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By Root 564 0

individual (childhood mishaps included getting bitten in the cheek by a seagull and breaking my nose falling out of bed), I have always thought it wise to maintain a healthy distance between me and firearms. Besides, you have to have had a certain kind of dad in order to join the culture of hunting in America, and mine, one of the great in-doorsmen, was emphatically not that dad. My father looked upon hunting as a human activity that had stopped making sense with the invention of the steakhouse. As a recreational pursuit that involved the certainty of going outside and the possibility of the sight of blood, hunting in his opinion was something best left to the gentiles. So in hunting my own dinner I would be starting very much from scratch.

Thanks to my mother’s more extensive engagement with the natural world, I did have some childhood experience as a gatherer. During the summer she would take us to the beach at low tide to dig for steamers, excavating by hand the airholes the clams had made in the sand flats until they squirted us in self-defense. In the waning days of summer we would pick beach plums that she would transform into a deliciously tart jelly the brilliant color of rubies. All winter long her beach plum jelly summoned memories of summer vacation: August on toast. My sisters and I also filled bowls with wild blackberries and huckleberries for dessert. Once as a teenager I gathered enough wild grapes to attempt to make wine. My understanding of fermentation was shaky, however, and after a week or so the sealed container I had put the crushed fruit in exploded, splattering the ceiling and all four walls of the living room where I had left it with grape-skin confetti. Another time I tried to make root beer from the roots of a sassafras sapling. The resulting concoction smelled right, but that was about it.

These elementary foraging expeditions were always accompanied by scary surgeon general–like warnings from my mother about the deadly poisons lurking in berries and mushrooms growing in the wild; she made it sound like it wouldn’t take much for a kid to get himself killed snacking in the woods. So I never picked any but the most iconic fruits, and while I enjoyed eating store-bought mushrooms, I never so much as touched one in the woods. My mother had inculcated a fear of fungi in me that put picking a wild mushroom in the same class of certain-death behaviors as touching downed power lines or climbing into the cars of strangers proffering candy.

So my fungiphobia was another thing I’d have to overcome if I hoped to ever serve a personally hunted and gathered meal, because wild mushrooms had to be on the menu. Mushroom hunting seems to me the very soul of foraging, throwing both the risks and rewards of eating from the wild into the sharpest possible relief. If I hoped to host representatives of all three kingdoms on my plate, learning to distinguish the delicious from the deadly among the fungi was a necessity. (Actually I hoped to wangle a fourth kingdom in there—a mineral—if I could manage to locate a salt flat within driving distance of my house.)

Why go to all this trouble? It’s not as though the forager food chain represents a viable way for us to eat at this point in history; it doesn’t. For one thing, there is not enough game left to feed us all, and probably not enough wild plants and mushrooms either. The prevailing theory as to why, as a species, we left off hunting and gathering is that we had ruined that perfectly good lifestyle by overdoing it, killing off the megafauna on which we depended. Otherwise it’s hard to explain why humans would ever have traded such a healthy and comparatively pleasant way of life for the backbreaking, monotonous work of agriculture. Agriculture brought humans a great many blessings, but it also brought infectious disease (from living in close quarters with one another and our animals) and malnutrition (from eating too much of the same thing when crops were good, and not enough of anything when they weren’t). Anthropologists estimate that typical hunter-gatherers