The mushroom season starts later in summer, but according to wild food forager Nathaniel Whitmore, the famous morel mushroom comes out earlier in spring when it is also a good time to pick wild edible vegetables such as roots and young greens.
Whitmore is a herbalist and shiatsu therapist, as well as a self-published author on ethno-botany. He is also a tireless educator who regularly conducts classes and walks on wild edibles.
I joined him on a walk last Saturday alongside a group of about 10 eager mushroom hunters—all of us excited at the prospect of walking in the fresh air, learning about and possibly even tasting our wild finds.
We set off from his Glen Spey property, in Sullivan County, just across the border from Orange County.
Someone who had met Whitmore some time ago commented that he seems to look younger now. He smiled shyly and knowingly. He is visibly a living testament to the philosophy that wild foods are more nutrient-rich, thus imparting great health. His active outdoor lifestyle doesn’t hurt either.
“My claim is that this time of the year I used to eat wild foods every day,” he said. But having recently relocated to Glen Spey he is still finding his gastronomic bearings. Some of his favorite wild plants are mustard plant, burdock roots, bracken, and edible fiddleheads.
Far from being sedentary, he is fully engaged in his environment on a daily basis. He is either gathering plants in the forest, giving private herbal consultations, sleeping in a tent when guests occupy the main house, or single-handedly working on his log cabin that is almost completed.
Unsurprisingly, like many people who live close to the land, and also holistic medicine practitioners, Whitmore believes that the best medicine is preventive. This is something that we have forgotten due to our busy modern lifestyles which force us to reach for what is quick, convenient, and woefully lacking in nutritional value.
He also mentions that the stagnation we experience in our bodies and our lives is due in part to a stagnant diet, so it is important to eat a variety of fresh natural foods.
“As a wild foods enthusiast and quasi-vegetarian, I delight in variety. I derive almost all of my nutrition from plant sources, and I believe that my success in doing so is largely due to variety. There are so many forms of plant life found in nature that can be eaten, including grains, beans, nuts, seeds, buds, flowers, leaves, stalks, shoots, roots, tubers, fruits, berries, seaweeds, fiddleheads, pollen, etc.,” Whitmore writes on his website. “The various tastes, qualities, and energies found in a diet of diversity make for great health.”
First Encounter With a Reishi
As we set out, we first looked around Whitmore’s land where we came across some glorious reishi mushrooms growing on a hemlock tree.
He patiently explained to those who were largely ignorant about the characteristics of the reishi that it is “the most revered of medicinals.” It has a strong and bitter taste, so it is used dried and boiled either in soups or tea. The reishi is known as the longevity mushroom and used as an overall body-mind tonic.
We then changed scenery and went for a longer walk along the river where he was excited to see dead elm trees. Not because the trees were dead per se, but because we were after all on the hunt for morels, and morels love dead elm trees. Apparently, the nutrients of a dying elm with all their sugary goodness are soaked up by the mushrooms that thrive under those conditions.
Morels can also be found in apple orchards but he cautioned against picking morels that grow there because they soak up heavy metals and, on older apple orchards, where arsenic was used as an insecticide, the mushrooms are themselves toxic due to their arsenic content.
In commercially grown apples the arsenic accumulates in apple seeds but not the rest of the apple. Even organically grown apple seeds naturally have cyanide—eating apple seeds is beneficial for the lungs in small doses, but they are not indicated to be eaten in large amounts according to Whitmore.
As we walked, Whitmore was clearly the most agile among us, but his agility was not all. He seemed to be the most alert and sharp in terms of using his every sense to survey the land. He pointed out a few interesting plants and where to look for morels.
