I wrote this little essay almost a decade ago, before I had even thought of writing a blog. Yesterday, as I sat here preparing for some upcoming posts exploring edible plants, there was a little echo in my brain telling me that I have thought about this before. I dug this essay out of an old backup drive and decided that today, on Father’s Day, was the perfect time to bring it into the light.
Thanks Dad, for teaching me to be curious.

“It tastes like root beer,” my father said. It wasn’t the first time that he pulled something out of the woods for me to eat. Sometimes it was wild strawberries, dandelion blossoms, or black walnuts. This time, we were walking along a path through the woods behind my grandmother’s house. He snapped a twig off of a tree, peeled back the bark and handed it to me. “Here, try this.” I rarely questioned him, so I took the twig. “It’s sassafras,” he said while gnawing on his own stick. The spicy flavor tingled on my tongue—it really did taste like root beer. I chewed on that stick for the rest of the walk. I tried to replicate the experience later on my own with very disappointing results. All twigs do not taste the same. I wished I had paid more attention.

The current focus on foraging for local foods has resurrected childhood memories. Back then, it wasn’t a culinary trend but just something that people did. We would forage for mushrooms in the spring as soon as the ground warmed. My father knew just which kind of trees they grew under and showed us what to look for—the ugly mushrooms that looked like brains. My brother and I were more interested in catching the salamanders that scurried out from under the damp leaves, but the mushrooms had our attention once we returned home. Dad would dust them with flour and fry them in butter. Sandwiched between two slices of Wonder bread, they tasted musty and earthy, like the woods. It wasn’t until decades later that I realized we had been eating morels. Not long ago, my husband and I paid a hefty sum for a mushroom foraging excursion in Vermont to do the very same thing that my father had taught me for free. Again, I wished I had paid more attention.

My mother has the sweet tooth in the family, so black raspberries were more her thing. We would head out across the fields, buckets in hand, towards the railroad tracks behind our house. The edges of the tracks were overgrown with wild black raspberry bushes, the tangled brambles growing taller than my head. Smears of purple juice mingled with splotches of blood from the sharp thorns, but pain could not keep us from our harvest. I would throw my body onto the prickly bushes to grab at the highest berries. Pounds of berries disappeared into my mouth instead of my bucket. There was more than one way to carry raspberries home and my stomach was the preferred container. Mom would transform the berries that made it home into flaky pies and sticky sweet jam that lasted throughout the year.

I haven’t forgotten the taste of those raspberries, though I’ve never been able to find it again. Likewise, morels rarely have the depth of flavor that I’m expecting. Maybe the taste that I remember was really the taste of the experience; the luxury of food foraged from our own little world. Luckily, the lesson of curious eating has endured – I did pay attention to some things. On restaurant menus, the most unusual dishes catch my eye; and when I do get a chance to walk in the woods, I look carefully at the flora around me, always wondering, “Can I eat that?”