About this item
In the tradition of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, and Mark Kurlansky’s Cod—a renowned culinary adventurer goes into the woods with the iconoclasts and outlaws who seek the world’s most coveted ingredient . . . and one of nature’s last truly wild foods: the uncultivated, uncontrollable mushroom.Within the dark corners of America’s forests grow culinary treasures. Chefs pay top dollar to showcase these elusive and beguiling ingredients on their menus. Whether dressing up a filet mignon with smoky morels or shaving luxurious white truffles over pasta, the most elegant restaurants across the country now feature an abundance of wild mushrooms. The mushroom hunters, by contrast, are a rough lot.
About the Author
I write about people who live at the intersection of food and nature. This gives me a chance to follow multiple threads that intrigue me: wild foods, foraging, natural history, environmental politics, outdoor sports, adventure travel, etc. My wife thinks it's all a racket--an excuse to bushwhack around the woods and waterways by day and put away obscene amounts of rich food and wine by night. I can't exactly argue with that view.
Really, though, my interest lies in the characters who feel equally at home in both field and kitchen. In my first book, "Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager," I go spearfishing for lingcod with a modern hunter-gatherer/English PhD; I hunt morel mushrooms with an Italian-American EPA administrator; and jig for squid on a city pier jammed with immigrants hooting and hollering in a dozen different tongues. Bottom line: Foraging is fun, reconnecting us to both the landscape and our fellow humans. Plus, a really good meal awaits. Each chapter concludes with a recipe.
My second book, "The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of an Underground America," is about the men and women--many of them immigrants from war-torn countries, migrant workers, or refugees from the Old Economy--who bring wild mushrooms to market. To write the book, I embedded myself in the itinerant subculture of wild mushroom harvesters, a mostly hidden confederacy of treasure-seekers that follows the "mushroom trail" year-round, picking and selling the fungi that land on exclusive restaurant plates around the country. The book takes place over the course of several mushroom seasons and follows the triumphs and failures of a few characters, including an ex-logger trying to pay his bills and stay out of trouble; a restaurant cook turned mushroom broker trying to build a business; and a celebrated chef who picks wild mushrooms on the side to keep in touch with the land. "The Mushroom Hunters" was awarded a 2014 Pacific Northwest Book Award.
My third and newest book is titled "Upstream: Searching for Wild Salmon, from River to Table." In many ways, salmon are the last great wild food. In North America entire societies were organized around the salmon lifecycle--a few still exist. To write the book, I traveled throughout "salmon country," from California to Alaska and inland to Idaho. I spent time with tribal fishermen, commercial fishermen, sport anglers, scientists, environmentalists, fishmongers, chefs, and others. Their stories reveal the importance of salmon both as a keystone species and as a cultural totem. More to the point, the fate of salmon is largely tied to our own fate.
What else? I've worked as a reporter, editor, and writer my entire career, for both Old and New Media. I took the plunge into full-time writing after a year spent living in a cabin off the grid with my wife and son. (I emerged from the woods with a boo
