Last September, Dave Odd was on a hike when he stumbled across a patch of wild mushrooms. Less than a year later, Odd now sells foraged foods to more than 20 of the city’s top restaurants.

The 33-year-old, a comedian by night, usually spends three to four days a week hunting for produce. He talked on the trail during one recent harvest about where to look for wild food and how to stay safe when eating the food you find.

I was finding a lot of chanterelle mushrooms while I was hiking in the woods, looking for critters to photograph. So I cooked some for myself and I started taking some home. The first time I found them, I roasted them on the side of the trail with some beef jerky skewered on sticks. Then, a couple weeks later, I found a whole lot more, and it got to the point where I had so many, I didn’t know what to do with them anymore. So I went to a farmers market in Skokie to see if anyone would be interested in them and the mushroom guy bought them from me, a bag for like 20 bucks. I was like ‘Really? They were worth that much? Okay.’ So I started bringing stuff for that guy, and then another guy said, ‘Maybe you should start selling to restaurants.’ I started cold calling restaurants off of yelp.com, and some of them said, ‘Yeah, come on in.’ So I would bring stuff in and they would buy stuff off of me and they would recommend other places down the street. Now each little neighborhood has three, four or five restaurants all in the same area that I go to with my stuff.

A lot of times, I just drive around and look. I can just kind of tell by the way an alley looks or the way a railroad bed looks what I may be able to find there. It’s more of an instinctive thing at this point. For instance, there is a plant called pineapple weed. It’s this little short plant like a Christmas tree and they have little yellow balls on top. They are a type of wild chamomile and I sell a lot of those. For some reason they only grow on gravel driveways, I don’t know if it’s an acidity thing or what, but I can tell by looking at a gravel driveway passing by whether it’s going to have it or not. I’ve been down a lot of these alleys plenty of times, but every couple of weeks new stuff is popping up that I haven’t seen before.

Wood sorrel and these lily buds are pretty much as common as can be. Most of the stuff that I sell isn’t a matter of rarity, it’s just a matter of collecting it. A lot of the chefs know exactly where they can find the stuff. They just don’t want to spend the time having to look for it. So essentially what they are paying me for is my time, I guess. But I make a pretty decent living doing this. In fact I make more than I make doing comedy.

It’s kind of up for debate. I’m always finding new stuff too, but certain types of mushrooms are probably the rarest. Last weekend I went down to Clark County, which is about 200 miles south, and I found 40 pounds of chanterelles. I get like $15 to $20 a pound for those.

Especially with mushrooms, there is a lot of stuff you can only get in the wild. Same with these mulberries. These aren’t really cultivated, necessarily. That’s kind of the novelty of it; a lot of this stuff is only available in the wild.

I think I trust nature more than I trust people. Generally speaking, in places like this [abandoned railway tack near a forest preserve] there is no reason for anyone to spray any pesticides. And especially up here, it’s elevated so any junk would run down. So this is a pretty safe spot. But when you are in the alleys and stuff like that, you gotta kinda keep an eye out. You know what dandelions look like after you hit them with weed-killer — they all curl up — stuff like that is obvious. And then generally speaking, if you don’t know what something is, you don’t eat it. When in doubt, throw it out. A lot of times, when I find something and I have no idea what it is, I’ll post pictures on message boards. Then I’ll cross reference and check and double check. And then, if I don’t die, I know they’re good to sell. That’s a general rule.