The Wild Food Guy

I just finished reading one of my Christmas presents to myself (you always get exactly what you want that way). It’s a book of essays put out by The New Yorker magazine editors. called Secret Ingredients, a collection of food and drink writing since the magazine’s inception over 80 years ago. One that just blew me away was by John McPhee, and the week in 1968 he spent foraging in the Pennsylvania wilderness with Euell Gibbons. Besides the pleasure of his fine writing style, McPhee very poignantly captures the personality of this fascinating and amazing character that was Euell Gibbons.



In 1968, Gibbons was at the height of his renown as a true American naturalist and writer (his first book Stalking The Wild Asparagus, published in 1962, was a national bestseller). He was a Quaker, a former schoolteacher, a railroad hobo during the Depression, and a frustrated writer of novels and short stories. But he hit his stride writing about something that he’d learned to do as a child to keep from starving, and continued to do all his life, from the pleasure of it: the gathering and preparation of wild food – most commonly known as foraging. His talent in the creative preparation of these foods earned him the moniker of greatest living wild chef when he was alive. (He died in 1975 at age 64.)



Gibbons once harvested edible weeds from the President’s garden at the White House, bagged 15 wild foods in a vacant lot in Chicago, and collected materials for 3-course meal from Central Park in New York City. His interest in wild food was to prove simply that there is a marvelous variety of good food in the world that is only partially found in supermarkets, and that mass production of just a tiny fraction of “cultivated” foods is contributing to the demise of the planet and our ability to feed all its people. One need never go hungry when one is a friend of nature.



As a Quaker, Gibbons was a pacifist and a peacemonger, and lived in intentional communities long before they were popular. His goal in foraging was to engage in “creative protest against the artificiality of our daily lives.” Though he was a product of the first half of the previous century, and was embedded with folksy, rural values, his perspective is timeless, sophisticated, and very inspiring. Everything urban foodies are now discussing about crop sustainability, organic and local farming, seasonal ingredients, and so on, old Euell was preaching about 40 years ago. I can’t wait to get my hands on all of his writing.

Winter in L.A.

We are now deeply into winter, aren’t we? For those of us here in Southern California, it means we’re able to drive an hour in one direction up to the nearby mountains and go skiing, sledding, and snowball fighting. It also means we can drive an hour in the other direction and sit out in the high desert under cobalt blue skies, then take a dip in a nearby hot mineral spring pool to stay warm. Or drive in still yet another direction and be at the beach, where you may or may not need to wear a sweater or jacket on the sand. Pretty amazing, isn’t it? Something I haven’t still gotten over, even after living here for 17 years.

The first winter I lived here, I remember driving up to the mountains with my friends, and piling snow on the roof of the car then driving down to the beach with it, parking on the sand, and drinking an ice cold beer as we watched it melt in the afternoon sun. We took lots of pictures with us posing by the snow covered car in our bikini tops and sunglasses.Life is good here on the edge of the continent, isn’t it?

Whenever the ungodly traffic, rude strangers, bad air, and other high costs of living in LA start to make me crazy, I find I’m able to calm down about it all a bit, by focusing on the bountiful aspect of nature that surrounds us here. It’s a cliché, but nature does heal – it calms and soothes in a way that nothing else can.

I spent some time once, in the late 1980’s, studying Native American shamanism with several teachers. One of the cornerstone’s of that spiritual path is the guidance we must be open to receive from Nature in all its forms — from plant life, rocks, animals, to the wind, bodies of water – if we are to evolve our thinking about ourselves and our place in the cosmos.

Here’s a poem by Mary Oliver – a very gifted poetess and high priestess of communing with Nature herself. (PS: You will get many chances to read Mary Oliver’s poems in this blog as she is one of my favorites. Look her up – you’ll love her, too)

The Swan

by Mary Oliver

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?

Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -

An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?

And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for? And have you changed your life?

Greetings for the New Year

The wheel has turned again, and here we are at the starting point of a New Year. What a great time to focus on how best we all want to live our lives: spending more time with those we love, creating meaningful work, participating in the conscious stewardship of our community — and by extension the world at large — and cultivating the good health that will make it possible to do all of these things for as long as possible. What does “good health” mean, anyway? For most of us, it’s getting a handle on stress, on finding ways to reduce it.

After that comes exercise, diet, sleep. But really, it’s all related: you sleep better when you aren’t stressed, when you are managing your time well, you have time to exercise, when you are exercising regularly, you tend to make better food choices, and so on.

So what’s the problem, here? Why is this very straightforward way to live and enjoy life more, so incredibly difficult to grab hold of? Perhaps it’s just the very nature of being alive in the era we now find ourselves, endemic to a particular American existence. When basic issues of food, shelter, and survival has been met, then one is free to start worrying about the other stuff?

“We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same.”
~ Carlos Castaneda

I’m reminded of what all great thinkers, spiritual teachers, and just wise people in general, continually seem to say about this: try to move into gratitude when all else fails. Gratitude is the thing that gives us the ability to pause, slow down a minute or two, and really put into perspective what it is we’re trying to do, to be, to know, to become.

Gratitude for the big things, as well as small. Gratitude for the ability to draw breath – the prana, or “life force” as it’s called in yoga - and to be alive, every moment of every day. This is one aspect of “conscious” living, and when it becomes a part of the fabric of our everyday lives, then everything else flows.

Thank you for reading, thank you for being a part of our GreenBliss community, thank you for making us one of your healthful living choices this past year, and in the year to come.