long honey locust pods, which Alan claimed is before entering the foraging trade; he gives im- one of the most flavorful wild foods in the re- promptu rap/breakdance performances, one of gion. We nibbled the edges of the pods, careful which is the popular “A Fist Full of Fungus,” not to eat the mildly toxic seeds. The taste was which we would soon witness as a grand finale The Day After sweet and reminiscent of tamarind, for which at the falls. And unlike most foragers, he doesn’t Alan says it can be used as a substitute. Lastly keep his knowledge close to the vest. If Alan BY FRED BAHNSON Alan passed around a plastic container filled has a basic message he wants to get across to his with cut-up bits of purplish flesh. It looked fellow foragers at the dawn of the New Age, like the tropical dragon fruit, and in fact tasted it’s that the world is still our home. We are safe like dragon fruit, except this fruit grew right up here. There is enough for everyone. A Cuban- the road. It was prickly pear cactus, another of American Jew who graduated from Princeton, n the morning of December 22, 2012, Alan’s favorite wild foods. The container went Alan has a cultural memory that reaches back the first day of the New World, a small twice around the circle, our fingers staining the to the days when his people gathered food each O tribe of humans gathered at the entrance color of blackberries, and when the container morning in the wilderness of Sinai; he knows to Pisgah National Forest in hopes of finding got back to Alan all that was left of the fruit’s that manna can’t be hoarded. something to eat. Our destination was Catawba dark flesh was an inch of what looked like co- We don’t make it very far past the trailhead Falls, whose elevation was lower and warmer agulated blood. Like a priest draining the chalice because Alan is stopping every five feet and than nearby Asheville, North Carolina, allow- after mass, Alan lifted the cup with both hands pointing out, if not actual wild foods, then the ing for a wider array of winter solstice pickings and swallowed the dregs. indicators of their presence at other times of the for the fallout shelter. Our leader was Alan Mus- “Okay, troops,” he said. “Time to move.” He year. Like those wineberry canes, which will kat, an expert at foraging for wild foods, and picked up his foraging basket and started up the fruit next summer, or the poplar trees which as we gathered in a circle Alan passed around trail, then hollered over his shoulder. “Deputy! form a symbiotic relationship with morels that edible samples he’d collected on recent forays Bring up the rear!” will emerge in the spring, or a dead hemlock into the woods, starting with a small dropper When it’s the end of the world as you know tree lying astride the creek on which can be bottle containing a black fluid. While the mys- it, the qualities you look for in a leader begin to found in the month of June a mushroom called tery mixture made the rounds, our little clan coalesce mainly around finding stuff to eat. The Ganoderma tsugae, known in China as ling zhi made introductions. woods are lovely, dark, and deep, and most of us (the mushroom of immortality) and known in There was a family of six from Florida who are pretty clueless about how to eat from them, American as white butt rot, but most widely did some foraging in the Everglades. A pair of and yet eat from them we can, Alan insists, and known by its Japanese name reishi, a medicinal computer programmers who had been travel- bountifully. For the past seventeen years he has mushroom that, when brewed into a tea, packs ing for the past three years and had hit it big made his living selling wild foods, especially a wallop of antioxidants and immune-boosting selling apps; they came to Pisgah after realiz- mushrooms, to Asheville’s top chefs, who pay polysaccharids known as beta-glucans. The Japa- ing they had no idea how to feed themselves. handsomely for his discoveries. He once sold a nese government has officially recognized reishi A father-son duo both named Pete—“people fifty-pound chicken of the woods mushroom as a treatment for cancer. call us Pete and re-Pete”—hailed from Jackson, for $750. At one time he supplied nearly four One of the Floridians asked if it really makes Wyoming. They wore Carhartts and Pete the hundred pounds of wild mushrooms a year you immortal. “Well,” Alan