The Omnivore's Dilemma

by Michael Pollan

  Anthony e-mailed that I should meet him in front of his house Friday morning at six o’clock sharp. He warned me to come prepared for any weather. “We’ll go rain, snow, or shine.” He wasn’t kidding. The weather up where we were going was extreme. It could snow in May or be very hot or both in the same day.

  He also described the ground we would be covering. “It is very steep and rocky with huge, burned fallen trees and ground that is thoroughly soaked. Bring a hat, the sun is stronger at this elevation, plus it keeps cedar needles and spiderwebs out of your face and can double as a mushroom sack when your basket is full.” Anthony also advised me to bring sunscreen and bug spray (for mosquitoes), at least a gallon of water, ChapStick, and, if I owned one, a walkie-talkie.

  Suddenly, morel hunting didn’t sound like much fun. In fact it like survival training than a walk in the woods. I crossed my fingers that Anthony was just trying to scare me, and set my alarm for 4:30 a.m. I wondered why it is all these hunting-gathering expeditions had to begin at such ungodly hours in the morning. I understood why you had to hunt pigs early in the day when they were active. But it’s not as though these morels were going to disappear after lunch. Perhaps the idea is to use as much daylight as possible. Or maybe we wanted the early start to beat other mushroomers to the best spots.

  WORKING THE BURN

  I pulled up to Anthony’s curb a little before six to find two thirtyish-looking men in rain slickers loading an SUV. They were packing enough equipment for an expedition down the Amazon. Anthony was a rail-thin six-footer with a goatee; his friend Ben Baily was a somewhat rounder and softer man with an easy laugh. I learned on the long ride that Anthony and Ben were childhood friends from Piscataway, New Jersey. After college they’d both moved to the Bay Area to become chefs. Anthony told me that we were going to be joined by someone they’d met at the burn the week before, a young guy known to them only by his mushrooming nickname: Paulie Porcini.

  Paulie Porcini was part of the subculture of mushroom hunters who travel up and down the West Coast. They follow the mushrooms as they appear: porcinis in the fall, chanterelles in winter, morels in the spring. “These are people living out of vans,” Ben explained. They make a living selling their mushrooms to brokers who set up shop in motel rooms near the forests. The brokers put up signs to let the mushroomers know where they are and they pay cash. Then they resell the mushrooms to restaurants and food stores.

  We drove for several hours and gradually climbed into the mountains of the Eldorado National Forest. The forest is a twelve-hundred-square-mile swath of pine and cedar stretched between Lake Tahoe and Yosemite. As we rose, the temperature dropped down into the thirties and a frozen rain began to pelt the windshield. Snow covered the ground. It was early May, but we had driven back into winter.

  We were looking for the edge between the snow and bare ground. That’s where the morels would be growing. At an elevation of about forty-five hundred feet we found it. We parked the SUV and looked around. Soon after, Paulie Porcini appeared. He was a bearded, quiet fellow in his twenties who carried a walking stick and had a bandanna wrapped around his head. He seemed like someone who was very comfortable in the woods.

  The forest was beautiful and it was ghastly. As far as you could see, it was a graveyard of black, soaring trunks. For five days the previous October the “power fire,” as it was called, had roared across these mountains, consuming seventeen thousand acres of pine and cedar. The fire had been so fierce in places that it had eaten trees down to the roots. This left blackened holes where the trees had stood. Not much lived in this landscape. We heard owls and saw a few squirrels.

  A burned-out pine forest in El Dorado National Forest, south of Lake Tahoe, California.

  DOWN IN THE MUD

  That was basically the last time all day I lifted my gaze to take in the view. As soon as Ben announced he’d spotted his first morel, I began looking down. The ground was covered with a thick carpet of pine needles and the charred trunks of pine. A morel resembles a tanned finger wearing a dark and deeply honeycombed dunce cap. They’d be easy to spot if they weren’t brown and black. As it was, they seem to disappear against the forest floor.

  To help me get my eyes on, Ben began leaving in place patches of morels he’d found, so I could study them where they grew. I found that if I actually got down on the ground I could see the little hats popping up here and there. From above they were invisible. Of course, the ground was thick black mud, but that seemed to be the price you paid for burn morels.

