Caffeine Cravings, Burnt Beans, and Anonymous Mushrooms
The Early Days of Eat Mendocino
by Gowan Batist
In Spring 2013, I was hungry and cold. We had just embarked on Eat Mendocino—a commitment to solely subsist from food grown in Mendocino County for one calendar year. I was 24, a young farm manager. I had radically underestimated how much stored food is needed to make it through the short, hard working days of spring before serious calories start coming out of the ground. Our spring crops of delicate arugula and curling garlic scapes are delicious, but not filling. This spring, I look back on myself with exasperation and fondness. It gets easier, it gets better, and it never has to be that hard. If you’re struggling through spring too, this is for you. As we repeat the project, you’re welcome to follow along with Eat Mendocino 2023, and learn with me which different mistakes I make this time around.
The redwood duff was soft under our feet, muting our steps below the way the fog muted everything above. The woods were soft and cool and dim, the slim redwood trunks left behind by generations of logging concealing and revealing themselves in the fog like fairies leading us deeper into the gloaming. It was everything a peaceful early spring evening on the Mendocino coast should be.
We were miserable. “There’s nothing here but the same little trumpet ones we saw back there,” one of us huffed out, our words carried on puffs of visible mist. My head was shot through by an arc of pain with each beat of my pulse, and everything was infuriating. The tiny clusters of orange and tan mushrooms seemed to mock us in their little winking groups, like a clique we weren’t being invited to join.
I had been a coffee drinker since I was in middle school. I grew up in the kind of shops and barns and garages that always had a tepid pot of burnt coffee with a film floating across its surface. I was generally the one who would bring a thermos of better coffee to share with the crews up north, where harvest work started at 5am to get ahead of the sun. I didn’t realize the level of my dependence on coffee for the simple reason that I had never been without it. I didn’t consider myself addicted to air, either. I didn’t drink alcohol unless I was in a social situation that expected it, and then not much. I thought I had a very moderate relationship to substances and it would be easy to let coffee go.
I intended to taper myself off slowly. I was pretty sure that was what I was doing, actually, even as the objective facts of the situation were otherwise. I tapered myself off of coffee so successfully that the evening of December 31st 2012, I was chugging the remains of a French press to get it out of my house before the day was officially over.
This is why, in the first week of the project, when Sarah and I went foraging for mushrooms in the misty woods, I did it with a full body withdrawal that was so horrendous, so gut-churning, so migraine-inducing, that the mere thought of coffee would turn my stomach for a decade to come. I stumbled, sweaty and miserable, through the dimming woods.
For Sarah, the days before the project were mostly about subtraction in the kitchen. She pulled the contents of her pantry, except for the ingredients she already had which were entirely local, and gave them to friends and family. For me, the preparation was months of addition to the pantry. I had been drying beans and vegetables from my garden, freezing summer produce and meat, and breeding goats in preparation for dairy five months ahead of time. I thought I had done a fairly good job, not having a real understanding of just how many calories it takes to sustain human life, especially while doing hard labor in the cold. I didn’t have the equipment or space to use a water bath canner, but I had done a lot with what I had. As I looked at my row of mason jars containing dried onion and tomatoes and a mix of beans, I felt ready.
In anticipation of the project starting, I went to the thrift store and did some dedicated kitchen shopping, including a crockpot. I had one in my garage shop, so I cringed at buying another, but as I used my shop crockpot to keep a boric acid solution hot to use for deoxidizing metal after heating it with a torch … I decided to get a dedicated crockpot for human food.
The night before the project started, I finished off the French press of coffee and put together my local ingredients in my new human food crockpot. Beans, dried onions (a worrying amount of my saved store of onions went into just that one pot, but I brushed that thought off), fresh winter vegetables like turnips and collards, and a bit of my precious frozen stock all went into the pot. I put it on low, and went to bed, feeling clever and secure in the thought that I was already a day ahead of the plan and would have a meal to share with Sarah the next day without us having to cook.
