Hunting & Gathering

Four-year-old Luca reminds me of my oldest son, Peter, when he was this age. He's always asking questions about how the world works, he loves scientific matters, especially when they involve dinosaurs, and he loves to gather plants to eat.

Yesterday, we counted the edible food plants in our back yard, a few of which are actually bearing at this time of the year -- peppers, peas, limes, lemons, butter lettuce, parsley, rosemary, sage, arugula, apples, plums, mint -- and few wild plants including sour grass and nasturtium.

We picked and ate six of them in a kind of wild salad mix, while clearing the top of the pond and confirming that the fish have survived the recent cold snap.

There's something deeply satisfying by being able to grow and/or gather at least a small portion of the food you eat. This feeling goes back a long way, obviously -- a long, long way.

Long before modern consumer industrial society, and even long before agriculture.

In my own youth, we had a garden of carrots, radishes, rhubarb, etc., growing out at the back of our yard next to the ditch that separated our property from the cornfield. In the ditch were frogs, turtles, minnows, and at a certain point in the year, giant fish swinging upstream to spawn.

Across the ditch, into the cornfield, I'd pick ears of field corn, roast them and eat them on the spot. I always had a knife and matches in my pocket; often a BB gun as well. Later, a 16-gauge shotgun.

Hunting and gathering -- it was passed down to me from countless generations in the past, back through Canada, Ireland, France, and wherever we were wandering in earlier eras.

Now, I'm passing it on, at least in a Big City context, to a grandson. I'll say this for him -- he remembers every edible plant after one time seeing it. That's a good sign for the preservation of his gathering skills so that one day he perhaps can teach his own grandson, too.

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