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Foraging – Desperate Times

December 19, 2010 by Suzy Badaracco — President, Culinary Tides Inc

Lilly looked around from her vantage point of the red flowered pillow and wondered what there was to eat. "Hey Teddy," she said in a sleepy voice, "what do we have to eat around here?" Teddy, who was resting on the depleted sock, wondered the same thing.

"I think there is hay over in the bailer – that is unless you have already pulled it all out," she replied. Lilly was always pulling all the hay out of the bailer and scattering it around the floor. "But the sock is empty and we finished off the Swiss chard about an hour ago," she said as she continued rolling onto her other side to face Lilly.

Lilly came from behind the cloth tarp in the corner of the cage and sighed. "Sure wish we could forage like the wild guinea pigs in Peru. Living in here is kinda humiliating don't ya think?"

"Are you crazy? You'd make so much noise if you lived in Peru that you may as well be ringing a dinner bell while screaming 'here I am, come eat me!'" Teddy exclaimed. "And can you imagine if our owners had to forage for us? Or worse, for themselves!?! It would take them all day and even then they might poison us. All I can say is you had better be happy we are inside the house and that the most adventurous they get is going to the backyard to pick us something from the vegetable garden."

Teddy now rose and got a quick sip from the water bottle and lay down on the blue flower pillow this time. "You know the drill. Hay, pellets, and fresh water in the morning, veggies at noon, and more hay at night. Yes ma'am that is all the foraging I want to do, thank you very much."

"You have a point," Lilly conceded. "But I sure wish they would take us to the supermarket with them sometime – I really like the baby mixed greens and the Italian parsley is so much tastier than the curly kind. Ahhh, a girl can dream can't she?"

Teddy felt bad now so she tried to put a positive spin on the conversation. "Well, just wait until spring comes around, we always get to go outside and eat grass – that is sorta like foraging really."

Lilly smiled at the thought of eating fresh grass as she waddled towards the hay bailer and sock, both of which had just been refilled for them.

The foraging trend is just so fantastic if you think about it. It is the latest morph on Local. In fact, one can think of it as Extreme Local. So instead of the 150 miles from home radius that Local had set years ago, now it is like 150 feet. The foraging trend stands for everything humans have been striving against for thousands of years. The ease that the corner market has brought to our lives is now shunned for its indecent cleverness and lack of, well, foraginess. Forget the supermarkets and restaurants, let's eat the tender weeds in the back yard that in the previous years we did battle with to kill. A new bar has been set by the urbanite. Now, not only are some studying and learning about what is edible in their immediate surroundings they have to try not to poison themselves in the process. I would love the CDC (Center for Disease Control) to do a study on the number of accidental poisonings as they coincide with the rise of foraging. I would also love to see if this trend fades with the recovery of the economy – more money, less time to explore the back yard or neighborhood park.

I support and celebrate the brave soles and their pioneer spirit and yes, foraginess! If anyone needs me, I will be buying organic dandelion leaves at Whole Foods. Oh, yes, and baby greens and Italian parsley. Back in a sec...

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