To write the book, I traveled throughout "salmon country," from California to Alaska and inland to Idaho.
In North America entire societies were organized around the salmon lifecycle-a few still exist. My third and newest book is titled "Upstream: Searching for Wild Salmon, from River to Table." In many ways, salmon are the last great wild food. "The Mushroom Hunters" was awarded a 2014 Pacific Northwest Book Award. The book takes place over the course of several mushroom seasons and follows the triumphs and failures of a few characters, including an ex-logger trying to pay his bills and stay out of trouble a restaurant cook turned mushroom broker trying to build a business and a celebrated chef who picks wild mushrooms on the side to keep in touch with the land. To write the book, I embedded myself in the itinerant subculture of wild mushroom harvesters, a mostly hidden confederacy of treasure-seekers that follows the "mushroom trail" year-round, picking and selling the fungi that land on exclusive restaurant plates around the country. My second book, "The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of an Underground America," is about the men and women-many of them immigrants from war-torn countries, migrant workers, or refugees from the Old Economy-who bring wild mushrooms to market. Bottom line: Foraging is fun, reconnecting us to both the landscape and our fellow humans. In my first book, "Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager," I go spearfishing for lingcod with a modern hunter-gatherer/English PhD I hunt morel mushrooms with an Italian-American EPA administrator and jig for squid on a city pier jammed with immigrants hooting and hollering in a dozen different tongues. Really, though, my interest lies in the characters who feel equally at home in both field and kitchen. My wife thinks it's all a racket-an excuse to bushwhack around the woods and waterways by day and put away obscene amounts of rich food and wine by night. This gives me a chance to follow multiple threads that intrigue me: wild foods, foraging, natural history, environmental politics, outdoor sports, adventure travel, etc.
I write about people who live at the intersection of food and nature.
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