Forage

Forage

We live in Northern California, which is perhaps unusually abundant, but walking from our house into the surrounding neighborhoods and open space, at various times of year we can generally find rosemary, bay leaves, yerba santa, blackberries, apples, walnuts, olives, lemons, oranges, and various kinds of mushrooms. (Be careful when foraging mushrooms, as some varieties can make you gravely ill or even be fatal.) And those are just plants that you can eat. We could make yet another list of medicinal herbs. In most places, the law says that if it’s growing outside of someone’s fence, it doesn’t belong to them. Any plant growth that hangs over the fence is up for grabs. This is called gleaning.

Americans often have a fairly prudish relationship with nature, which is actually reflective of disconnection, that says Leave it alone! Oh, don’t walk off the trail. You’re going to hurt it! And while there are, indeed, certain ecosystems of extreme fragility, native people have known and practiced for millennia the "tending of the wild,” an intentional and dynamic inter-relating with the living world, harvesting and tending it according to regenerative principles. This is shown to actually increase plant yields. Plants seem to like being used (I’m not making this up, and this isn’t something New Age. It is as old as humanity). If you want to see remarkable research on this topic, read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s astonishingly beautiful Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Dr. Kimmerer is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Environmental Biology, and the Founder and Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. Among other studies, her research has demonstrated that purposeful harvesting according to indigenous ecological principles increases crop yields and the health of various plant populations. Other indigenous activists and researchers have demonstrated that this is also true for the health of various animal populations. For example, in the Pacific Northwest, tending of the mussel beds has been key to their health, and in the absence of human tending (because of government-imposed ecological bans), population health has disastrously declined. Western science, in general, has extremely misguided recommendations around these issues. The Western forestry policies that emphasized not getting involved with wild lands have led to fifty-plus years of accumulations of fuel loads, which is part of the reason wildfires in California have been so devastating. Traditionally, indigenous people engaged in controlled burns, and other active land management practices, to keep the forests healthy. The Australian government, as well as western U.S. states, are finally turning to indigenous firekeepers and their cultural practices for guidance about how to manage the forests in the face of extreme wild-fires. These traditional people have been performing controlled burns for thousands of years. When white explorers first encountered forests in the southwestern United States, they experienced them as wilderness parks because of how well-tended they were. This was not Nature. They were tended by the indigenous cultures: wild-tended.

All of this is to say that going out into nature, respectfully, with reverence and curiosity, and gathering what is useful, in moderation, may be beneficial to us as well as nature. Of course, this must be done skillfully. As Dr. Kimmerer points out, part of the ecological knowledge passed down from generation to generation is about which plants to gather, which parts to gather so as to stimulate and not disrupt growth, and how much to gather—a restraint that we moderns often struggle with. As noted in the preface at the beginning, we don’t take care of what we don’t feel connected to. Although it challenges liberal sensibilities, many conservation efforts have been undertaken by hunters, and hunting organizations, because people who want to hunt the animals are typically connected to them, value them, care about them, are intimate with them, and are invested in making sure that their habitats are pristine so that they stick around. If you flip this around, and want to take this to its logical extreme, you might consider not eating anything that you are not personally willing to kill. This is the Old Way. In our modern sanitized situation, kids don’t even know where hamburger comes from. I’ve heard multiple conversations with young children and their parents when the kid discovers that their burger was once a cow. They feel betrayed. They didn’t know that. If you ask a 5-year-old where the hamburger comes from, they’ll tell you it comes from the store, and they’re right. But because our food systems at industrial scale are not actually tied back to their sources, because what they actually do is veiled, we don’t hear, every time we walk up to the butcher counter, the screaming of animals. But perhaps our children would be better off if they knew.

I’m not trying to convince you to become a vegetarian. I’m just trying to stop you from dissociating about what you are actually doing. Through a connection phenomenology lens, all of this is about being in reality. About the source of our food, the cycles of life and death are involved. Foraging, hunting, fishing, in places where you are not endangering critical or depleted populations, connects you to the land, the sea, the source of your food. All of this is restorative, because it brings us back to reality, to finitude, to our responsibilities of stewardship.