Editor’s note: Don Peterson is a contractor and a self-described unpaid lobbyist for the natural world. He is a longtime resident of Lowell.
For years, my friend Walt and I were trail adopters for the Green Mountain Club. We finished off our annual spring cleanup with a visit to a nice field of wild onions high up the ridge and off the trail. After a long tiring hike the onions fried in bacon made a great day better.
A few years later, I encountered “wild ramps” on the menu of some New Age restaurant — you know the kind I mean — hamburgers are $17 and the food comes served in a pile with sprinkles of sauce on a white plate, preferably square. No ”wild onions there” — too rustic I suppose. The revolt against factory food has created its own language and sensitivities, and in the process, eggheads and nerds have discovered foraging. It’s not a great day for the wild onions, or the chanterelles either for that matter.
Think about it: people discover something they can just pick up from the ground and eat, with very little effort. There is no ownership. You don’t have to buy land, spread fertilizer, maintain equipment. You don’t have to guard against woodchucks or pay property taxes or hire help. All you do is pick. All of Judeo-Christian belief says this is not how it’s supposed to be, and that it will end badly.
A few days ago a friend showed me a ramp field close to a major highway. Every foodie in the area knows of this patch. Each visit leaves a patch of bare earth. Each picker looks over the patch, and takes a few pounds, leaving their version of “plenty left.” From the bare space in the center, it looked like someone had dug up one very large patch. Those ramps were headed to the Square Plate Cafe by the pound I would think.
Ramps spread via bulb division, so I imagine the large bare areas will be empty of ramps for a long time to come. False hellebore looked like the opportunist that will prevail instead, and that leaves the ramps homeless, so to speak. There is no one to protect them. Oh well.
I would hope that you might see the connection between yourself and the rest of planet and look beyond the immediate price of a thing, but I don’t insist upon it.
From all this I get an economic theorem: When the resource is dear, it is preserved and nurtured and cultivated. When it is free, the resource is squandered and depleted. A great example of this is fossil fuels: in general the attitude is that these are found resources, like the ramp patch. Fossil fuels have always been priced largely by their extractive cost, with no thought to their replacement. In this case, a whole universe has been created on a price model so faulty people will burn two gallons of gasoline in a 3,000 pound car to drive to a store for one pound of wild onions. Put another way, we will knowingly contribute to destroying the planet in order to eat a food we think is nurturing, without asking if anyone is replacing what we have eaten.
You don’t even have to believe in climate change to see the absurdity of a fossil fuel price model based only on the price of the drill bit. I would hope, however, that you might see the connection between yourself and the rest of planet and look beyond the immediate price of a thing, but I don’t insist upon it. After all, I have my own secret ramp patch, and it’s not on a state highway.
PS: Don’t mistake false hellebore for an edible plant. You’ll get a stomachache if you do. This is not the Garden of Eden.
