Mushrooming in West Marin

The Big Island for Foodies

A great video introduction from Gourmet Online.

Fruits de Mer

Tuesday went diving at Van Damme State Beach, Mendocino near Fort Bragg. Thanks to Charles and Andy for taking me along. Water was flat, visibility 25 feet, which is about as good as it gets in NorCal. Could see many abalone snorkeling from the surface. Water about 52F. Came home with three abalone and three urchin.

This past weekend we found this funny Russian import market in the Richmond called Europa Plus with various, generally low quality-seeming good. They have unwrapped frozen Alaskan chum salmon filets (or so they say) loose in a cardboard box for $3. See what a Google reviewer had to say (Oct 3), I found myself thinking much the same thing (pirated?).

This place has got the cheapest salmon in the city. I just moved to the Tenderloin last Friday and glad I found this place on the bus today. I shouldn't be sharing this secret. I love salmon as much as the bears who feast on them each breeding season. They sell salmon here at $2.99 lb and it's for real, it might be stolen, but who cares. I bought some frozen and had it for dinner. It was fresh without a doubt. The store also has seasonings, candies and other Russian foods, most of which are in Russian. I'm going back to this place for all my fish feasting needs.

http://www.yelp.com/biz/europa-plus-russian-imports-san-francisco

Anyway, I bought canned Latvian sprats, sardines and mackerel from this mart, just for kicks.

Also in the pictures below, my stash of smoked salmon from the Portlock store in Seattle. I'm hoarding.

Leaving Seattle

Th

Ivar's and Anthony's are both at SeaTac. Ivar's has clam and salmon chowders on special for 75c a bowl, so of course I had to have some.

Wed

Chocolate University at Theo, part two. Didn't eat quite as much chocolate as last time. Tried 100% cacoa liquers (Ghanaian and Venezulean). Blech! Tasting 100% cacao is only for the professionals.

Tues

Uwajimaya has whole albacores for $3.79 a pound. I was tempted to buy one to try cutting it up (tuna is built fundamentally different than other fish, doesn't have two fillets, but four loins). Didn't want to stink up Jon's kitchen though.

Chocolate

Th
Jon made me and his wife a great dinner with produce from nearby Metropolitan Market in the U.
I also picked up a Beecher's cheese and truffle butter sandwich there. I may have to get another.

Wed
Facebook feed:
went to chocolate university at theo in seattle last night, taught by the COO, brilliant phd biochemist/ops engineer/angel investor. it was a phenomenal discussion of chocolate history, biochemistry, taste, culture, politics, food production, business. i'm thinking of flying back next wed for part 2. i was also on a theobromine bender from all the chocolate.

Seattle Pics

Sorry, you have to be on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2036729&id=1443656174&ref=nf

WA Mainland

Monday

I'm in Bellevue now. I was looking for a favorite spot of mine, Koot's Green Tea cafe, but it closed. I'm staying at Vasa Lake Resort on Lake Sammamish in Bellevue (look up the history of Sweden's infamous Vasa) for the next night or two. The camping is warm and easy. I can see a mansion up on the hill over the lake -- it might be Ichiro's house.


Sunday

Drove back to Seattle. Got a hotel near the airport so Edita could leave early the next morning. Amusing incident, on the way back, Edita needed a coffee, so we stopped at one of those uniquitous road coffee shacks. Turns out it was called Baristas Gone Wild, and the barista was in a bikini. We kept an eye out for other coffee shacks on the way back, and quite a few of them had these girlie themes. I guess one started as a novelty and the others in the area decided they had to compete.

That evening we went to Seattle, stopped by Ballard locks (saw a few salmon), went to the Portlock store (Edita bought a few salmon) stopped by the Fremont market and (stay tuned for a picture of a fascinating six-person orthagonal bike coming soon). We stopped by Theo and tried all their chocolates. I noticed a Theo signature chocolate bar that had pinenuts and basil (in other words, pesto). Chocolate and pesto, two of my favorite things, so I had to have it, even though it was $4 an ounce. It was very good, but I wasn't blown away:


"Our Limited Edition Basilico Pignoli (Basil Pinenut) bar was featured in the recent issue of EVERYDAY with Rachael Ray. This item is available by special order, please contact us for details."

We stopped by the REI flagship as well. To continue an earlier analogy, REI is the Neiman Marcus of Seattle. Having driven to Ranier base camp, I now get a sense now how much Ranier dominates the Seattle consciousness, as visible as it is from Seattle, how nearby it is, and the outdoor opportunities it has to offer. Without Ranier, there probably would be no REI.

Saturday

Earlier in the week, I had noticed in the paper that the Ranier Mountain Festival was this weekend. Edita has a strong interest, because she wants to climb Shasta, Ranier, and eventually K2 (nuts). So we left San Juan island Sat morning and drove to Ranier Base Camp in Ashford, WA, about 3 1/2 hours. The whole base camp area (store, bunkhouse, rentals) is owned by the Whittakers, a famous climbing family. Copper Creek Inn nearby has very good food, especially the blackberry vinagrette.

The children's playground at base camp has a climbing wall for toddlers. I kid you not (see pics, to follow once we upload them). We camped at nearby Alder Lake.

San Juan Islands

Fri - San Juan Island

Drove around the island today. Saw orcas on the west side. Stopped by Roche Harbor Village, which reminds me of the village from the BBC show The Prisoner. Really. About to go salmon fishing. 70F and sunny today.

Th - San Juan Island

Kayaked around Friday Harbor today in a sit-on-top Hobie pedal boat. Rented a crab pot and caught two red rock crabs, which we had for dinner.

