“WILD THINGS”

In one of those Instagram quotes I read in passing I loved what it said: “May we all continue to be blessed by the incredible biodiversity of wild things.” The post was from a forest forager on the island, and it featured tropical plum recipes made into syrup for tart glaze and other preserves and this workshop wedding cake-like centerpiece stunning in purple inlay frostings design of jelly ivies. I love creativity in food extending its capacity to awe, as creativity in color is food’s intrinsic quality. Foraging is an eye-skill in the challenging woods, and when they make it to your kitchen the wildness never dies in the hunter. Nature the greatest caretaker of wild food - that is biodiversity’s gifts of earth divine, a produce market stand without a price. This is sweet beans plum soup in the picture - an extraordinary take of the taste of wild still tasting “the olives in the oil, or the grape in the wine, or the dark chocolate in the cocoa pod.” This is the biodiversity of flavor composed here by the cook to capture the essential stew of purple in the plum. I owe to artists my lunch, to the yeasts of sourdough, to the meadows in clarified butter toast for its melt. I am on friendly terms with this post’s forager, I see her on the valley road at times and she smiles. Yet formal between us is our shared love for wild things cooked. Common also between us is a comrade I now remember whose wildness is a true form in his soul. The three of us would converge in her garden behind her home overlooking Iao stream after a swim in the forest pools still wet in shorts under the sun and talk about the benefits of wild food and hunting-gathering. Comrade believes in his heart to be direct descendant of the epoch when the first upright men roamed the wild earth for food sustenance and fire and place, without which the development of our complex minds today would’ve have evolved if not for the relationship begotten from pre-historical nature we learned from before our own. I miss him. I miss his brilliant mind. When I see the forager lady, on occasions I do, I see my old comrade in affectionate figures of memory, a genuine Montaño.