So I'm sitting here eating ferns I collected in the forest. It was late-season fern-picking. And as I was cleaning my take, I noticed two distinct types of fern. Danger, I thought. I'll eat some of these before I serve them to my friends.I've eaten about 30% of the ones I prepared. They tasted pretty good, though a few were gritty from poor cleaning. A simple preparation - butter, garlic, dill; a dash of salt. I threw the ferns in w/ some onions, and sauteed them 'till the onions looked done. We'll see where I am in an hour...
Now I'm a pretty busy guy, and I certainly have no need for subsistence activities - I'm pretty integrated into capitalist society and have no qualms about turning to Carrs or McDonald's. But I've been collecting wild animals and plants to supplement my consumption since I can remember. Prickly pears and rainbows, passion fruit and tako, stinging nettles, algae, nutmeg and gooseberries, crawdads and blueberries. Deer. Each has a season, a place, an experience that surrounds it.
That's proably why I did the stupid thing of not properly identifying the plants before eating them. Inapplicable but similar experience masquerades as useful information. For example, I'd collected ferms with an expert last spring, but this two kinds thing threw me. But, well, I was out there, and collected them. Berries won't be coming around for over a month...
Being in Alaska, where information about local edible stuff is readily available, and local edible stuff is so readily available, and people/government are supportive of subsistence activities, it's possible for even the most urban dweller to maintain at least some type of one-on-one, symbiotic relationsip to nature. Through subsistence activities, we don't merely watch the changing seasons as we would our televisions - we live them.
- Through subsistence activities, we don't merely watch the changing seasons as we would our televisions - we live them
But the seasons can get rough. And productive subsistence activities can get even rougher. I opened my summer fishing season with a clam-digging trip. It involved seven hours of driving. We limited out at 60 clams per person within three hours (there were two of us), and headed home the next day. We expected processing would be time-intensive, but never expected the hours-long ordeal of cracking, cutting, cleaning. Our yield: about 10 pounds.
Things are similar on the fruit and vegetable front. The mushrooms will come out maybe in a month, but odds are about 75% of them will be infested with maggots. The ferns are curled up around all sorts of inedible stuff that's pretty tough to clean out. In addition to collecting each shoot singly, each one must be thoroughly washed as it's unrolled completely - each one thoroughly caressed and inspected for hours.
That's one of the great joys, too. Every clam I eat, every fiddlehead I sautee, I think back to the time in the forest I spent picking it, and how at least twice that time was spent in processing hell in my kitchen, preparing the food for storage. And how, while it may lack the genetic sophistication of Carr's produce, food I've gathered from nature holds a meaning that's far more nourishing.