Or, rather, what has only recently become usual. My interest piqued by imagining the lives of my chicken and goose, I seek out books about the industrialization of food, which I am startled to discover is such a recent phenomenon. Agriculture itself is only about eleven thousand years old. In An Edible History of Humanity, Tom Standage tells us that if all of man’s 150,000-year history were likened to one hour, “it is only in the last four and a half minutes that humans began to adopt farming, and agriculture only became the dominant means of providing human subsistence in the last minute and a half.”
Today more than nine out of ten land animals killed for food in the United States are broilers. Fast-food chain KFC alone buys nearly one billion per year. On top of that, more than 250 million chicks are destroyed each year, most of them layers who—oops!—turned out to be males. Michael Pollan writes: “The industrialization—and brutalization—of animals in America is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do.”
I read through stacks of books on modern food production, and the more I learn about the treatment of livestock, the more enthusiastic I become about hunting as a compassionate, alternative meat source. These animals are free-range, and if their lives are not exactly easy—life in the wild is full of hardship—well, at least they are free. Before it lands on my dinner plate, a wild duck gets a chance to be a real duck, to dabble and splash and migrate and do everything that other ducks have done for thousands of years.
The meat that I buy from the grocery store cannot be as special to me as the meat I hunt and kill myself. But those few, extraordinary meals that result from a hunt can—and do—change the way that I feel about even boring old livestock that I still buy from the grocery store. As I nick the plastic with my knife and unwrap the seal around a package of boneless, skinless chicken breasts, for example, I recognize the taut, quivery flesh of my pheasant. I recognize the graceful curve that was once covered by skin and adorned with feathers. My experiences in start-to-finish butchery have granted me the ability to mentally rebuild the bird, bone by bone, slice by slice, pluck by pluck. I can picture its former self, like a ghost. Until even the floppiest, most unrecognizably boneless, skinless cutlet is no longer just a piece of meat. It’s a piece of an animal. A piece of its life.
I used to forgo packages of thighs or breasts in favor of a whole animal—a chicken or turkey—only once or twice a year. Just rinsing it, patting it dry and placing it in the roasting pan felt daunting. Its animalness was too obvious, too on display. I felt guilty and clumsy while handling it raw. I hurried to get it in the oven, so it could be transformed into something easier to sit with—a browned, aromatic meal. But with each animal that I gut and dress, I gain confidence. I begin to buy whole chickens from the supermarket, instead of packages of breasts or thighs. It’s cheaper this way. And there is less waste—something that is becoming important to me.
A 2009 study found that more than 40 percent of all food produced in the United States is thrown away instead of eaten. Waste occurs during food manufacturing and distribution, but most of it is attributable to consumers who buy the food and then throw it away. After shooting a bird and seeing it as not only a piece of meat but a whole life, I find myself loath to throw away even a scrap of meat.
Something else happens—unrelated to hunting—that makes me even more conscientious about wasting food. Scott and I become friends with an elderly man named Raymond who lives next door to us. Raymond lives in the same seafoam-green bungalow where he was born. It has two bedrooms and one bathroom. Raymond was born with some sort of developmental disability, one whose name we never learn. When he speaks, he slurs and is hard to understand. With nothing but meager Social Security and disability payments to keep him afloat, Raymond must pinch pennies to make sure he has enough to eat each day. Soon Scott and I find ourselves driving Raymond to various grocery stores so he can take advantage of coupons. Each outing turns into a long ordeal. He doesn’t read very well, so it takes him several minutes to discern whether a sale price applies to a particular can of stewed tomatoes. Sometimes I can’t bear to look at the canned chili and stale donuts in Raymond’s grocery cart. Because he is always seeking the best deal, he rarely ends up with the makings of a healthy diet.
I think of Raymond when we finish eating a well-balanced meal. If we have leftovers, I pack them into Tupper-ware containers and carry them next door. Every once in a while, we invite Raymond to eat dinner with us.
One night, Raymond sits at our table and tells us a story we’ve already heard dozens of times: After his father got into a car accident and was unable to work at the lumber mill in Bend, the government awarded him a scholarship to go back to school to learn a new trade. The whole family moved to Klamath Falls, about 130 miles south of Bend, for two years.
