The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [196]
“But you must never forget the final theory, the theory of all theories,” Ben warned near the end of my morning tutorial. “We call it TPITP: The Proof Is in the Pudding.” In other words, when hunting mushrooms you should be prepared to jettison all previous theories and go with whatever seems to be working in this particular place, at this particular time. Mushrooms behave unpredictably, and theories can go only so far in pushing back their mystery. “It’s a lot like gambling,” Ben said. “You’re looking for the big score, the mother lode. The conditions might be perfect in every way, but you never know what you’re going to find around the next bend—it could be a sea of mushrooms, or nothing at all.”
The morning was spent wandering in more or less the same square mile or so, the four of us with our heads down, tracing utterly random patterns across the steep hillside, following trails of morels that went hot and cold. My gaze locked on a point about six steps in front of me, I’d completely lose track of my location in space and time. In this, mushroom hunting felt like a form of meditation, the morel serving as a kind of visual mantra shutting out almost every other thought. (Which was a good thing indeed, because my socks were soaked and icy.)
To regain my bearings I’d have to stop and reclaim the panoramic view, but because the day was foggy and the terrain was so heavily and deeply creased, I often had no idea in which direction the road was or the others had wandered. Every now and then a burst of static would shatter the meditative quiet, as my walkie-talkie erupted: “I’ve hit a mother lode down here by the creek” or “Where the hell are you guys?” (That’s another kind of pleasure mushrooming affords: Boys in the woods with walkie-talkies hunting treasure.)
It was deeply satisfying when the morels appeared, a phenomenon you could swear was as much under their control as yours. I became, perforce, a student of the “pop-out effect,” a term I’d first heard from mushroomers but subsequently learned is used by psychologists studying visual perception. To reliably distinguish a given object in a chaotic or monochromatic visual field is a daunting perceptual task, one so complex that researchers in artificial intelligence have struggled to teach it to computers. Yet when we fix in our mind some visual quality of the object we’re hoping to spot—whether its color or pattern or shape—it will pop out of the visual field, almost as if on command. To get your eyes on is to have this narrow visual filter installed and functioning. That’s why Ben had me practice on his finds, to fix in my mind’s eye the pattern of morels as seen against the forest’s layer of duff. To hunt for mushrooms makes you appreciate what a crucial evolutionary adaptation the pop-out effect is for a creature that forages for food in a forest—especially when that food doesn’t want to be found.
Without the pop-out effect, finding one’s dinner would depend on chance encounters with edible species and, of course, on fruit, the only important food source in nature that actually tries to pop out. Since the evolutionary strategy of fruiting plants is to recruit animals to transport their seeds, they’ve evolved to get themselves noticed, attracting us with their bright colors. In the case of the fruits and flowers, the pop-out effect is, in effect, collaborative. But just about everything else you might want to eat in the forest is hiding.
Wandering aimlessly and yet purposefully through the blackened forest, steadily turning blacker and blacker myself, I realized I had entered the existential opposite of a garden. In the garden almost every species you encounter engages with you. Nobody hides; nobody means you harm; your place in the local food chain is established and acknowledged. Everything you sense in the garden—the colors and patterns,