I woke up to the physical need for coffee and the smell of burning.
On this thrift store crockpot, apparently all points on the dial set it to “high.” The stew, whose ingredients I had carefully grown and stored, was a brown lump in the bottom of the pot, peeling away from the sides in flaking, leathery strips. It smelled noxious in that way that only overcooked beans can and was filling the kitchen with smoke. With a disgusted and despairing groan, I took the entire crockpot off the counter and into the yard, my huge sleepy dog trailing after me in confusion, plunked it on the grass, and ran the hose into it. I resolved not to tell Sarah anything about the monstrosity I had created or the meal we had both lost. Bucket, my honey-eyed and gargoyle-faced mastiff, sniffed it dubiously and backed away.
I hung the hose up and leaned against my tiny porch railing. I sighed and automatically reached for my coffee cup. It wasn’t there. “Well friend,” I addressed my solemn dog, “we’re off to a great start.”
Ironically, for people who lived within the constant sight and smell and sound of the ocean, so loud in the winter crashing against the high carved cliffs, we were soon out of salt. We had relied on the knowledge that there was a local salt company that made salt from the simple process of sea water plus time on drying screens. We anticipated being able to buy it in bulk. When a family member of the company had a tragic illness, the salt disappeared from the store. The season to gather salt from the flats is in late summer, and we did not yet know how to make it. Neither is winter the best time in terms of salinity of the ocean or safety of gathering. Cabbage soup without salt is a Siberian labor camp-level culinary experience. The textural homogeneity of a diet largely consisting of bland soup left me searching for anything with crunch and color.
I had never liked growing radishes. They’re prone to slug damage and they turn over in a bed very fast. And on the big farm in Oregon, I had spent long weary mornings, with the sun just beginning to pick out the corners of the buckets and the trucks, pulling handfuls of them out of the cold mud, twisting a tie around their always breaking leaves, brushing off the organic iron phosphate pellets the soil was covered with as well as any obvious worms, and tossing them into a bucket. In my mind, radishes are the worst kind of crop—a single harvest of the entire plant, requiring the harvester to crouch all the way on the ground, prone to damage, sensitive to weeds, and with a low sales price. In my new context, their redness and their sweet spicy crunch was miraculous. I didn’t use the iron phosphate pellets, so their globes, often twisted from crowded planting by kids, were pocked by small round scoops from the mouths of snails. I didn’t care. I was ravenous for anything that wasn’t soup.
With the short daylight hours, my hens weren’t laying much. A typical breakfast in those first weeks was a single egg, boiled for lack of oil to fry it, a swig of leftover soup, a cup of hot water with a sprig of mint, and ceaseless rain, all I could swallow for free as it ran across my face. Water, coming up from the ground and down from the sky, was all we had a lot of.
A spiral of self-reinforcing hunger set in, where the less I ate, the less I felt free to use the food stores I had saved the year before. I had a massive chest freezer sitting in the barn at the school program that I had crammed with local food, but it felt terrifying to dip into the reserves. We should have. We lost the freezer in February to a drunk driver hitting a power pole nearby and shorting out the electricity. We crammed what we could save into two tiny apartment freezers, and felt the scarcity even more keenly. I was frustrated and embarrassed. I thought I was ready. I didn’t want people to know how unready I was, which means I didn’t ask for help.
The fog and driving rain and monotony of short farm days felt like being out of time, disconnected from a community, existing only in a private state of lack. That was the opposite of what I wanted from this project. Meanwhile I was still having to do chores twice daily to care for animals that were not currently feeding me. Goats that were not giving milk still needed bedding, clean water, and hay, and chickens not laying eggs needed the same. My already short days were bracketed by these tasks.