“Did you like Klamath Falls?” I poke around for a new layer in this oft-cited tale.
“Eh,” he says, shrugging. “It was okay. Not as good as Bend.”
“Why not?”
“The water didn’t taste as good.”
Occasionally, Raymond does this: He reduces something to such a basic level that he ends up saying something profound. After all, when considering how to rank two small eastern Oregon towns, what could be more essential than comparing the quality of our most basic need?
Living in Bend for more than four years, I’ve thought a lot about what makes a place worth calling home. I’ve grown frustrated at work, and I’m toying with the idea of applying for jobs in other states. Reporters move a lot, which is just a fact of the profession. And I’ve been here so much longer than I ever planned. Maybe it’s time to move up to a bigger, more respected newspaper. I browse the dwindling job ads, but it’s a tough time to be in the market for a reporting gig. In my head, I turn over the name of each place—Anchorage, Salt Lake City, Sarasota—and wonder if it would be worth it to move there.
I’ve always seen myself as a city person, but now that I’m faced with the choice of staying in Bend or moving to an only slightly larger city, I find myself reconsidering what it is that appeals to me about cities. The diversity interests me most, the hodgepodge of languages and backgrounds, the variety of ethnic foods, the array of nightlife. More people means more chances to make friends, right? But I can’t shake this niggling feeling that maybe these things aren’t what I want, after all. Maybe what I’m finding right here—in Bend and the surrounding landscape—is just as valuable.
I hash out my dilemma with Scott. He tells me that he will go wherever I want, but I can tell that deep down, he wants to stay in Bend. For the umpteenth time, I run through the pros and cons of moving to a larger city, a larger paper. When I ask for his opinion, he sighs.
“Lil, I don’t think about these things the same way you do.”
“What do you mean? You don’t ever think about leaving your job for something bigger and better?”
“I don’t know.” He pauses. “I guess I don’t want as much as you do. I mean, yes, I want a job that gives me some amount of satisfaction. But at the end of the day, it’s always going to be just a job to me. More than anything, I want to come home to you. I want us to go camping on the weekends, maybe fishing, maybe skiing. Maybe go to a movie, maybe stay home and read. That’s all I want.”
I’m embarrassed that I’ve spent so little time thinking about how much good is in my life right now, right as it is. The things that Scott just framed as modest desires, aren’t they really the biggest, most important things in life? Someone to love, a decent income, hobbies that make us happy. Why should I—why should anyone—want more than that?
In the fall, our friend Betsy takes us mushroom picking. Mushroom hunting—like animal hunting—had a bad reputation in my family when I was growing up. We actually knew of one person who hunted mushrooms on the way home from the subway station, which was fine in theory—there were no guns involved, after all, and no animals were harmed. But sti
ll we concluded that this man was crazy. All mushrooms looked pretty much the same to us. What if he plucked the wrong kind by accident and died of mushroom poisoning? How could one ever know without a doubt that a particular wild fungus is safe?
As with animal hunting, my life in Oregon has dulled these concerns. For thousands of years, people have foraged for wild food and survived. There is a body of hard-earned knowledge out there, practically begging to be passed on to other generations. The people I know who forage for mushrooms have reassured me: If you know what you’re doing, it’s very safe. (And if you’re ever in doubt, they add, you don’t eat it.) Only a few known species of mushrooms are, if ingested, capable of killing an otherwise healthy adult. Most poisonous mushrooms cause run-of-the-mill food-poisoning symptoms: diarrhea and vomiting but nothing close to death. Besides, after hunting with loaded guns, mushroom hunting sounds relatively stress-free. So one Saturday morning, we pull on comfortable, layered clothing and sturdy boots and gather a few canvas tote bags to carry our bounty, in case we get lucky.
In the car, Betsy turns to us and delivers a stern lecture.
“The biggest rule in mushroom hunting is that you never tell anyone where you went,” she says. “I’m serious. I’m showing this place to you because I trust you.”
