The Outdoorsman

The nature writer, in his own words, on the power of foraging to reconnect us to the natural world—and raise its next generation of stewards

Wild foods found me in my mid-20s. I’ve always been a nature buff—a birdwatcher, hiker, and so on—but it wasn’t until I moved to Seattle and fell in with a crowd of outdoorsy folks who liked to eat well that I recognized the specific charms of foraging. I was hanging around with a bunch of hungry grad students who couldn’t afford fancy restaurants but could pull on a second-hand wet suit and go free-diving for a delicacy like Dungeness crabs in Puget Sound. We had epic crab feeds in those days! I’ve been foraging ever since, now more than 30 years. At first, it was something to do while camping or hiking in the mountains, but as new wild foods landed on my plate, the foraging itself began to take on more importance until it became the focus. I started designing trips with particular wild foods in mind, especially mushrooms.

I love to learn. For me, foraging is a way to spend time outdoors learning. It teaches you how to read the landscape. You need to know your trees, your wildflowers, your weather patterns. The list goes on. You can never know enough. In the spring when I’m hunting morels or picking fiddleheads I’ll hear the songs of newly arrived birds—hermit thrushes, western tanagers, yellow warblers—and it’s like running into an old friend on the street.

Location: Seattle, Wash.

Favorite Spring Edibles: “Finding morels on a consistent basis requires an intimate knowledge of the natural world. I call it ‘nature’s Rubik’s cube.’ But what a fungus it is! Meaty, earthy, loamy—there are plenty of adjectives to describe the ethereal tastiness of morels, yet none of them quite captures their essence.”

There are endless reasons to forage: exercise, a good meal, time spent in nature, knowledge acquisition. I tell my students that becoming reacquainted with the landscape is chief among them. The natural world needs advocates more than ever; foraging is one path toward that advocacy. While we’re all descended from successful hunter-gatherers in the deep past, modern civilization has made such skills seemingly less relevant. We can just go to the supermarket, right? Being a forager is a choice, not a necessity. It’s a form of recreation. But it’s also a bridge back to that deep past. And maybe now, it’s more important than ever that we recognize where real food comes from, where clean water comes from—that we recognize what sustains life on Earth. •