Given that today is World Animal Day, it might not be a bad idea for Smith readers to get in touch for a moment with their bestial sides. Few of us feel much connection with our inner knuckle dragger anymore, having traded fur for pressed slacks and social lice picking for instant messaging — not altogether for the better, might I add.

Anyone eager to bond with their inner troglodyte might consider some old style hunting and gathering. Barely practiced anymore except by fishermen, the wild-catching of food is actually what all humans did before we had jobs. Most of us have at least a shred of experience with it, whether it be picking blackberries or digging clams. I proudly recall many sun dappled afternoons hunting morel mushrooms as a hippy child in Northern Michigan.

As it turns out, foraging has undergone something of a resurgence in the popular mind of late. In the U.K., excitement over what promises (based on weather) to be a banner mushroom season has mushroomed (pardon me) into lenthy point/counterpoint columns in the Guardian. (The interest in foraging is also tied to concerns over the ponderous and precarious length of contemporary food chains, and the global movement to shorten them. What better means to that goal than plucking lunch from your own yard?)

Should you wish to gather edible weeds, berries, fungi or whatever may be in season in your neck of the woods, there are a number of resources at your disposal. I’d go into some hunting resources here, but we both know if you weren’t raised shooting deer, boar or bird, odds are you’ll die never having done it. I grew up in a town where the first day of deer season was a reasonable excuse to miss school, and it makes me sort of sad now that I was always one of the kids yawning through a substitute-taught class on that day.