Dawn of the mushroom hunters

[cartoon id="284538"] Modern man is nothing. We all should pick up spears, don fur pelts, and go forth to hunt mushrooms. At least, that’s what my friend Carrie says. Well, I call her a friend, but real friends wouldn’t say “prehistoric times” with such a syrupy tone. And real friends wouldn’t go mushroom hunting and force me to come along. She said fresh-picked tasted better than store-bought. She said it was a way to commune with nature. She said I should pick up a spear, don a fur pelt, et cetera. I don’t have anything against buying mushrooms. But I draw the line at picking my own. The trouble with mushrooms is that there are about 570 different varieties and 569.5 of them are poisonous. And the last half is only edible if you cook it the right way. It’s not like I haven’t heard of mushroom hunting. My parents used to live in the Soviet Union, where people gathered mushrooms to supplement their diets. The trouble was that if you lived near Chernobyl, the mushrooms tended to run away from you. Between being poisoned and spending the day slogging through dangerous forests where the mushrooms prowl, the experience didn’t strike me as particularly worth having. So I said no. I can barely find what I’m looking for in a grocery store. And in a forest, mushrooms don’t come with labels and neat plastic packaging. My friend was undeterred. She had a book on edible varieties of fungi. She had done this before. She also had a spear. So I went. There’s no arguing with prehistoric people. We tramped around in the soggy undergrowth of my local park, where nature communed all over my shoes. Carrie was radiant. “Look at this gorgeous portobello,” she said, pointing. I gave it the trained stare of the mushroom hunter. “I don’t know,” I said. “It looks like a potato to me.” “Don’t be stupid,” she snapped. “Mushrooms aren’t potatoes.” I didn’t argue the point. Eventually I thought I’d feel less guilty about refusing a potentially lethal dinner if I didn’t actually gather the things that would be on my plate. So I decided to just hold the basket. Carrie had no such qualms. She scooped up mushroom after mushroom and tossed them toward me. I squelched after her and tried to avoid getting hit by bits of flying fungi. Finally we went back to her place. She hurtled about the kitchen, cooking the mushrooms, while I communed with a sofa. For all her claims about the prehistoric, Carrie had a gas stove like anybody else. She filled my plate with mushrooms and a few items that had probably spent years tightly enclosed in neat plastic packaging. We both sat down to eat. Carrie had only taken mushrooms for herself. Her prehistoric dinner smelled delicious, and I bet it tasted great. Or maybe it’s the other way around. She finished her portion before I properly started mine. “Well, what do you think?” she asked. I moved the mushrooms to the side of my dish and tried to take a bite of Kraft Mac And Cheese. The cheese had glued my fork to the plate. “Oh, you know,” I said, struggling to wrench it free. The fork made an ominous cracking sound. “I prefer the modern stuff.” - Copyright 2024 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Alexandra Paskhaver is a software engineer and writer. Both jobs require knowing where to stick semicolons, but she’s never quite; figured; it; out. For more information, check out her website at https://apaskhaver.github.io.