Says Robin Greenfield, quoted in "He forages all his food but calls your diet ‘extreme’/Robin Greenfield seeks to challenge ideas about what counts as normal food" (WaPo)(gift link).
I see that he's in northern Wisconsin, and he eats a lot of "wild rice, acorns, wild pecans, black walnuts, hazelnuts, plums, fish and deer."
How do you eat acorns? We could forage a lot of calories from our own little yard if we knew how to eat acorns. Hint: It's a lot of work!
By the way, I remember Euell Gibbons. He was big enough, back in the 1970s, to be satirized on "The Carol Burnett Show":
Posts
31 comments:
Some parts are edible
““ Right now, we’re going through the sixth extinction. It’s human-driven. Millions of species are going extinct because of our actions. That’s extreme."
Says Robin Greenfield,”
Yes, another lovable dumbshit.
Gibbons started writing in the early Sixties, but his heyday was short: the iconic commercial came out in 1972, and he was gone in 1975 -- aortic aneurysm.
J.J. Rodale, the organic gardening and health food activist behind Prevention magazine passed out and eventually died during a taping of Dick Cavett after making comments like, "I'm in such good health that I fell down a long flight of stairs yesterday and I laughed all the way," and "I've decided to live to be a hundred". Wikipedia relates that 'Rodale's last interaction with Cavett before dying was "offering the host his special asparagus boiled in urine."'
Also from Wiki: "Gibbons is considered a saint by the God's Gardeners, a fictional religious sect that is the focus of Margaret Atwood's 2009 novel The Year of the Flood."
““ Right now, we’re going through the sixth extinction. It’s human-driven. Millions of species are going extinct because of our actions. That’s extreme."
Bah. That’s not an extinction. This is an extinction:
“Approximately 90% of all species on Earth died during the Permian–Triassic extinction event (the "Great Dying") about 252 million years ago.”
We got through that one OK. We’ll be fine.
Two things you can be sure of in life:
1) Malthusians are always wrong, and
2) Malthusians will always be with us.
Just for old times' sake: How do you recognize Euell Gibbons in a nudist colony? He's the one with the goldenrod and the wild hickory nuts.
Euell Gibbons was not big enough to get a tag by Althouse
When times get tough, he has a secret stash of Grape Nuts.
You don't win friends with salad.
It’s probably not too much work if you are hungry.
If I recall correctly, when John McPhee took a canoeing trip with Gibbons during which they ate only stuff they foraged (which McPhee wrote about in "Stalking the Wild Asparagus"), at the end of the trip they both gorged on porterhouse steak.
I do recommend the McPhee piece. Gibbons was a much more interesting person than the legend suggests.
Extreme rhetoric.
- Krumhorn
Foraged food and explosive diarrhea go hand in hand.
Also, nuts in shorts.
Raw Bits.
“ You know I love that organic cooking
I always ask for more
And they call me Mr. Natural
On down to the health food store
I only eat good sea salt
White sugar don't touch my lips
And my friends is always
Begging me to take them
On macrobiotic trips
Yes, they are
Oh, but at night I stake out my strongbox
That I keep under lock and key
And I take it off to my closet
Where nobody else can see
I open that door so slowly
Take a peek up north and south
Then I pull out a Hostess Twinkie
And I pop it in my mouth
Yeah, in the daytime I'm Mr. Natural
Just as healthy as I can be
But at night I'm a junk food junkie
Good lord have pity on me”
I remember that skit - I'll still say, "Ever lick a river?" if the topic of food foraging comes up. It amuses me, but I just get strange looks from anyone I've said it to. I had forgotten that it was from The Carol Burnett Show.
Never listen to health advice from a guy who dropped over dead at 64. Jim Fixx, the father of jogging, died of a heart attack at 52... while jogging... George Burns, who smoked 12 cigars a day, lived to 100!
The old joke is when Gibbons died, they only determined his age by cutting him in half and counting the rings.
Can't be certain of the source, but think it might be Johnny Carson.
Wow, a Euell Gibbons reference! I hadn't heard his name in years.
In junior high (mid-70s), I took a "multimedia" class and had a project to make a short film with an 8mm camera. My film, "Hungry", was about two lost and starving kids foraging in the forest Gibbons-style. I re-discovered my 8mm film recently, had it digitized. Fun to see again!
As species go, we're no all that durable. We've only been around for 300,000 years. This civilization thing is a recent construct. We've already had several near extinction events, and civilization has at all times been precarious.......At the time that Edward Gibbon wrote Decline and Fall, civilizatio,n, at least for gentry class like him, was somewhat more debased and straitened than in the times of the good emperors.......We lack the sturdy resilience of the cockroach and the crocodile. I don't think we'll be around for much longer.
Here's the famous commericial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOqjdRyZWiA
Strangely, I always thought it was "ever eat a pinecone?" not ever eat a "Pine tree?". but then i knew the comedic tropes before I ever saw the commerical.
Our mother followed the fads of the 70s. Grapenuts were in, bacon and eggs were out. Butter was the devil. We all needed to eat carbs and cut out fat.
And now, we all have diabetes. LOL.
Reminds me of Ron Dunn. In the immortal words of Cat Stevens, "If you want to be free, be free."
Deer are high caloric return on effort. Extremely nutrient dense.
Acorns an Rice are low caloric return on effort.
You can't grow a big brain unless you feed it. Herbivores just have smaller brains.
Why does Euell Gibbons have purple children? Because he has Grape Nuts.
the spanish eat acorns, of course they process them through a pig first
Here's something extreme.
If everybody tried to survive by foraging we would very quickly run out of food, after causing the extinction of all of the forage species.
Obviously he hasn't thought this through very carefully.
More for me. Hahaha!
“How do you eat acorns?”
Feed the acorns to squirrels then eat the squirrels.
The privilege involved here is obvious. Like anyone has time for this shit, and the retort that almost no one can do it because there's not enough food to forage is correct. We'd destroy the entire ecosystem and then starve. Finally, we did that for millions of years, and maybe it's time to try something else.
"Many parts of a chicken are edible. It's true!"
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 4 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith. Also: No italics, even briefly. Use asterisks for emphasis. And don't play with the format by changing fonts or using boldface or all caps. Never include more than one extra line break between paragraphs.