survival | barbara koenen

Muse
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They are heavy in my hand. Round, lumpy, fecund. If Years later, preparing for an exhibition, I found myself
48 I threw them against a wall they would explode, fragments researching the iconography of war rugs, carpets woven in
of pulp and red stain. response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that depicted
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One Chicago winter, I remember watching my art- various forms of weaponry amidst traditional floral and
school friend cut up pomegranates for her children to eat. geometric motifs. Considering that impulse to document
Paper and plastic covered the table and the red juice flowed war in craft form, I wondered what an American example
over everyone’s faces and arms, dripping onto the floor. would look like. Just as my aunt would crochet cozies for
Eating pomegranates was rooted in tradition for her, the “unmentionables” like tissue boxes and toilet paper rolls, I
daughter of Armenian immigrants. It was important that her began crocheting cozies for hand grenades. That was when
children experience this sensual, staining fruit that was so I discovered that grenades were named for pomegranates.
much work, yet so much fun. A sensory burst—delicious to I knew a little about pomegranates, mostly from art-
eat, to see, to smell, to feel. For a Midwestern girl like me history classes. Our English word comes from the Old
to witness such an event was unspeakably exotic. French pome grenate, “apple with many seeds.” The fruit

gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.11, no.2, pp.48–50, issn 1529-3262. © 2011 by barbara koenen.

of a deciduous shrub that has grown for millennia in
the Fertile Crescent, pomegranates have been cultivated
throughout Iran, India, parts of Southeast Asia, and into the
East Indies and tropical Africa. They were introduced into
California by Spanish settlers in the 1700s.
Symbolically, pomegranates are the motherlode, repre-
senting fertility and eternal life in many cultures. Goddesses
from Phoenicia (Astarte), Greece (Hera, Aphrodite, Demeter,
2010 ©
Persephone), and Rome (Juno, Athena, Ceres, and Proserpina)
photograph by william zbaren
are represented by the fruit. Winter’s barren months are the
result of Persephone/Proserpina eating just three (or four, or
six) of the juicy seeds while held captive by the god of the
underworld. Pomegranate trees were planted on the graves
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of heroes in ancient Greece, to ensure that they would have
many successors, and brides wove branches in their hair 49
for weddings. Pomegranate depictions are found on ancient
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coins and on pottery and jewelry. King Tut was buried
with a pomegranate, while the Madonnas of Leonardo
and Botticelli cradle an infant Jesus holding the fruit that
symbolizes the generosity to be found within his church.
Talmudic scholars speculate that the pomegranate is the
fruit that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden. Buddha
received a gift of a small pomegranate from a poor old
woman and then adopted it as one of three blessed fruits.
Beginning in the fifteenth century the meanings
changed. No longer just a representation of fertility and
 love, the pomegranate also became a small projectile bomb.
The heavy, lumpy round fruit containing hundreds of little
seeds and topped with a distinctive crown, or calyx, was
the perversely logical namesake for a handheld projectile
filled with tiny metallic shrapnel and a fuse contained in
a distinctive cap. Grenade, granada, granata, rimmon, its
name was adopted into many languages. Grenadiers were
the French soldiers who threw the small bombs from the
front lines. These tall, strong men, revered for their bravery,
evolved into elite units serving Napoleon i and the King of
Prussia. Since World War i, grenades have been a mainstay
of warfare the world over.
Years after my friend’s pomegranate feast, in 2003, a
clever ad campaign began for a new product whose antioxi-
dant properties would “prevent death.” It was a “survival kit,”
“death defying,” an “ancient power” that was also “pure sci-
ence.” The Antioxidant Superpower™ would provide “heart
therapy,” “life support,” a “survival kit,” an “extreme make-
over” that would “cheat death” and, as our “guardian angel,”
make us “forever young.”
POMWonderful™.
Suddenly, everyone in the United States was talking
pomegranates. Pom-tinis were served at the Academy
Awards, and pomegranate recipes appeared in magazines,
food blogs, and on Martha Stewart and Oprah. Grocery
shelves featured bulbous containers of variations on the
pricey elixir. POMWonderful™ had tapped into the jugular
of the post 9-11 zeitgeist—joining reality television, Botox®,
and the War on Terror. Its marketing campaign extended
into research, with over thirty-four million dollars provided
to top scientists and leading universities whose studies
yielded impressive results: pomegranates lowered the risk
of prostate cancer, ldl cholesterol, blood clots, and erectile
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dysfunction, to name but a few contemporary scourges.
