August 2009 Archives

I mention this here primarily because Uncle Ken is the OG wild edible plants aficionado in my life (OG stands for "orginal gangster" but has come to mean original, first, or deserving of credit and respect--although I wonder if that term has ever been applied to a forager of wild edible plants before...) Anyway, Uncle Ken is the one who gifted me a copy of Euell Gibbons' Stalking the Wild Asparagus when I was a teenager. He dragged me along trails throught the woods when I was even younger, offering me this and that to taste, much to my mother's chagrin.

We lost our backpack in a New York City cab last week, and with it went our newly acquired book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, by Michael Pollan. The book was gifted to Gregg recently by Bill, and I consider it to be the biggest loss of our whole backpack debacle. I had read almost all of the first section, "The Age of Nutritionism," on the train ride in, and of course that was as far as I got. I liked In Defense of Food enough, however, that I am going to break my own rule and write about a book I haven't finished until a new copy lands in my lap.

The central idea, as proposed in the first line of the introduction, is that we should "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Pollan goes on to describe the historical process by which our food has been (ideologically, hence the "ism" in "nutritionism") broken down into nutrients in the public's consciousness, so that people came to believe they had to shop nutrient by nutrient, knowing which nutrients were "good" and which were "bad," as opposed to trusting their senses as humans had always done before and eating whole foods. One of the many effects of this changed way of thinking about food is that it relegated the expertise of eating to scientists and took it away from the individual eaters, complicating and thereby removing pleasure from the eating process, which, he argues, is a crucial component for human health and happiness.

The Known World by Edward P. Jones is the fictional account of many interwoven lives centering around the life and death of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who becomes a slave owner himself. The story takes place in the antebellum days of Manchester, Virginia, a town and county replete with well-illustrated historical records--all of which are products of Jones' imagination. That black ownership of slaves did occur historically is a known fact, although Jones himself admits to uncertainty about how widely spread the practice actually was.

The background of the story is that Henry Townsend's father, an accomplished craftsman, is eventually able to buy his own freedom from his master, Henry Robbins. Over the years--and it takes several years each time--his father saves up enough money to buy his wife's and then his son Henry's freedom. With Henry, however, the slave owner comes to have a larger influence on the boy's thinking than does his own father. Taking a liking to Henry while the boy is still a slave on his plantation, Robbins treats him "well" and eventually, after Henry is a young free man, helps him to buy his own first slave. Over the years Henry acquires many slaves, much to his father's dismay. When Henry dies, his wife Caldonia is left to run the plantation, which falls increasingly into chaos.

Still, I had a lovely time climbing around in the underbrush, eating probably more huckleberries than I collected and joking around with mom, even as the mosquitoes made a decent lunch of us as well. We spent about a half hour and collected half a small berry container of them, which my four-year-old niece (one of two young'n's who call my mom "grandma") later helped us to devour.

Well, the blog experiment was going great until I hit the road to do some extended visiting in Connecticut and New Hampshire last week. I was blogging just about every day, which was the goal. The Googlebot was visiting regularly; my visitor count was up, and life through the interwebs was generally rosy.

I must say that my original intentions were good. I packed up a few topics I wanted to cover on this trip. I brought along the newest addition to my wild edible plants library, the Peterson Guide to Edible Wild Plants by Lee Allen Peterson, son of Roger Tory who wrote many of the Peterson guides. Since Lee Allen Peterson grew up in Old Lyme, Connecticut, just across the river from my parents' house, I was excited to have that book and start foraging when I got here. I was also thinking I'd finally be able to respond more thoroughly to Steve in Minnesota (I haven't forgotten; I swear!) regarding edible flowers, since the northeastern plants are probably much more similar to what grows in Minnesota, and because I'd have Lee Allen Peterson's guide.