The New Yorker's Culture Desk has a pointed little piece about the Oregon family who got lost in the mountains while foraging for mushrooms earlier this month:

These days, everyone wants to know where his food comes from. Provenance is an essential part of marketing. (Even McDonald’s, the symbol of featureless, anonymous, global slurry, has a new ad campaign designed to introduce consumers to the most telegenic of its farmers and ranchers.) The Connes, and their ordeal—hypothermia, trench foot, dehydration, near starvation—are a reminder that before people foraged because it was glamorous—they foraged because it was necessary.

Read it all, hippies.

(My sister's boyfriend—unable to find work after months of looking, and sick of living with his parents—recently announced his intention to go "live off the land" in Northern California, which is a hard sentiment to take in with a straight face. Maybe I should send him this clipping. And a copy of Hatchet.)