth.

My go-to preparation method for ramps also happens to be one of the easiest. Put a pile of oiled ramps on a hot skillet or medium hot grill and sear until the leaves blister and the stalks start to blacken, then flip and repeat with the other side. Pull the ramps away from direct heat and allow to cook down until they’re a tangled mess of oniony goodness. Serve alongside your favorite protein or on their own as a decadent appetizer.

Ramps are a proud and essential piece of North American foodways and even if you’d never eaten one, they’ve still impacted the world you live in today. Anyone who is from, has visited, or heard of Chicago owes the humble ramp a nod of gratitude. The name Chicago comes from shikaakwa or chicagou, the Miami-Illinois word for ramp. Allegedly, the indigenous Miami people who were the first inhabitants of modern day Chicago, characterized the banks of the Chicago River as having a “skunk-like” smell due to the amount of flavorful ramps growing along its banks where it meets Lake Michigan. The Chicago River may still smell skunk-like today, though likely for different reasons.

It’s worth underlining that before they were a trendy vegetable at farmers markets in gentrifying parts of your town, ramps were a staple of many different indigenous cuisines across North America. The Cherokee would boil or fry them, the Iroquois seasoned them with salt & pepper, and the Ojibwa and Menominee would dry and preserve them for the winter. Indigenous peoples in North America also used ramps as medicine as well as food, treating everything from colds to earaches and insect stings. In Appalachia, where ramps grow particularly well, ramps have long formed the nucleus of spring harvest festivals and are usually fried alongside bacon.

Ramps grow naturally in forest floors underneath deciduous trees in rich soil. In mid April they emerge from the soil like periscopes scouting out signs of springtime in the moist air. Once their sword-like leaves emerge, they’re around for a month or two and are gone by June.

They’re the only member of the allium family that is foraged, not farmed. This makes harvesting them much more akin to fishing or hunting than gardening. Just like hunting or fishing, harvesting means killing. Ripping a ramp out of the ground effectively ends its aromatic lineage then and there. While the Cherokee would harvest ramps more sensibly, removing just the top of the plants so the bulb could keep growing, the white ramp enthusiasts who displaced them haven’t adopted this restraint. While ramps can technically be grown from seed or via transplants, it takes 5-7 years for them to be ready to harvest, and they require very specific growing conditions, so you'll have to make your garden or farm mimic a shady forest, or better yet, just move it into the forest. You now get why ramps have been so hard to put under the yoke of industrialized agriculture. While onions, garlic, leeks, shallots, scallions, and chives are now the chihuahuas and house cats of the allium family, ramps remain the elusive tigers of the bunch.

Thanks to their awesome, nuanced flavor and the tragically short growing season, ramps reliably whip foodies across North America into a frenzy each spring. I quickly found out that this was one food trend I was not going to be immune to.

Once I’d realized how much I enjoyed them, I went through the stages of grief that every other ramp enthusiast goes through, starting with coming to terms with their transience and then their price. The aisles of Berkeley Bowl had lulled me into a complacent sense that anything I’d possibly want to cook with from pineapples to every possible color of bell pepper would be available basically year round. Yet here was this boutique onion that was only available for a few precious months a year. I had to act fast and have a plan for every single ramp I brought home. This wasn’t just a pain for meal planning, however. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, for me, dealing with such a fleeting vegetable made me taste my mortality. After their magical season ends you have to sit with the fact that you’ll be a year older the next time you taste them. Just as you’ll only get to see so many World Cups and US presidents, we are all dealt a finite number of ramp seasons on this magical turquoise marble we’re all inhabiting. Appreciating ramps made me appreciate this reality in a new light.

Their short growing season and reliance on foragers in far away states like Michigan, Virginia, and Ohio meant that their price was astronomical for a vegetable, ranging from $13 to well over $20 a pound at the Bowl. While I’d sometimes see ramps from closer to home like Oregon or even California (I have to assume some grow in the Cascade and Sierra foothills?), the price was always in the realm of speciality mushrooms like Chanterelles and not workhorse alliums like onions or shallots.

While their rarity and price could have driven me away, they had the exact opposite effect. My response to getting to know this elusive leek was obsession. The more of them I consumed, the more they consumed me. For much of my twenties, from spring until early summer I made ramps my entire personality in the way some men do with IPAs or smoked meats. I hit the ramps hard and they launched me off of the deep end. I went ramp crazy.

Ramps are to this date the only food that I’ve cleaned a store out of on multiple occasions. I’m not proud of this in retrospect, but multiple bowl visits ended with me greedily buying every single ramp that Berkeley Bowl West had. This raised a few eyes at checkout and gave me some chances to evangelize my new favorite vegetable. To anyone who wanted to buy ramps during the springs of 2013-2017 at Berkeley Bowl West, but couldn’t, I am truly, madly, deeply sorry. My ramp obsession got the best of me. What pains me most from the vantage point of today is how my personal obsession is now becoming a national issue.

In a tragic yet not surprising twist for attentive students of US history, the popularity of ramps is now threatening their survival. Once a niche star of Appalachian festivals and indigenous foodways, ramps are now becoming yet another trendy ingredient in the industrialized food system, with chefs and home cooks demanding more and more each season. This voracious appetite doesn’t mesh with a wild plant species that takes years to mature and can’t be easily farmed. As a result, many are rightfully worried that wild ramp populations are being foraged into oblivion. It eerily mirrors how the Mescal boom has been bad news for wild agave populations in rural Oaxaca. A delicious but slow-growing rural plant species is “discovered” by the larger (and whiter) food industry, hyped, and then overexploited to the point of collapse.