  The morning was spent wandering across the steep hillside with our heads down, my gaze locked on a point about six steps in front of me. Wandering around that way, I completely lost track of where I was. To regain my bearings I’d have to stop and look up. The air was foggy and the hills were cut with deep ravines. I often had no idea in which direction the road was or where the others had wandered. Every now and then a burst of static would come over my walkie-talkie: “I’ve hit a mother lode down here by the creek” or “Where the hell are you guys?”

  When I did see morels, it didn’t feel like I had found them. It felt more like they had decided to show themselves. There’s something mushroomers call the “pop-out effect.” Here’s how it works: When searching for something, you fix its visual pattern in your mind. Then it seems to “pop out” of the background.

  FOREST VS. GARDEN

  You don’t need to play these tricks when looking for fruits and vegetables. They depend on animals to eat them and spread their seeds, so they have evolved to be noticed. In the garden nobody hides; nobody means you harm. Everything in the garden (or almost everything) is there because the gardener wants it there.

  Morels popping up through a bed of pine needles.

  Gathering in the forest is a very different thing. We didn’t create the forest. It does not exist for us. The morels would just as soon I pass them by. Even the bright berries aren’t growing there for us. We didn’t work to make the forest happen. It’s more like we are stealing from it. Alone in the woods, out of earshot of my fellow mushroom hunters, I found myself, idiotically, talking to the morels. Whenever a bunch of them suddenly popped out, I would cry, “Gotcha!” You would never feel like that with an apple tree in an orchard. Of course the apples are there—a farmer planted them.

  MORELS AND FIRE

  I’d completely lost track of time and space when my walkie-talkie blurted, “Break for lunch—meet back at the car.” I had wandered nearly a mile from the car, mostly downhill. By the time I worked my way back up to the road, the others were standing around munching trail mix. They all had pretty impressive hauls. “You couldn’t have picked a better day,” Ben gushed when I wandered over with my own bag full of morels. “The mushrooms are so on today, I’ve never seen it like this—we’re killing them!”

  We sat on a charred log (by now we all looked charred ourselves) and ate our lunch, talking about the mushrooms and the people who made their living as mushroom hunters. People have been gathering morels in burned forests forever; Ben mentioned that in Germany long ago people would set forest fires just so they could harvest morels.

  Scientists think that morels are a mycorrhizal species that live on the roots of the pine trees. When the pines die in a fire, the fungi face a crisis. Suddenly there are no more roots supplying them with food. So the fungus fruits, sending up morels to release trillions of spores. It is up to the wind to spread the spores far from the blasted forest.

  The morels are trying to escape the dying forest. Yet at the same time they also help it grow back. The slightly meaty odor of morels attracts flies, which lay eggs in the safety of the mushroom’s hollow stalk. Larvae hatch and feed on the flesh of the morels. Birds then return to the forest to feed on the larvae. The birds drop seeds that sprout on the forest floor, beginning the process of regeneration.

  MUSHROOM TREASURE

  After lunch we wandered off on our separate ways again for a few more hours. I worked my way downhill, slip-sliding in the mud and
following a stream that led to Beaver Creek. I had no idea where I was or where I was going. I was following the trail of mushrooms. Along Beaver Creek that afternoon the morels were totally on, as Ben would say. Almost everywhere I looked the dunce caps appeared, and I filled a bag in less than an hour. I had no idea how deep into the woods I’d wandered, and I was more than a little lost, but not to the morels, who weren’t hiding from me any longer.

  I felt, again, the gratitude I’d felt in that other forest, the moment that wild pig first appeared to me on the top of that ridge. It can be hard work, hunting and gathering, but if you come away with something, it’s almost by chance. You don’t feel your hard work has been rewarded. You feel more like you’re getting something for nothing. A gift.

  Before we climbed into the car to head home, a passing hiker took a picture of the four of us holding a crate loaded with morels. From left: me, Paulie, Ben, and Anthony.

