Foraging on Suspect Terrain
Perceptions of scarcity, unrequited connection, & the ethical conundrum of ramp season in Illinois
Foraging promises delicious food and, allegedly, a deeper connection to nature. I have lately been rethinking my relationship to this practice with a more critical eye and questioning: connection for whomst?
As mentioned before in this newsletter, I am a hungry person who loves to eat. The idea that I can find tasty snacks out in the woods while I’m walking around appreciating the trees is extremely appealing to me. When I started learning basic mushroom identification somewhere around 2009, I was amazed at how quickly and easily the pattern-recognition part of my brain kicked in, almost as if to shine little spotlights onto the morels and chanterelles I was on the hunt for.
At that time I was living in Oregon, hiking with people who had lived there a long time and who’d acquired an extensive Cascadian mountain vocabulary for the local mushroom varieties and their particularities. “Sometimes you walk into an open glade in the forest and can just feel that chanterelles grow here,” one such person said to me. People in Oregon are serious about mushroom hunting: keeping secret the whereabouts of known mushroom “spots” and handing down that information from generation to generation, keeping it in the family. Despite such security measures, mushrooms are abundant in the fern-verdant, mossy rainforests of the Pacific Northwest.
Like many foragers I have experienced transcendent moments while in a lot of physical discomfort in order to find the hunted-for delicacy. In the woods of Iowa, for example, army-crawling on my belly through the brush with a screaming hangover in the early July morning, humidity and mud soaking us, looking for morels for hours without finding a single one. Sean and I had read the Sylvia Plath poem “Mushrooms” aloud as an incantation before beginning but nothing less than a full surrendering to the act of looking would render the longed-for results. The first morel caught my attention by singing out, by lighting up as if in the center of a darkened stage. Every subsequent morel did the same until we had two bags heavy with fungi, from which we made a huge homemade pasta and morel feast (I hope that all of you get to eat Sean’s homemade pasta someday, it is truly a singular culinary experience) that we shared with many friends.
I bring these anecdotes up to show that I’ve loved foraging for a long time, and that it’s been a huge part of the way that I learn about and relate to the landscape wherever I’ve lived. Finding, identifying, and sharing wild and medicinal plants and fungi have been acts of love and connection for me – I feel connected to the cycle of the seasons, to the various kinds of local habitats, to the friends I share food and knowledge with, to some psychic remembering of a distant past where finding food in the woods was necessary for survival, and to, an ocean away, the traditions of my forebears that grew out of that necessity (this is an interest in historical folkways and foodways, *not* a desire to go back in time in any way).
Connection is really a two-way street, though, and I’m seeing that foraging without reciprocity isn’t exactly “connection” in the way I thought it was. It’s an activity that makes me feel good and it points toward something genuine, but I don’t think anymore that it’s the antidote that I’ve believed it to be.
Living in Illinois has really changed the way I think about foraging and the way that I position myself in relation to the landscape. Illinois ranks 49th out of 50 for the amount of land conserved (i.e., we have the second-to-least amount of conserved wild spaces of any state in the country). Illinois is called the Prairie State, but tallgrass prairie is now one of the rarest ecosystems in the entire world. Read that again: in the entire world. It feels like we already have such tiny crumbs of land – we can’t afford to lose any of it, or anything from it. Perhaps I would feel very differently if I were still wandering around in the comparatively huge forest preserves of Oregon. The context is critical.
The moment that really changed my thinking was ramp season last year. For those of you who may not know, ramps are a delicious, ephemeral allium that comes up for a couple weeks in the spring. It is prized for its distinct garlicky flavor and for the brevity of its season. My friend and I came across a huge patch of them in our forest wanderings, and I showed him how to harvest them conservatively, taking only a single leaf from a few of the plants. The whole plant is commonly harvested, but it takes ramps six or seven years to develop their bulbs while the leaves taste just as good. When you leave the bulbs, you know there will be more ramps the following year. If you pull out the bulbs, no more ramps.
When I came back that way the next week, all the ramps were gone. Gone-gone, as in dug up, shovel holes and piles of dirt. All of them! From this absolutely enormous patch! Hoovered right up into oblivion, slorp slorp. I don’t know if they were harvested for someone’s home kitchen or for sale (if you’ve ever seen ramps for sale at a coop or farmer’s market you know they sell for quite a bit, $20 per pound or more in my experience), but either way that is just greedy, selfish, and not right.
As angry as I was in that moment, it forced me to reflect on my own foraging behavior and attitudes. My anger felt righteous at first because I had taken care to harvest the ramps in small amounts, but as a relative newcomer to the area, what do I actually know about what a healthy upland forest looks like in this part of the country? What would actually qualify me to make that assessment? Certainly, quite a bit more knowledge and experience than what I currently possess. A much, much deeper relationship to that specific patch of forest.
I think also that my perspective from moving from place to place around the country, desiring connection to nature in all of those places, is illuminating here. What do I really know about a healthy ecosystem in Illinois, or in Oregon, for that matter? I am realizing that as much as I love to be out in nature and appreciate all of the plants and bugs and animals and fungi, as much as I have worked to learn about them individually and collectively, I am ultimately unequipped to evaluate the health of an ecosystem. I’m just a lady sitting on a log with a field guide. I return to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s essay The Honorable Harvest in Braiding Sweetgrass:
Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them. Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer. Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need. Take only that which is given. Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm. Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share. Give thanks for what you have been given. Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken. Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.
Kimmerer goes on to emphasize that each person needs to come to their own conclusions about what is acceptable to them, and this missive is my way of working through that. Here’s my self-assessment: I’m a well-fed person living in a place where protected wild spaces are few and small in acreage (i.e., my enjoyment of tasty woodland num-nums is not something I need to survive, and it certainly doesn’t outweigh the imperative to protect the species that grow here). I do not have traditional ecological knowledge of the land. I do not have a regular practice of reciprocity with the land because I don’t know what the land needs that I could give (although I have some ideas – more on this in the next essay).
So it’s clear to me that I personally don’t feel good about foraging in Illinois the way that I have in other places I’ve lived. Context, again, is critical. I don’t mean this to sound like a condemnation of foraging in all contexts – it is definitely not that. For one, I still think urban foraging is good and fun to do – I am thinking specifically of the giant persimmon tree in the middle of downtown Champaign whose extremely abundant fruits you can watch rot en masse on the sidewalk over the winter months if no one comes by to pick them up and put them to good use.
In the next newsletter I’ll be back with more about foraging ethics; especially the collective yearning for the Commons (or at least the dream of the Commons) that many people share although not all of them know it, my own land reciprocity action items, and the ethical imperative of eating invasive species.
In the meantime, I know that quite a few of you are fellow foragers (some of whom I’ve had the IRL pleasure of mushroom hunting with!) and I would love to know about your philosophy of the ethics of foraging. How do you decide where to forage from? What is your thinking around reciprocity? Is this an issue I’m blowing out of proportion? Also especially curious to hear from folks who have lived in Illinois a longer time than me! The comments are open and I am genuinely interested in having this conversation so please share if you feel so inclined.
Unsolicited Recommendations / a foraging bibliography
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Published in 2013 by Milkweed Editions.
Alexis Nicole AKA Black Forager has made some videos about foraging as a black woman that I think are really important to this conversation (again, context is critical!).
Rot Collective has been an influence on my thinking on many facets of land stewardship, including foraging. This post in particular is great.
