Fat of the Land

   My new (this is Eric) blog is by Langdon Cook is Fat of the Land .  He is a forager and food writer who lives in Seattle.  He has a new book to go with the blog called: Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21ST Century Forager.  I don't see myself becoming a forager vocationally, but I do see it fitting in with eating locally and seasonally as well as taking advantage of the bounty that this earth has around us.  Take a gander at the blog and you might find it interesting.
    
   From the time I was a kid, I always found it exciting to find things in the woods to eat and use.  I cannot tell you how many gallons of blackberries I have picked as a kid.  And I still pick gallons more every summer at my mother-in-laws blackberry patch.  I remember one time picking tiny wild strawberries that ripened in May.  I think I picked for 4 hours and only got about a quart (OK more, but those were eaten and not counted for).  I remember that black raspberries ripen for a very short period of time the first week in June.  One year I convinced my parents to let me collect the sap from the sugar maple trees around our house so that I could boil it down and make my very own maple syrup.  It tasted bad, but I thought the process was cool.  Oh, I can't forget the bees.  My dad and I kept bees and I still did up until we moved to Wisconsin, and I found it fascinating that bees would collect pollen and nectar and make honey.  Truly an amazing creature.  Below is a picture of my bees in Knoxville (circa 2002) when they produced 200 lbs of honey!!  The beehive was taller than me.

   All of these foraging things I did as a kid struck a long dormant nerve in me.  Kinda like your appendex or your tonsils.  You don't need them now, but maybe sometime in the past, they served a vital survival purpose.  Every time I picked blackberries or fly fished for trout this long dormant nerve was activated and twitched in me a feeling of satisfaction, and also a feeling of 'rightness'  that I belonged doing this.  It is more than 'getting something for nothing'.  It itches at something more primal; more in the likes of survival.  OK, this is sounding very Michael Pollan (here is a good introductory article that Pollan wrote in the New York Times), but I think he is right.  Foraging and hunting are ingrained in us.  We have long since removed ourselves from it from a survival point-of-view, but that long dormant nerve is still in us and gets excited every once-in-awhile, more so in some (like me) than others.

   I have a foraging goal in the spring.  Wisconsin is well-known it's morels.  I am already staking out places to hunt for morels.  They say in good years you can get easily 20-30 lbs in couple of days time!