This code of secrecy is common among practitioners of all different sports in Oregon. When I first moved here, it annoyed me. Anglers complained when a prominent outdoors magazine profiled their favorite “secret” fishing holes. Skiers lamented any published ballyhoo of their favorite backcountry trails. Hunters bemoaned that a guide led a paying customer to the clearing where they, unguided, shot a buck three out of the last five years. I understood the fear that a favorite, seldom-visited spot could suddenly become overrun with outsiders. What bothered me was the sense of ownership underlying that fear. I want to say to each of these whiners: You think you discovered this snow-covered slope? This deep bend in the river? This patch of browse? Sorry, bub, it’s the twenty-first century. People have scaled this hillside, fished this stream, hunted this piece of ground for thousands of years. You are not the first. This world is everyone’s to explore.
But when I try mushroom hunting, I sort of get it. There are exceptions, but the general rule is that mushrooms tend to grow in the same spots, year after year. And they don’t fruit year-round. More than one person can ski the same slope, fish the same waters, hunt the same forest. But if you return to a familiar, fertile ground and another forager has just picked it clean, you’re out of luck. Betsy has spent years hunting mushrooms with a friend’s Japanese American family. Her friend’s grandmother knew, for example, that one particular pine tree was surrounded by one mushroom species at a precise time of year. One year, she went to the tree and other pickers had not only removed all of the mushrooms but raked the ground. Some pickers do this to churn up every last mushroom, but raking can destroy the underground roots that would produce next year’s fruit. Betsy saw this woman mourn a true loss that day.
As Betsy recounts this story, I realize: What is the harm—other than grouchiness—in laying claim to a place? Perhaps that’s our best hope for protecting it: a constituency of people with real connections to the land.
Mushrooms are not technically plants, and they’re obviously not animals. They are the sole occupant of a third kingdom of life: fungi. The capped mushrooms that we’re used to—the kind you could slice and sprinkle on a pizza—are actually the reproductive structures of an organism that is largely invisible. It’s off-putting to think of these delicacies as genitalia so we use the more polite, poetic term: fruiting bodies. Unlike plants, which produce their own food, mushrooms must ingest nutrients from another source. The mouth and digestive system—the gut of the fungus—is a web of thread-like fibers called mycelium. In most of the fungi we eat, the mycelium is buried underground. In some, it weaves through a tree trunk.
Betsy takes us to her secret spot, and we hike around looking for chanterelles and matsutake. She quickly finds one of each and explains how to identify them. The chanterelles (Cantharellus cibarius and C. subalbidus) look like trumpet-shaped coral. Some are white with amber edges; some are yellow or orange all over. All are beautiful. There are a few inedible (only one is poisonous) mushrooms that could possibly be mistaken for chanterelles, but Betsy, an experienced forager, offers to confirm our finds for us.
The matsutake (Armillaria ponderosa) is rarer than the chanterelle. It grows primarily in the Pacific Northwest, though a closely related species blooms in Japan. It is white and unremarkable-looking, similar to the cultivated mushrooms sold at any grocery store. But then Betsy turns it upside down and instructs us to inhale, our noses to its gills. The spicy fragrance is unlike anything I’ve ever smelled. In what will become my favorite mushroom guidebook, Mushrooms Demystified, David Arora describes it as “a provocative compromise between ‘red hots’ and dirty socks.” To me, the scent is an earthy-citrusy combination, like fresh grapefruit squeezed over rich, loamy soil.
We spread out and begin walking across the forest, eyes trained on the floor. Betsy has an almost superhuman ability to spy mushrooms from several yards away. But to my eyes, a few dried pine needles and the dim forest light manage to camouflage even the brightest chanterelles. The matsutake are even more difficult to spot because you can rarely glimpse the mushroom itself. Instead, you look for a raised clump of duff and then use a stick to nudge it over, hoping to unearth a white mushroom cap. Betsy advises us to crouch down, to better notice any promising divots.
I find myself enjoying this search even though I’m not picking anything. I notice parts of nature that I would normally overlook—lacy bits of lichen, fluorescent green and robin’s-egg blue, strewn along the ground. And though I’m not seeing either type of edible mushroom that we’re targeting, I do see mushrooms galore. Small purple toadstools poke out of black soil. Glistening smooth caps perched atop slender stems pepper a mossy log, as if slimy mushrooms were cast in the artistic reenactment of an ant colony. Shelf mushrooms jut out from the trunks of live trees.
