by Bill Heavey
Before bringing out the goat cheese and “pickled gleaned fruit,” Grosser had the room engrossed in the story of how the semi-successful mushroomers, returning after hours of foraging in the woods, had seen from the highway a just-picked vineyard with grapes still on the vines. They stopped, asked and received permission to glean the zinfandel grapes, and had brought home boxes of them. I’d seen the grapes. They were misshapen and tired-looking. You wouldn’t have given them a second look in a store. But now they had a story. They had taken on the status of gleaned fruit, the same way that an artist picks up a discarded object and transforms it. It suddenly seemed improbably strange that “gleaned” fruit carried such cachet. Historically, all the way back to Ruth in the Old Testament, gleaning was the province of the poorest of the poor. Jean-François Millet’s 1857 painting, The Gleaners, was famous—and famously derided by critics of the time—for its sympathetic depiction of the lowest ranks of French rural society. I once spent a couple of days working on a small organic farm in upstate New York, and the farmer’s wife told me how one fall they’d opened their harvested fields to gleaners. They’d given the matter little thought. After all, they were done with their work. The next thing they knew, she said, they had been inundated with people they’d never laid eyes on. There were hundreds of people parked along the field roads. “You ever see gleaners?” she asked, shaking her head. “Half of them—I’m serious—just looked like they were crazy.”
Grosser had probably “pickled” the grapes that graced the goat cheese as much to disguise their condition as anything else. But the diners ate it up—both food and story. Most chewed in rapt silence, their expressions suggesting that they had never paid true attention to grapes before, regretted it, and were now bent on atoning that sin of omission.
But it was an earlier course—one that replaced a planned dish of wild sardines that Kirk Lombard, an unnamed contributor to the dinner, had attempted to obtain—that prompted the greatest reaction. (“Hey, man, sardines are hit or miss, you know? And the little fuckers just weren’t running,” Kirk had explained to me.) And the reaction started before the first bite, at Grosser’s description of the dish. Lacking sardines, he had substituted “boquerónes” (a term I later looked up to discover it was the Spanish word for fresh anchovies) marinated in vinegar, garlic, and parsley and served over Shisito peppers that he had just “blistered” in the oven, along with a “chorizo, green lentil, chive, and lemon zest relish.” At the description of the relish, one woman moaned audibly with pleasure. After a second, a round of applause quickly erupted. It was the most bizarre thing. The seemingly involuntary moan had something in it that was decidedly not involuntary—a subdued but distinct note of self-congratulation. It was as if by her outburst, the woman were staking her claim to having—even among devoted foodies—a passion for food that was more profound and heartfelt than anyone else’s. The subsequent applause seemed, to my ear at least, almost involuntary, a collective gag reflex. It was the hasty applause of people who’d just realized they’d better join in quick or risk not being part of the club. In the end, I couldn’t have told you what they were applauding—the chef’s imagination, the woman’s appreciation of the chef’s imagination, or the fact that they had all snagged seats at the hippest meal in the city that evening. Whatever it was didn’t matter, except that this was the moment when I realized I did not and would never belong among these people. If this was trendy, you could include me out.
The courses and wine kept coming. At a certain point I realized that half the room was smashed. While uncorking a guest’s bottle of wine, I found myself almost involuntarily caricaturing a waiter in a pretentious restaurant. Draping a clean towel over my left forearm, I poured a sip into the woman’s glass and bent forward attentively, the better to receive her reaction, as if she had the option of sending back her own bottle. I thought she would get the joke. I was wrong. She took the proffered glass, swished the wine around for a test drive, then swallowed and murmured, “That’ll be fine.” I bowed as I filled her glass, somehow unable to break character. It was only when I was a few steps away that I allowed myself to wonder what parallel universe the woman was living in.
Late in the evening, we split the tips the diners had left us. They’d evidently enjoyed themselves, for they’d tipped well. We pocketed more than fifty bucks apiece. I did some math before leaving San Francisco. This wild dinner alone ran for three nights, on each of which eighty people were served. Eighty people at $80 each times three is $19,200. I didn’t know what Rabins’s overhead was, but it couldn’t have cost anything close to that to get the food, rent the space, and pay the chef for the evening. ForageSF, for all its talk of rediscovering a forgotten food system and building a wild foods community, was one slick little business machine.