50
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Much of the research was funded by the owners and found-
ers of POMWonderful™, Lynda and Stewart Resnick (who
also created Teleflora™ and FIJI water and their memorable
marketing campaigns).
Pomegranates provided the American public with an
excellent diversion from another marketing campaign at
about the same time, one that was equally effective but that
had extremely different results. When President George W.
Bush declared that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction, his extraordinary claims laid the groundwork
for the u.s. invasion of Iraq. As accusations crisscrossed the
airwaves, the newspapers, and the floor of the u.n., America
launched the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The initial “shock and
awe” was followed by years of deployment of thousands of
American soldiers carrying millions of grenades into the
heart of the Fertile Crescent.
With thousands of lives lost, millions ruined, and tril-
lions of dollars misspent, the rationale for the invasion of
Iraq was publicly debunked in 2004, when it was confirmed
that Saddam Hussein did not possess or have the capability
to produce Weapons of Mass Destruction, and was not
supporting Al-Qaeda. It took a few more years for the amaz-
ing powers of the pomegranate to be quietly refuted by
the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade
Commission. Although it is a nutritious fruit with a lot of
Vitamin C, the agencies’ research revealed in 2010 that the
pomegranate is not exactly death defying. Not to lose hope,
however. In 2008 the United States sponsored a twelve-mil-
lion-dollar campaign to promote pomegranate exports from
Afghanistan. Perhaps the Antioxidant Superpower™ will pro-
vide life support and a survival kit after all.g
passions | sabrina small

Harmony of the Spores

John Cage and Mycology

Finding a cohesive link between musician John

Cage’s mycological and compositional pursuits is as frustrat-
ing as hunting for summer truffles in November. Cage’s
quirky obsession with mushrooms may seem like nothing
more than a career side note, but his contributions to the
field of amateur mycology were actually quite significant.
Mushrooms, for Cage, served as a muse of sorts. Adamant
about not letting his personal taste interfere with the
process of creative discovery, he adopted a ritual of using
chance operations to compose and write many of his best-
known works. In this regard Cage’s taste for mushrooms
seems anomalous compared to his other projects. And
yet he titled numerous poems, articles, and compositions
around mushrooms. It is somehow comforting to contem-
plate Cage’s involvement with mycology, to know that the
rigid experimentalist who created 4’33” and cajoled audi-
ences into enduring lengthy “prepared piano” performances
would go home and cook wild mushrooms for his friends.1
Through this article’s focus on mushrooms, I hope to offer
a more intimate portrait of this singular and astonishingly
productive man, who was revered as a composer, musical
innovator, visual artist, writer, lecturer, Zen Buddhist, and

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anarchist—all in the span of one lifetime. When you add
his significant achievements in mycology to that list, it is
remarkable that Cage found time to sleep.
Although many researchers have sought to discover
the decisive link between mushrooms and all other things Above: John Cage gathering mushrooms in Mountain Lake, 19
Cageian, success has mostly eluded them. The first to try Virginia, 1983.
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photograph by tim wilson / personamedia.com © 1983

was Tim Wilson, who in 1983 recorded a program for cbc
radio called Cage in the Woods. The segment was meant and Cage responding with another, more open-ended one.
to be a metaphysical exploration of Cage’s weltanschauung Any attempt to get Cage to imbue the activity of foraging
by means of a mushroom foraging expedition. Although with spiritual import ends with Cage slyly subverting the
the introduction promised to turn listeners into “Alices of very terms Wilson proposes. When Wilson mentions coyly
a sort under the spell of Cage, a cryptic caterpillar,”2 the that “a lot of people regard mushroom foraging as a sacred
result was far more chaotic and circuitous than the term activity,” Cage answers rather sharply, “I don’t think any
cryptic implies. Wilson and Cage volley questions at one one thing is more sacred than another. We should brush
another like actors in an alternative version of Rosencrantz our teeth and wash our dishes without giving any prefer-
& Guildenstern Are Dead, with Wilson asking a question ence to one thing being sacred and another not.”3 When
gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.11, no.2, pp.19–23, issn 1529-3262. © 2011 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to
photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press ’ s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2011.11.2.19.
 the program ends, one is left with the sense that Wilson was
frustrated by the colossal task of picking out a mushroom-
focused argument from Cage’s taciturn displays and
resigned himself to let the piece stand for itself, no matter
how unwieldy it turned out to be.