Wed - Orcas to San Juan

Packed up Wed morning at Moran State Park (rainy night), then took the ferry to San Juan Island. Our ferry, The Evergreen State, has half-done puzzle out on tables for passengers to entertain themselves with, which Oliver would appreciate. We arrived in Friday Harbor and dropped in on Joyce. One of her neighbors is away, so she let us stay at their house. Very nice! They all live in a secluded development on the west side. We picked apples from two kinds of apple trees, snap peas from Joyce's other neighbor, an Alaskan fisherman.

Tues

Took a six-hour kayak tour out of Deer Harbor, great weather and views. Stopped on a couple of islands along the way. Tried fishing off a pier out of Orcas Village in the eve, just caught some bait and dogfish sharks.

Mon

Took the ferry from Anacortes to Orcas Island. Set-up camp in Moran State Park. The eponymous Robert Moran is a very interesting character, look him up. Last night we did some window shopping in downtown Seattle, went to the Columbia Sportwear and Mountain Hard Wear stories. They almost count as high-end fashion in Seattle, sort of like Armani and Prada.

Urban Seattle - Sunday

We shopped for our trip and spent time in and around Seattle. Went to Uwajimaya in South Seattle, a fabulous Japanese megamart with great produce, Japanese groceries and delis. Also stopped by Fran's Chocolates in downtown -- famous for smoked sea salt caramels, I have her cookbook)in downtown, one of my favorite chocolate places all time, I've spent way too much money there. Stopped by the Bumbershoot music festival. Browsed some Pacifc NW First Nations art galleries. Off to Orcas Islands tomorrow. Pictures to come later in the week.

www.uwajimaya.com
www.bumbershoot.org
www.franschocolates.com

Arrived in Seattle - Puget Sound and Salmon

I've decided to post to his blog again, at least for a little while, so as to not clutter Facebook with too many updates of my trip.

We arrived at SeaTac Sat afternoon. It rained on and off during the day, but it was mild -- 55F at night, 70F during the day. Our campsite is at Dash Point in Tacoma, right next to the ocean. It rained quite heavily at night, but fortunately, we were upgraded to a rental car that is large enough for us to sleep in. That worked out real wekk. We will be able to weather the rain this long weekend in Seattle in the car. Hopefully once we arrive on the San Juans on Monday, the rain will let up. This weekend if also the Bumbershoot film festival in Seattle.

One of the attractions of the Puget Sound area is that is has the urban attractions of Seattle, but relatively pristine nature nearby, including the sound. I took Edita to Point Defiance Park, which has inexpensive boat and fishing rod rentals. We saw people catching Dungeness and salmon there. This got us excited about the prospect of fishing the islands next week. You wouldn't catch me eating a crab or salmon out of SF Bay, but here it's fine.

Another Seattle attraction for me and Edita is Ivar's Seafood Bar. This is literally a fast food joint, but it has wild Yukon river salmon (grilled or fried) as well as other wild fish such as halibut. Also, among other thins, salmon chowder and cioppino. This is kind of the McDonald's of Seattle.

Right now we're waiting out pouring rain at Starbucks in Tacoma. Trying to decide whether to do something outdoors or indoors.

http://www.ivars.net
http://www.metroparkstacoma.org/page.php?id=79

San Diego

So I have some doubts whether I should continue this blog. Element Spice is more a hobby than a business, so should I keep a blog dedicated to it (you may have noticed I've drifted already anyway). And maybe a better place to keep people updated is Facebook.

I've spent the last week and change with Mandy, Kirk, Andy and Craig. Pantea has awesomely allowed us to stay at here place in Sorrento Valley, which is quite suburban, reminds me of Walnut Creek. The difference from the Bay Area though, is that this suburb is 20 mins away from the beach and central locations like Pacfic Beach and La Jolla.

The group liked both In N Out Burger and Souplantation. I found a Vietnamese supermarket and Pho place near Pantea's house. I bought a bag of fried chips there: jackfruit, taro, pineapple, sweet potato and banana. Despite my aspersions about Filipino food, I tried some rice and casssava snacks wrapped in lotus leaves at the Filipino adjunct to the supermarket, and they were pretty good. The Hong Kong places gave out Sriracha hot sauce packets with my dumplings. I've actually gained some weight in the past week -- normally with heavy diving, I lose weight.

I haven't been to Tamales Ancira, the 100 tamales for $154 place.

The last post?

Out of the Wild

http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-03-18/news/out-of-the-wild/

Out of the Wild
Iso Rabins' foraged food is the toast of San Francisco's gourmet set. Health inspectors and environmentalists aren't so thrilled.

