The Hunter-Gatherers of Findlay, Ohio

Some scientists claim that in terms of dietary benefits and environmental sustainability, we would do well to imitate the world’s hunter-gatherers. If we all went back to exploiting a seasonal variety of natural food sources, we would have stronger teeth and better endurance. We would also have sharper minds, because the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is not for the dull-witted. It takes considerable intelligence, memory, and experience to be at the right place at the right time to ensure survival, especially in hostile environments where full-scale agriculture cannot take root.

Gary Paul Nabhan, ethnobotanist and winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant, has been telling us this for some time now. In Gathering the Desert (1985) Nabhan revealed the forgotten bounty available in the seemingly uninhabitable wastelands of the American southwest; in Coming Home to Eat (2001) he undertook an experiment in consuming only those foods that were locally available. Most of us can scarcely imagine living off the grid of American agribusiness, accustomed as we are to neon-lit supermarkets where every imaginable kind of food lies before us, beautiful and new in irresistible packaging. Nabhan’s environmental localism might seem to recall Voltaire’s view that we need to cultivate our own gardens, until we realize that it is far more radical than that: Nabhan promotes a time before we had gardens, when we trusted to the earth’s ability to sustain us without undue manipulation or fuss on our part.

As a child I once briefly possessed a minor-league version of that trust, though not from any conscious respect for the earth. My most vivid memory of the time when I tried to live off the land comes from a summer afternoon in 1960. My friend Robbie and I were standing in Mrs. Scott’s back yard, silently picking plums from a tree and dropping them into a net potato-sack. Like most ten-year-olds, we knew that stealing was wrong, and the instant we heard the slam of a screen door, Robbie vanished into some nearby bushes. I panicked and froze in place, literally holding the bag. “I see you!” Mrs. Scott was shouting as she clomped down her backstairs and headed my way. “I see what you’re doing!”

The Scotts were the neighborhood old people, retirees who spent countless hours maintaining their yard, an immense putting green fringed and dappled with all sorts of plants and flowers. Ordinarily they were nice to us neighborhood kids, but now Mrs. Scott’s face was red with anger as she peered at me through her thick glasses and wagged a finger. Though I could hear Robbie faintly giggling from behind some bushes, I couldn’t blame him: I’d be giggling, too, if I had escaped undetected. But then an extraordinary thing happened, the sort of thing that a child will deem a miracle. Mrs. Scott looked me squarely in the eye and said, “Robbie, I’m telling your mother what you’ve done.”

The giggling behind the bushes stopped. Grateful for this unexpected deliverance, I mumbled that I was sorry, handed Mrs. Scott the half-filled bag, and walked away with my head down so she couldn’t get another look at me.

The theft of Mrs. Scott’s plums was not the impulse of a moment. All that summer Robbie and I had been stealing produce throughout the neighborhood. It had become one of our favorite games, played at least three or four times a week. We called it “Food Raid,” and the object was simple: to creep unseen through neighborhood yards gathering edibles and assembling what we called “wild dinners.” We were not poor kids stealing food out of necessity. We didn’t even like much of what we stole: in an irony lost on us, the fruits and vegetables that we gathered were the very items that we refused to eat when our mothers served them at dinner. We exemplified that old saw about forbidden fruit: the same green beans left on a plate tasted like ambrosia when eaten raw from a neighborhood garden.

We played Food...