The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [145]
Hiking in the Berkeley Hills one afternoon in January I noticed a narrow shady path dropping off the main trail into the woods, and I followed it down into a grove of big oaks and bay laurel trees. I’d read that chanterelles came up this time of year around old live oak trees, so I kept an eye out. The only place I’d seen a chanterelle before was over pasta or in the market, but I knew I was looking for a yellowish-orange and thickly built trumpet. I scanned the leaf litter around a couple of oaks but saw nothing. Just when I’d given up and turned to head back, however, I noticed a bright, yolky glimmer of something pushing up the carpet of leaves not two feet from where I’d just stepped. I brushed away the leaves and there it was, this big, fleshy, vase-shaped mushroom that I was dead certain had to be a chanterelle.
Or was it?
How certain was that?
I took the mushroom home, brushed off the soil, and put it on a plate, then pulled out my field guides to see if I could confirm the identification. Everything matched up: the color, the faint apricot smell, the asymmetrical trumpet shape on top, the underside etched in a shallow pattern of “false” gills. I felt fairly confident. But confident enough to eat it? Not quite. The field guide mentioned something called a “false chanterelle” that had slightly “thinner” gills. Uh oh. Thinner, thicker: These were relative terms; how could I tell if the gills I was looking at were thin or thick ones? Compared to what? My mother’s mycophobic warnings rang in my ears. I couldn’t trust my eyes. I couldn’t quite trust the field guide. So whom could I trust? Angelo! But that meant driving my lone mushroom across the bridge to San Francisco, which seemed excessive. My desire to sauté and eat my first-found chanterelle squabbled with my doubts about it, slender as they were. But by now I had passed the point of being able to enjoy this putative chanterelle without anxiety, so I threw it out.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had impaled myself that afternoon on the horns of the omnivore’s dilemma.
SIXTEEN
THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA
1. GOOD TO EAT, GOOD TO THINK
My encounter with the chanterelle—or was it a false chanterelle?—put me in touch with one of the most elemental facts about human eating: It can be dangerous, and even when it isn’t dangerous, it is fraught. The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he’s pretty much on his own.
As noted at the beginning of this book, the omnivore’s dilemma, or paradox, was first described in the 1976 paper, “The Selection of Foods by Rats, Humans, and Other Animals,” by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul Rozin. Rozin studied food selection behavior in rats, which are omnivores, in the hopes of understanding something about food selection in people. Like us, rats daily confront the bounty of nature and its manifold perils—perils designed to protect plants, animals, and microbes from being eaten. To defend themselves from predation, plants and fungi produce a great many poisons, everything from cyanide and oxalic acid to a wide variety of toxic alkaloids and glucosides; similarly, bacteria colonizing dead plants and animals produce toxins to keep other potential eaters at bay. (Also similarly, we humans manufacture toxins to keep rats from