By Peter Jamison
published: March 18, 2009

On an unseasonably warm winter afternoon, Iso Rabins stepped out of a silver Subaru Legacy at the intersection of Walnut and Pacific streets, a tony corner of Pacific Heights that abuts the southern edge of the Presidio. Pausing to roll and light a cigarette, he hopped the waist-high stone wall lining the park. Behind him, rows of shingle and brick two-story houses climbed uphill into a bright February sky. As he stepped slowly and deliberately across an overgrown hillside bisected by a dirt walking trail, eyes trained on the ground like a man who had lost his wedding ring, the gentle ping of bats on baseballs rose from fields below. Suddenly Rabins froze, knelt, and began to nibble on a weed.
"This is wild radish," he said absently, eyes scanning the ground as he masticated his find. "I've used it in potato salad, with wild salad greens. There's a subtle flavor to it." A few more steps and Rabins came upon a patch of Claytonia perfoliata, or miner's lettuce, so named for the 49ers who grew fond of the plant as a source of Vitamin C during the Gold Rush.
The bounty did not stop. Looking around, Rabins rejoiced at the presence of chickweed (another salad green) and stinging nettle. The latter, once blanched to remove its prickly spines, would be the key ingredient that night for his nettle ravioli supper. "Look at all this!" he said. "This is crazy."
Less intrepid diners treated to the spectacle of this scavenger hunt would probably agree with the crazy part. But in Rabins' world, the weeds that blanket this stretch of the Presidio are of interest to others besides sweater-clad Chihuahuas on the hunt for a latrine. This man is in business, after all, and he was looking at his products — several of them.
Rabins is mounting a first-of-its-kind commercial enterprise, called ForageSF, that would provide the denizens of this food-frenzied urban center with regular access to wild-growing edibles — not just salad, but mushrooms, seafood, and fruit, as well as "wild-crafted" or processed goods such as acorn flour. (The selling of meat from wild game, such as deer, is illegal.) This month, he is launching a "Community Supported Forage" (CSF) box of wild foods. Modeled on Community Supported Agriculture organic-farm boxes, the subscription service will provide clients with a biweekly allotment of seasonal foraged products.
"Maybe we're a little spoiled here in the Bay Area, but even the farmers' market has become too pedestrian," says Rebecca Klus, a San Francisco cooking instructor and wild-foods enthusiast.
You can dispute the tastiness of stinging nettles, but there's no contesting the fact that Rabins, like any savvy capitalist, is meeting a demand. Some heavy hitters of Bay Area haute cuisine have joined the wild-food cheerleading section, and chefs at renowned eateries such as Chez Panisse, Pizzaiolo, and Incanto have all done business with Rabins.
"In my cooking, I would love to use more wild food," says Jerome Waag, a chef at Chez Panisse who has worked at the Berkeley restaurant for 15 years and has bought wild mushrooms from Rabins. A native of southern France, Waag describes the appeal of foraged food with continental flair. "It comes directly from the earth and the wind and the rain," he says. "It's sort of a concentration of natural forces, as opposed to something that's been more organized. I think it's for the flavor, but also the whole romantic aspect."
But in Rabins' case, finding an eager and untapped market for his products is the easy part. His is a supply-side problem. In this day and age, hunting and gathering — humans' sole means of feeding ourselves for most of our species' history — is a proposition fraught with ethical, logistical, and legal problems. In the U.S., a gamut of regulations governing food safety and environmental conservation would long ago have rendered any surviving forager societies extinct. And there's no shortage of people who think Rabins' effort to buck the trend of modern agricultural and industrial food production is misguided at best — and dangerous at worst.
San Francisco's chief food inspector, for instance, says a steady stream of unregulated foraged food into the city could bring with it diseases or even death — leptospirosis, a bacterial infection spread through animals' urine, can cause jaundice and kidney failure, and some mushrooms are among nature's most grotesquely effective poisons. There's also the matter of whether wild ecosystems can bear the effects of anything beyond the most modest return to mankind's previous foraging habits. Rabins recently learned that in the Presidio, one of his heretofore steady sources of foraged food, removing his favored salad greens for commercial use is a federal offense subject to a $125 fine.
So far, Rabins' efforts to get ForageSF off the ground raise more questions than they answer. Among the most interesting: How did one of humans' most elemental and ancient activities — finding and eating food in the places we inhabit — become so complicated?
The day before he foraged the Presidio, Rabins had driven down to Santa Cruz to see a guy about the modern era's most valuable and widely consumed foraged food product: mushrooms. As his car chugged along Highway 17, threading the redwood-forested hills south of Silicon Valley, Rabins pulled onto a turnout and hoisted his iPhone from its resting place by the emergency brake.
"Christian," he said. "This is Iso. We're on our way down. Where would be a good place to meet?" After a moment, he hung up and smiled. "They've got me pulling over to make phone calls," he said, shaking his head. "The Man's got his foot on my neck."
At first glance, he seems a less-than-likely target for the Man's subjugation. Rabins is a lean, bearded 27-year-old of middling height, with warm brown eyes and short brown hair. Like some of the foragers with whom he does business, he has led a nomadic existence. He was born in Santa Cruz to parents he affectionately describes as hippies; the product of Russian Jewish forebears, his first name means "shoreline" in Japanese. He lived in different spots as a child — Philadelphia, Vermont — and attended the Buxton School in western Massachusetts, a small boarding school where students split the wood that heated their buildings. He studied film at Emerson College in Boston, traveled in Italy and Mexico, and, like so many other East Coast émigrés, fell in love with San Francisco on a drive up Highway 1. He moved here in the fall of 2007.
Rabins' paying jobs have always been restaurant gigs, and after he moved to the city he started bartending at Fresca, a chain of Peruvian restaurants. While visiting his father a year and a half ago in Willow Creek, an inland hamlet of Humboldt County near the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation, some family friends brought over a gift of wild, edible mushrooms plucked from the local hills. "I was like, 'No fucking way,'" Rabins recalled. "'Really? You actually forage for wild mushrooms?' It was this amazing moment. I was like, 'You have to teach me this.'"
Soon Rabins was networking with mushroom foragers in Mendocino County, buying in bulk and selling to chefs at famous Bay Area eateries like Chez Panisse. As a mushroom middleman, he began confronting some of the logistical issues faced by any food buyer. At one point, a 100-pound shipment of wild mushrooms worth about $1,500 rotted over the weekend in a UPS shipping warehouse. ("They'd actually started to compost in the middle," Rabins notes dispassionately.)
He also began getting familiar with the eccentric ranks of those who know the woods well enough to find hundreds of pounds of mushrooms in the first place. Rabins remembers in particular a late-night rendezvous with a gentleman in the parking lot of a Burger King in Willits. "I felt so much like a drug dealer, it was insane," he said. "I pulled up and he pulled up in his pickup truck. It was just packed with mushrooms. We spent about an hour weighing them."
