Dog Penis Mushroom

The Elegant Stinkhorn fungus (Mutinus elegans) is also called the "dog penis" mushroom, and I had a small line of them yesterday morning in front of the camera trap next to the greenhouse. By evening they were gone. It rained buckets last night, however, so Satuday should be good mushrooming weather!

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Big Puffball Mushroom

This is a Puffball Mushroom, well past prime, and about the size of a human skull. This one was found in the hedge yesterday -- a classic Calvatia gigantea. If found young, they are excellent eating, provided the middle is still white all the way through.

After the cold snap and all the rain we have had for the last four days, mushrooms should be sprouting all over.

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Oyster Mushrooms

 

Some late season Pleurotus ostreatus mushrooms. I did pretty well in my fungus course in college, but in truth all you really need to know is the names and clear signs for about 5-6 common mushroom species in your area. I once fed wild mushroom omlettes to 125 people in college -- they had no idea and no one got sick.

Oberlin

I stopped off at Oberlin, Ohio on the way back from picking up the dog. Oberlin College is a small school for common-as-ditchwater kids that are pretty smart and a little odd. The school boasts an impressive conservatory and a history of leftist social activism that is a source of pride for both the school and the alumni.

Oberlin was the first school in the country to admit women and also the first school in the country to admit blacks. It's motto is "Learning and Labor," and the typical Obie (if there is such a thing) grows up in the spirit of service and with an eye to changing the world just a little bit for the better.

All of this is theory, of course. Diversity at Oberlin includes every odd thing imaginable, but it does not often stretch to having a conservative born-again Christian in the classroom. It's not that Oberlin would not welcome such people (they would), but that such people tend to get uncomfortable around blue-haired girls with nose piercings, and inter-racial lesbian couples, and people who talk passionately about the evil that was (and is) the KKK.

Their loss, if you ask me -- there are some fascinating creatures at Oberlin. You do not have to actually wrestle with the bears to watch them and even admire them for their struggle to exist. In fact, most of the people at the school pass for entirely normal; it takes only 50 truely odd people out of 3,000 for it to feel like a parade.

The college and the town have not changed too much in 25 years. A few new buildings, a few new stores in old buildings, one old store in a new building, etc. There was one very odd sign that made even this alumnus pause, scratch his head, and reconsider annual giving. Such is the march of progress.

Tappan Square is a 14-acre park on the edge of campus and it looked pretty much the same, except that the Oberlin Rocks seemed to have grown smaller.

Barney, my late great terrier, was painted on to the side of one of the Rocks for a while, when he was "lost." It turned out he was not lost, but instead had been stolen by the dispatcher for the local Police Department. I marched right over, picked up my dog, and committed no bodily harm only because the police and I had met before.

Let it be said that somewhere in my files at Oberlin is a notation about me and the dog. "The dog is very well behaved, but Mr. Burns is not. It is best to ignore the dog and act as if it is invisible." I have not actually seen this note, but I was told it was there by someone who managed Wilder Hall. In those days, my terrier was (in theory) persona non grata on campus, but I am not one for authority if it makes no sense. At Oberlin, you learn to push back against oppression in any form.

I was, at times, strapped for cash in College, and I well-remember a month when I figured I would save a little money and buy Barney generic dog food. He would not touch the stuff, but I figured that would change when he got hungry enough. At the time I was pinching pennies myself and living off of raw rye (from a feed store bag in the lab) and yeast (also from the lab), and washing it down with a pitcher of beer an evening at the Celler in the basement of Wilder (I was broke, but beer was a prioity). While I was in the Cellar, Barney was tied to a bench in the hall. Generally he slept there and no one paid him a mind.

Weeks went buy and Barney did not seem to be losing weight, but he was not eating that generic dog food either.

All was explained one evening, when I came out to find one of the older woman who worked the grill stroking Barney's head. "Is this your dog?," she asked. "I give him a T-bone steak every night."

