The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [143]
“[T]here is value in any experience that reminds us of our dependency on the soil-plant-animal-man food chain, and of the fundamental organization of the biota,” Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac. He was talking specifically about hunting, but the same might be said of gardening or hunting for mushrooms. “Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.”
Leopold’s injunction was back there somewhere behind my desire to do some hunting and gathering, as no doubt was a line of Henry David Thoreau’s that had irritated me when I first came across it years ago. “We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun,” he wrote in Walden. “He is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected.” That pitiable, uneducated boy was me. But this boy was determined now to take up Thoreau’s and Leopold’s challenges: to personally hunt down and drive into a corner that whole charged web of relations with other species we so blandly call “eating,” reduce it to its lowest denominator, look at it squarely, and see whatever there was to see.
2. MY FORAGER VIRGIL
The desire was one thing, fulfilling it quite another. A whole host of hard questions now strode into view. How was I going to learn to fire a gun, let alone hunt? Did I need a license? What if I actually managed to kill something—then what? How do you “dress” an animal you’ve killed? (And what kind of euphemism is that, anyway?) Was it realistic to think I could learn to identify mushrooms with enough confidence to actually eat them?
What I badly needed, I realized, was my own personal foraging Virgil, a fellow not only skilled in the arts of hunting and gathering (and butchering), but also well versed in the flora, fauna, and fungi of Northern California, about which I knew approximately nothing. You see, there was this whole other complication I’ve neglected to mention: On the eve of this experiment I had just moved to Northern California, a place that is an ecological world away from the New England woods and fields that I knew my way around—a little. I was going to have to learn to hunt and gather and garden on what amounted to a different planet, for it was inhabited by dozens of exotic species about which I possessed not the first useful fact. What did people hunt here, anyway, and when did they hunt it? Which Plant Hardiness Zone is Berkeley in? What time of year do the mushrooms mushroom around here, and where?
As serendipity would have it, a foraging Virgil appeared in my life at exactly the right moment, though it took me a while to recognize him. Angelo Garro is a stout, burly Italian with a five-day beard, sleepy brown eyes, and a passion verging on obsession about the getting and preparing of food. Shortly after we moved to California, I started running into Angelo at dinners to which we’d been invited, though I noticed that only rarely did he play the typical, more or less passive, role of guest. No, Angelo was always intimately involved in the story of the meal. He’d gotten the halibut from a friend at the dock in Bolinas that morning, picked the fennel along the highway on the drive over, made the wine on the table, and brined the olives and personally cured the prosciutto being served. Inevitably he wound up in the kitchen cooking the dinner or passing platters of his famous fennel cakes to whet our appetites while he explained the proper way to make farro pasta or boar salami or balsamic vinegar, this last assuming you had ten or twelve years and the right kind of barrels. The guy was a one-man traveling food network, a poster boy for the Slow Food movement.
Eventually I pieced together Angelo’s story. He is a fifty-eight-year-old Sicilian, from the town of Provencia, who left home at eighteen, following a girl to Canada; twenty years later he followed a different girl to San Francisco, where