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Twenty years later, in 2008, David W. Rose wrote a long
and impeccably researched article for Fungi Magazine, in
which he set out to fully integrate Cage’s practices concern-
ing “mushrooms, music, daily living, and habits of work”
20 into a unified aesthetic.4 Rose leaves no toadstool unturned
on his journey. He manages to amass an impressive col-
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lection of mushroom-related materials, but his analysis,
once again, lacks definition. It’s as if in his fungi-fueled
frenzy to find connections Rose begins seeing mushrooms
everywhere, even where they don’t belong, and in his
effort to perceive mushrooms as Cage’s ultimate “teaching-
machines,” he sees them as tools of silence. “Coming to
terms with silence,” Rose advises, “is the critical capability:
silence leads us to nature, and thence to mushrooms.”5
Unfortunately, the same could be said about many other
aspects of Cage’s symbology. Indeterminacy, for example,
Above: John Cage, Vorticella (For Miles and Ruth Horton), 1988.
courtesy of ray kass and the mountain lake workshop. photograph by deb sim. © john cage trust
the foundation for most of Cage’s compositions, is the
notion that ideas are not precisely determined or fixed. In
their randomness, mutability, and variability, mushrooms
are emblematic of this concept, and it is possible that inde-
terminacy, rather than silence, is the “critical capability” we
must come to terms with in order to unravel the greater
meaning of mushrooms in Cage’s universe.
Using the old literary argument against authorial intent,
the possibility of finding the ultimate connection between
Cage and mushrooms becomes much more tangible when
it turns to the facts, rather than trying to rely on the com-
poser’s own nebulous comments on the subject. And facts
abound: Cage began to forage for mushrooms in his home
of Carmel, California, during the Great Depression as a
means of supplementing his meager meals. He realized
quickly that mushrooms were not especially nutritious
when, after subsisting on them for a few days, he grew very
faint.6 Despite mushrooms’ lack of calories, the activity of
foraging them became a constant throughout Cage’s life.
His association with mycology is well documented on two
levels: one personal and artistic, the other official and pub-
lic. The difficulty in analysis relates to the personal, artistic
level. Were we to draw conclusions based merely on Cage’s
public involvement with mushrooms, the narrative would
be quite simple and straightforward.
By the late 1950s Cage had established himself as a
devotee of amateur mycology, reaching out to experts in
the field and amassing a considerable collection of books
on the subject. He became so competent in mushroom
identification that he sold many of the mushrooms he
collected to Creative Food Services and to Restaurant
Associates, in New York, which supplied, among other high-
end restaurants, the Four Seasons.7 Perhaps because the
pool of applicants was not very large, or perhaps because
Cage was an ambitious, highly organized public figure, he
was offered a variety of official positions by far more serious
mycophiles. His earliest official mushroom capacity was
as Vice-Chairman of the People-to-People Committee on
Fungi, a program established under the Eisenhower admin-
istration to promote peaceful international relations. Cage
was responsible for coordinating the work of this committee
in the eastern region of the United States. He was joined
by his friends and fellow foragers, artist Lois Long and
New Jersey naturalist Guy G. Nearing. Throughout his life
Cage worked closely with Long and Nearing on a variety
of mushroom-related projects. From 1959 through 1960, for
example, he and Nearing taught mushroom identification
classes through the New School for Social Research. The
classes feature heavily in Cage’s writings about mushrooms,
and it was with the help of students from these classes
that Cage was able to found the New York Mycological
Society in 1962, arguably his most lasting mycological
contribution. Still in existence today, the nyms boasts over
150 members who meet regularly for walks, lectures, and
larger events. Cage’s work in establishing the nyms garnered
him the North American Mycological Society’s Award for
Contributions to Amateur Mycology in 1964.
Perhaps Cage’s most public mushroom-related event
occurred in 1959, when he was a contestant on the Italian
quiz show Lascia o Raddoppia (Double or Nothing). The
show invited participants to choose an area of expertise,
and over the course of a week they were asked a series of
questions, each more difficult than the next. One incorrect
answer and the contestant was booted off the show. Cage
competed as a mushroom expert. His final task was to cor-
rectly name all the genera of white-spored mushrooms,
which he did, walking away with the lira equivalent of six
thousand dollars.8 The quiz show garnered Cage celebrity
status throughout Italy, as well as offers to join various
European mycological societies.
