Don't Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff

tour is signaled with the flourish of the Merry Melodies theme (in clap-mouth, of course) and a friendly “B-dee, B-dee, B-dee, That's All Folks!” He takes a moment to say good-bye to each of us and also manages to sell one of his books.
    “Who should I sign it to? It's more valuable if I sign it,” he says.
    “Sign it ‘To the plant world,'” says the young venture capitalist.
    Brill does, and hands it over. The failure in logic in this exchange is not so much that the plant world, although living, is categorically incapable of appreciating an inscribed first edition but that even if it could, the plant world might not take too kindly to the volume in question,
The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook.
    LATER THAT NIGHT , I stand over my sink eating my salad of hedge mustard, goutweed, peppercress, and chickweed. Brill advised us to eat small amounts of anything we pick the first time out. He wasn't kidding. This is a very small but formidable bowl of food. Commercial plants are bred to be bigger and heavier. They contain more water while wild edibles contain more nutrients. I get fuller much faster than normal. There is almost too much flavor here, and a tongue-swelling rawness. It's not unpleasant, but there is a tenacity to these greens. It takes some major mastication to tear through them.
    At first blush it had seemed puzzling, inconceivable almost, that the bushes of the park weren't overrun with people harvesting all of these marvelous free eats. But Brill's tour ultimately proves the opposite point. Even here we remain subordinate to the caprice of nature. At a Japanese knotweed plant, Brill finds only two eight-inch-long edible stalks left to feed twelve of us. Its season is almost over. It's wonderfully lemony, and I'm even a little full at this point, having sampled cattails, poor man's pepper, and field pennycress, but I need no clearer explication than this, standing here chewing on my meager ration no bigger than a cocktail gherkin, to see why our ancestors decided to give this up and begin growing their food.
    Brill described getting arrested that day as the best thing that ever happened to him. It allowed him to forage full time, he says. But “allowed” is hardly the word I'd use. If Brill and his family are to stay alive, he is going to have to forage full time. Brill is trying to embody—and to sell to us, if only over the course of the afternoon—a lifestyle that was found to be impractical and unsustainable ten thousand years ago. As for those people on the globe still unfortunate enough to have to rely upon this method for getting their food, they definitely aren't vegans. Or if they are, it's not by choice. I would bet cash money that, if dropped down into Prospect Park, they would forgo the pokeweed, however plentiful, and the rare mushrooms, however delicious, and make a beeline over to the easily accessed protein of the hot-dog cart a hundred yards away. Even Brill, for all his obvious knowledge, industry, and sheer love for what he does, concedes this point in a way when I ask him if he ever has to shop for ingredients.
    “Occasionally,” he says. “I haven't seen too many tofu trees.”
    All of human civilization—from the first agrarian settlements at Jericho, all the way up to now—in that simple statement. Wildman heads toward the subway.

AS IT IS IN HEAVEN
    T he takeoff is intense, so the rumor goes. A filling-loosening interval of judder and roar, our ascent as steep as a rocket. The interior is cramped. As we approach Mach speed, we will lurch forward twice, the sonic boom will be an audible thud. At cruising altitude, almost eleven miles above the earth, I will see the curvature of the globe below, and above me, the dark blue of the stratosphere, the very edge of the black vastness of outer space. Also, a spontaneously occurring red streak runs along the ceiling, some kind of inter-cabin mini–aurora borealis electrical thingie, apparently. There is the smell of burning fuel and metal