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Foraging, you decide, is going to be your thing—the way other people decide to take up pottery, filling their homes with wheel-thrown mugs that grow a little less disheveled with practice. You start downloading the mushroom identification diagrams made by users on the forum: photos collaged together in MS Paint, with Comic Sans labels admonishing you to CHECK the gills FIRST. The best diagrams attain a sanctified status: with each repost, the images become minutely more corrupted, amended with new layers of text and annotations.
In the early summer, people begin to post about chanterelles, and by July it seems like half the community is foraging for them. They’re quite beautiful: bright, golden, with delicate folds curving into the stem. You’ve gotten comfortable posting here and there, politely celebrating someone’s foraging haul and making small inquiries — Would you say these are easy to find? How long were you out searching? Eventually, you too are out scanning a forest floor for chanterelles.
Alice has already gotten over her guilt about being bioregionally ignorant, but she is impressed by your mycological literacy. You invite her over for chanterelle tagliatelle, and she art-directs the photo you take for the forum. “These are so beautiful,” she says, using a pair of chopsticks to nudge a chanterelle stem into a gentle curve. “I can’t believe you learned how to find these yourself!”
“Yeah,” you say, pleased. “It’s been a really fun hobby.”
The world around you starts to feel intelligible and familiar. On your walk to the farmer’s market, you try to match your new vocabulary to the plants you see. Trees shade your face and spread out in varied shapes: narrow and elliptical; egg-shaped leaves with blunted tips; palmate leaves that fan out from a branch at one point; pinnate leaves lining the length of a branch, twisting in the wind.
The farmer’s market is in a large, sun-drenched square. You approach a table with a variety of specialty mushrooms, where you see the rippled, layered folds of a bright yellow fungus. “What are these?” you ask.
The man running the stall is lean and freckled with a fading sunburn. “They’re called chicken of the woods mushrooms. Really popular with vegetarian and vegan restaurants around here. Have you come across these before?”
You’ve only ever seen pictures of them on the forum.
Celine Nguyen is a designer, design historian, and writer. She is an MA student in History of Design at the V&A Museum/Royal College of Art, where her research considers contemporary web aesthetics and their relationship to our ecological world. Right now, she wants to know: what does degrowth look like for the web?