ForageSF already offers direct product sales, and this month will launch a small batch of CSF wild-food boxes that will range in price from $40 to $80. Rabins hopes to start with 20 subscribers and build the service over time. He also wants to include an educational component to the business, with foraging tours and talks. It was to that end that he was headed to Santa Cruz, where he was to meet Christian Schwarz, a budding mycological scholar whom Rabins hoped to bring to San Francisco to offer presentations on mushrooms.
There would be no darkened Burger King parking lots for Schwarz, who requested that Rabins meet him outside a bagel shop downtown. A rail-thin 20-year-old with luxuriant dark hair and a ghostly complexion, Schwarz is an ecology and evolution major at UC Santa Cruz. He became a mushroom enthusiast in his early teens, in the way that other young boys develop obsessions with skateboarding or baseball statistics. But his hometown, San Diego, was not prime fungal territory. Attracted by the Central Coast's moist, forested hills, he came to UCSC.
"My interest in mushrooms is mainly academic," Schwarz said. When talking about mushrooms, he frequently betrays an abstract turn of mind; at one point, discussing the fatal "death cap" mushroom, two ounces of which make a lethal dose, he remarked, "People who have eaten it and survived said it tastes really good."
As he and Rabins drove into the hills of Soquel, where they were to go on a recreational mushroom hunt — the equivalent, in foraging circles, of unfamiliar executives meeting for a round of golf — he expounded upon America's relative dearth of mycological traditions when compared to such countries as Russia or Italy.
"Here in the U.S., we don't have a long foraging history," Schwarz said. In China, he said, citing research by renowned mycologist David Arora, one infamous strain of wild mushrooms provokes an identical hallucination of xiao ren ren, or "little people," among all those who eat them. Many do so by accident — for example, after eating the culprit fungus in a dish prepared at a restaurant — and the resulting visions stir no more alarm among Chinese diners than an upset stomach.
The fungal kingdom is a living rebuke to biologists, who still know astonishingly little about mushrooms — how long they live, why and how they spring up when they do (a mushroom can mature in a span of time from several hours to several months), or how they propagate. The mushrooms we eat are the fruiting body of extended, nervelike networks of the organism mycelium, which attaches itself to the roots of trees or to decaying vegetative matter. The vacuum of hard knowledge surrounding this subterranean entity has invited a plethora of pseudoscientific observations; at least one prominent mycological expert, Paul Stamets, theorizes that the mycelium is a sentient being.
This being was to prove elusive for Rabins and Schwarz, who parked the car and wandered into the woods above Soquel Creek, their shoes crunching over mats of dead fern branches and maroon scrolls of madrone bark. The air was cool. Water from the past week's rains dripped from the boughs of redwood trees. After a time, an excited whistling struck up somewhere in the woods.
It was Schwarz. He had found what would be the day's sole edible mushroom: a black trumpet, or Craterellus fallax, an earth-colored bugle of a fungus, typically sautéed, admired for its smoky flavor. After a moment spent admiring the mushroom, Rabins and Schwarz resumed the hunt, with no further luck. Eventually they gave up. Schwarz cast the black trumpet into the woods. "Go," he said softly. "Spread your spores. Please."
On the way back down the trail, Rabins lit a cigarette. Schwarz walked ahead with long strides, whistling "Silver Bells."
The cult of mystery surrounding the mushroom is only enhanced by its aura of danger. Most people know that eating the wrong wild mushrooms can make you see strange things or kill you. What they don't know is just how outlandishly potent some of these naturally occurring poisons are.
Larry Pong, principal food inspector in the San Francisco Department of Public Health, recounts the case of a man who ate a bad mushroom several years ago during a feast at a local winery. "He died a painful death," Pong said, quickly elaborating: "It was painful in the beginning. And then, after his liver disintegrated, he went into a state of euphoria. And then he died." Such cases crop up regularly in mushroom-hunting territory. Between January and November of last year, the California Poison Control System received 721 calls from state residents who had eaten questionable mushrooms, according to Stuart Heard, the agency's executive director. Three of those cases led to serious illness, and one to death.
Mushrooms aren't the only foraged food with which people must take care; hemlock, which killed Socrates, resembles wild parsley and often grows among patches of chickweed. But Rabins says he takes the safety issue seriously. "I know a lot about seven types of mushrooms, and that's all that I ever sell to people," he said. "I wouldn't pick a wild mushroom, look at it in a book, decide it was the same one, and try to sell it to somebody."
For Pong, these assurances don't cut it. Citing the grave risks associated with ingesting wild plants and fungi, he argues that Rabins should be subject to regulations governing other food vendors. Pong says he already knows what his answer will be if an application from Forage-SF arrives on his desk: "We would just flat-out tell him, 'You can't do this.'"
But things may not be so simple. Given its novel nature, ForageSF falls into something of a regulatory gray area. Rabins has registered his business with the San Francisco tax collector's department, and says he was told after consulting with city authorities that he did not need special permits to sell wild-food products. His goal, he says, is to run a legal operation open to public scrutiny — but he came away from the permitting process with the impression that government officials weren't quite sure what form that scrutiny should take.
"I just became frustrated with the whole licensing situation," he said. "I feel like I did put in the time trying to make it right, and they didn't know the answers to my questions."
Others fear the ecological toll of Rabins' approach to foraging. Connie Green, a commercial mushroom broker from Napa County, hires nomadic foragers — many of them Laotian and Cambodian immigrants who hunted and gathered in the hills of their native countries — to scour the great morel zones of the Northwest, in places such as Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. While on the hunt, Green sets up camp in the forest with anywhere from six to 14 foragers. Yet even she questions whether putting nature's supply of wild mushrooms on tap for a city in thrall to food fads might not pose new risks of overharvesting. "If people don't have an understanding, be sensitive enough to the life of that plant, they can do real harm, particularly when it's driven by [customer] orders," she said. "You have to be able to say no."
Nature's inability to feed large numbers of people is a simple fact of human history. Various theories of our species' transition to agriculture have been propounded, all turning on the theme that the quantities of food rendered by hunting and gathering were inadequate to sustain a growing population. But our ingenuity in bolstering the food supply came with tradeoffs. Agriculture, for all its improved predictability, delivered a narrower and hence less healthful range of cultivated food staples, as well as the diseases that spread when humans live close to livestock. "The key to agriculture is that it's not necessarily more nutritious," UC Berkeley anthropology professor Kent Lightfoot said. "It's more viable."
An object lesson in the viability of supplying anything beyond a meager clientele with foraged products can be found in the grim fate of humanity's last large-scale source of hunted and gathered food: the commercial fisheries. On a recent Friday morning, Rabins wandered along Pier 45, behind San Francisco's tourist-thronged Fisherman's Wharf. Passing crab pots teeming with seagulls beneath a bright winter sky, he ducked into one loading dock after another. He was looking for a supplier of fresh local fish, which he hoped to include in his CSF box.