Barney just looked up at me and laughed, comfortable in the old lady's lap. I tried to give the dog a reproachful look, but I suspect it came out as grin. Barney and I always admired anything that got by on grace and cleverness alone. I certainly admired that smart little dog.

While going to the book store to look for a few things on my little excursion back to college, I noticed that a huge old tree on Tappan Square was gone, replaced by a small grouping of low shrubs. The tree had been planted by Professor George Jones' kindergarten class -- a fact that Professor Jones himself had told me when he was 92 years old.

George Jones was introduced to me by David Miller, another biology professor, and I remember well the day that Professor Jones and I went mushrooming for morels. This was a big day for me, not only because I was in the hands of an expert (though I was not a complete slouch, which is why Professor Milller had introduced me to Professor Jones), but because mushroom hunters are not ones to show others where the best ones lie, lest they might poach the best grounds. Going out with George Jones was like getting 70 years of local mushroom lore dumped in my lap. Only later did it occur to me that a 92-year old might not worry too much that others might steal his mushroom grounds in future years. At 92, you should be so lucky to live that long. But George Jones was lucky -- he lived to the age of 101.

I walked around Campus and stopped by a couple of places where I used to live. I even went inside Wilder, which seemed more-or-less the same. I drove out to the reservoir, and Spice -- the new dog -- and I walked around it together.

I walked this reservoir I lot when I was in college, as it was just a short walk from Johnson House where I lived my last year -- a huge pink, Queen Anne Style house with an attached farm with land that ran clear to the reservoir. How good was that? I even had an original Picasso in my room that year -- a loaner from Allen Memorial Art Museum. It was not a great and important piece (Picasso sometimes did 75 drawings in a day), but it was a Picasso all the same.

I remembered Reefer -- the large Pit Bull Alan G. had adopted off the streets of Oberlin, just as I had adopted Barney, my little terrier. One cold winter day, Alan and the dogs and I walked the reservoir, which had been frozen for weeks, but had begun to thaw a little after three or four days of warm weather. Water stood on top of the ice, and in the middle of the reservoir someone had hacked a hole for a couple of ducks to bob around in and feed. Reefer took off after those ducks, and in the darkness and moonlight, it was a truely surreal moment, as the massive dog seemed to be walking on water, busting the ducks into flight out over the ice and the bright white snow. More than 25 years later, I remember it like it was yesterday.

At the Ben Franklin, where they sell a better selection of used books than any you will find in most big city book stores, I mentioned that the large organic garden that we used to have at Johnson House was no longer there, and that I found that a little odd considering the huge new Environmental Science building that had been constructed since I left.

"Oh, all the farmers are out at the George Jones Memorial Farm," said the cashier.

Ah! So the giant tree is gone, but Professor Jones lives on in the land forever. All is good and right with the world.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

My father used to subscribe to a publication called Organic Gardening put out by Rodale press, and he also had this huge book on composting.

This may not seem like such an odd thing in this day and age, but in 1969 it was an almost subversive thing to subscribe to this kind of publication. It meant, at some level, that you were either a hippie, a free thinker or a bit strange.

What was particularly odd about it is that I have never once seen my father with a hoe in his hand (or even a paint brush), and we were living in North Africa at the time. Whatever organic gardening was about, it did not seem to have too much to do with turning over the soil. It seemed to have something to do with thought -- a way of looking at the world.

As for a 400-page book on compost, that was clearly either madness or a mistake.

At age 10 I did not quite get it, but by age 20 I did. By then I was a pretty good mushroom collector. I even took a course in fungus in college, and once served wild mushroom omelets (clitocybe nuda) with apple sauce (made from found apples) to 100 folks at an eating co-op on campus. No one got sick, the omelets and applesauce were proclaimed excellent, and the total cost was $20 bucks.

A few folks gave me strange looks when they later found out I had collected the mushrooms from a leaf mulch pile near where I had constructed a dog run for my terrier, but what could they say? The food was good and they were very much alive.

Life moved on.

