'THE PLUMS ARE dropping on Dorland," I said to a friend the other evening. "How do you know which ones are the plums?" he replied. As my friend rightly pointed out, store-bought fruit is often merely a distant relative of what you might find in the wilds of the city. Growing up around fruit trees on the streets, going to U-pick farms in summer, and carefree childhood experimentation with random plants have left me equipped to recognize some edibles on sight. Besides various fruit, I can eat local (though not necessarily native) plants such as nasturtiums, violets, oxalis, wild mustard, fennel, watercress, thyme, rosemary, sage, society garlic (an ironic name, seeing as the smell doesn't leave one for days), and some species of mushroom. I guess everyone needs a ranger – someone who stops in his or her tracks and stoops down to examine something that you'd never noticed before, maybe growing in a crack in the sidewalk, saying, "Have you ever tried this?" Sitting in a backyard on Cesar Chavez and South Van Ness recently, I saw enough possibilities to stay fed for a good summer week: mint growing from between cracks in the concrete, a couple of fig and plum trees, and a mere hop over the fence to the neighboring yard, loquats and, I think, apples were ripening. But I've only begun to tap the possibilities for foraged feasts, as I discovered from a recent trip to the library.

"Is there a limit to how many books I can check out?" I asked a shelver at the San Francisco Main Library, as I peered out from behind the teetering tower in my arms. I'd found plenty of volumes on searching for and preparing wild foods. Denizens of the East Coast wrote most of these books 30 or 40 years ago, back when eating wild was coming into fashion. The biggest obstacle for the layperson using these guides is that the plant illustrations are black-and-white sketches, making it a sketchy task (if you'll pardon the pun) to distinguish a sunflower from sumac. And you certainly don't want to pop anything into your mouth if you're unclear on its toxicity.

The books did open my taste buds to certain plants I already recognized but had no idea were edible, or how to eat them. Did you know that cattail pollen can serve as flour? Or that the cattail's young shoots can substitute for leeks? I didn't know that yarrow makes a tasty tea or that miner's lettuce roots taste like chestnuts. Wild-food classics like Euell Gibbons's Stalking the Wild Asparagus and Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop (and the rest of his Stalking book series) may not be useful for a novice forager trying to identify his or her first pigweed, but they're enjoyable introductions to the passion for gathering. Other useful books from the library: Donald R. Kirk's Wild Edible Plants of Western North America, Pamela Michael's All Good Things around Us (with color illustrations, lore, and recipes), and Anne Gardon's Wild Food Gourmet (mainly relevant to the eastern United States but with great photos and mouthwatering recipes). Margit Roos-Collins's Flavors of Home: A Guide to Wild Edible Plants of the San Francisco Bay Area is, obviously, regionally relevant, but though it was published in 1990, it still has the uncertainty-inspiring black-and-white sketches.

Alastair Bland, a UC Santa Barbara student, spent 80 days and nights of last year eating only what he could forage (including, with permission, in people's gardens). Turns out that figs, the iconically Edenic fruit, have a dark side – as evidenced by Bland's account at www.egullet.com: "Figs are members of the rubber tree family and secrete white, sticky latex that can irritate the skin. Having eaten approximately three thousand in three months, I am all too familiar with the potential consequences. Sometimes after a fig jaunt, I would slink home, bloated and heavy, with my mouth and tongue burning and actually seeping blood." Sounds like a job for Figaholics Anonymous. I recall a similar experience, minus the blood, resulting from frequent illicit trips to an untended apple tree. Take away from this last tale what you will, but don't let it stop you from the educated enjoyment of out-of-door edibles.

Should you feel squeamish about pursuing wild food, at least make your way this season to a U-pick farm in our surrounding semirural environs. Plenty of these farms are to be found in Brentwood and near Antioch – though maybe not for long, as tractors compete with the SUVs of encroaching subdivisions. Check out www.harvest4you.com or www.pickyourown.org for details on farm locations and to find out when your favorite delectable is ripe for the plucking. Or just stay home and eat your household bugs. Please send superior recipes for domestic insect fricassee my way.

E-mail Masha Gutkin at lydialeapfrog@yahoo.com.