It’s mushroom season in Russia, do you know where your babushka is?
A friend sent me a great article from The New York Times titled, “A Hypnotizing Hunt Leaves Russians Bewildered.” For those of you who have hunted mushrooms, you will empathize with the experiences of these die-hard foragers. But for those of you who are alive, maybe you will not. It so happens that when mushroom season hits, many people leave for the woods and some don’t return. No offense to the loss of loved ones, but I find this funny, not to be too sardonic or anything. There’s something humorous in the idea that every fall the rescue teams are wary of mushroom hunters.
Aleksandr Zmanovsky, who leads a rescue team near Bratsk, said nearly every year someone goes into the wild and is never found — often because of bears, who so thoroughly bury the remains of a body that “we will never find anything.”
An older generation knew how to navigate by the angle of the light, he said.
“If a person just puts on his sneakers and goes into the taiga, or someone drives him there and he doesn’t know where he is, then of course he gets lost,” Mr. Zmanovsky said. “I call those people the children of asphalt, those who grew up in the city. People who grew up in villages, they don’t get lost.”
Children of the Asphalt – what a telling phrase! Throughout the article I remembered our various mushroom adventures and the fear I often have of getting lost. Lucky for me, my neuroticism prevails so that no bear finds me alone in the woods, hunched over examining a potential specimen. And yet, I think one of the real joys in “the hunt” is this tendency to lose oneself in the meander. The act of wandering through the woods, just gazing at the ground is hypnotic. It’s also liberating from the silly anguish of city life, even meditative at times.
My desire to learn how to forage wild edibles has ironically grown from my urban lifestyle. Since college I have always lived in a city and always romanticized the great outdoors. Over the years I learned how to source produce and meat from local farms (i.e. within 100 miles.) I suppose the interest in foraging developed in two ways: 1. my wife loves mushrooms and introduced me to foraging and 2. looking at fancy recipes and realizing that some of the ingredients I could either grow myself or forage. And so began the hobby for hunting mushrooms and other wild plants.
The article also raises an important issue for me – how connected we are to our food. I will be the first to praise the local food movement and all its progress. The rise in farmer’s markets and home gardening are really positive signs. Maybe this is the first step of moving beyond “children of the asphalt.” That said, I want more people to try foraging. The experience of looking for an edible plant in the woods or at the beach or on a hillside is exhilarating. I don’t want to say one is better than the other, but if you want to truly connect to your food, I recommend the good ol’ hunter and gatherer method. What better way to boycott the industrial food system than by leaving the city altogether and returning to the woods!
Ah. How romantic.
Just watch out for the bears and the hunters and poisonous mushrooms and getting lost!
Related posts:
- The Dark Side of the Organic Food Movement
- Foraging (part 1)
- Success!
- Urban Foraging
- Immersed in the Northwest (weekly menu 8)
Tags: foraging, slow food, wild mushrooms