It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It : Misadventures of a Suburban Hunter-Gatherer.

ISBN:

9780802193483

Title:

Author:

Heavey, Bill.

Personal Author:

Heavey, Bill.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (199 pages)

Contents:

Cover -- It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It -- Also by Bill Heavey -- Title Page -- Copyright © 2013 by Bill Heavey -- Dedication -- Contents -- Introduction: How Hard Could it Be? -- Chapter One: Blood, Guts, and Other Signs of Spring -- Chapter Two: A "Savory Little Fellow" Rediscovered -- Chapter Three: The Homicidal Gardener -- Chapter Four: Of Cattail Disasters and the Blue Goose Incident -- Chapter Five: Enter the Girl, Sour Cherry Pie, and Five Bites of My Own Lawn -- Chapter Six: Among the Cajuns -- Chapter Seven: Of Closet Carnivores and the Gospel of Small Fish -- Chapter Eight: "You Don't Want to Grab Anything Has Red Eyes" -- Chapter Nine: People of the Caribou -- Epilogue: Don't Ever Let that Man Near a Stove -- Acknowledgments.

Local Note:

Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2019. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.

Subject Term:

Wild plants, Edible-United States..

Wild foods-United States..

Wildlife as food-United States..

Cooking (Wild foods).

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

Click here to view book

Publication Date:

2013

Publication Information:

New York :

Grove Atlantic,

2013.

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
581.6320973	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ON-DEMAND	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

From the beloved Field & Stream columnist: "Heavey takes us back to the joys--and occasional pitfalls--of the humble edibles around us" ( The Wall Street Journal ).

For Bill Heavey, being a sportsman is more than a hobby--it's a way of life. So despite living inside the DC Beltway, raising a daughter who has an aversion to "nature food," and having zero experience with foraging or gardening, Bill attempts the ultimate sportsman's dream: living off the land.

Unsurprisingly, Bill's foray into catching, finding, and growing his dinner doesn't go exactly as planned. From battles with tomato-eating squirrels to a grizzly attempt at gutting perch to multiple failures at harvesting an appetizing salad, Bill stumbles through his quest for wild food with blood loss, humiliation, and hard lessons. Still, with the help of his locavore girlfriend and an eccentric neighbor who runs an under-the-table bait business, he manages to eat the way our ancestors did--and uncovers the true meaning of being full.

"Bold, courageous, hilarious, honest, and touching" (Duff Goldman), Bill Heavey's first full-length book is a must-read look at how we consume, consider, and source our most basic of needs.

Author Notes

Bill Heavey is an editor-at-large for Field & Stream , where he has written since 1993. His work has appeared in numerous publications including Men's Journal, Outside , the Washington Post , the Los Angeles Times , and the Best American Magazine Writing .

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Longtime Field & Stream contributor Heavey leads a delightful romp through the backwoods and front yards of the D.C. Beltway area as he tries to eat wild. He notes that his adventure "was anything but radical. For most of our history, eating wild was what people did." Heavey's no expert, and read-ing about his stumbles through harvesting a salad from his lawn or learning to gut perch ("It looked like the bedroom scene from Macbeth") is surprisingly both amusing and touching. Perhaps this is be-cause Heavey has a gift for capturing the people around him: his skeptical young daughter; his ex-tremely competent foodie girlfriend; and especially his friend Paula, a live-off-the-land expert and "about as eccentric as you could get and still be on the right side of crazy," who takes him to harvest sour cherries right in the middle of the nation's capital. Heavey doesn't shy away from the potentially off-putting extremes of locavore living: he hunts, fishes, and even catches frogs, and his book is en-gaging, thoughtful, and truly funny. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Library Journal Review

Claiming that he's made a career of writing for Field and Stream and other similarly outdoorsy publications out of "ignorance and incompetence.my forte," Heavey spins a yarn of how, armed mainly with enthusiasm and a refusal to admit when he was licked, he took up hunting and foraging in the Beltway. A chatty tale of all the plants, animals, and people he encountered, this book is mostly set in and around the Washington, DC, area but also chronicles trips made hither and yon: fishing for smelt in San Francisco, frog grabbing in the Louisiana swampland, and hunting caribou above the Arctic Circle in Alaska. Although each chapter ends with a recipe of sorts, Heavey is mostly cooking up an engaging autobiography/ersatz primer on how to (or not to) undertake subsistence living in an urban environment. While this title is chock-full of facts about nature and industrialized foodways, it's also a story about friendship and falling in love. VERDICT Laced with tart humor and spiked with moments of sentimentality, this work makes for a compelling read.-Courtney Greene, Indiana Univ. Libs., Bloomington (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.