Seeing the writing on the wall, some areas have responded by regulating ramps. Ramp harvesting is now banned in some parts of Appalachia, while in Quebec, where they’ve been banned for 20 years, there’s an underground black market for them. As foodies grapple with the dark side of ramps popularity, ramps may be on their way to becoming endangered. The USDA has declared them a species of special concern in Maine, Rhode Island, and Tennessee. One herbalist has issued a “ramp challenge,” encouraging her social media followers to avoid harvesting them. How far are we away from a Monterey seafood watch for ramps or diets that proudly avoid them as a way of virtue signaling? Why can’t we have nice wild foods anymore? Seafood experts are likely sighing in recognition at this last question. As a dragon-weary Bilbo asks himself, the audience, and perhaps Peter Jackson at the end of that ill-advised second Hobbit movie:

“What have we done?”

This might not be a popular take, but I believe that some of our most horrific acts as a species have been justified by the pursuit of delicious things. While mass religion rightly gets a lot of grief for its role in global atrocities, as a species we have just as long of a track record of hurting a lot of people and places in the pursuit of our historical moments rarest and therefore most prized foods. It’s not much of a stretch to argue that the exploitative modern day corporation as well as settler colonialism began when the Dutch sought to monopolize clove and nutmeg production in modern day Indonesia. What surprised me about learning this history was (sadly) not the horrific impact of the spice trade, but the order things happened. I’d always thought that capitalism came after colonialism, but time and time again it was actually the other way around: colonies emerged to protect capitalist interests, usually built around profitable luxury food stuffs like spices, sugar, and tea. Long before there were British or Dutch colonies in South Asia, there were the British and Dutch East India companies doing business there. The literal canary in the coal mine of slavery, genocide, and colonialism to come occurred when the Spanish killed off the indigenous population of the Canary Islands over the course of the 1400s and then turned them into profitable sugar plantations. This is a pattern the Dutch and Spanish pioneered but the British went on to perfect, a dream for their booming economy and a nightmare for millions of other people. Centuries of British hegemony over India centered around control of the tea and spice trade. Then, attempting to out-British themselves they also managed to declare war with China and inundate it with opium as a result of a trade imbalance they themselves created. Their punk offspring across the pond took notes, going on to overthrew a monarchy in F-ing Hawaii for control over sugar and pineapple plantations. Then, attempting to out-British the British and ourselves, we’ve since been involved in violent coups and interventions to protect US sugar and banana growing interests in this tragically non-exhaustive list of countries: Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. For a fuller dive into this, check out Johnny Harris’s more in-depth, though still heavily abridged history of US-backed coups video.

In my analysis, seeking out deliciousness is one of the most amazing things about being alive and also one of our most destructive impulses if left unchecked. Exploiting deliciousness is one of the oldest and easiest paths to profitability. The only more surefire shortcut to profitability is addiction, perhaps the ultimate most concentrated, taboo form of deliciousness, as our current drug war and opiate crisis both illustrate.

Our complicated food cravings continue. Today, much of modern chocolate is grown by children in pseudo slave labor conditions in West Africa and our avocados may be simultaneously supporting cartel violence and threatening Monarch butterfly populations, to say nothing of how combining them with toast is ruining my generations’ chances of ever owning a home.

Yet we aren’t holding all the cards. As our appetites grow more ravenous and fulfilling them becomes more lucrative, the very ecological conditions that support our favorite luxury foods are shifting beneath our feet. Some of our favorite delicacies days are numbered. Black truffles may vanish entirely as Europe heats up due to climate change. Bananas may go extinct due to diseases since the Cavendish variety we eat are all genetically identical. In France, wineries that have been making wine since the Romans are now reckoning with heat waves that drive up the alcohol in their beloved reds as well as “apocalyptic” hailstorms that wreck entire crops and devastate yields. Ramps precarious state, in this larger context is worrying but remarkably fixable. We just need to tone down our collective ramp fever a few notches.

To misquote one of my favorite Walt Whitman quotes, ramps are full of contradictions because they are vast and contain multitudes. They’re an iconic totem of the powerhouse allium family. They’re a hopeful, edible symbol of springtime. They’re downright delicious. They’re a cautionary tale. They’re a real life Lorax, an edible, ecological parable for us to all pay attention to. They also remind us that all of our favorite seasonal treats might be best enjoyed as just that: seasonal, regional treats. When we expect them to be too plentiful or too available, we hold them too tightly, and threaten to strangle the very thing we love. As our food system grapples with challenges on multiple fronts, a hug of death is pretty much the last thing we can afford.

When ramp season rolls around, enjoy it but don’t go crazy. Savoring a seasonal delicacy is as much about acknowledging and appreciating its fleeting nature as it is about relishing the bounty of the moment. Just as the rests in a symphony turn what would be a dissonant wall of sound into something delicate and beautiful, so too do the gluts and pauses of the seasons make deliciousness have a more complex texture throughout the year. If they bring you joy, I encourage you to buy some ramps and try making something delicious for a friend. Just please don’t buy all of the ones you see at the store. That last reminder is for me.