Michelin chef Iliana Regan on the art of foraging, addiction and grief

By KATHI WOLFE

Nature makes me queasy. Reading about poison ivy or mosquitoes makes me itch. I don’t see myself in the woods enjoying the beauty of a pack of wolves. I adore eating all kinds of foods, but would I, in my wildest dreams, forage for mushrooms in the forest?

Sipping Starbucks coffee, eating a croissant I hadn’t baked, I came to “Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir” by Michelin chef Iliana Regan with a food lover’s fascination and a city-aficionado’s trepidation.

I’m glad I foraged into “Fieldwork.” The book, Regan’s second memoir, is a mosaic of memory, hope, fears, family, love, gender identity, respecting the land, food,and hospitality.

Regan owned and operated Elizabeth, the acclaimed Chicago restaurant, from 2012-2019. She passed on Elizabeth to collaborator Tim Lacey in 2020. Each year of its operation, the renowned eatery earned a Michelin star.

In 2020, Regan and her wife Anna Hamlin left Chicago to open the Milkweed Inn in the woods of northern Michigan. Regan forages in the forest and nearby river for the food that she feeds their guests This brings Regan full circle to her roots – to her ancestors, birthplace, and childhood.

Regan’s first memoir “Burn the Place” was long-listed for the 2019 National Book Award. This was the first book of writing on food to be so honored since Julia Child won the Award in 1980.

Even as a tot on her family’s farm in Indiana, Regan didn’t feel like a girl. The youngest of four sisters, she dressed in a shirt and tie. Her Dad, who she foraged with for mush- rooms, berries and other foods in the woods, called her “the son he’d never had.”

“I always thought I was a boy,” Regan writes, “even before Dad ever said I was.”

Regan, born in 1979, grew up with a heritage of foraging, Eastern European ancestors, feeding people, love, and addiction. Her father’s grandmother Busia helped her family run an inn in Eastern Europe. Later, she settled in Gary, Ind., where she told stories of the forests in her native land. In Gary, she opened Jennie’s Café, frequented by generations of steelworkers.

Regan’s mother married young. (Regan’s parents’ union was in many ways not a happy marriage.) On her mother’s side of her family, there was alcoholism and domestic strife.

Even as a child, Regan was careful to stay away from her father’s brother, her Uncle George. Early on, she sensed that this uncle was a predator who should be avoided.

“Fieldwork” has much lyrical writing about mushrooms, forests, the wind, honoring the land and animals. But Regan, who earned an M.F.A. in writing from the Art Institute of Chicago, is at her best when she writes, with unflinching, trenchant honesty, about we, humans, with our stew of strengths, resilience, sadness, joys, addictions and flaws. Regan is a magician with images. She’s a wizard at using metaphors of foraging and food to draw us into the stories of the people, past and present, in her world.

Regan remembers her mother as being like “the kitchen” and her father as seeming like “the forest.” In the middle of the two, she was “the sheep’s head — wily, twisting — and the honey mushroom–Stretching, symbiotic,” Regan vividly recalls.

Regan had three older sisters. She and her family were devastated when her sister Elizabeth, struggling with addiction, died in jail at age 39.

“Grief may be the worst thing I’ve ever experienced,” Regan writes, “and at the same time the only thing that keeps me going.”

“Fieldwork” will convert even the most nature-averse into a respect for the land and the animals that inhabit it. Yet, the memoir is free of new age woo-woo.

Sometimes, memoirs about addiction are too pat. People in them often end up in seemingly untroubled recovery. Regan avoids this pitfall. Without pretense or self-recrimination, she describes how, during the pandemic, she began drinking again after becoming sober.

Regan forages as much into her memories and dreams as she does into the forests. “Fieldwork” is food for thought and the soul.

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