It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It

May 27, 2013
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.

April 15, 2013
In which an inside-the-Beltway type goes all Euell Gibbons on us--and doesn't starve to death and even finds true love in the bargain. Granted, Heavey isn't your typical D.C. commuter: A freelance writer, he hunts, fishes and contributes columns and pieces to magazines such as Field & Stream, Outside, and Men's Journal on hook-and-bullet subjects--though, as he describes it, he is blessed with more enthusiasm than art. Here, he describes, as both literary project and life hacking, his efforts to live closer to the land, lessening his reliance on grocery stores and big carbon footprints in favor of heading out into the world to gather baskets full of goodies. His travels, sad to say, require big carbon footprints, as he jets off to the Arctic and the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico. What he brings back, apart from mushrooms, serviceberries and wild rice, are stories of how people of all sorts have gone back to the land, some out of necessity and custom, others by choice. One neighbor, for instance, is a combat veteran who has mastered the flora of the region, a solid candidate for survival come the apocalypse. (And apocalypse, meltdown and the end of civilization are never far from some of these back-to-the-landers' thoughts.) Heavey describes himself as "not the most likely guy to write a book about food," a matter he skirts around by writing about many things other than food. However, he does provide some useful recipes for dishes such as boiled ground squirrel, fried perch and sauteed dandelion greens (to be found in lawns and parks, with the proviso, "What you're trying to do is avoid herbicides"). Really an overblown magazine article, lightly and pleasantly enough written, though without the depth of like-minded projects by Bill Bryson, Jim Harrison and others.

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July 1, 2013

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

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