Cage was not only a brainy mushroom pseudo-academic,
he was also a highly gifted mushroom cook. Up until the late
1970s he, like many American gourmands of the era, was
heavily influenced by French cuisine. He used a lot of cream
and butter and loved red meat and red wine (he also loved
whiskey, coffee, and cigarettes). Cage’s love of food was well
documented by others and by himself. In the essay “Where
Are We Eating? And What Are We Eating?” Cage chron-
icled all the meals he ate while on tour with the Merce
Cunningham Dance Company in 1975. Mushrooms were
definitely on the menu. With its colloquial, good-humored
tone and rapid-fire verbal snapshots of life on the road,
“Where Are We Eating? And What Are We Eating?” allows
the reader to observe Cage the social animal. At times he
appears nurturing, commandeering motel kitchens with his
bounty of recently foraged mushrooms and creating elabo-
rate feasts for the entire dance company. At other moments
he seems endearingly childlike, studding each sentence
with exclamation points to communicate his excitement to
the reader: “We’re going to Athens in southern Ohio. Every
mile (we’re going seventy!) brings us closer to morels!”9
There are even moments in the essay where Cage, usually
the center of attention, seems gratefully dependent on the
people he encounters. In one episode in Kansas, Cage
hands his wild mushrooms over to a motel-restaurant cook.
“They came to the table swimming in butter. Carolyn, who
isn’t wild about mushrooms, had seconds. I complimented
the cook. How’d you know how to cook ’em? ‘We get them
all the time: I’m from Oklahoma.’ ”10
In the foreword to this essay, written five years after it
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first appeared in print, Cage brings the reader up to date
on his eating habits. Though the essay describes copious
amounts of artery-clogging fare, by the time Cage wrote
the foreword he had embraced a macrobiotic diet, on Yoko
Ono’s recommendation. He writes of his sudden conver- 21
sion: “For two days I lived in shock. I ate almost nothing. I
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couldn’t imagine a kitchen without butter and cream, nor
a dinner without wine.” The positive effects on his health,
however, helped convince him the diet was worthwhile.
“Within a week the pain behind my left eye went away. After
a month the toes began to move. Now my wrists, though
somewhat misshapen, are no longer swollen and inflamed.
I’ve lost more than twenty-five pounds.”11 Perhaps the fact
that mushrooms were still permitted in his diet allowed
Cage to surrender the butter and booze. “I follow Lima
Ohsawa in the cooking of mushrooms, sautéeing them in a
 little sesame oil, finally adding tamari.”12 Cage continued to
eat macrobiotically until his death in 1992.
Due to his public identity as a mushroom forager, Cage
amassed quite a cache of mushroom-related items. In 1971
he entrusted nine archival boxes of mushroom ephemera
to the University of California at Santa Cruz. The contents
of the Santa Cruz collection meld Cage’s personal and pro-
fessional mushroom pursuits. Here we find his mushroom
watercolors, mushroom poems, and the legendary mushroom
book on which he collaborated with lithographer Lois Long
and professional biologist Alexander H. Smith.13 The collection
also contains various mushroom-related gifts Cage received
from colleagues and friends: mushroom guide books, a
collection of mushroom recipes, even kitschy mushroom
paraphernalia like mushroom-print tea towels and a mush-
room-print tie. What the contents of this collection say
about his persona, however, remains difficult to decipher.
