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“This online forum I’m on,” you say. You’re worried your face is flushed. “Sorry, it”s a bit weird — people will share information about mushrooms — other plants and things —”
When you’re able to perceive something other than your own intense embarrassment, you see that the man has a gentle, interested posture.
“That’s so cool,” he says. “I mean, a lot of professional foragers — we all follow each other on Instagram. Nice to have someone to brag about your finds to.”
He doesn’t ask what the forum is; you wonder if it’s a kind of forager’s etiquette, the way you won’t press him about his favorite spots (although it would be nice if he volunteered them). Instead, he asks: “Do you ever forage together? Or is it just you?”
“Just me,” you say. “I guess I like the solitude.”
He laughs and nods at this. You smile at each other.
“You should definitely look for these mushrooms,” he says. “They’re part of the foolproof four. You might already know this, sorry — morels, chanterelles, giant puffballs.”
Someone else arrives at the stall, so he gives you a quick nod and ducks away. You linger around the market a bit and buy a punnet of strawberries, then go home, walking slowly into the afternoon sun.
At home, you think about his question. Do you ever forage together? What an easy, generous question, the kind of question that assumes a real friendship is operating.
Right now, your best friend is very into the word parasocial to describe the pseudo-friendships you have with celebrities: a surreal kind of intimacy where you feel you know them, their lives, their personality, when all you really have is the performance of intimacy through social media. This isn’t social media, and none of the users on the forum are celebrities. But in your head they are fully realized people — who’s usually the first to give advice, first to welcome a new user, first to chastise someone for breaking the rules.
There are people you admire. One user in France makes the most incredible meals of entirely foraged and homegrown ingredients. Whenever he posts, there’s a flurry of activity, and everyone is eager to respond first.
Another user, seed_historian, went foraging along the coast — returning with sea lettuce, bullwhip, kelp, rock weed, and kombu. Their post inspired three nights of research where you mapped out directions to your nearest coastline and what seaweed you could expect to find.
The forum users populate your day with their stories and adventures. But you don’t really know them, and they haven’t interacted with you beyond a few polite reactions to your posts.
This observation makes you a bit uncomfortable, but you keep on posting. You like this community, this hobby. And it’s satisfying to brag about your foraging hauls, especially to the people who inspired you to forage in the first place.
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?