One after another, buyers gave him a somewhat astounding answer: Eating fish from San Francisco Bay has become practically impossible because of a dispiriting combination of environmental regulations and economic reality. Salmon season was likely to be cancelled for the second year in a row because the fish had been depleted by poor river conditions, and crab quotas for many fishermen had been met within the first few weeks of the winter. Local sardines were sold to companies operating tuna pens in coastal Mexico. About the only edible fish being pulled out of the bay was herring — and almost nobody eats herring anymore. The fish are stripped for their roe, which is sent to Japan.
Eventually Rabins encountered Ernie Koepf, a tall, shambling herring fisherman sporting a silvery mane of hair and a torn plaid shirt open at the neck. Leaning back against the dock rail above his boat, the Ursula B, Koepf offered his own take on the situation: Increasingly zealous regulators had deprived San Franciscans of local seafood.
"It's taken about 15 years, but various interest groups, among them well-meaning, organic, green-thinking folks, have fucked themselves out of having fresh fish," he said. "Now, I can tell you for a fact that there's lots of fish available out there, but I can't get access to them, so the public can't get access to them. That's why those guys over there were all giving you the horse laugh. I'm eating a piece of fish wrapped up in a fucking piece of plastic when the same fish is swimming right out there."
Rabins stood before him in sunglasses, dark blue jeans, and charcoal-colored New Balance shoes, holding a Starbucks cup. "It's wild," he offered. "It is," Koepf said. "It's a perversion. A cultural perversion."
The merits of current state and federal fishing regulations can be argued both ways, but are indicative of a prevalent modern mindset toward wild places that is incompatible with the goals of hunting and gathering. According to this outlook, forests and oceans should be preserved in something approximating a state that predates human civilization — looked at, and not eaten from.
Rabins' hope is that eating wild food can bring people into a more immediate and vital relationship with wilderness. "Right now, we think of the woods more abstractly," he says. "It's out there; we like to walk in it. But we don't value it in that personal way, as a food supply."
He adds, "In a capitalist system, the only way someone's going to care about a resource is if it becomes profitable. I think as interest grows in wild food, it will actually help protect the resource."
Others think the resource is already protected just fine, thank you. Commercial foraging is illegal, for example, in all California state parks. "We have the parks as an inviolate place for plants and animals," says Roy Stearns, spokesman for the state park system. "Parks were not set up to be a commercial enterprise. They were set up to be a preservation of what's there." The same is true of federal parks like the Presidio, which is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
Rabins said he had been unaware of Park Service regulations governing the Presidio until late last month, and said he plans to cease foraging there. As for the bulk quantities of mushrooms he buys from foragers in far Northern California, he said he trusts that his hunters are prowling private land or other legal spots — but acknowledges there's no knowing for sure. "You really don't know where they're from," he said. "They come from the woods, and someone walks out of the woods and sells them to you. It's sort of a don't-ask, don't-tell situation."
On the evening of Friday, Feb. 27, Rabins showed up at 18 Reasons, the upscale Guerrero Street art gallery and dining room affiliated with Bi-Rite Market, the Mission's renowned gourmet food store. The night's main event was a four-course dinner built around foraged foods, including chickweed salad with Half Moon Bay squid, Portuguese caldo verde soup prepared with nettles, and garganelle pasta with sautéed black trumpet and hedgehog mushrooms. Rabins had brought a sheaf of flyers detailing the final composition and pricing schedule of his foraged-food boxes, ranging from a $40 "Veggie" box of nettles, salad greens, fruit, and mushrooms to an $80 "Pesca-fungitarian" box featuring rock cod and extra 'shrooms. (When it comes to fish, Rabins has been obliged to relax the otherwise regional emphasis of his boxes because of local fishing restrictions. He says he will procure it from locations as distant as Canada when it's not available in California waters.)
After debriefing a small crew of servers on the contents and preparation of each menu item, chef Morgan Maki took a few minutes to offer a reporter his thoughts on ForageSF's financial prospects while dinner guests trickled in. "I think if it were going to succeed anywhere, Northern and Central California would be the place," said Maki, a butcher at Bi-Rite. This isn't just because of the Bay Area's prevailing ethical-food trends. The enterprise of supplying foraged food to consumers is geographically self-limiting. Maki noted that in the wintry landscape of Montana, a state he used to call home, a project like ForageSF would be impossible.
There were 19 guests in all, each paying $40 for the meal. The well-heeled crowd of thirtysomethings gradually took their seats at a long wooden table between walls hung with unframed sketches. Among them was Jennifer Jones, owner of a boutique clothing store around the corner. It was her first foraged meal. "I'm excited to see what it's like," she said.
Halfway through the second course — a bowl of caldo verde, prepared from wild nettles and salt cod, with a vibrant green hue akin to that of wheatgrass juice — she had made up her mind. "It's so overwhelmingly fresh-tasting," she said. "It's so potent. It's not even that the flavors are intense. They are, but that's not it. It's so satisfying to eat something that's so close to the earth."
If people like Jones or Maki don't share the concerns of San Francisco's health inspectors and parks officials, it's not because they're scofflaws, but because they increasingly make culinary decisions based on an antique ethos of food production that today's regulatory apparatus simply is not built to understand. Rabins' big idea depends upon faith in and familiarity with the men and women who procure edible things, not the bureaucratic superstructure that grew up over the past half-century to curb the excesses of industrial-scale food production.
In the world of wild food, says Bi-Rite wine buyer Josh Adler, "there's that element of trust." In other words, consumers must believe their favorite forager knows enough to distinguish an edible mushroom from a poisonous one, or a clean leaf of miner's lettuce from one ridden with bacteria. Rabins hopes his customers will place that extraordinary trust in a film major recently converted to mycological pursuits. Granted they do, it is reasonable to ask where there's room, even in the Bay Area's niche food market, for a forager facing doubts about the safety and environmental toll of his products.
The answer: at 18 Reasons, amid a chatty and affluent crowd. As the meal unfolded, a mirthful din filled the small room. The storefront windows on Guerrero had steamed over. Rabins sat at the head of the table, beaming and fielding questions about wild food, an attractive blond woman at his side. The diners around him conversed avidly, leaning forward on their elbows, sipping wine and unfiltered beer. By the end of the night, three of them signed up for CSF boxes. An eager tension seemed to grip them. The salad course was over; their plates were empty. Like the ill-fated eater in Pong's cautionary tale, these men and women had entered a state of euphoria — but their livers were still intact, and they would live to tell the tale.