The desire to find direct correlations between mush-
rooms and any of the concepts in Cage’s musical oeuvre
quickly leads to tautology. Cage’s contradictory statements
about mushrooms are as uninterpretable as those of the
smiling Cheshire cat. “Music and mushrooms: two words
next to each other in many dictionaries,” begins one of
Cage’s readings from a series of one-minute performances
he made under the umbrella title Indeterminacy.14 Many of
the minute-long readings Cage incorporated into the per-
formance pertained to mushrooms, and because each piece
stands on its own it is tempting to read them as parables
handpicked by Cage to illustrate some larger truth. A num-
ber of the stories do, in fact, work that way, such as the one
about Mr. Romanoff, one of Cage’s mushroom students,
who expresses “childlike pleasure” at every specimen he
encounters. He takes color slides of the mushrooms and,
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after smelling one mushroom in particular, asks whether it
has been perfumed. The segment ends with Cage warmly
quoting his pupil, “Mr. Romanoff said the other day, ‘Life is
the sum total of all the little things that happen.’”15
22 Because Cage so often ended the Indeterminacy stories
with a simple, straightforward statement, it is tempting to
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see mushrooms as representing an obtuse sort of wisdom
that we often overlook in our busy, chaotic lives. Indeed,
many of the stories have a “stop and smell the mushrooms”
feel to them, such as this one about Cage’s mushroom men-
tor Alexander Smith:
While hunting morels with Alexander Smith in the woods near Ann
Arbor, I mentioned having found quantities of Lactarius deliciosus in
the woods of northern Vermont. He said, “Were the stipes viscid?” I
said, “Yes, they were.” He said, “It’s not deliciosus; it’s thyinos.” He
went on to say that people go through their entire lives thinking that
things are that when they are actually this, and that these mistakes are
necessarily made with the very things with which they are most familiar.”
Illustrating the simple truths that mushrooms can bring
to anyone who cares to stop and consider them is a theme
that pops up throughout Indeterminacy, but Cage goes even
further in the following story, which casts composer Colin
McPhee in an unfavorable light, suggesting that Cage was
personally disappointed by his reaction. “When Colin
McPhee found out that I was interested in mushrooms, he
said, ‘If you find the morel next Spring, call me up, even
if you only find one. I’ll drop everything, come out, and
cook it.’ Spring came. I found two morels. I called Colin
McPhee. He said, ‘You don’t expect me, do you, to come
all that way for two little mushrooms?’’16
Cage’s attempt to use mushrooms to draw our atten-
tion to things we often overlook is partially attributable to
his affinity for the works of Henry David Thoreau, who
spent two years in relative isolation meditating on solitude,
contemplation, and closeness to nature. When asked about
the deeper meaning of mushroom foraging, Cage often
mentioned Thoreau. Specifically, when Tim Wilson asked
him in their 1983 interview whether he did a lot of thinking
while gathering mushrooms in the woods, Cage replied, “I
don’t think so. What you’re doing in the woods is looking
at what there is to see.” Cage credits Thoreau with this
perception, remarking that Thoreau wrote, “What right do I
have to be in the woods, if I’m thinking of something out of
the woods.”17 In the sound composition “Mureau” (a meld-
ing of the words music and Thoreau, although mushrooms
and Thoreau produce the same hybrid) Cage explored sev-
eral variations of Thoreau’s message, layering them in a sort
of textual collage along with other works he found relevant.
For example, he whittled down R.H. Blythe’s original haiku,
“The leaf of some unknown tree/ sticking/ on the mush-
room,” to read simply, “What mushroom? What leaf?”18
Restructuring and reshaping language focused Cage’s
mind in much the same way that foraging for mushrooms did.
Mushrooms themselves presented an especially intriguing
platform for language play because their names are seemingly
fixed. Based on rigid Latinate taxonomy and classification
models, mushrooms require rigorous identification methods—
after all, misidentification can result in death. But Cage was
determined to find a way to keep mushrooms “fresh and
experiential” as opposed to “fixed and clear.”19 If he could
not tinker with mushrooms themselves, he could extract
and dilute their meaning on a purely linguistic level. Cage
was attracted to the musical, polysyllabic names of mush-

rooms, and he constructed hundreds of mesostic poems
around them and featuring them. In the poem “Song,”20
which Cage wrote for and constructed around the name
“JASPER JOHNS ,” mushroom varieties appear numerous
times, though their meaning is maddeningly vague.
not Just
gArdener:
morelS
coPrini
morEls
copRini
not Just hunter:
cutting dOwn
aliantHus
cuttiNg down
alianthuS.