I never did meet Iso Rabins, although I spoke with him once very briefly on the phone and e-mailed him a few times. Over the phone he told me that after college he had sold mushrooms for a while, had worked as a line cook at ten bucks an hour, but had “always been business-minded” and that he thought “everyone could start their own business and make money from what they’re passionate about.” At one point, I proposed coming back to watch him and Grosser get the food together for another Wild Kitchen dinner, especially if we could hunt boar together. I never heard back.
Iso was probably smart to avoid me. He was an entrepreneur, a mover and shaker. My interest and sympathies lay further down the economic food chain, with the guys who actually foraged, the people he hired to give forageSF legitimacy. Both Kevin and Kirk, I learned, were paid flat fees. Kirk characterized his as “not much.” He had never heard of Iso until Iso called after reading about him in the local press. Nonetheless, later, when Kirk tried to branch out, offering his own private walks and fishing classes in addition to his forageSF work, Iso was displeased. Feral Kevin seemed caught in the same bind. When I spoke with him privately, he complained that he was paid “very little” for the walks he ran, even though he also did all the administrative work—scheduling, registering attendees, collecting the money. As with Kirk, Iso had made the first move, contacting Kevin, who said he’d taken Iso out a few times and showed him where to find various edibles. Kevin, a self-described hermit, wasn’t as entrepreneurial as Kirk, and had never gone out on his own. So he accepted the deal.
It wasn’t at all clear to me that forageSF was succeeding in its stated goal of making foraging “a sustainable lifestyle,” though through the Wild Kitchen it was certainly getting people to pay for it.
The typical piece about Rabins—and there were a lot of pieces, not just in food magazines and blogs but also in the national press—described him more or less the way Lettuce Eat Kale’s Sarah Henry did: “The frequently plaid-clad Iso Rabins is a king of inner-city cool and in high demand in culinary circles.” They praised the follow-your-bliss principle he applied as a businessman and his savvy in keeping his ventures “light”—i.e., free of capital-intensive outlays—so that forageSF could be responsive and flexible. Most articles included what I came to think of as the “when he’s not foraging” clause, which listed all the things Iso also managed to cram into his busy life: the occasional column for chow, blogging, speaking at food panels, working on a book of wild food recipes. The problem with this is that I never found any evidence that Iso had ever been either particularly skilled or passionate about foraging itself. When we spoke on the phone, he told me he foraged “one day a week at most.” I suspected it was actually less than that. What he was indisputably successful at was finding a way to build his brand and to monetize foraging and underground food cachet.
It was possible that what Iso was doing really was a form of genius. After all, nobody else at the time had managed to bring foraging anywhere as close to the mainstream as he had. And in founding forageSF he had at least helped bring the whole world of wild edibles to a wider audience. But if I had gone to San Francisco in search of the center of a potential wild food
s revolution, I hadn’t found one. Iso, I decided, was a guy looking for business opportunities. He wasn’t a wild edibles revolutionary. He was a guy who had found ways to make money from the revolution.
