The story below is an excerpt from our May/June 2018 issue. For the rest of this story and more like it subscribe today, log in to read our digital edition or download our FREE iOS app. Thank you!
Digger Jay is keeping his grandparents’ knowledge and skills alive. And is now operating a nine-person foraging business that supplies some 200 restaurants, Jay Marion is also passing along the family tradition to his own 16-year-old grandson.
Jay Marion spent his boyhood summers with his maternal grandparents, who lived deep in the Alleghany Mountains of West Virginia.
“My grandparents lived their entire lives in the backwoods of West Virginia,” he explains. “They were born in the late-1800s. Their families were mountain homesteaders. They’d been raised using this knowledge to survive.”
“This knowledge” being how to read a forest for its scores of wild and edible plants.
And so Marion, the 62-year-old native of Verona, Virginia, came to adulthood with much of that knowledge.
“They taught me this stuff because they didn’t want to see the skills get lost,” says Marion. “Personally, I look at my business as a way of passing on that knowledge.”
While he’d always loved learning and teaching others about wild foods, prior to the mid-2000s, Marion says public interest in the activity was almost nonexistent.
Then came the publication of Michael Pollan’s 2006 best-seller, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” Advocating for a local-foods economy, the book helped spark a national farm-to-table revolution. With Swoope-based farmer Joel Salatin playing Pollan’s charismatic protagonist, the Shenandoah Valley and surrounding areas were positioned at the movement’s epicenter.
“In January of 2007, I heard a guy was opening a restaurant in Staunton, Virginia, that was going to specialize in local foods and figured I’d give it a try,” explains Marion.
That guy was executive chef Ian Boden. The restaurant was The Staunton Grocery—a precursor to The Shack, which opened in January of 2014 and has since helped Boden become a two-time semi-finalist for the James Beard Foundation Best Chef in America award.
Surveying the menu, Marion was impressed.
“Just about everything came from small-scale farmers located nearby,” he says. Furthermore, Boden’s emphasis on seasonality and the use of non-traditional ingredients like a garnish of fried pig-ears or roe harvested from West Virginia brook trout got him thinking.
“I thought, well, if he’s looking for stuff that’s local and in-season, maybe he’d be interested in what’s really local—the foods that grow out there in the woods without anybody’s help,” says Marion. Phoning Boden, he discovered he was right. Boden gave him the green light to bring by whatever he could find.
That spring, Marion launched Digger Jays Wild Edibles. To accommodate his day-job as a supply manager at Lowe’s, he started out foraging on weekends, hunting well-known and sellable staples like ramps—a kind of wild cross between garlic and green onions—and mushrooms. Camping near his grandparents’ old homeplace in Bartow, West Virginia, he’d spend Saturdays and Sundays gathering what he affectionately refers to as his “goodies.” On Sunday afternoons, he’d head home, clean what he found, and take it over to Boden. Whatever Boden didn’t take, Marion drove to Charlottesville and sold door-to-door.
