Squab sisters

THE OTHER MORNING I woke up to a squab in my house. This squab, its feathers still damp with youth, was perched on the curtain rod of my kitchen window, looking out to freedom – inasmuch as a Mission alley littered with shit and hypodermic needles can count as freedom. But it does count: for me and for the squab. I couldn't fathom exactly how the squab had flown in, and it couldn't figure how to get out. Contemplating it in my half-conscious state, I had a brief, predatory urge to eat the hapless bird for breakfast. It was eerily apt that a squab was in my kitchen, as just a day or two before, a friend had told me about some guy in New York City who spent six months subsisting on only what he could forage or catch. Think Survivor for the urban foodie set. Not surprisingly, squab – young pigeons – featured prominently in his diet.

I didn't slay the squab. For one thing, it was far, far from appetizing; for another, I could see its parent fluttering anxiously on the other side of the glass. Bambi and Babar flashed before my eyes. I nudged said squab onto a folded newspaper (it was quite cooperative) and released it into the urban wild and its parent's waiting wings, unleashing my hunting-gathering impulse instead on the wasteland of my pantry.

Fending for oneself is a hot topic in food these days. The theme of this year's Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery is "Wild Food: Hunters and Gatherers," and rumor has it a couple of books on modern-day incarnations of this subject have been snapped up by major publishing houses. This fascination with urban subsistence eating goes beyond the frontiers of dumpster-diving – an art, incidentally, beautifully chronicled by the peripatetic and persistently homeless Lars Eighner in his memoir, Travels with Lisbeth. There's an apocalyptic tinge to the current trend – but which versions of apocalypse are lending their colors?

The Oxford Symposium Web site reads, "A major theme of the meeting will be biodiversity." Certainly biodiversity's diminishment is one apocalypse that manages to be both looming and continuous. Estimates of the extinction incurred by tropical rainforest deforestation and the destruction of other habitats range from one species snuffed an hour to one a minute. A starring role in the rise of monoculture is accorded to agriculture. Not farming, but agriculture. The distinction between the two (as made by Richard Manning in Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization) is that farming produces food, whereas agriculture produces commodities. (Paradoxically, agriculture grows while farming dwindles. Recently, at a wedding in a gorgeous slice of rural northern Virginia hemmed in by sprawling suburbs – plaza after plaza after plaza – a fellow guest who'd grown up in the area related that 20 years ago the state was about 85 percent farmland; now she estimates that figure to be less than 1 percent.) I was fascinated to read, in Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire, that the New Leaf potato (a variety, impervious to the dreaded Colorado potato beetle, that was concocted and patented by agriculture monolith Monsanto) is actually classified by our government not as a food but as a pesticide; as such, it's under the jurisdiction not of the Food and Drug Administration but of the Environmental Protection Agency. Truth: now even stranger than fiction!

And then there's this sneaking suspicion I've got that more and more people are convinced that civilization as we know it is coming to an end. My notions were confirmed while eavesdropping on two women on the 22 Fillmore – strangers thrown together by fate and public transport. Having first bonded over their disgust at a demonstration-induced bus delay, they moved on to agree on larger issues. For example, that Iraq's oil is funding Dubya's reelection campaign. Although they didn't say the world is coming to an end in so many words, they did say:

"Girl, these are some crazy goings-on. I ain't never seen shit get this crazy."

"You know it, girl."

Once apocalyptic thinking moves out of the exclusive realm of radical mountain-dwelling enclaves and into urban discourse, tips on subsistence eating in the concrete jungle can't be far behind. Hence Ragnar's Urban Survival: A Hard-Times Guide to Staying Alive in the City (Palidin Press). Ragnar offers tips on finding water, trapping and butchering game, and food preservation. I was all ready to shell out the bucks to order it on Amazon.com, but then a review from "A reader from People's Republic of Maryland" cautioned: "Take his food storage section with a very large grain of salt. The information presented there is dubious at best, and his guide to canning meats with a steam bath canner could very well get you killed." I guess I better start boning up on my copy of Canning and Preserving for Dummies.

Speaking of canning and preserving, plum season is nigh upon us. Just today I popped a couple of unripe ones from a Berkeley tree in my mouth merely for the tart bliss of it. A coworker promises to make jam from her backyard. Tune in next time for the "Food Snoop's Urban Gratification: A Good-Times Guide to Staying Happy in the City" – somewhat nonapocalyptic tips on enjoying prime foraging season in the Bay Area. Gather ye stone fruit while ye may.

E-mail Masha Gutkin at lydialeapfrog@yahoo.com.