On a warm, cloudless morning, I am crouched in the underbrush, the only sounds in the woods the song of a pine warbler, the whine of a mosquito, and the distant drone of an airplane. I am entirely absorbed in picking blueberries. They give the least bit of resistance, but with a gentle tug the ripe ones roll into my hand and then into a bucket. I admire them as I gather: they are less blue than purple and blessed with a slight white blush. Warmed by the sun, they are delicious, evoking the piney woods, the singing warbler, the Fowler’s toad that hops away, and my sheer happiness.
I feel a similar joy in the off season, when the object of my gathering is the celebrated and delicious clam. Out on the West End flats at low tide with my rake and basket, surrounded by my fellow townspeople, roaming opportunistic gulls, and a few late shorebirds, the smell of the briny wet sand and mud suffuses my senses. I drag my rake through the sand until that just-perceptible thunk tells me that I have one or two, maybe more, and into the basket it goes. Later, as the clams give up their little lives in a pot on my kitchen stove, the steam delivers that essence of the flats all over again.
The atavistic pleasure of hunting and gathering surely resides in our cellular memory. Humans existed on wild foods for thousands of years before they blundered into agriculture, and even then we hunted and gathered as we grew our crops and tended our livestock. Berries and littlenecks are as far as I go: the rabbits, the ducks, and the deer are safe from me. But there are those here who can describe the joy of hunting, and I understand it. And, of course, fishing is a great mainstay for many on the Cape. I have just wandered away from it — lost my poles and gear.
I don’t have much of a garden anymore, either, but I used to, and I can remember the joy of harvesting our own greens and plucking a ripe tomato we watched grow day by day. There are many who still delight in these activities, and I envy them.
I am sorry to say that almost the entirety of my diet is derived from foraging in the strangely artificial climate of Stop & Shop. I admit that a large part of my off-season social life takes place in those aisles and is enjoyable, but I also feel a kind of resignation and dependency as I fill my cart.
There is a larger problem. It is true that you are what you eat, but equally true that you are as you eat. Arguably, one of the largest effects we have on our suffering planet is through diet. American agriculture produces large amounts of greenhouse gases (more than 20 percent) and consequent climate change as well as pesticides and herbicides (over a billion pounds a year) and genetically modified crops.
Most of us who have enough to eat do not give much thought to what we are putting in our mouths — where it came from, how it was produced, how it got to us, or what effects it has on our environment. My healthy breakfast, for instance, of assorted fruit and bran flakes with soy milk, and coffee, might seem benign. But there is sugar and corn syrup in that cereal; both are environmental (and health) villains. Forests are cleared to grow the soy. In season, the fruit is grown in the U.S., but for much of the year it comes from South America, where environmental regulations are relatively lax. (I admit that I do not spend the extra dollars on organic produce.)
I try to buy shade-grown coffee so that habitat for our migrating songbirds is preserved, but it is hard to find and more expensive. And of course, all these items have to be shipped, entailing fossil fuel emissions. I could go through the same analysis for lunch and dinner.
I do not eat meat. (See “Food for Thought,” Feb. 4, 2021.) The horrors of factory farming should be enough to dissuade any compassionate person from doing so, and the environmental effects are staggering. But I do eat fish, and the carbon footprint of the fishing industry is also high. If I lived according to my precepts, I would limit such food to locally grown shellfish.
But there is the challenge: to “live deliberately,” as Thoreau termed it, to take control of this very personal aspect of our existence and its effect on our planet as we go about our busy lives.
I’m off for more blueberries.
