Anything That Moves by Dana Goodyear

Florida. “All my family used to be in the citrus business,” the farmer told me when I called. “Then one night it got down to ten degrees. First they went broke, then they got dead. I was Br’er Bear at Disneyworld. Then I was a bartender. Then I got divorced and had to run away from my wife.
Huitlacoche
was my brother’s idea. We started doing it together, then we got in a fight and now I’m doing it on my own.”
    Wild products often come with even more obscure pedigrees. Huckleberries, fiddleheads, lichens, ramps, ferns, and, of course, mushrooms, are largely unregulated, potentially dangerous, fragile, precious, and scarce. Finding them is a scrounge. Often they represent stolen goods; a great deal of foraging takes place on government and private land, unpermitted. Iso Rabins is a sometime mushroom picker who ran San Francisco’s Underground Market—part church bake sale, part faerie bazaar, a place where you could buy DIY rearing-and-grinding mealworm kits—until the health department shut him down. He told me, “Once a chanterelle gets into Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco it has this elitist air of a clean, pure, product from the mountains, untouched by man.” The truth, he said, is often less savory: tweakers driving dirty pickups into the national forest, mushroom buckets rattling around with the old beer cans. “Meth is a really good drug if you want to forage all the time,” Rabins said. “If you want to spend forty-eight hours looking at the ground, meth does a good job.” A major West Coast mushroom buyer told me that professional pickers tend to be “feral types.” He said he once turned on the news to see a guy he’d been using for a couple of years named a Most Wanted Person.
    Commercial foraging is largely subsistence work for marginal people with little connection to the gourmet status of the forest products they are gathering. Sometimes they may not even recognize their yield as edible. One Sunday in the winter of 2012, Belinda and Dan Conne, a couple in their late forties, went with their twenty-five-year-old son, Michael, and their pit bull, Jesse, into the Rogue River–Siskiyou National Forest, a wilderness area outside Gold Beach, Oregon, to pick black trumpets and hedgehogs. The Connes, who did obtain a permit, were amateurs, recent transplants from Oklahoma who had come to Gold Beach in search of work but found little available by the time they arrived in July. They moved into a tent at a campground and eventually into a camper with no electrical or water hookups. Belinda cleaned motel rooms for a few hours a week; Dan, scraggly-haired, tattooed, and missing several of his top teeth, had a back injury and couldn’t work.
    A neighbor in camp, seeing that they were struggling, taught Michael how to hunt for mushrooms—in addition to the black trumpets and hedgehogs, they found yellow feet, candy caps, and “channies”—which they sold to the local agent for a big mushroom buyer. (The agent they sold to, a Czech forager in his late fifties, pleaded guilty to trespassing in 2006, after being charged with using GPS to poach chanterelles from ranches in Lompoc. His advice to me: Don’t get arrested in Santa Barbara County.) For black trumpets, a picker usually gets about five bucks a pound from a buyer, who marks them up 30 percent and sells them to a wholesaler, which sells them for 30 percent more to a retailer, which, depending on the season, doubles or quadruples the price and puts them on the shelves. A typical haul brought the Connes $50, enough to fill their car with gas, buy some propane, and get a few days’ worth of groceries. “We did this so we could survive,” Belinda told me.
    The Connes were having a good day, and, after emptying their buckets into bags in the car, decided to go back out again. Just as they got to a patch of trumpets it started to rain, and the woods grew dark.