Foraging with Climate Change
The Pennsylvania woods in early Fall along with some edible fungi. Photo by douglas reeser.
by douglas reeser
January 26, 2021
Chapter 2
I got my first mushroom identification book back in the mid-1990s when I was living and working on a river in southeastern Pennsylvania. When you spend time in nature, it's difficult to ignore the strange and unique forms that mushrooms take over the course of a year. At the time, I was also discovering the joys of good food as a novice vegetarian seeking to expand his diet beyond breakfast pastries and processed veggie patties. Whole foods and vegetables, my first forays into gardening, and of course, an interest in finding edible mushrooms and other plants in the woods all became a part of my life.
Fast forward around 20 years, after various jobs in the food industry, then a return to academia, I found myself starting a small farm-to-table pub. My anthropological training, rich in the many tenets of social justice, led me to truly embrace the farm-to-table approach. Situated in a suburban-rural zone, I was able to work with dozens of small, family-run, private producers (small farmers, cheese makers, animal raisers, butchers, bakers, and other food producers) to supply the pub. Our menu changed weekly so that we could fully embrace the seasonality of our small-scale producers. For the ultimate in seasonal menu items, I also began purchasing foraged food for the pub, and soon began foraging myself. I was looking for mushrooms in the woods again, and it felt wonderful!
Five years later, the pandemic hit. Everything changed. Again. The common thread? With a whole bunch of extra time on my hands, I found myself in the woods a whole lot more. I was looking for mushrooms and other wild foods, expanding my knowledge base while spending time in nature, centering myself and connecting to our planet. Over the course of many walks through the woods, I decided to dust off my anthropology training and begin writing again. And what better topic to explore than an activity that has held my interest for at least 25 years: foraging.
To write effectively on a topic, one must begin with research. As much as I would like to be spending time with other foragers (in true anthropological style!), we remain in a global pandemic, so I've started by reading. I've begun working through the academic literature on foraging, looking for underlying themes, understanding what we know as scientists and researchers, and searching for a useful path for my own research. I'm writing from within this process, so these chapters presented on la Cocina dooglas are an unfolding of sorts, an unfolding of my research process and findings. Chapters may come in fits and starts, and probably won't have clear continuity at first - or at all - but this is work that I hope can be done when a more complete story about foraging becomes clear.
So where does that leave us now? Well, for starters, foraging is about food and the environment. Someone who forages is someone who is looking for edible plants and fungi out in the natural world. Thinking about foraging is also thinking about food and thinking about the environment. And so recently, I've backed up a bit to take a look at the current state of food and food production along with what scientists are writing about the environment. It's not a pretty picture being painted out there.
Despite some advances in indoor growing methods, the bulk of food production occurs outside in the natural environment. Farmers rely on a relatively stable climate to plan and produce from year to year. Climate change has been a hot button topic for at least a decade, politicized and discounted by some. However, scientists continue to show evidence of our changing climate. Take for example a peer-reviewed study published in late January of this year (2021) - just days ago - describing ice loss around the globe. The authors document that "Earth lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice between 1994 and 2017," and that "the rate of ice loss has risen by 57% since the 1990s" [1]. Ice loss is taking place across the planet, leaving less reflective surface, leading to warmer temperatures and sea level rise [2], and ultimately a less stable climate. The implication for us is that the increasing loss of global ice will not make producing food any easier, and is likely to affect agricultural zones across the planet.
And ice loss is just the tip of the proverbial and once mighty iceberg. In another study also published in January, 2021, scientists lead their article with: "Humanity is causing a rapid loss of biodiversity and, with it, Earth's ability to support complex life. But the mainstream is having difficulty grasping the magnitude of this loss, despite the steady erosion of the fabric of human civilization" [3]. They present evidence that with 1 million species under threat of extinction (nearly 20% of all species) we are likely experiencing the 6th Mass Extinction on the planet. Further, we now have severely damaged fresh water and marine environments, and a planet that has had over 70% of it land altered by human hands. The result? "With such a rapid, catastrophic loss of biodiversity, the ecosystem services it provides have also declined. These include inter alia reduced carbon sequestration, reduced pollination, soil degradation, poorer water and air quality, more frequent and intense flooding and fires, and compromised human health" [3].
Without diving too deep into the climate change literature, I think it's safe to say that the climate is changing, and we're likely to see some repercussions. One of them is sure to be the affects of a changing climate on our system of food production. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the affects include: more flooding, more droughts, change in crop and animal viability, new pests, weeds, and pathogens, degraded soils, unsafe working conditions, more crop failures, and more vulnerability to farmers and their communities [4].
For me, what's extra unsettling about all of this, is that climate change and its associated implications were, at one point not too long ago, something that would play out over the next century, with the most dire affects occurring beyond 2070. There seems to be increasing consensus that we will be dealing with many of these problems a whole lot sooner, and in fact, that we are beginning to experience climate change now. It feels like there should be an urgency to our discussion on what to do. Instead, the Green New Deal, a policy proposal in the US aimed at addressing climate change, has become increasingly politicized, and at this point mostly stalled.
So again, where does that leave us? While we can't be certain of how quickly climate change will affect our daily lives, we can rest assured that we will increasingly be forced to deal with the reality of a warming globe and changing climate. And while the documented impacts on our food system are few and mostly unknown to date, there is little doubt that our food system will face some challenges to its ability to feed us all. Is the situation hopeless? Well, of course not. But we certainly have to work to make changes, and I've come to find relevance in the move to a more local-focused existence, one in which many or most of our daily needs are supplied by producers within our local sphere. This looks like small farmers and producers providing a wide(r) diversity of goods to a small(er) geographic circle. The picture probably includes more self production on the household scale (gardens!), and perhaps... a revival of foraging and gathering foods from our local wild spaces (in a responsible way of course!).
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References
[1] https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/15/233/2021/
[3] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419/full
[4] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/climate-change-and-agriculture
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