Why We Forage...

It's an unseasonably warm October day in Wisconsin and we have no plans so we cruise slowly through the backroads enjoying the beautiful scenery while keeping a sharp eye out for DNR signs. Back "home" in Illinois, parks and trails almost always appear on the map but in Wisconsin we've found some of our favorite trails and forest preserves simply by taking the long way home and suddenly seeing signs declaring a "State Natural Area" lining the road. Today we drive for a bit while the girls enjoy impressive scenes of rolling horse farms and craggy cliffs and we followed the DNR signs until we discovered some semblance of a parking area.

Stepping onto the trail, we breathed in Autumn. We are a Summer family, a family that lives for Summers the way some people live for the weekend. So on this wonderfully warm day I close my eyes and soak up the sun and try to forget that it's October, but my nose betrays me. Heather and I are mindful that we are not just here for pleasure...we're hunting for our dinner, or something to go into dinner, at least. So as we stroll along, kicking up fallen leaves of every shade, we gaze into the woods, high and low, in search of mushrooms.

We forage for food for so many different reasons. Both Heather and I share a nerdy "investigative" trait that allows us great enjoyment in the process of first researching an edible wild food in both books and online and then going out to the forest and actually hunting it down. We then harvest the food, and because we know the source of the food, we need not worry about pesticides or the like, its always "organic". It is, of course, also highly nutritious to eat a wider variety of foods and those foods in the wild tend to have higher levels of antioxidants then most foods, since they have to fend for themselves out there. Bringing this food home to our kitchen has the automatic effect of expanding both our palate and dinner menu, since half of the fun of finding food is discovering a great recipe to prepare it. May I also mention that it's free? Yes, at the risk of sounding like a cheapass, some of our foraged foods are that same that gourmet chefs pay big money for and we can find for free. Lastly, foraging is a great way to reconnect with nature and get some exercise at the same time.

Today we found plenty of mushrooms, but none that were choice edibles as far as we know. But I look down the trail lagging behind and both our girls are poking around in the woods gathering Birch bark, feathers and sticks for an art project back home. The Maple trees are aglow in every shade of yellow, orange and red set against a beautiful cloudless blue sky. As we leave the trail today, our mushroom bag is empty but our hearts are full.