I bend over to examine yet another mound of duff that is probably just that. A white ridge seems to protrude from the clump of soil. I take my stick and flip over the clump. And there, lying exposed, is a giant white mushroom cap. I gasp.
“Betsy,” I yell, “I think I found one!”
I drop my stick and use my hands to shovel soil away from the stem. Next I grasp the thick stalk and rock the whole mushroom back and forth until it tears away from the ground. It’s magnificent—the top is more than six inches in diameter, and its whole being reeks of that strange, fruity scent. But it’s bigger than the matsutake Scott and Betsy have found so far, most of them just a couple of inches wide. And the cap is less spherical, more convex. Could this really be the same species?
Betsy appears beside me.
“That’s huge! Is it a matsutake?”
“I’m not really sure.”
I’m almost shaking as she takes the giant mushroom, turns it over and smells it. “Mmmm… It’s definitely a matsutake. Good find!”
For the rest of the day, I feel giddy.
Mushroom hunting as recreation has developed a sort of whimsical persona. The species bear common names that are anything but—angel wing, man on horseback, ma’am on motorcycle, shaggy parasol, poor man’s slippery jack, dead man’s foot. When mushrooms pop up in naturally occurring circles, the formations are called “fairy rings.” Certain mushrooms, called candy caps, have a sugary taste when dried. Foragers pick them, dry them, chop them up and bake them in cookies or sprinkle them on ice cream.
I haven’t admitted this to Betsy but the truth is, I don’t like eating regular mushrooms. The texture and the taste are just a little too unusual, although I will choke them down to be polite or sometimes out of laziness. With these wild mushrooms, however, I can’t wait to dig in. Finding them was such a joy that I expect their taste will be, too.
We cook only the chanterelles the first evening.
Some people have allergic reactions to wild mushrooms, so Betsy warns us to take precautions. We eat just a small amount of one type of mushroom at a time. And we don’t drink much alcohol with this meal, as the interaction can compound allergies. Betsy tells us to wait a day to see if we have any reaction—intestinal distress or even a rash—before eating more.
We opt for the simplest preparation: sautéed in butter. Instead of chopping the chanterelles, Betsy shows us how to peel them apart like string cheese. They are mild-flavored with a firm, fibrous texture similar to chicken breast. They aren’t bad, exactly, but I don’t enjoy them as much as I’d hoped.
The next day, I discover that the matsutake have a pungent, otherworldly flavor, as their smell would suggest. Unlike the chanterelles, they can’t be gummed and swallowed quickly. You have to really chew them, like calamari, and that just releases more of the strange taste. I get the first slice of sautéed mushroom down but gag on the second. I push my plate away and watch as Scott relishes the rest of what we cooked. I’m jealous of him, and disappointed in myself for not having a more sophisticated palate.
I once wrote an article for the newspaper about the Pacific lamprey, a parasitic fish that hatches in streams, then swims to the ocean and eventually returns to fresh water to spawn. These eel-like animals are one of the oldest species still living on earth—an estimated hundred million years older than the earliest dinosaurs—and they’ve been an important food source to local Indian tribes for thousands of years. But lately, tribal elders have had to coax children to even try a bite. Their palates are accustomed to cheeseburgers and fries, not dried or char-grilled lamprey.
Our palates change over time, depending on the foods that are most available in our society. In his book Putting Meat on the American Table, historian Roger Horowitz traces the change on American dinner tables from cured to fresh pork. Our taste for salted barrel pork—a staple that any reader of Little House on the Prairie will recognize—dissolved in the late nineteenth century as fresh beef appeared in more urban markets. As the cultural preference tilted toward beef, pork producers were forced to reexamine their offerings and switch to products such as fresh chops and loins, which had a flavor and texture more similar to beef. Two hundred years ago, when more of us ate wild game, Americans undoubtedly had a different palate than we do today. Although humans could eat hundreds of animal species, only a few are readily available to us. Just 14 of the world’s 148 large terrestrial mammals have been domesticated. As someone who grew up eating chicken, pork, beef and occasionally turkey, I found even duck meat difficult to eat at first, more flavorful than what I was used to. Not knowing how to describe it, I fell back on that generic, derogatory word: “gamey.” But with time, I learned to love duck meat. Befitting of waterfowl, it tastes to me like slightly fishy-tasting turkey.
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