Philadelphia Woman Shares Why Her Grandmother Used to Forage Dandelions. She Made Delicious Recipes Out of ‘Free Food.’

Foraging content is usually informative, and rarely does it bring people to tears. But after Marie from Philadelphia shared a recipe from her grandmother, TikTok was left sobbing.

“Koreans make everything into kimchi,” Marie explained on her Tiny Grandma (@tiny_grandmom) TikTok account. There, she shares stop-motion puppet animations of her grandmother cooking up her signature recipes. Marie’s grandmother is a Korean immigrant, and the recipes often come with a story.

“My grandma would wander out into the neighbor’s yards and see dandelions. As far as she was concerned, that’s free food that the white people didn’t want anyway.” Although Marie’s grandmother fuses Korean flavors into the dish, she wouldn’t be the first to turn dandelion leaves into a delicacy. Nevertheless, the practice is uncommon—most people treat dandelions as a weed with nice flowers, nothing more.

Misunderstood as an immigrant

Marie recalled that whenever people found her grandmother in their yards, she pretended not to understand them before running away. Needless to say, it’s trespassing—but Marie said her grandmother leaned into misconceptions about Asian identity to get away with it. Her grandmother’s foraging adventures happened back in the ’80s while they lived in an area with few to no Asians. Thus, many neighbors dismissed it as a strange “Chinese” activity—even though they were Koreans, not Chinese.

Marie was still in school at the time, and her grandmother would wander with an Easter basket in tow. That’s when her father would know that the “old bat”—an affectionate nickname he has given his in-law—has gone out to forage.

“Normally, we find her like a mile away from the house, having cleaned every single lawn,” Marie recalled. They would wash the greens before fermenting them into kimchi. They joked that her grandmother would “put the landscapers out of business” with what she does. But the dish that would come out of her foraging adventures would always be delicious.

TikTok shares their own foraging grandma stories

The dish is relatively simple, and Marie shared the recipe in depth in another TikTok video. But the initial story won over the hearts of other social media users. There was a lot of effort put into the stop-motion animation, and the unique recipe got a lot of attention. But Marie’s story prompted other social media users to share experiences of their own grandmothers and mothers, who also foraged for edible plants.

One commenter wrote, “We lived in Alaska, and she foraged in the summers. She taught me what was edible off the side of the mountain right outside of Anchorage. I used to be so embarrassed as a teenager, but now I feel so blessed she used to drag me out there to help.”

Although other Korean migrants in the comment section also recalled similar experiences, foraging is not exclusive to Asians. Dandelions are rich in antioxidants and known for lessening inflammation, and this is old knowledge that transcends borders. The French, Greek, and Italian use dandelion leaves for salads. Even one commenter on Marie’s video says her Polish grandmother used dandelion for her dishes.

They wrote, “My grandmom was the same, and we are Polish! She had a phase when she decided to pickle everything in sour brine, we Poles love sour brine cucumbers. And she also made honey from dandelion.”

These are heartwarming stories, to say the least. Foraging these days isn’t everyone’s first instinct when there’s always Costco and Walmart around the corner. But sometimes, people don’t need to look further from their lawn for what they need.

(featured images: Tiny Grandma)

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