Thoreau and foraging for survival at Dark Mountain

Somewhere in the 1850ties Henry Thoreau wrote the following paragraph that 150 years later would be published in Wild Fruits (see earlier). It reads like a proto-transition town rave against globalisation and estrangement from nature. Here is a man who talks about foraging skills as the only thing that can help you survive when the immanent breakdown of society will come to pass. And notice how he describes cities at the end. What a style and compare with these quotes from Gary Snyder.

When La Mountain and Haddock dropped down in the Canada wilderness the other day, they came near starving, or dying of cold and wet and fatigue, not knowing where to look for food, nor how to shelter themselves. Thus far have we wandered from a simple and independent life. I think that a wise and independent, self reliant man will have a complete list of the edibles to be found in a primitive country or wilderness, a bill of fare, in his waistcoat pocket at least, to say nothing of matches and warm clothing, so that he can commence a systematic search for them without loss of time. They might have had several frogs apiece if they had known how to find them. Talk about tariffs and protection of home industry, so as to be prepared for wars and hard times! Here we are, deriving our breadstuffs from the west, our butter stuffs from Vermont, and our tea and coffee and sugar stuffs, and much more with which we stuff ourselves stuffs, from the other side of the globe. Why, a truly prudent man will carry such a list as the above, in his mind at least, even though he walk through Broadway or Quincy Market. He will know what are the permanent resources of the land and be prepared for the hardest of times. He will go behind cities and their police; he will see through them. Is not the wilderness of mould and dry rot forever invading and threatening them? They are but a camp abundantly supplied today, but gnawing their old shoes tomorrow.

Thoreau & the great forage revival

'Wild Fruit' (1991) is a collection of field notes and observations rescued from Thoreau's enormous backlog of unpublished illegible manuscripts and beautifully presented with illustrations and annotations. 

To most people this book will be as boring as watching paint dry and the comparison is apt because Thoreau is almost doing just that. With painstaking detail this book layers tons of observations on all sorts of weedy and wild edible (fruit) plants through the year,  commenting on their blooming season, taste, form and their history of domestication. This makes 'Wild Fruit' a kind of food-for-free augmented foraging guide of the Gutenberg age, informing you how to recognize plants, what can be eaten and when it is best eaten, and its place in history with quotes from 19Th century botanical sources as well as the 'classics'. 

The fruits are listed by their consecutive period of fruitation throughout the year, an interesting way of organizing the material; appropriate but unusual when you are looking for a specific plant. (Did I ever tell you about 'Six Records of a Floating life' by Shen Fu?) This is not so much a guide as a database, a Xanadu machine for fieldnotes and perambulation about species and sometimes individual plants. You could very well imagine a online version of this book, and you can very well imagine this book as a model for a story telling approach to Boskoi and similar edible city Gmaps.  

But this is Thoreau and what makes Wild Fruit essential reading as a precursor to the modern edible city / urban foraging revival is that his observations can at any moment issue and answer a philosophical question of the most basic nature: what do we know (we don't even know our own backyard) and how do we know it (hearsay and trust or direct observation and experimentation). The choice to be 'boring' is Thoreau's ultimate philosophical point.  

The Preface by Bradley Dean is worthwhile.

Thoreau and Cryptoforest Philosophy

Thoreau's walden, the stones mark the location of his cottage.

Listen to Henry David Thoreau (Chesuncook part six) and let's capitalize the key words:

The kings of England formerly had their forests ‘to hold the king’s game,’ for sport or food, sometimes destroying villages to create or extend them; and I think that they were impelled by a true instinct. Why should not we, who have renounced the king's authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be ‘civilized off the face of the earth,’ — our forests, not to hold the king's game merely, but to hold and preserve the king himself also, the lord of creation, — not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true re-creation? or shall we, like villains, grub them all up, poaching on our own national domains?

Here is another random quote:

In fact, the deeper you penetrate into the woods, the more intelligent, and, in one sense, less countrified do you find the inhabitants; for always the pioneer has been a traveler, and, to some extent, a man of the world; and, as the distances with which he is familiar are greater, so is his information more general and far reaching than the villager’s.