Not what we were looking for

Iliana Regan‘s truck has a decal in the back window that says “Stay out of my morel patch.” When I went foraging with her in Indiana this week, though, we weren’t looking for morels—those grow in the spring. We were trying to find maitake mushrooms. Or Regan was, at least. Mostly, I was trying to keep up with her as she plunged through the underbrush. She moved quickly in the woods, but that could have been because every time she stopped I’d ask her to identify every berry and mushroom in sight. Her answer was almost always the same: “Don’t eat that.”

So I didn’t. I just took pictures of everything that caught my eye, without any regard for whether it was edible or not.