Gormet Foraging
December 24, 2003
Only a few generation ago, our ancestors foraged for food with a digging stick or a club. If they found something to eat, they ate it on the spot. Maybe they cooked it before they ate it but they did not consult a detailed and complex cookbook for a recipe. It may have been necessary to travel hundreds of miles to find a pinch of salt. Spices were largely unknown. The difference in the gene pool between me and my ancestors is likely very close to zero. Like my ancestors, I like to eat simple foods. When I enter a grocery story, I wish to grab a few of my favorite foods and leave within five minutes or so. Sure, I like a fairly balanced meal of fruits, vegetables, meats, breads etc. A simple sandwich, a little salad and a glass of water serve me just fine. I believe in the old saw that I should “eat to live, not live to eat.”
But, don’t get me wrong! I do not wish to return to the good old days when several days might pass with no food to eat until some enterprising family member killed a tasty skunk or something. I think the modern grocery store is an absolute marvel. The local Safeway grocery store in Redwood City must be one of the truly great ones in the world. It is almost as big as a WalMart Superstore, and has one of the widest assortments of quality food we have seen. My complaint is not with the quality of food available to us, it is just that we tend to eat too much of it. And, we wish it to be very tasty so we pay huge sums of money to gormet cooks in restaurants so we can eat like kings. I read somewhere that European royalty seldom lived to the age of 50 because they died from eating very rich foods and the diseases resulting from this consumption. So, the phrase “eat like a king” sounds to me like a suicidal prescription.
Anyway, Pat and I were doing some grocery shopping at this Safeway to make sure that when we gather together with our children and their families at Lake Tahoe for a Christmas ski trip, we would not suffer from starvation. Our usual strategy for foraging in a supermarket is for one of us to get a cart and the other to carry a handbasket. The grocery list is divided in half so we can each forage on our own. When we run into each other somewhere in the store, the contents of the handbasket can be transferred into the cart to reduce the handbasket weight and the foraging continues. I usually head for the fresh food section and stock up on apples, bananas, salad stuff, potatoes, etc. then to the meat section for some fish or chicken. Pat often gets the canned and frozen stuff. This process usually works very well for us as it speeds the process and simplifies the foraging. If the store is large and Pat would be hard to find, I find the magazine rack near the checkout counter and read until Pat appears. But this time, when the list was divided, it was written on several different scraps of paper so I did not really get half. I quickly and efficiently gathered the items on my list and proudly showed my spouse what a great hunter and gatherer she had married. “Not so fast” was her reply. Here are a few more things that you can help me find.
Could you find a package of ten, eight inch flour tortillas, two cups of ½ and ½, two cups of cool whip and 2 cups of cubed ham? Suddenly, my foraging strategy became much more complicated and my foraging confidence began to fray. These items were not on my normal foraging route. It was now necessary to venture into stranger territories. Who knows what dangers lurked there! The ½ and ½ was fairly easy because I expected that it could be found someplace close to the milk. Maybe the cool whip could be found nearby. But all I could find was a can of some other kind of whipped stuff. Cubed ham? Forget it!
No comments:
Post a Comment