Journal - I Was Never Chasing The Hunt

I never truly cared that much about hunting. What held me was what came after.

Even as a kid, it wasn’t the gear or the mechanics of it that stayed with me. It was the meal. The simple fact that you could walk out into the world—into a stretch of timber or along a piece of shoreline—and come back with something that would feed you.

That idea settled in early and never really left.

It’s a strange thing, the way people imagine this hunting and wild food lifestyle.

There’s a tendency to picture it as complicated. Expensive. Dependent on the right equipment, the right vehicle, the right set of exotic circumstances lined up just so. As if food from the wild exists somewhere farther out—past where most people are willing or able to go.

But most of it isn’t far at all.

It’s closer to the surface than that. Like trout holding in a seam you’ve crossed a dozen times without noticing. Like clams buried just deep enough that you’d never know they were there unless someone showed you how to read the ground.

Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee. A stretch of beach at a low tide begins to look different. The edges of a field start to feel less empty. Even a dock or a rockpile takes on a kind of quiet potential.

Food isn’t scarce in the way we tend to think. It’s just easy to overlook. Like walking past a tree heavy with fruit because you’ve only ever known fruit to come from a store.

That’s the shift.

Not a change in location. A change in attention.

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I think that’s what I was really drawn to all along.

The idea that a meal could have a place tied to it. A time of year. A set of conditions that had to come together in a certain way. Something a little closer to the tide than to the clock.

You begin to notice patterns. Water moving a certain way. Birds working a shoreline. The feel of the ground under your boots. It’s not complicated, but it does take time—like learning the cadence of a river or the way wind moves through a valley.

And once it starts to come together, it feels less like acquiring a skill and more like being let in on something that was there the whole time. These days, that’s what I keep coming back to. Food that has a season. Food that asks something of you. Food that’s gathered a little at a time, in the margins of a day. Nothing elaborate about it. Just kind of primordial. Old. Familiar.

If any of that resonates—if you’ve ever had the sense that there’s more out there than what ends up on a plate—then you’ll likely feel at home here. There’s a simple way into it.

You just have to learn how to see it. Food Afield Podcast.