Dining Dictionary: Eating Your Words

Today’s word of the meal: “wildcrafted,” as in “hen of the woods mushrooms, wildcrafted by Patrick Murphy.” Spotted last week in the Fair Food Farmstand e-newsletter (sign up here), “wildcrafting” is akin to the more familiar “foraging.” The difference, Farm Stand manager Sarah Cain explains, is that the term requires an added level of concern for maintaining the environment from which the wild fruits, vegetables, herbs or fungi are gathered. It’s not a new word — back-to-the-earth advocate Mother Earth News called it the world’s “oldest profession” in 1974, and it was legally defined in the Organic Food Production Act of 1991 — but it will likely be a newly popular one in our politics-on-the-table era.