Seattle Forager Inspires Others To Learn About Wild, Forgotten Foods

For Langdon Cook, a walk in the woods isn’t that different from a walk through the produce section of the supermarket. He’s a writer, blogger and all-around outdoorsy type, but in outdoorsy Seattle, he’s made his name primarily as a forager.

He’s kind enough to let me tag along on a mushroom hunt in the Cascades. In the back of his Subaru (the official car of the Seattle outdoors) he already has a basket full of morels, porcinis and coral mushrooms — the fruits of about ten miles of hiking, he says. He doesn’t want me to be too specific about our location because other mushroom hunters might yell at him. But he’s not so protective of his foraging secrets. In fact, he enjoys teaching people how to spot food.

He lists the foods at hand just in this section of the forest: Fiddlehead ferns. Stinging nettles. Miner’s lettuce.