Omnivore's Dilemma

Back to my penchant for posting quotes from my reading books, there are lots of quotable bits in The Omnivore's Dilemma, but this one, which was in my morning's reading is especially related to the title, and as such probably especially good.

The author goes into the hills above UC Berkeley (he actually said, "the Berkeley Hills" so I assume somewhere around the Berkeley of UC), he went in search of a chanterelle. While I was reading it I had temporarily put a mental sketch of a bird, not knowing what a chantarelle is, not having dined very well, I suppose. It's a mushroom as it turns out (erase orangeish bird, sketch mushroom with orangeish top).

I took the mushroom home, brushed off the soil, and put it on a plate, then pulled out my field guides to see if I c ould confirm the identification. Everything matched up: the color, the faint apricot smell, the asymmetrical trumpet shape on top, the underside etched in a shallow pattern of 'false' gills. I felt fairly confident. But confident enough to eat it? Not quite. The field guide mentioned something called a 'false chanterelle' that had slightly 'thinner' gills. Uh oh. Thinner, thicker: These were relative terms; how could I tell if the gills I was looking at were thin or thick ones? Compared to what? My mother's mycophobic warnings rang in my ears. I couldn't trust my eyes. I couldn't quite trust the field guide. So whom could I trust? Angelo! But that meant driving my lone mushroom across the bridge to San Francisco, which seemed excessive. My desire to saute and eat my first-found changerelle squabbled with my doubts about it, slender as they were. But by now I had passed the point of being able to enjoy this putative chanterelle without anxiety, so I threw it out.

I didn't realize it at the time, but I had impaled myself that afternoon on the horns of the omnivore's dilemma.