Taking our places: The foraging path to truly sinking in
Why we forage for mushrooms in the wild
Dear Ones,
asked: why do you forage for mushrooms in the wild?
"Over here! It's HUGE!" My wife Yuhong pointed to the forest floor, just a few feet away from the winding trail that took us through the Sierra Nevada mountains. A tan dinner plate-sized dome poked through the dirt, looking unnaturally smooth and clean among the forest debris. It was the telltale sign of a Boletus grand edulus, or the California King Bolete, or the Porcini--many names for the most prized fungus in this part of the world. They are sold for US$50 a pound in bougie shops, if they are even in season.
Back at home and bent over the kitchen sink, I cleaned our bounty. It took hours to peel off the skin of the slippery caps, remove the spongy undercaps, and cut away the worm-eaten parts. Yuhong and I cherished our kitchen time together, as we caught up on our respective conversations with our friends during the trip. "Oh she told you this...?" "Yeah we gossiped about..." We giggled over inside jokes. Soon the processed piles became cream of mushroom soup, pizza, pasta.
The foraged fungi weren't enough to make full-on meals on their own, and these treasures are found too infrequently to be part of our regular diet. And the chances of encountering a porcini in the wild are slim; and we have spent countless hours driving and hiking, only to come home empty handed. So why bother?
I can tell you that it's fulfilling to have an alternative to the industrialized food systems, to take out the middle men, to take a break from capitalistic paradigms where everything comes down to money. But it's a drop in the bucket, and Amazon Fresh orders still appear at my door. (In fact, I "cheated" with the mushroom pizza--I had placed the ghee-fried slices on top of Digiorno's croissant crust with four cheese.) It’s also fun to show our friends what nature can provide, especially with fellow foragers who understand the amount of work involved.
But a non-foraging friend expressed alarm–he warned us of mushroom poisoning. “You don’t want to need a liver AND a kidney transplant!” We tell him we take caution to prevent our premature demise–lots of time spent researching the poisonous look-alikes. For boletes, we make sure the cap undersides are spongy and not gilled, and definitely no red undersides (that’s a Satan’s bolete–not fatal, but will get us very sick.)
Yes, nature can wreck us with her unpredictable weather patterns, wildfires, and armada of mosquitoes. Even the friend who warned us about needing both liver and kidney transplants takes calculated risks while flyfishing, traversing rivers in waders with water chest-high to feel the exciting tug of a hooked steelhead trout.
But for me, the risks involved in foraging help me face my culturally-ingrained fear of nature itself. As someone who grew up indoors in air-conditioned malls and houses in Asia, nature was something taught to be shunned, controlled, and kept apart. Only the poor live with the dirt and the mosquitoes—and the rest of us, we are kept “safe” and “clean,” and exiled from the natural world.
Therefore, foraging is a way for me to reclaim my connection to nature–to be less afraid of what is “out there” when what is “out there” is the same as what is “in here.” When I get to eat what I find in the woods, it feels intimate–like I am taking my place in nature, as nature.
Colophon
The title / subject line of this piece is inspired by Taking Our Places: The Buddhist Path to Truly Growing Up by Norman Fischer. It is an excellent read on the meaning of spiritual “adulting” from the Soto Zen tradition.
A huge thank you to:
and . They gave fantastic feedback, especially towards restructuring the second half of the essay when I went into weird third-person mode and became too distant from the subject matter. Sandra also had to put up with excessive alliteration in the first draft, and playfully reminded me to publish this essay over the past several months.A huge thank you to
for holding space and encouraging me to finally ship this piece!
Can all your posts be a response to questions I ask you? I have so many.
What a darling reason to forage. Should I read that book? What even is spiritual adulting?
Wow, what a find Christin. I like the concept of foraging as a way to connect with the natural world. In a similar way I feel like meeting real people out in the world is the equivalent of relationship foraging, rather than the curated and second-hand faux forging we think we're doing on social media to "network". Everyone once in a while you meet a person who is rare as a California King Bolete.