Kona End

Tues through Sunday were the instructor class, so didn't do much diving.  We did a weird drill on Sunday just for laughs.  Dive down to 70 feet, take off your mask, put it back on, then clear it by blowing the water out with air from your nose.  All the time, whale were singing in the background.

Monday Karen and Alex went diving.  I decided to do something different and actually visit the park at Pu`uhonua o Honaunau.  Tues I hung out at Lava Java, and had a huge cinnamon roll since they were staying me in the face all month.  Then I checked out some real estate.  Flew to Honolulu, had dinner at Jason's restaurant (Camillia Korean Buffet on McCully).   Then took a red eye back to SF.  I think I left my IPhone on Flight 221 HNL-SFO.  Ugh.  Had chicken and waffles with Donna and Amanda at Merritt's in Oakland.

Kona

Tues

The was the first day of the instructor class.  We did some weird drills in the pool that probably only freediver could do well.  I actually have homework now, so I'll have less time.

Mon

In the ocean, worked out some bugs in my technique, then did 43m pulldown.  The tide was exceptionally high at Place of Refuge (Pu'uhonau o Honaunau in Hawaiian) when we were there.. Ben and I estimated the bottom at 46-47m, which would have been a record for me.  I was about to go for it, but we ran out of time, which is fine, since I still need to work on my 40-42m technique rather than just going for 46m.

Sun

Think I did a couple of 41m dives today, but the days are beginning to run together in my mind.

Kona

I have to put in some culinary content here, so below is a picture of Lava Java, which is in the main plaza in the center of Kailua, Coconut Grove. It has excellent food, from coffee and pastries to full-on dinner. Our group eats there all the time -- Performance Freediving should try to get a deal or commission from them, but the company is way too busy with its core-mission to have time for things like that.

Saturday
I finally got my act together to do a max breathhold in the pool. If you don't get a consistent procedure down, then it's hard to do a max breath hold, you experience a lot of discomfort, and if you're lik me, you wind up quitting early. That's why, e.g., I only did 5 min yesterday. Today felt pretty good, so I was going for 6:30. I planned to "wake up" at around 6 mins (conserve energy for the first part, then wake up at the end to monitor whether you are going unconscious/hypoxic). However, I started to go hypoxic at 5:40, so came up at 5:45 with what we call a loss of motor control. Instructors said it was probably beccause I did a lot of deep diving yesterday. Hypoxia from one day does not generally carry over to the next day, at least not in a major way, but I guess it does in a minor way, and this incident is an example of that, as 5:45 breath hold shows a diminshment in oxygen capacity, but a minor one. However, since oxygen deficit does affect the rest of the day, because of my incident, I would not be allowed to dive the rest of this day.

The rest of my time in Kona is going to be spent on safety drills and learning instruction, so I might not get a crack at 50m or even 45m. That's OK because it's actually more important for me to perfect my technique to 40-42m than to just force it down to 50m. I may get to squeeze in a few of those between drills. I also will be able to practice some 40-42m if I teach for them in coming months.

Friday

Did an easy 5 min breathold in the pool (Ben did 6:30 yesterday). Went to the ocean and did two 41m pulldown dives fairly smooth, but not perfect with the equalization. I have never had been able to get beyond 40m with at least some pause for equalization, but I'm getting better. Also I did not feel tired at all after doing 41m dives, so my tolerance for depth is getting better.