Wild Kitchen duties done, I was happy to go smelt fishing with Kirk. I’d already told him about my experience working the wild dinner. What I had learned there, I told him solemnly, was that it didn’t matter whether we actually caught smelt. It was that our food should have a story. He repeated his warning that this was likely to be a futile quest. With that settled, we headed north along the coast. Kirk pulled over at the first overlook to gauge water conditions. He came back to the truck and said, “There’s like four fucking sets out there. And it’s pretty crunchy.” I had no idea what any of this meant, but the tone was not hopeful. I could feel him mentally rifling through possible fallback plans. “What the hell,” he finally said. “Let’s keep going.” A few miles later we stopped at another overlook, a little lot where fishermen and surfers parked before descending a steep, treacherous-looking path to the water. I was struck by the coastline. I was used to the wide, flat beaches of the mid-Atlantic coastal plain and their small, orderly waves. The coastline here was one of the cliffs and mountains that tumbled into the Pacific Ocean. Ninety percent, maybe more, of the shore was inaccessible, sheer cliffs. If you ever found your way to the edge, it was one step and several hundred feet to the ocean, where big waves pounded the rocks senseless. It was as if the ocean had a grudge against the land, one so old that it could no longer remember why it was beating it up but kept on anyway. Sometimes there was a tiny piece of beach way down there, but mostly the waves just crashed against the rocks in discrete, incredibly loud claps. It actually did sound like cannons firing. Lombard was used to that. He was focused on what was happening farther out. “Water’s a little better out there,” he said. “But those gulls facing away from the water?” He pointed to a short, steep beach a few hundred yards off. I could barely make out the white dots against the khaki sand. “Means nothing’s happening.” Back at the truck, a knot of about twenty other seagulls screamed hoarsely as they fought over a fish head by a Dumpster. One bird would grab the head and attempt to fly away, whereupon it was assaulted from all sides. It was as if the purpose wasn’t so much to get the fish head yourself as to make sure nobody else did. We watched for a moment. “Gulls,” Lombard said absently. “They’re such haters.” The observation struck me. It wasn’t just that it was so casually apt—although it was. It was the casualness with which he said it. It bespoke someone who with an intimate knowledge of gulls, someone who had spent a long time observing them.
At our target beach—which Lombard absolutely forbade me to name—he finally smiled. “Goddamn,” he said. “We just might get lucky here.” I told him I didn’t understand. There were gulls at this beach, just like the last. I could see them several hundred yards off.
“Yeah, but look closer,” he said. “They’re facing the water, which means there’s at least the possibility of food there. And look, they’re following the waves in and out.” I could just make them out. They were following the forward lip of each wave as it lapped up the beach and slid back into the sea. Kirk had lent me a pair of waders to wear in the cold water, but he was going to fish—I finally learned that you threw a cast net to catch surf smelt—in a swimsuit. We walked down a long set of wooden stairs set into the hillside and headed for the gulls. At a certain moment, without saying a word, he took off at a jog. I could see some other birds, which looked like cormorants, diving and swimming a few yards from where the gulls were following the waves. In any case, it was more than Kirk could stand. I could hear the plastic bucket containing his gear thump against his leg as he ran. I quickened my pace to try to catch up. But as soon as I did, the bucket was thumping at double time. I’d seen a piece of black driftwood being pushed around by the surf. Now I realized that it was a sea lion. Even I knew that had to be significant. Maybe that was why he’d taken off. I’ll be damned, I thought. Evidently, the planets had aligned.
Kirk had already made a couple of throws with the cast net by the time I arrived. He had caught a few smelt and was keeping them in the bucket filled with seawater. They were inside a yellow mesh bag, which had handles like a purse. This, he said, was to deter the fucking seagulls, which would otherwise pluck them right out of the bucket. The smelt were sleek, silvery things, five or six inches long. They were handsome fish, with clean, sculpted bodies. As they lay suspended motionless in the bucket, to my eye they looked like nothing so much as really expensive fishing lures. Kirk, barefoot, would wait for the wave to break and flatten out before he threw the weighted circular net just behind the lip. The water he was targeting couldn’t have been more than twelve to eighteen inches deep. I watched as I struggled into the waders trying to see how it was done. He stopped to give me a two-minute tutorial on throwing the net. The process was too complex to explain here, involving draping the net over one arm, holding the weighted edges in your mouth and both hands, and spinning the thing as you threw. It was one of those things that is essentially quite simple when done correctly, but could also go wrong in any number of ways, most of which I explored in depth. When this is done correctly, the net blossoms into a circle and sinks. My blossoms were long and narrow, but Kirk said I was doing fine. I knew this was a lie. He just wanted to get back to casting himself. I was grateful for it anyway. I figured I’d improve with practice. “This is called ‘blind tossing,’” he said. “The Portuguese guys would laugh their asses off at us. They don’t throw unless they can see the fish. But in dirty surf, it’s this or nothing.”
