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Excerpted from “A Bright Clean Mind: Veganism for Creative Transformation”
The Edible Woods
Foraging for delights, plus recipes for tiny wild cherry pies + rosehip infusions
I have always wanted to be the kind of person who ventures into a lush green forest with an empty basket. While some scroll through their Instagram feeds envying other people’s six-pack abs and exotic vacations, I’m wishing I could be one of those foragers harvesting elderflowers for cordial or showing off a massive haul of hen-of-the-woods mushrooms. It’s the most practical hobby imaginable: not only are you finding free food, some of which you rarely see in the grocery store (like ramps and fiddleheads, which are very pricey because Whole Foods is paying people to forage them for you), but it’s likely more nutritious because Big Ag hasn’t wrung all the vitamins out of it. Foraging simultaneously appeals to my Parable-of-the-Sower-grade apocalypse anxiety and my fantasy of living in a pretty little cottage in the forest with a well and a vintage hand pump right in my kitchen. At any rate, I want to stop talking about living closer to nature and actually learn something that will allow me to do so.
Local farms and nature reserves often sponsor guided walks, but finding someone to take you on a one-on-one hike is an expensive proposition. Foragers can be very territorial, which doesn’t seem so stingy when you consider that some people over-harvest with no concern for sustainability. And there’s only so much you can learn from a book.
My roommate Rachel and I go on a guided mushroom walk at Ballard Park in Newport, Rhode Island, a beautiful wooded nature reserve that was a working quarry in the 19th century. Our guides, Emily Schmidt and Ryan Bouchard, explain the symbiotic relationship between trees and fungi and say they don’t recommend gilled mushrooms for beginners, as there are about a dozen deadly gilled species. (“There was a guy who survived eating a death cap,” Ryan says, “and he said it was really, really good.”) The edibility of most of the mushrooms you’ll see is questionable, so you’ve really got to learn one species at a time.
Nature astonishes us: there is a mycelium growing under the earth in Oregon that is bigger than a…