More Kona

Thursday
Went to the ocean in the afternoon and did 2 41m pulldown dives.

Wednesday
Today the advanced class started. Went to the ocean in the afternoon, had some problems with my equalization procedure, only got to 37m.

Tuesday

On Tuesday morning I accompanied the class to Place of Refuge.  I helped quite a bit more this time, helping set up, working with the two people with ear problems, and doing some safetys and practice rescues.  I also squeezed in a 37m dive, which came quite easily.  So that counts as my warmup for the advanced class starting tomorrow.  Most of the students in the class were able to do 30-40m.  No dolphins today.  Now I have the afternoon off.

Oh, here is my application for the Great Barrier Reef job that has been making the rounds on the Internet.

Kona Out of Time

So my friend Ben just posted video of my last trip to Kona, November 2008, so please don't be confused just because I am here now.

Here are two videos, which I won't bother embedding here, I'll just provide the links.  The first is my dive to 44meters.  On the way down I had to pause to deal with pressure equalization issues (I seem to have this problem more than most freedivers).  On the way up I took a few initial arm pulls as a little safety margin, as it was my deepest dive to date.  In fact, I would be inclined not to post this video, except the bonus, DOLPHINS!

Look at the end of the dive and you can see a dolphin behind me.  Dolphins in Kona are rather ho hum, though.  After the dive is some more dolphin action.

The second video is a more textbook dive to the same depth.  Julie is a member of the Canadian national team, and her dive is a lot smoother.  She is also using a top-of-the-line monofin and freediving suit (low-friction smooth skin).  It was also her personal best.

Robert's video 

Julie's video 

More Kona

Monday

Went to Place of Refuge in the afternoon with PFI.  I was somewhat useful this time, as two people had trouble equalizing pressure even at a few meters, so I worked with them directly.  Mandy and Kirk said I could also get in a few dives since I would have a small three-person safety rotation with them.  I had plenty of time to do this, but events conspired against me again, as another diver forgot his depth gauge, so I had to lend him mine, and the lens in my mask came loose, causing it to leak and making it hard to do deep dives.  Still a good day.  I think I left my shoes at Place of Refuge yesterday and of course they were gone today, but even I know that's not a big deal (probably got them at Big 5 for $25).

Sunday

In the morning, Bill gave me a ride down to Place of Refuge to join their regular Sunday diving group.  These people are quite serious, and train almost every week, so many of them are over 70m.  I made a somewhat poor decision today.  I started following them out to the deep 75m buoy but lost track of them.  I thought I had an idea where the buoy was, problem visiting it a few years ago, but I was wrong.  So I swam around for a couple of hours looking for them.  I went out way too far, and so it took my a while to get back.  The group was mildly concerned until I showed up.  It wasn't a very much of a poor decision considering this is a sport with a high mortality rate.

As soon as I got lost, I should have swam back to shore too see if I could spot them.  If I had done this I might have been only 30 mins late.  Also, if I wasn't going to be able to see them from shore, I certainly wouldn't have been able to see them bobbing in the ocean.

I had been hoping to start my trip off this day with a 35meter dive as a start.  Oh well, again, another day in paradise.  The two positives are that I got a hell of a workout swimming around (a few miles at least) and I ran into a five-foot reeftip shark.  I was swimming around and I kicked something solid.  I heard something thrash and I saw the shark swimming off.  I don't think they attack people, but they could definitely deliver a nasty bite.

After I came ashore and checked in with the group, I went out with the PFD group doing their first ocean session.  Again their wasn't much for me to do, but it's always fun out there.  I had a spinach salad for dinner, then the butter avocado.  I love avocado but that a little too much.  It weighed almost a pound, albeit with a large pit.

Sat

Performance Freediving started their Intermediate clinic today.  I joined them in the afternoon and did a 4 minute breathhold in the pool with them, along with some rescues.  Their are twelve people in the class for three instructors, which are perfect numbers, so I'm kind of a third wheel.  If there had been an odd number and/or a few too many people in the class, I could have paired up with someone and had more to do.  But I can't complain, it's another day in paradise.

Kona, Fri February 13

So why did I take the time to muse and write about the above decision rather than just looking to the right (in terms of decision theory) and just get right out and enjoy Kona?  I think that bears some discussion. For one, I have been to Kailua Kona almost a dozen times so it is more of a second home to me than truly exotic. Also, admittedly, I am more of a thinker and a described than a doer. In the past, the problem was that my thinking would be so abstracted from experience that it was irrelevant. I think I have managed to fix that, now I make sure to experience things enough to make my commentary meaningful, but that I am still by nature more a thinker than a doer.

For instance, I am probably not going to be the guy that freedives to 100m (the current world record is 113m). I am the guy that may dive 60m and does a physiology study on the 100m guy, or writes an article about the sport for Outside Magazine.

In any case, I did get out of the condo and took a quick walk to the farmer's market, where I scored a butter avocado, three sherwil avocados, and a pound of rambutans.  It's the dead of winter in Kona, so the temperature is like 75F.  Traffic in town is crazy due to the long weekend! I saw a Model T Ford in the streets.  The surf is pretty pounding in Kailua.  However, we dive at Place of Refuge, which is generally safe from swell.

The condo  is right next to Jack's Diving Locker, and while the building is a little worn, the condo itself is quite nice, 1 BD 2 bath, quite a deal for $99/night plus tax I think. Since the condos are individually owned, they may vary in quality. This one is Kona Alii #209.

Now I am off to do my pranayama yoga (life force/breath practice) which I learned from Elle in LA. I'm thinking maybe eventually I can learn to control my heart beat.