My first two throws came back fishless, but the third yielded three or four glistening, flapping surf smelt. As they spilled from my net, I fell to my knees, cupping each against the sand before waves or gulls—both quite close—could take it away. The beach itself was short and steep, and with a powerful undertow. Fighting the blow and suck of the waves—even in water only eighteen inches deep—was surprisingly hard work. The waders were just that much more surface area for the water to work with. I figured I’d be better off without them. I hadn’t brought a bathing suit; I had only my jeans. And I wasn’t going to wet my only pair of pants. “I’m gonna strip down to my shorts,” I told Kirk.
“Dude, don’t,” he said urgently. “I know people here.” The unembarrassable Lombard looked abashed. But it was too late. For one thing, there was nobody else in sight. For another, I figured that anybody who did see us would do so from a good distance, at which my plaid boxers would look like swim trunks. The undertow was a little less forceful, but my feet went numb within minutes from the cold water. The sea lion, often just yards away, ignored us, confident of its protected status. He was a big boy, longer than I was and a good 400 pounds, possibly more.
“Make sure that rope’s not looped around your wrist,” Kirk called. “Snag that guy and it’ll be your last ride. You feel me?” Wow, I thought. I hadn’t considered this. The animal looked calm and probably was. But I’d mistaken “calm” for “tame,” and this large marine mammal was anything but. A toss that landed on any part of him would undoubtedly set him off. I’d heard of anglers getting an arm caught in a loop of fishing line when fighting a big fish—a marlin or tuna—and being dragged down hundreds of feet to their death. I increased my distance from the beast and slid the loop off my wrist.
I made a particularly sloppy throw that must have hit a school, because my net was alive with fish when I pulled it in. “Holy shit!” Kirk shouted, running over to help. I counted forty-one surf smelt as I slid them into the mesh bag and back into the bucket. Within a couple of hours, we had a quarter of a bucket—maybe seven or eight pounds, more than enough for dinner. Kirk hoisted the mesh bag and told me, “Smell.” I did and inhaled the clean and unmistakable scent of fresh cucumber. “Weird, huh? People usually don’t believe it when I tell them smelt smell like cucumber. They think I’m being poetic or something.” It was amazing. I’d sniffed
actual cucumbers that smelled less, well, cucumbery than these little fish.
At the truck I changed back into my pants, ditching my wet shorts under the front seat. We drove back into the city, to the apartment where Kirk and his wife, Camilla, live. Within an hour we had cleaned the fish, dredged them in egg and seasoned breadcrumbs, and fried them up. They were delicious. We were both pumped. Every so often a one-in-ten shot—Kirk’s assessment of our chances when he suggested the trip—pays off. I couldn’t help picturing the smelt served as a forty-dollar entrée in one of San Francisco’s upscale restaurants. The chef at any one of these, I was certain, would have paid top dollar for those fish—as obscure, fresh, local, and difficult to obtain as food got. The fact that we were eating them at Kirk’s kitchen table with a couple beers and the stereo playing old Slim Harpo blues in the background made them taste that much better.
I had come to San Francisco hoping to find a young but promising wild foods movement. Over the past five years or so, there seemed to be a growing collective awareness of the disconnect between people and food, accompanied by a sense that the industrial food juggernaut, which had been humming along on autopilot for decades, was due for an overhaul. More people were wondering if cheap chicken justified searing the birds’ beaks off so they could be raised in closer quarters, or breeding them to have breasts so heavy their legs woudn’t support them. San Franciscans were leaders in this kind of thinking. Given the rise of forageSF and the current wild edibles craze in the restaurants here, it seemed that if there was going to be a foraging movement coming together anywhere, it would be San Francisco. I’d expected to find at least a few people who, like me, were interested in learning to forage, fish, and hunt. It hadn’t happened. People here valued food that had come directly from the wild, especially if it was fresh and local and came with a story. But they seemed to want merely to consume such food, not to be part of the story. Bottom line, the act of getting the food yourself didn’t seem to have any more traction here than it did at home.