This culinary boredom and shocking reduction in our daily calories pushed us into the woods to look for mushrooms. Mendocino County is rich in mushrooms, but their most abundant season is fall, not spring. The topographical variation in the county is immense. The land rises up from the ocean and passes through a myriad of biomes that are incredibly distinct from each other. In one short hike on the Ecological Staircase, a person can pass from the beach, through coastal prairie, deep fir forest, and up into pygmy scrub, an exceptionally rare ecosystem known nowhere else on earth where extremely acidic podalized sandstone grows twisted, acid loving plants like dwarf pine trees, towering rhododendrons, and thick huckleberries. This unique ecosystem, full of precious insights, already damaged by nearby logging, is of course also the home of our landfill, but there are many areas where edible mushrooms that love the acidic duff are abundant.
For weeks after work, with the short days already falling into darkness, we would head to the woods. We were looking for chanterelles, golden and black, hedgehogs, and maybe a precious last bolete in a grassy area under a pine tree, but the trails were popular and there weren’t many mushrooms out, except one type. It was everywhere, sprouting up with little orange trumpets topped with brown furling caps. They looked similar in form to a black chanterelle, but different enough in color and texture that I was sure they couldn’t be related. These mushrooms seemed to volunteer for our efforts, showing up everywhere we looked like kids raising their hands for a teacher, begging to be called on.
It took several days—in which we thoroughly came to resent these little mushrooms—to identify them, and when we did, I laughed. All around us, literally everywhere, were yellowfoot, also called winter chanterelle, a perfectly edible but not widely fetishized member of the family we had been looking for the entire time. They were so abundant that, had we the baskets and daylight, we could have harvested our weight just with the mushrooms within sight of the spot we stood.
Mushrooms are not plants, neither are they animals. They are something else, of which the mushrooms we see are only the fruiting bodies. When I was a kid, it was explained to me like an apple tree under the ground, whose apples popped up to the surface leaving the rest below. I found this image scary, envisioning the mushroom as literally resembling an underground apple tree—a gnarled, cephalopodic subterranean creature slinking and coiling mysteriously under the forest. It could grab me and pull me down into the soft humic darkness. Arguably the biggest living organism is a single mushroom that covers thousands of acres in Oregon. The mysteries of the fungi were vast and only just beginning to be revealed to me in part, but I know two things clearly from experience. Mushrooms contain a serious amount of protein, and I also know that they have a sense of humor.
Finding a glut of mushrooms reminded us that abundance was possible. We broke out of our stupor and reached out to the community. An elderly farmer, John, who was close to retirement and had mentored many of us, including teaching me to harvest ducks the previous year, had a few sacks of potatoes in his shed. They were second quality, going slightly soft, but they were rosy and full of calories. He gave us three bags, 150 pounds, and we ate them between us over the next two months. Skimmed chicken fat from stock made roasted potatoes possible, which felt like life itself. The next huge development, near the end of the spring, was dairy. Our friends in Boonville had a milk share with their cows. We signed up, and the combination of milk, potatoes, cabbage, and collards, with salt from the ocean water we gathered in perilous bottles, kept us alive like it had my Celtic ancestors. The freefall on the scale slowed, and then stopped. I will never, ever underestimate again in my life the power of potatoes and dairy for storing the solar energy of the previous year and passing it along, or forget the lesson that abundance is here in this place, as long as we learn enough to recognize it and are humble enough to accept it.
Farmer John has passed on now, but Farmer Kevin, a member of our collective in Caspar, as well as Brian in Covelo, have filled our 2023 pantry with potatoes. Mushrooms of all descriptions, including the one who frustrated us with its abundance until we learned we could eat it, yellowfoot, are packing jar after jar on our shelves. A decade of hard-won lessons are going into this reprise, and the pantry is stuffed, but I doubt it’ll be easy—the county agricultural landscape has changed and so have I. Join us on our social media and my Patreon for ongoing updates … including meals we cook in our new and improved, less flammable crockpot!
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist working towards regeneration on landscapes her ancestors devastated. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed out in the fog or the oak savanna propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or sprawling on the ground with dogs.