  By the end of the afternoon we’d all ended up down by Beaver Creek. Around four we made our way back to the car. We changed our soaking socks on the tailgate and filled the entire cargo area of the SUV with morels. We tried as best we could to hide them from view. No reason, really, but a big haul of mushrooms just isn’t something you want to advertise. (Earlier that afternoon a couple of mushroom hunters in an old van stopped to ask if I was having any luck. For no good reason I had lied through my teeth.)

  We’d found sixty pounds of morels, it turned out—a personal best for Anthony and Ben. Before we climbed into the car to head home, we asked a hiker to take a picture of the four of us holding a crate loaded with morels, a huge one propped up on top of the pile. We were filthy and exhausted, but felt rich as kings.

  22

  The Perfect Meal

  Perfect?! A dangerous boast, you must be thinking. And, in truth, my do-it-yourself meal did not come out exactly as I hoped. The dessert, a cherry tart, was slightly burned. The morels were a little gritty. The salt I had gathered in San Francisco Bay was too toxic to serve. But for me it was still the perfect meal.

  I set the date for the dinner—Saturday, June 18—as soon as my animal was in the bag. Wild California pig would be the main course. That gave me a couple of weeks to plan and gather the rest of the menu. I made myself some rules for what I would include.

  1. Everything on the menu must have been hunted, gathered, or grown by me.

  2. Themenushouldincludeatleastoneanimal,vegetable,and fungus, as well as an edible mineral (the salt).

  3. Everything served must be in season and fresh.

  4. I would spend no money on the meal, but I could use items I already had in my pantry.

  5. The guest list was limited to those people who helped me in my foraging and their partners. This included Angelo, Anthony, Richard, and a friend named Sue who took me chanterelle hunting. Plus, of course, my wife, Judith, and son, Isaac. Unfortunately, Jean-Pierre was in France. There would be ten of us in all.

  6. I would cook the meal myself.

  SALT OF THE EARTH

  As with any set of rules, I soon found I needed to break one. The problem was the salt. I had learned that there are still a few salt ponds at the bottom of San Francisco Bay. On the Saturday before my dinner a very good-natured friend and I drove down to a lonely stretch of shoreline beneath the San Mateo Bridge. After an endlesstrekthroughtrash strewn wetlands, we found the salt ponds: rectangular fields of shallow water. The water was the color of strong tea. The shores were littered with garbage. There were soda cans and bottles, car parts and tires, and hundreds of tennis balls abandoned by dogs. There was everything . . . except salt.

  Salt ponds occur naturally in the San Francisco Bay, and are also man-made and controlled by levees in order to make commercial salt. Because they are so shallow, algae often grows in them in various bright colors, which you can see from above.

  There had been heavy rains all spring, making the ponds deeper than usual. There were no white salt crystals on the rocks, as I’d expected. We ended up filling a couple of soda bottles with the cloudy brown brine. That night, I evaporated the liquid in a pan over a low flame. The kitchen filled with a smelly chemical steam, but after a few hours there was a layer of brown crystals in the bottom of the pan. Once it cooled I managed to scrape out a few tablespoons.

  The salt I wound up with was greasy and tasted so much like chemicals that it actually made me gag. Here was a good example of how disgust can save your life. No doubt professional salt gatherers have better ways to purify their salt, but I had no clue what these might be. So I abandoned plans to cook with or serve my own salt, and counted myself lucky to have survived.

  PLANNING THE MENU

  Perhaps the hardest rule to obey was the one about freshness. I was trying to bring to the table wild pig, wild mushrooms, fresh local fruit, and garden-picked vegetables all at the same time. Once again I had to bend the rules since there are no good local mushrooms in the Bay Area in June. Luckily I had dried a pound of the morels that I’d gathered the previous month. I decided to use those. (At least I had gathered them myself.)

  For the appetizer I turned to the garden, where there were fava beans ready to pick. I’d planted them back in November, and by May I had scores of fat glossy pods. The fava is a broad, flat, bright green shelling bean. If picked young and quickly boiled, it has a starchy sweet taste that reminds me of springtime just as much as fresh peas or asparagus. But by June many of my beans were not so young anymore, so I decided to make fava bean toasts. I’d mash the beans with roasted garlic and sage and serve them on toasted rounds of homemade sourdough bread. (The younger, sweeter beans I’d reserve for the pasta.) For a second appetizer, I asked Angelo to bring a block of the pâté he’d made from the liver of my pig.

