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My dad and I used to gather wild mushrooms all the time when I was a kid....in the cow pastures and in the woods. He was very knowledgeable about them. I'd never attempt it now, I don't trust my recollections of which are good and which are poisonous.
He also had a huge organic vegetable garden with everything from lettuce to potatoes. We never bought produce, even well into the winter.
MBM, I looove fiddleheads! Haven't had them in years!
as a mainer we live off the land.... quite a hearty bunch up here..
this past spring I picked fiddleheads (baby ferns) a veggie
we barter amongst neighbors, we grow different fruits and veggies
we also hunt game, we fish and we are an opportunist... wild turkeys are now quite abundant, about 5 have flown into my car- thumped and died...so I did the humane thing,,,couldn't let it go to waste, so I cut the breast right out of it.... it is very good!!
I hunt deer, moose, bear, and sometimes patridge and bunnies- as a professional butcher, I cut up a lot of critters for friends and relatives- and they often pay me in meats- so my freezer is full..
we have many geese and ducks on our lawn, as we live on the water,,,it would be so easy to pick one off..
but I haven't- its fun to watch them and the little ones
I fish often and eat what I catch..
I grew up on wild fresh seafood,,,my father is a lobsterman,, I ate lobsters every day out on the boat
we dug clams and picked mussels
my grandfather had a farm, and when we visited, my grandmother would ask what would you kids like for dinner??
us kids said chicken,, so she said follow me
she grabbed one of the chickens and cut the head off.... my sister was gagging,,,,grandmother said,,, " you are lucky to be so squeamish" "when I was your age , we sometimes didn't eat more than a potato in a day"
since someone mentioned killing an animal - any animal I kill for consumption dies quickly
I cant say that in nature- ive seen coyotes feeding on a deer while the deer is still alive,,
a painful slow agonizing death, ive seen an eagle take a goose and that thing squawked for 20minutes
humans have been hunter gatherers from the start - I saw a documentary a few weeks ago,, now many scientists believe we were more of a hunter than a gatherer,,as the leap forward for human evolution is attributed to eating meat/proteins
I hated missing the wild blueberries this year but there was too much going on--like a refrigerator that died....twice! I needed to freeze the berries so I ended up not going at all.
Yes, the story about cutting the chicken's head off rings true. My grandparents came here poor, from the north of England. They drilled it into us how lucky we were. I saw my favorite chicken's head get chopped off so they (I just couldn't eat that night) could have her for supper.
We humans probably lived on fish and what animals we could catch, and in season, we could pick berries and other wild foods. It wasn't until "recent" times that fruits and vegetables were cultivated and we could load up on them. My most recent food that I picked myself was peas from the garden last night.
I grow my own herbs. I use a lot of them fresh and when I have a surplus I dry them. I always have more than I need so I share with relatives and neighbors. I make pesto sauce out of the tons of basil I grow. I used to grow tomatoes but after I moved to Arizona it was not so successful and I spent more money on the project than the tomatoes were worth. So I make my red gravy out of canned tomatoes now (Muir Glen Roasted Tomatoes are my favorite for that purpose).
My brother has lemon trees, so every year I pick a bunch of his lemons, squeeze them, freeze the juice in ice cube trays and keep the cubes in plastic bags in my freezer so I have local lemon juice for my cooking most of the year.
Once when I was in Greece my friends and I helped an old lady pick walnuts in a forested area. We took them to her house and I learned what a pain in the butt it is to clean walnuts. We also learned how to roast and preserve red peppers on an outdoor barbecue at the home of one of my traveling companion's relatives. I have a bunch of funny photos of Greek grandmas in long black dresses teaching the dumb American women how to put up peppers for the winter the old-fashioned way.
I don't think hunting and gathering is a lost art at all, OP. I think there will always be city folk or others who will never learn to do it, or ever care, but even in the cities people hunt and gather.
My dad grew up in Oakland, CA, right across the bay from SF. A city. And he loved to fish at the piers. And we'd go crawdad hunting (crayfish) in the creeks around the bay area.
Many cities, even in the SF Bay Area allow chickens in people's backyards. Even small backyards. I recently looked up the backyard chicken/farm animal laws for a few cities around San Francisco. I think it was Berkeley that only requires your chicken coup to be 25 feet from your neighbor's house. Not the fence, their house. So, pretty much anybody, even in the city can have chickens and a garden. Heck, Berkeley will even let you keep a goat.
Oakland and Alameda also allow certain backyard animals and chickens. I used to live in Davis, and people can have chickens there, too.
My mom (also in SF Bay Area) growing up, usually had a garden in our little backyard.
But the cities in CA only take up a fraction of the entire state. Lots of hunters and gatherers outside the cities, too.
Since we're including gardening in the definition of "gathering," I gathered cherry tomatoes for my lunch off of my dresser in my studio apartment. I don't have a balcony or patio, so I got a grow light and on top of my large dresser (about 48" x 20") I have some patio cherry tomato plants, some marigolds (for fun) and some basil.
Over the winter I answered a few ads on Craigslist to come take some Meyer lemons and some grapefruits off of people's trees for free. Just finished my last lemonade from the canned juice from last winter this week. I was so sad there was no more!
Last month while walking my dog by the river, I was eating wild plums whenever we walked there. In the spring at the same place, I was munching on miner's lettuce.
I did move from the city to the country in WA state right out of high school, and married someone who hunted regularly. I also used to go gather berries and rose hips and all manner of goodies from the countryside and the woods.
Now, my daughter is mildly interested in gardening, but that's about it. Funny, she grew up in the country in WA state (now lives in Oakland) but she's always been a mall girl. More interested in fashion and shopping at the mall, than any back to nature gardening/farm animals stuff.
I also raised pigs, but I couldn't kill them myself. I paid the butcher to come haul them away in a truck. Then they'd come back in tidy packages for the freezer.
There will always be people not into it. But, it's not a dying art, at all, in my opinion.
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