Forager Cracked

[Brinda]

Lookingfor insight into farmer-era world views, I just read the 1931 novel The Good Earth, about Chinese farmers. It is of course more a morality tale than a documentary, and the main character soon gets rich, and is then no longer a representative farmer. But the story illustrates differences between farmer vs. forager style morality.

Foragers live in close egalitarian bands, with behavior well adapted to their environment. So forager morality issues are mostly about well-adapted personal behavior in conflict with group interests. Foragers sin by bragging, not sharing, being violent against associates, etc.

The current American culture war, we have found, can be seen as arising from the fact that liberals try to create a morality relying primarily on the Care/harm foundation, with additional support from the Fairness/cheating and Liberty/oppression foundations. Conservatives, especially religious conservatives, use all six foundations, including Loyatly/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation. (more)

Farmer morality, in contrast, is much more about conflicts within people than within groups. Farmers sin by being lazy, wanting overly fancy foods, taking drugs, having sex with prostitutes, wanting status markers that cost too much in the long run, etc. Farmers need to resist internal temptations to do things that might make sense for foragers, but which can ruin farmers. These can also ruin one\u2019s family and friends, so farmer sins also have shades of selfishness.

Of course farmers also care about bragging, violence, etc. In some sense farmers have more morality \u2013 more and stronger rules, to fight against stronger natural inclinations. So farming culture introduced religion and stronger social pressures to enforce their rules, to keep farmers from relapsing into foragers.

I\u2019ve suggested that as we\u2019ve become richer, we\u2019ve become more forager-like. If our descendants get poor again, they\u2019ll probably need stronger social norms again, to get them to resist temptations to act like foragers and do what is functional in their world. Their morality would probably rely on a wider more-conservative-like range of moral feelings.

In the em scenario I\u2019ve been discussing here, sex would be unimportant except as a possible way to waste too much time. So em morality would be pretty liberal on sex. But money, work, and reputation would be important \u2013 ems would probably have pretty conservative attitudes on keeping their word, doing their job, obeying their boss, and not stealing. When mind theft or virus corruption are big risks, they\u2019d also probably have strong purity feelings about avoiding acts that could risk such harms. And they\u2019d probably feel strong clan loyalty, even beyond what farmers feel, to the clan of copies of the same original human.

In 2020, they left a long history in Colorado and relocated to Wisconsin and Oregon. Now snowbirds, they spend summers in Wisconsin and winters on the central Oregon coast, enjoying all the mushrooms the rain brings in the fall. They tend to follow mushrooms seasonally and are lucky to enjoy yearly hunting expeditions in CA, CO, WI, OR and Western burn sites. They are not mycologists but love to utilize the science behind edible mushrooms to help them locate prime terrain.

Trent has taken his passion for fungi to the next level as the sitting President of the North American Mycological Association. He enjoys engaging with the community on a regular basis and supporting mycological societies around the country. He is also a master of all things Google, including maps. Trent is the reason these two are so successful at scouting new locations and regularly finding the bounty they seek.

They are the creators of www.modern-forager.com, digital burn morel maps, and the book Wild Mushrooms: A Cookbook and Foraging Guide. Their fondest wish is that in some small way, they can help you discover the same joys of nature that they cherish.

Earthguyrye turned out to be Ryan Robinson, and he got back to me fairly quickly. During the interview he invited me along an informative hike a month away from the interview date at the 12-mile Swamp Conservation Park.

Robinson presses the Loblolly pinecone against his hand leaving a mark on his palm giving an example of the strength this plant holds against its predators and competitors. Robinson moved very quickly throughout the hike with him, he would jump when recognizing a plant and quickly go over to identify it.

The forager pulls apart the Longleaf pinecone, to describe how weak it is compared to the other native Florida pine trees. When I arrived at the location of the hike, he provided me with a homemade tea from a pitcher with all found ingredients. After a bit of smelling this mysterious liquid, I decided to try the tea, it tasted bitter and earthy.

Robinson points out the berries on this plant, warning me that they are not Florida blueberries but a plant that often gets confused for it. He brought notecards in preparation for this hike, to be sure that he covered all the information he would like to before ending the hike.

Tama Matsuoka Wong never thought foraging for wildfoods would ever become the hotness in fine-dining restaurants. She was justplucking plants as a way of getting to know her backyard: a hobby, basically,until, one night in 2009, she had dinner at Daniel and brought, as she puts it, "a bunch of twigs" with her.

The chef de cuisine,

Eddy Leroux, was so taken with thetastiness of her twigs that he started asking her for roots and leavestoo. He even started designing dishes around her gatherings, and as

Rene Redzepi'swild-foods-centric restaurant Noma rocketed to stardom, Tama found herself in themiddle of a foraging frenzy, becoming Daniel's official forager, writing a book with Eddy called ForagedFlavor (published by Clarkson Potter, where I work), and, recently, giving aTEDx talk.

After that presentation, I sat with Tama to talk about how she wentfrom a life of high-flying corporate law to traipsing in the woods, theendangering of ramps by faddish foodies, and whether foraging reallydeserves the aura of "sustainability" people seem intent on giving it.

How does an international corporate lawyer get intopulling up weeds for food?

Tama Matsuoka Wong: Well, I worked inHong Kong, Tokyo, New York for 25 years, but I wanted a cleaner environment formy family. So we moved back to near where I grew up in New Jersey. I'd beenaway for a long time, but when you've been away for a long time, you can reallysee it. The first thing I noticed was the sky--it was huge! And then Istarted to really look at the plants and, luckily, a lot of my neighbors couldtell me what they were. The more you look, the more amazing, the more beautifulit all is.

I was brought uplike, "Dirt is good!" You wanna get your hands in it. My father was Japanese,so for him nature was poetic. And my Chinese mother had a vegetable garden sowe were eating stuff that came from the dirt, sometimes without even washingit.

That's funny; my Chinese mother was obsessed with thingsbeing "clean." She'd freak out if I ran into a dirt patch, let alone eat out of it.

TMW: Well, if you takeDoritos--look at the label. Do you know what those things are? Di-methylwhatever? But people have been eating wild honeysuckle in China since ancienttimes. So it's funny that we're in this extreme of not knowing anything aboutour food, but we get nervous if we're doing something that people have doneforever.

It's one thing to see something delicious and pluck it for yourself.But it's another to supply a world-class restaurant. How do you decide what topick, and how do the chefs deal with an erratic supply?

TMW: With Eddy and a few others, I work veryclosely. I've eaten at their restaurants, I know their food, whatflavors they like and don't like. I can be in the field, text them a picture, and have them say, "I want it!" That might work for a special.

But if Eddy puts something on the menu, I have to think of thedish lasting for like two months. The key is for me to be looking forward in the season, and for him to develop the dish where we can have a few different things thatwe can substitute. For instance, there'sa type of upland cress that he likes. I know theseason for it won't last two months, but I also know a few similar varieties that come up in succession, a little later in the season, a littlefarther south. So he'll develop a dish for it, and we know we can get that flavorprofile for about two months.

But there's this wild herb ravioli that got very popular, soI'm sweating a little when it goes back on the menu, I don't want them to lose a Michelin star because theinspector came in and couldn't get the ravioli!

The first time I heard about people foragingfor wild food, it wasn't really about brilliant chefs; it was all my unshoweredhippie friends who were reading this book called Stalking the Wild Asparagus...

TMW: You know howorganic food used to be? You'd go in the store, and it all looked like granola?Foraging was like that--people who were doing this were eating from health foodstores.

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