Ican still remember the first time I worked up the courage to cook a wild mushroom. 

It was the height of the pandemic, and everyone’s brains were still scrambled from too much boredom and isolation and the internet. I was on a long walk with my partner in the woods—walking was pretty much the only recreation left to us—when we spotted a pair of orange lips pouting from the rotten wood of a fallen log. Naturally, my first instinct was to eat them. 

In those days, I had just started exploring mycology forums online and had learned just enough to know that those lips were probably not poisonous. Still, there was an unavoidable anxiety as I trimmed a corner of the saffron flesh and watched it spit and pop in a hot pan. I started with a single bite, half-expecting to turn into the stricken hospital patient at the start of an episode of House. 

It tasted exactly like chicken. 

The Latin name for those orange lips is Laetiporous sulphureus. The fungus is more commonly known as Chicken of the Woods, and it’s quite a bit better than the real thing. When picked young, the flesh has the taste and texture of the most succulent dark meat. But it does not dry out if you leave it on the grill; it only seems to get juicier. You also won’t get salmonella if you undercook it, although some people can develop digestive upsets or allergic reactions. 

If the idea of harvesting the Colonel’s finest from a rotten tree strikes you as unusual, you might be surprised to learn just how many meaty meals you can find in the fungus kingdom. I know a clearing where skirt steak grows on trees and lump crabmeat grows out of mossy logs. Lobster mushrooms are self-explanatory, and in the summer, suburban lawns are full of fat white shrimp. 

Since that first hesitant bite, I’ve tried many more wild mushrooms, and every year I cross a few off my list. Some of the advantages of foraging are straightforward: it’s a convenient excuse to get outside, and many wild mushrooms have rich flavors that cannot be obtained in a grocery store. Others are more abstract: foraging makes you think about your food, where it comes from, and the economic forces that brought you to a diet of factory-farmed mystery meat.

Join me, then, on a summer day in the steaming woods of upper New York. Today we are looking for one of the rare treasures of the forest: the golden chanterelle, an elegant twist of butter-colored flesh that grows in the mossy shade under conifer trees. Chanterelles are among the finest of gourmet mushrooms, with a complex flavor and a delicate aroma of ripe apricots. 

They are also very hard to find. Chanterelles depend on living trees for nourishment. Along with morels, porcini, and some other exotic fungi, they are nearly impossible to cultivate in farms and can only be sourced through foraging. At the Hunts Point marketplace in the Bronx, which supplies 60 percent of New York’s produce, the wholesale price of foraged chanterelles is up to $25-30 per pound, and that’s only when they’re in season. The rest of the year, they are not available at any price. (It’s the same on the West Coast, where a pound of golden chanterelles currently sells for $31.77 on the website Pacific Wild Pick.)

Or—if you have access to the right kinds of woods and know when and where to look—you can dine like a French epicure for free, several times a year. 

Identifying fungi is not quite as intimidating as you might think. While some edible mushrooms have deadly doppelgangers, there are also plenty of beginner-friendly species that won’t turn you into the subject of a murder mystery novel. The black-staining polypore (Meripilus sumstinei), which grows at the feet of older trees, has a rich beefy flavor and makes superb jerky. Hen of the woods (Grifola frondosa), which grows between the roots of old red oaks, can be roasted into a crunchy snack similar to crackling. Neither of them have any dangerous relatives, although it is still important to identify them correctly.

One encounters a lot of hand-me-down foraging wisdom through old saws like “you can eat anything growing on wood” or “the ones that stain blue are poisonous.” All of these are bunk—there’s so much diversity in the fungal kingdom that you might as well claim that berries are safe as long as they’re not red. 

Many mushrooms tend to accumulate heavy metals, and it’s always a good idea to pass on meals that grow too close to a road or work site. In a way, this feels more insidious than checking for poison—there’s no guidebook that can tell you if a mushroom is full of mercury, and even edible species can be contaminated. Even foragers can’t escape the industrial world and its pollution entirely.

There is something quite rewarding about a lucky or unexpected find. It’s a bit like catching a rare Pokémon: I haven’t yet had a chance to try the cauliflower mushroom (Sparassis crispa), which resembles a delicious mass of tangled egg noodles, or the black trumpet (Craterellus fallax), supposedly one of the most delicious edibles. One of the weirdest and rarest prizes is the beefsteak fungus (Fistulina hepatica), which resembles a slab of raw meat. For many years it was at the top of my bucket list.

The real reward in foraging, though, is psychological. For the people who make it their hobby, looking for food in nature is a deeply satisfying experience. Hunters and anglers tend to feel great pride in providing for the table through their own skill, and that feeling is much greater than the pleasure of getting a discount at the supermarket. Foraging has the same effect without killing your local wildlife. 

In this way, searching for wild mushrooms is a welcome contrast to the way our agriculture and food system works today. Unlike the factory-farmed, mass-produced, and highly processed food products sold to us in stores, mushrooms are truly natural. In eating them, we are able to conceive of our human life as part of nature and the wider ecosystem, rather than something cut off from it. 

