Coincidentally, not long after I wrote this post I was reading a chapter in Michael Pollan’s "The Omnivore’s Dilemma" in which he recounts his experiences foraging for morels in the Sierra. He too describes (much better than I) the meditative quality of the task, as well as the “pop-out effect”–that amazing perceptual ability that allows us to pick out even camouflaged objects from their surroundings. Here’s more from Pollan:

“My gaze locked on a point about six steps in front of me, I’d completely lose track of my location in space and time. In this, mushroom hunting felt like a form of meditation, the morel serving as a kind of visual mantra shutting out almost every other thought."

And:

"It was deeply satisfying when the morels appeared, a phenomenon you could swear was as much under their control as yours. I became, per force, a student of the ‘pop-out effect,’ a term I’d first heard from mushroomers but subsequently learned is used by psychologists studying visual perception. To reliably distinguish a given object in a chaotic or monochromatic visual field is a daunting perceptual task, one so complex that researchers in artificial intelligence have struggled to teach it to computers. Yet when we fix in our mind some visual quality of the object we’re hoping to spot–whether its color or pattern or shape–it will pop out of the visual field, almost as if on command.”

Pollan suggests this perceptual ability makes good evolutionary sense in an environment where most food (apart from fruit) “hides” from us.

And no, even apart from their being so tiny, I don’t think one would want to eat the mud snails . . .even with garlic butter.