I'M NOT A FORAGING EXPERT, and I’m not a botanist; I’m a physically restless chef who likes plants. I’m attracted to fruit because plants developed their fruit to be attractive to animals, and I am a curious animal following their lead. I don’t generate any income from foraging, and the food I bring home represents a tiny sliver of my annual diet. But even if I come back from an outing empty-handed—which is most of the time—I return enriched, because there’s always something new to see. I don’t just gather food. I gather observations.
This book is about fruit and foraging, but it’s really about walking and noticing, activities that create a lens through which the world around us comes into clearer focus. Walking is a huge part of what makes us human. It’s how we get from one place to another, even if the distance is only from the front door to a car door. On foot we absorb information differently. Our contact with everyday living things is more intimate. We can hear leaves rustle. We can hear insects hum. We can look fellow passersby in the eyes and smile.
We can see things grow.
The world offers us unspeakable atrocities and moments of unfathomable beauty, sometimes in the same event. But in between those two extremes is the stuff of life. That middle space is defined but vast. The middle is not one thing, the way a medium-sized soft drink is one thing or Mama Bear’s bowl of oatmeal is one thing. The middle is almost everything.
This middle place is our Eden. Eden is not static, the way popular culture depicts Adam and Eve hanging out in blissful ignorance with no concept of time or personal needs or desires. That would be impossibly boring, and therefore hellacious. Eden is dynamic. There’s give and take, a constant series of millions of small lives reacting to external circumstances and in turn setting off new reactions.
Foraging for fruit is not the only way to engage with our Eden, but its sensual aspects are, by design, difficult to resist. There is sweetness, color, fragrance, bitterness, juiciness, sourness, lusciousness. Blooms and pollinators. Producers and consumers. Ends and beginnings. There is looking and finding. Foraging is our journey in Eden.
My daily walks make up my foraging practice, the way other people have a yoga practice. Most of my foraging practice is prosaic stuff, like walking my daughter the few blocks to her elementary school in the morning. It’s the same route over and over again. I take comfort in the routine. Sometimes I’ll modify my route back home so I can see the progress of specific fruit trees, depending on the season: the persimmon tree in the fall, the plum tree in the summer. It’s like stopping in on friends.
I came into this world with a heartier dose of existential dread than the average person. I’m not sure why—I have a loving family and a stable home—but unresolvable issues about the human condition have always plagued me. My daily walks are more than a mechanism for better circulation and getting fresh air in my lungs. If I don’t get out of the house at least once a day, I lose it. My temper flares up, my energy level plummets, and I feel too much inside of myself.
The existential dread is an emotional cancer, and my foraging practice is a distraction for those overeager white blood cells that cause trouble. I channel that destructive energy into something constructive. Worst-case scenario, I get exercise and wave at some neighbors; best-case scenario, I bring home something interesting to eat.
Foraging has also made me less egocentric. Instead of thinking of a route as an obstacle to endure—a thing standing between me and a location where I will accomplish a necessary task, like driving to the grocery store or walking to the library—I think of each journey as a holistic experience. My neighborhood was not erected specifically for my convenience. It is a settlement, just as anthills and squirrel nests are settlements on the same land as the streets and sidewalks I use.
This is at odds with one of the fundamental ways we define our natural resources. Is our planet a global convenience store of energy and water and raw material for us to help ourselves to without reservation? From that viewpoint, everything exists for people, like props and scenery on the set of a play.
I’ve been grappling with the concept of a seven-day creation with mankind at its apogee ever since a kindly Sunday school teacher first presented the lesson to our young class. It never clicked for me. In my own lifetime, I’ve noticed changes our consumption habits have initiated. I gaze into the woods and see a lot more of some plants and a lot less of others. I hear the dreaded racket of leaf blowers drown out the backwash of other, gentler sounds. I see deer move closer and closer to our homes, because we’ve moved closer and closer to theirs.
I’m complicit in all this, of course. I cram garbage into nonbiodegradable plastic bags and shove the filled bags into our garbage can to eventually be buried in the earth. I book flights and buy frozen pizzas imported from Italy and grapes grown in Chile. I enjoy the comfort our first-world status affords us.
But I know it has its limits. It can’t last, and no one making money from the perpetuation of that lifestyle is happy to admit it. The powerlessness I feel as a participant in a cobbled-together system that ruins what we hold most dear overwhelms me, and sometimes I get numb and push it all to the back of my head so I can keep on going.
Foraging is, to me, a daily, small act of civil disobedience. Simply looking for wild stuff to eat is a way of flipping the bird to our industrialized food system. It’s a way of asserting our intellectual curiosity and reclaiming our natural role as humans on this planet, something we’ve allowed our modern lifestyle to strip from us. Foraging restores the balance a bit. Even if it’s just a handful of blackberries or a few fallen apples from a neighborhood tree—these things still count. The magic of foraging is ultimately about the quality of time you spend interacting with the world around you, not the quantity of edibles you haul home.