  So yes, okay, here was another exception to the rules: Angelo made the pâté. I also asked him to make the pasta for the first course: morels sautéed in butter with thyme and, for color, the tiny fava beans, over fresh egg fettuccine.

  Wild California pig was the main course, but which cut and how to prepare it? Angelo recommended slowly braising the leg, in his opinion the most flavorful cut. (To braise it, I’d first sear it in a frying pan and then slow roast it in liquid.) I was curious to try the loin, and grilling outdoors over a fire seemed to me more in keeping with the hunter-gatherer theme. Unable to choose between the two approaches, I decided to try both. I would braise the leg in red wine (Angelo’s) and homemade stock. The loin I would brine overnight, to keep the lean meat from drying out on the grill, cover it with crushed peppercorns, and then grill it fairly quickly over olive wood.

  I wanted to bake my own bread and decided it would be fitting to use wild yeast. That would introduce a second type of fungus to the menu. Yeast is what makes bread dough rise. The yeast eats the sugars in bread dough and, as a by-product, gives off carbon dioxide. The bubbles of gas create little pockets in the dough. That’s what gives bread its light and spongy texture. Bakers buy yeast in packets to add to their dough, but there is also wild yeast in the air. I found a recipe that gave instructions for gathering wild yeast, in a process that took several days but didn’t sound too difficult.

  After the main course there would be a salad. I had originally hoped to make it with foraged wild greens. Earlier in the spring I had found a lush patch of miner’s lettuce and wild rapini in the Berkeley Hills, but by June the greens had begun to yellow. I decided to go instead with a simple salad of lettuces from my garden.

  That left dessert, and for a while that posed a problem. My plan was to forage fruit, for a tart, from one of the many fruit trees lining the streets in Berkeley. I see no reason why foraging for food should be restricted to the countryside. In the weeks before the dinner I went on several urban scouting expeditions. In other words, I strolled around the neighborhood with a plastic bag. Since moving to Berkeley I’ve located a handful of excellent fruit trees—plum, apple, apricot, and fig. They all had branches I could reach from public land, but none of them had quite ripened yet.

&nb
sp; It was my sister-in-law, Dena, who saved my dessert. She reported that her neighbor’s bing cherry tree was so heavy with ripe fruit that several of its branches were at that very moment bending low over her backyard. I checked to make sure it was legal to pick fruit from someone else’s tree that is hanging over your yard. It is and I did. Bingo! Bing cherries for my tart.

  With dessert I would serve an herbal tea, made from wild chamomile. I’d picked the chamomile flowers in the Berkeley hills earlier in the spring and dried them. Then I mixed them with mint and lemon balm from the garden. I also had a jar of honey made by a friend in town. You could say the honey was foraged too, by the bees who made it.

  CHEZ POLLAN

  Now I had my menu and I wrote it out on a card. Being in Berkeley, home to many fine restaurants, I felt compelled to add a few over-the-top menu flourishes:

  The last item was one of Angelo’s homemade wines.

  I started cooking Saturday’s meal on Tuesday morning, when I made the stock and started the wild yeast culture for the bread. For the stock I used bones from both my pig and from a grass-fed steer. After roasting the bones in the oven for an hour, I simmered them for the rest of the day in a stockpot with the vegetables and some herbs.

  Gathering wild yeast turns out to be no big deal. The spores of various yeasts are floating in the air just about everywhere. Collecting them is a matter of giving them a moist place to rest and something to eat. Some species of yeast taste better than others, however, and this is where geography and luck enter in. The Bay Area has a reputation for its sourdough bread, so I figured the air outside my house would be an excellent hunting ground for wild yeast. I made a thick soup of organic flour and spring water. I briefly exposed the mixture to the air on a win dowsill, then sealed it in an airtight container. By the following morning the surface of the chef, as it’s called, was bubbling like pancake batter on a hot griddle. That was a good sign, because it meant the yeasts were already at work and growing.