Bob Marley died, the hippies disappeared, eating co-ops vanished into the sucking tide of individuality, and I got a job that required a suit, a tie and wingtips.

One day in the 1990s I looked up and it seemed every independent store in America had fallen under the rip tide of corporate America, with Bed, Bath and Beyonds, Starbucks and Best Buy stores shoe-horned into every strip mall. Nothing was "mom and pop" anymore -- it was all Big Corporate.

Meanwhile, something weird was happening to the food. It was subtle. At first it was the ever-expanding sodas and bags of popcorn at the local movie theatre. The cups were now so large they would not fit in the holders.

Hamburgers, which had been discrete human-sized items wrapped in paper, were now so large they were served in Styrofoam boxes. A "Whopper" -- once one of the biggest hamburgers imaginable -- was replaced by the Double Whopper. McDonald's came out with the Big Mac and the Quarter Pounder.

Meanwhile, the grocery store produce section no longer seemed to have seasons. You could get grapes year round, and oranges too. New varieties of fruits and vegetables started showing up. What the hell was Bok Choy and Star Fruit?

On trips across America, I would see fewer and fewer cows and horses. I almost never saw a pig.

Sometime in the 1990s tobacco disappeared in Maryland and Virginia and North Carolina. Only two crops seemed to be grown now: corn and soy. A great deal of land in the Baltimore-Washington corridor, and all along I-95 South seemed to be lying fallow. Old pastures of thick grass reverted to weeds and small bushes.

Flying down the road you could not help but notice that a lot of land was being colonized by dense stands of Virginia cedar.

I would never have thought all this was connected, but after reading Michael Pollan's excellent new book Omnivore's Dilemma, I can see that it is.

When I first heard about this book, I was not all that interested. It was clearly a book written by a “foodie,” and I am pretty much done with food-fadists who think bread is evil, and so too are beef, eggs, milk, and …. My God are you eating an apple? They have Alar on them!

But Fate intervened when I came across the book at a local book store. Reading the back of the book, I realized Pollan was the same fellow who had written "The Botany of Desire" -- a book I found quite well written and entertaining. I flipped through his newest book and saw a section on mushroom hunting. I was in.

My money was well spent. The Omnivore's Dilemma is a terrific book. Roughly structured around four meals, Pollan attempts to trace the food back to its origins. How was this stuff grown? What are the ecological, economic, health, and social trade-offs to eating conventional food from the local grocery store versus "Fresh Fields" (industrial organic), versus artisan foods (local organic) and even hunting and foraging?

The book starts with a chapter on corn, which is so astounding that it alone is worth the price of the book.

And let me hasten to say that while Pollan is squeamish (and almost vegetarian), he went on his first hunt (for pig) while writing this book, and his conclusions are pleasantly surprising. There is only one “perfect” meal in this book, and it does not come from Whole Foods.

The power of Pollan's book is that he connects a lot of disparate pieces into a greater whole.

One small fact-filled mosaic after another is slipped into the frame until at last you have a larger picture of what is happening, not only on America's farms, but also in politics, economics and kitchens.

I had seen bits and pieces of this story myself, but only after reading this book did I understand the big picture of what has been going on all around me my whole life. Good stuff. Not just good writing, but good thinking.

Pollan is not a polemicist, and he does not tie it all up with a "this is what you need to do" kind of ending (thank God!)

In fact, he does not need to. If you read this book, you will get the point and you may actually change what you buy. Grass-fed beef may show up in your cart as well as locally grown vegetables. You may discover the joys of returning to seasonal food selection.

Pollan does not seem to think everyone has to eat the same way, and he does not begrudge those who want to continue to eat as they are eating now.

He suspects, however, that if people knew more about the economics and ecology of corn, and the fakery behind much of the "organic" food being hawked to us today, more people would eat locally, seasonally and healthier (even if not entirely organic).

Suffice it to say, that he made a believer out of me, and I was not a likely convert.

And, for the record, he confirmed what I already knew: My Old Man is a pretty smart cookie and more than a little bit ahead of the curve.