The Marxist term alienation is usually used to describe the effects of industrial capitalism—the sense of detachment and isolation that comes with being a tiny piece of a large and inscrutable machine of mass production. The classic example is a worker on a factory assembly line who might spend all day turning a single bolt over and over again and, in the process, feels like little more than a faceless hand in the workplace. But the concept of alienation also applies to the manufacture of food. Unless you’re one of the rapidly-shrinking number of people who still works as a professional farmer, it’s hard to keep track of the labor and subsidies and pesticides that it takes to bring food from the ground to your plate—not to mention the horrific conditions under which animals must live their short lives thanks to sadistic food corporations that produce boxes of McNuggets or pounds of hamburger meat. The whole system of food production is being taken over by a handful of gigantic agribusiness companies, and farming itself is increasingly automated. So it’s difficult to feel, when you walk into a grocery store, that you have any real idea what you’re eating or where it came from. The connection between humans and the rest of nature has been frayed, if not severed. 

Illustration by Kasia Kozakiewicz

But foraging changes things. After a few trips to the woods, I started paying more attention to the seasons and the weather. Before, I couldn’t tell the difference between elms and beech trees; later I learned to recognize their bark at a distance, the better to spot the mushrooms at their roots. 

Apparently, I’m not the only one. During the pandemic years, many people have become more interested in finding their own dinners, says Steve Brill, who leads foraging tours into New York parks. When I last saw him, Brill—who gave himself the nickname "Wildman"—was leading a group of around two dozen New Yorkers through the shrubs and weeds of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. 

Brill has the air of an eccentric old hippie, and he largely communicates through puns and painfully bad jokes. “On one tour, we had one person put a poisonous plant in his bag, and he didn’t survive,” he told me mournfully. “Poor guy died of embarrassment.”

“We teach people about the common edible and medicinal plants that people don’t realize are growing right outside their doorstep,” said Violet, Brill’s 20-year-old daughter, who has been guiding tours with her father since she was nine. “The ones that are cut down by lawnmowers and keep growing back again, common renewable plants that people often think are weeds—we show that these plants are actually useful.”

Violet says that she’s been foraging since she was a toddler, when Brill used to hold her up to pick wild berries. She’s now studying environmental sustainability at Cornell. 

“It's nice to go outside and know what you're looking at and what you can pick,” Violet said. “When people are exposed to nature and build a connection with the environment around them, that's when people's lifestyles will actually change.”

At Prospect Park, Brill introduced the common plantain—a common resident in driveways and sidewalks, useful for bandaging wounds—along with jewelweed, which can be applied to burns and rashes (including those caused by poison ivy). I knew both plants by sight. They grew in my backyard when I was a kid—and probably also in yours. But I’d never learned their names or how to use them in medicine. This is the cost of urban life: in exchange for modern medicine, we’ve traded away our knowledge of plants and herbs.

Most of his tours focus on plants, but Brill can identify fungi just as easily. When I found a cluster of pink-gilled mushrooms, he identified the species at a glance and told me exactly how to cook them. Altogether, Brill says he can recognize hundreds of edible species, as well as their poisonous look-alikes. 

There are other hazards to foraging, as Brill learned in the 1980s. Back then, he caught the attention of the Parks Department, which busted him in an elaborate ambush—complete with undercover Park Rangers, who arrested Brill as soon as he took his first bite of a dandelion. As he tells the story, The Wildman became something of a cause célèbre—the Parks department ultimately dropped charges and allowed his tours to resume. By his estimate, he has held about 5,000 wildlife tours since the 1980s. 

Let me share one more memory. Several years after I took that first bite of mushroom chicken, I was on another walk, this time arguing with my partner as we picked our way through the thorny undergrowth. It was one of those painful fights that seemed like a misunderstanding, but, looking back, I can see that it was only the first drop in a rapidly steepening relationship decline. 

We had just about decided to break up for good when she spotted a strange lump on a nearby stump. “What’s that?” she said. 

It was a beefsteak fungus, one of the rare treasures of the forest. That was obvious, even before we’d checked the guidebook. Imagine a kidney-shaped slab of raw meat sticking out of the grass, complete with white marbling. When I cut it loose, it seeped pink “blood.”

The argument stopped when we realized what we’d found. We removed it carefully and carried it reverentially back to our campsite. 

For something that looked so much like meat, the beefsteak mushroom tasted exactly the opposite: it had a tart, summery flavor, with a hint of citrus. We sliced it raw and tossed it in a salad with fresh leaves. Years later, when we finally split for good, we still relished the memory of that tart taste as one of the best meals that we’d shared.

If you find the idea of picking mushrooms scary, there are easier species to choose for a quick snack. Depending on the season and the locale, raspberries and blackberry bushes are a common sight; in my part of the Northeast, it’s difficult not to find them. Some easy to spot plants like wild onions and garlic mustard are as delicious as they are invasive. You’re doing nature a service by eating them. 

There’s plenty to pick in cities as well. In New York, I’ve met people harvesting mugwort and ginkgo nuts. In June, you can always spot the mulberry trees by the carpet of jam and fallen fruit on the sidewalk below. 

In my neighborhood of Queens, there’s a park next to a Costco where I sometimes stop to watch the sunset. In the summer, shoppers sit on the grass to eat their pizza and dollar-fifty hot dogs, while their neighbors cast fishing lines and children pick mulberries from the trees lining the shore. It’s comforting to see that people are still engaging in the oldest modes of human subsistence alongside the newest.