replied, “I’ve been Younger sported a neck cravat. Pete the Elder to over thirty local chefs, but more and more taking it for only a couple hundred years. Check had the craggy features and bowed stance of a he’s focused on teaching a new generation of back with me in another two.” man who has spent his life outside on a horse. foragers. He maintains a lively website called We walked further and found several persim - He looked just like one of the lawmen from No Taste Like Home, featuring long, rumina- mon trees, which still had a few fruits, though The Outlaw Josey Wales. Alan looked him over tive blog posts peppered with foraging advice, they were too high to reach. In addition to the and said, “I’m going to make you my deputy.” philosophical musings, and folksy epigrams fruit, which is very sweet, the seeds make a good Even postapocalyptic foragers, it seemed, need (“Home + Land = Security,” “We revel in real coffee substitute. Alan had heard about coffee law and order. The newly deputized Pete the eating and real-ating,” “Coming home to eat, beans prized for having passed through the gut Elder took a squirt from the dropper bottle and we find what truly feeds us”). Known as the of the cat-like Asian palm civet, but those sold grinned. “It tastes like geology.” Mushroom Man, “a carnival barker for fun- for $160 a pound, so he decided to try a local al- The decoction contained chaga, Alan ex- gus,” Alan has appeared on Bizarre Foods with ternative. “I dug some persimmon seeds out of plained, a Russian name for a fungus reputed Andrew Zimmern, The History Channel, and a pile of bear shit and roasted them for coffee,” to contain powerful anticarcinogenic properties. PBS, and is now being courted by several reality he said. “The drink was quite tasty.” Even in this new era, one in two men and one TV shows. They’re digging for drama and lurid Someone asked about the ubiquitous thorny in three women among us would suffer the dis- details, though, and Alan is not sure he wants vines throughout the woods. That would be ease at some point in our lifetime. Chaga fungus, to play along. Most foragers tend to be a reclu- greenbrier, also known as Confederate barbed along with turkey tail and reishi mushrooms, sive lot, but Alan has more Miami in him than wire, also known as blasphemy vine for the curs- were among the best cures. Deputy Pete nodded Asheville. He drives a convertible 2002 Toyota es it will extract. But like just about everything gravely and took another squirt from the vial. Solara and listens to ’70s yacht-rock bands like Alan pointed to, it had a culinary use: the roots Alan passed out dried berries—sumac (sour) and Steely Dan and The Eagles. He occasionally DJs were called sarsaparilla, the main ingredient in beautyberry (sweet)—then came a bag of foot- parties, which he did professionally for ten years root beer.
OxfordAmerican.org - 47 - It was 11:30 A.M. and we’d barely walked on an objective sense of the universe, like INDEPENDENT LISTINGS half a mile. Alan wanted to get us to Ca- conditions are going to force things upon tawba Falls before noon, when the class us. But people have chosen to live more would end, so we covered the final mile as self-sufficiently for ages, because it’s more THE “BABY a forced march, with the deputy bringing rewarding in and of itself. We’re coming out up the rear. The falls were lovely. In the e- of a 5,000-year-old fear-based civilization. DOLLS” mail Alan sent out earlier in the week (the We think that we need to take care of our - Breaking the computers were still working then), he in- selves because Mother Nature won’t. That Race and Gender Barriers of the structed us to pack a lunch for the falls, but fear all comes down to our separation from New Orleans only a few of us did. I passed around a bag nature. Science, engineering, agriculture— Mardi Gras of carrots from my garden, Deputy Pete these all arise out of a desire to control that, Tradition shared the salmon he’d caught in Alaska in turn, stems from an objective view of the that summer and smoked, but the Florid- world. Yet quantum physics is only confirm- ians came empty handed. They were happy ing what ancient traditions like nondualism Bring home the fascinating history of the to eat our food. have taught for centuries: that we live in a “raddy-walking, shake-dancing, cigar-smoking, Alan fired up the camp stove and cooked subjective universe, a much more fluid one, money-flinging” ladies who strutted their way up a batch of oyster mushrooms he’d found where we’re all ultimately free. It means into a predominantly male establishment. the day before. He cooked them in nothing we don’t have to be afraid. Like Jesus said, $ 22.95 | lsupress.org but olive oil, sea salt, and garlic, then mixed ‘Don’t worry about tomorrow. God feeds in a little Amish sour cream. A single plate the birds. Isn’t he gonna feed you?’ It’s the was passed, and by the time it got to me there practice of surrender.” were just a few little morsels left. I hungri- It seemed an attractive way of living in ly lapped them up. To say that warm oyster the New World Age. Still, the fear-based mushrooms cooked in sea salt and Amish approach runs strong in our tribe. Alan has cream eaten on a cold winter day beside a recently been contacted by a neocon sur- mountain waterfall were delicious would vivalist group called The NOAH Project be like saying that the world is our home (Neighborhoods of Alternative Homes), and we should be content here. It simply who want him to teach them how to forage. goes without saying. But in this new world Located somewhere within a two-hour drive Visit the Trail’s website for current events in we’ve entered, we need to be reminded of of Charlotte, North Carolina, NOAH has Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi with support the small, good things, so I’ll say it. They been described as “high-end self-reliance” from the Alabama Humanities Foundation, were delicious. living, where you can “survive in style.” Georgia Humanities Council, Mississippi Humanities Council and the Mississippi Then came the grand finale, the time in Worried about hungry neighbors looting Development Authority’s Division of Tourism. Alan’s program when he wrapped things your larder? Fear not. The postapocalyptic SouthernLiteraryTrail.org up by rapping things up. He broke it down community is a quasi-fortress “capable of right there beside the waterfall and busted providing its own self-defense” and appar- out his song. Donning an old woman’s vel- ently accessible only by helicopter or jeep DELTA MUSIC MUSEUM vet purse on his head, some shades, and a trails. One of NOAH’s team members is & ARCADE THEATRE gaudy, oversized necklace, he rapped his Newt Gingrich. How would neocons sur- PERFORMING ARTS CENTER “A Fist Full of Fungus,” complete with beat vive, I wondered, after their MREs and box and breakdance moves. The group dis- Spam ran out? Would they turn on one an- The Delta Music persed, everyone making their way down the other? I pictured an emaciated Newt crawl- Museum tells the story of three local trail at their own pace, and I joined Alan for ing on the forest floor, digging for grubs boys—cousins, in the drive home. On the way he wanted to among the mossy stumps of a world he fact—who rose to swing by a butcher’s place where he’d heard helped destroy. A disturbing image. Yet national prominence … Jerry Lee Lewis , Mickey there were deer scraps free for the taking, as oddly satisfying. Gilley, and Jimmy Swaggart. But the museum also long as you claimed they were for your dog. Turns out the butcher was out of deer focuses a spotlight on the role of the Mississippi River in nurturing the distinct sounds and stories Last time he’d made off with a scapula and a scraps, but it didn’t matter, we had the top of Southern music, with exhibits that highlight few leg bones. “Foragers can’t be choosers.” down, and we felt fine. On the drive home, blues, gospel, R&B, and country musician greats The day was cold but sunny, and we rode a question was forming in my mind. I want- such as Aaron Neville, Conway Twitty, Erma with the Solara’s top down, Fleetwood Mac ed to ask Alan if foraging habituates in us Thomas, Percy Sledge, and Fats Domino. The cranked at full volume, and the heat on high. a posture of receiving, rather than squab- restored Arcade Theatre next door resounds with performances and broadcasts by musicians. That’s when I asked Alan about the long bling over, the food that’s all around us, but view. Had the world really just ended? that seemed overly abstract. The winter sun “Year of LA Music 2013” event, August 3, 2013 “It’s funny. People look at transition or shone on his face, he was singing along with ('.Bek_i_WdW7l[dk[<[hh_ZWo"Bek_i_WdW - 48 - SPRING 2013