I started foraging because I am nosy and cheap. I like free things, and I like to look at property that does not belong to me and imagine what goes on there. Do this long enough and you will notice different types of fruit growing, some of it free for the taking. I noticed the fruit, and I took it.
When I lived in California and was just embarking on my career as a chef and writer, my foraging was sporadic and casual. Fruit just happens in California; you’d have to put an effort into avoiding it. I didn’t care as much about the trees as what they produced, and I mostly remember receiving sacks of Meyer lemons and Hachiya persimmons. Two plum trees in the backyard of a shared rental house dropped buckets of teeny, squishy, giant-pitted plums that I’d bake in coffee cakes.
I moved too often to undertake gardening, so I relied on other people’s plants. I liked the adrenaline rush of unexpected fruit windfalls, which sent me into the same elated states as a good score at the record store or sighting barely damaged furniture on the curb. Some people’s role is to drag home what is unloved and give it a place to belong.
Belonging is elusive. It comes and goes. I grew up in southeast Ohio, where Midwest meets Appalachia. It was fine enough, but always flummoxed me because its midwestern understatement and Appalachian self-reliance bled together to form a specific yet unspoken regional identity I couldn’t summarize in one handy sentence to use as a reply when people asked me where I was from. It’s appropriate that I didn’t see my first pawpaw—to me the Sasquatch of fruits—until after I’d lived for years away from where they grew, when I’d defined myself as someone who left and would never return. But I eventually grew disenchanted with the easygoing magic of West Coast life and struggled with profound stirrings to move back to my small hometown; wanting to settle there again meant I’d had no idea who I was all along. But we packed up and did it—I had a husband and a young daughter by then—and the adjustment was trying. There were ugly arguments and job search woes.
To work through the stress I’d created for us, I took to the woods and did some heavy-duty forest bathing. I wasn’t even looking for pawpaws when I found my first. I was walking on a trail in the woods, and one lay splayed open smack in the middle of the path in front of me, displaying its saffron-colored guts.
I don’t believe in fate, but I do believe in the magic of being receptive to the right thing in the right moment, and when I encountered that pawpaw, that was it. I went back and looked for more. They smelled and tasted like nothing I’d ever encountered in Ohio, though they’d been growing there for millennia. I fell for their amazingly tropical flavor and intensely perfumed flesh. I started hauling them home and have been at it ever since. It’s like that pawpaw found me, not vice versa.
When my pawpaw obsession was still new, my brother thru-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s easily one of the definitive episodes of his life. As he shared crazy stories and amazing, scenic photos, I wasn’t exactly envious, but I did yearn for the days when I’d summited gnarly peaks and touched the face of a rawer, seemingly more majestic incarnation of nature. There I was, back in Ohio, living amid so many things that had barely changed since I was a kid. No mountains, no canyons, no ocean coastline.
But what had changed was me. I saw my hometown differently. Instead of having nothing to offer me, it had everything to offer. I had a daughter and a husband and a dog, and it was the right place for us. I had to be open to wonders on a smaller scale if I wanted to have any adventure in my life. I had to allow my surroundings, rather than my expectations, to redefine what was epic.
So while my brother made his way north through the Laguna Mountains all the way to the Canadian border, I undertook my own ambitious journey. I hiked over the same stretches of trails day after day. The trailhead was right behind where my daughter went to preschool, so I’d drop her off and set out on my little adventure for the day. I liked how intimately I got to know the curves and dips in the trail, where to avoid roots or poison ivy.
I noticed new things every time. I watched as the pawpaw trees budded, then bloomed, then sent out their long, gently tapered leaves. I saw the fruit set, and grow, and then I snatched up pawpaw after pawpaw as they became ripe. When fall came I saw those leaves turn gold and eventually shrivel up, then fall to the ground and leave behind short, slender trunks and branches. I noticed all kinds of insects and fungus and moss.
Pawpaws were my gateway drug of foraged foods. Every year I see or hear about new things, and my repertoire expands: crab apples, mulberries, sumac, autumn olives, spicebush. Off the trails I see what’s growing on trees in yards and gather stray apples and persimmons off the sidewalk. I learn about fruits that don’t grow here, and I try to look for them if I happen to be elsewhere. But setting out to look for fruit isn’t as fun as leaving the house and being open to what you happen to come across. If you are receptive, what’s seemingly insignificant can become one of the most significant parts of your life. Who knows where fruit could lead you in the future? Let it open you up to follow your instincts and see the magic that happens because of it.