*****

My loose goals for this trip, in order of importance are:

(1) become a certified instructor with Performance Freediving

(2) take a 15 second rest in the sand at the shallow buoy (45m/147 feet)

(3) do a 50m dive (167 feet) at the deep buoy (about 80m)

(4) complete a 100m underwater swim (no fins)

I just had dinner with Mandy, Kirk and Craig.  The local rental agency didn't have any cars, but Kirk was able to get a 12 seat minibus at the last minute from Thrifty, but not cheap.

Economic Decision Making

Yesterday, Thursday Feb 12

I was at SFO waiting for my NWA afternoon flight to Honolulu.  The flight was overbooked, so they offered $300 credit for bumping to the next day.

I told the counter that I would do it for $500 (in my mind to a rough approximation, that would have clearly been worth it) but they said they couldn't go that high.  So I declined the $300 and took the flight.  Now I am here in Kona, Friday Feb 13, and I think I made the wrong decision (not a horrible decision mind you, just the slightly less optimal one). 

I have in the past had the Phineas Gage problem where I am paralyzed by small decisions, and even today, I still spend too much time on $5 decisions.  This was a decision in the low hundreds of dollars, however, so I think I should have sat down and thought out all the factors, at least for ten minutes.  It was taking a while to load the flight, so I had time.

Here are the facts:

The offer:

$300 NWA credit

Hotel and meals for the night in SFO

Standby for first-class

Considerations:

$300 credit is not cash.  I would value it at $150, since it might not get used.

I didn't need to be in Kona by Thursday night.  I have really nothing going on today, Fri.  But I had packed and was at the airport, so I was emotionally ready to go.  In fact, if you had told me on Wed that I could delay going to Kona by a day for $0, I probably would have said yes.

I night in SFO staying at a decent at hotel and getting a workout in would not have been unwelcome.

I am not earning any money now, so my time is worth very little, though I do have plenty of savings.  If for some reason I am not working two years from now, I'm sure I would be all over a $3oo offer (my marginal time would be worth the same, about $0, I would just be feeling a lot poorer by then).

I could theoretically save $110 by pushing back my condo in Kona a night (I would say $50% I could do this).

The NWA flight was leaving an hour late.  Thus I was probably going to miss my connection to Kona, and likely to have to pay $30 in Honolulu to change it, since I booked it on Hawaiian, not NWA.

This is the key question I did not ask NWA.  If I bump to Fri, can you book me all the way to Kona?  This would have saved me the change fee described above, plus about another $30 in baggage fees (I don't pay baggage fees on NWA because I have elite status).  If I had sat and meditated for 10 minutes this might have occured out at me.

Turns out, when I got to HNL, I had to pay $100, not $30 to change and upgrade to first-class since coach was sold out.  The real "disaster" would have been if I had to spend the night in HNL.

Another thing going on at this time was that I was having an email conversation with Mandy.  She and Kirk had not been able to rent a car in Kona for the class, this was a little problematic for them.  I told them that Annabel told me about a  local place that has cars on a first-come, first-served basis that closes 4:30 Fri (after they get in).  She called and they said they might have a pickup truck for rent.  I offered to pick it up for them and pick them up at the airport.  She said that would be great, but if not, no big deal, they would try on Sat.  So I felt a little invested in doing this for them, but certainly not obligated.

To run the numbers again

$300 credit on NWA (value it as $150 cash)

50% probability of saving $110 at the condo

50% probability of saving $50-$100 going to Kona by having NWA book me straight through

So, not a huge value.  On the other hand, I think I mis-assessed the value of being in Kona on time, instead of a day late.  The value of that really was about zero, but emotionally I was invested to go, I had packed up and taken the BART to SFO.

Thoughts?  Should I try to make a better decision about the same circumstance in the future?  Or is this not even worth thinking about?  Clearly I am thinking about it now, so I guess I do wish I had thought about it yesterday.

Most people would not take the $300 because their schedules are far less fluid than mine.  This is an example of how many more options I have with my time than most people because of lack of regular job and wife and kids.  Ultimately, they did get the required two people to accept the $300 to skip the flight, but it took a while.

I realize this has nothing to do with food.  Yes, I know this shows how scatter-brained I am.  I think may be it is my destiny to be forever unfocused, but at least I make it work somewhat well (earn a six-figure living in most years).

Korean Fried Chicken

I had been reading about Korean-style fried chicken so decided to go try it in Koreatown with my brother's friend Ed.

NYT Article

It is quite unique and worth trying. This is the place we went:

Kyochon Chicken

Pu’er Tea Bubble

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/17/world/asia/17tea.html

January 17, 2009

A County in China Sees Its Fortunes in Tea Leaves Until a Bubble Bursts

By ANDREW JACOBS

MENGHAI, China — Saudi Arabia has its oil. South Africa has its diamonds. And here in China’s temperate southwest, prosperity has come from the scrubby green tea trees that blanket the mountains of fabled Menghai County.

Over the past decade, as the nation went wild for the region’s brand of tea, known as Pu’er, farmers bought minivans, manufacturers became millionaires and Chinese citizens plowed their savings into black bricks of compacted Pu’er.

But that was before the collapse of the tea market turned thousands of farmers and dealers into paupers and provided the nation with a very pungent lesson about gullibility, greed and the perils of the speculative bubble. “Most of us are ruined,” said Fu Wei, 43, one of the few tea traders to survive the implosion of the Pu’er market. “A lot of people behaved like idiots.”

Get paid $100K to hang out on a tropical island for six months

I think I will apply for this job, I need to make a 60 sec video. Any suggestions? I wonder if they'll let me spear fish.

http://www.islandreefjob.com/#/apply-now