Whether this poem was intended to be read as a per-
sonal message for Jasper Johns or as a simple language
exercise is unclear. For Cage, mushrooms evolved from a
philosophical tool to train our minds to the beauty of exis-
tence into objects whose meanings continually transform
to suit their conjurers’ needs. In yet another mushroom-
inspired work, The Music Lover’s Field Companion (a
humorous take on the common mushroom field guides),
Cage begins, “I have come to the conclusion that much
can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the
mushroom.”21 What follows, however, is not a concise or
profound deliberation on the true meaning of either entity,
but rather a farcical play in which Cage bemusedly remarks,
“What a boon it would be for the recording industry if it
could be shown that the performance, while at the table, of
an lp of Beethoven’s Quartet Opus Such-and-Such so alters
the chemical nature of Amanita muscaria as to render it
both digestible and delicious!”22 And yet, it is within the
short and farcical Music Lover’s Field Companion that we
find some of the most whimsical yet poetic writing about
mushrooms and music Cage ever conceived:
I propose that it should be determined which sounds further the growth
of which mushrooms; whether these latter, indeed, make sounds of
their own; whether the gills of certain mushrooms are employed by
appropriately small-winged insects for the production of pizzicati and
the tubes of the Boleti by minute burrowing ones as wind instruments;
whether the spores, which in size and shape are extraordinarily various,
and in number countless, do not on dropping to the earth produce
gamelan-like sonorities; and finally, whether all this enterprising activity,
which I suspect delicately exists, could not, through technological
means, be brought, amplified and magnified, into our theatres with the
net result of making our entertainments more interesting.23
Compared to this lively and quixotic prose piece, Cage’s
mesostic poems appear clinical. But, as with most of his
artistic pursuits, the ascertainment of meaning and aesthet-
ics were secondary to the experiment itself. Mushrooms
offered yet another lens through which to explore experi-
mental production. Cage’s unabashed pursuit of the new
and undiscovered may be the only true link among all of
his artistic projects. Each subject was a platform from which
to spin words, images, and sounds. While mushrooms
inspired a staggering amount of artistic output for Cage,
they turn the task of writing about Cage in this capacity into
a bewildering exercise. Perhaps Cage saw a profound con-
nection between music and mushrooms; more likely he was
only trying to make his entertainments more interesting.g
notes
1. In the prepared piano pieces the strings of a piano were fitted with a variety of
screws and then plucked mercilessly by eager virtuosos.
2. Tim Wilson, “Cage in the Woods,” Inside the Music, cbc Radio-2 (2009).
3. Ibid.
4. David W. Rose, “A Plurality of One: John Cage and the People-to-People
Committee on Fungi,” Fungi Magazine 1, no. 4 (2008): 27.
5. Ibid., 25.
6. David Revill, The Roaring Silence (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), 43.
7. Ibid., 182.
8. Rose, “A Plurality of One,” 27.
9. Alison Knowles and John Cage, “Where Are We Eating? And What Are We
Eating,” in John Cage, Empty Words: Writing 73–78 by John Cage (London:
Boston: Marion Boyars, 1980), 82.
10. Ibid.
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11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. John Cage, Lois Long, and Alexander H. Smith, The Mushroom Book (New
York: Hollander Workshop, Inc., 1972).
14. John Cage, A Year from Monday: Lectures and Writings (London: Calder &
Boyers, 1985), 34. 23
15. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (London: Marion Boyars
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Publishers Ltd., 1987), 268–269.
16. Cage, A Year from Monday, 35.
17. Ibid.
18. Rose, “A Plurality of One,” 30.
19. Tim Wilson, transcript of an interview with Cage made in Mountain Lake,
Virginia, September 1983 (www.personamedia.com).
20. Cage, Empty Words, 10.
21. Cage, Silence, 274–276.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
 americana | ruth tobias
Catfish and Controversy at the
Okie Noodling Tournament
I think I’ll noodle ’til I die. If that’s not what kills me.
—Jerry “Catfish” Rider, Okie Noodling
The deeper you go, the darker it gets. That, in a
nutshell—make that fish maw, for a more appropriate
metaphor—is noodling, otherwise known as handfishing,
hogging, grabbling, stumping, cooning, or dogging.1 It’s
true of the sport itself, which involves submerging partly or
fully in your river, lake, or pond of choice to trap catfish in
their nesting holes or under brushpiles, jamming your arm
through their mouths—getting “tore up pretty good,” of
course, in the process—and bracing for a tussle. It’s true
of noodling’s murky history, unrecorded beyond “a few
photos here and there of Native Americans holding up fish,”
as Bradley Beesley, director of Okie Noodling and Okie
Noodling 2, puts it.2 “Most of the guys I’m in touch with are
now in their forties; they were taught by their fathers, who
are now in their seventies. I haven’t yet found the great-
great grandfather who’s going, ‘I remember when,’ but that’s
because there was a time people didn’t think much about
it. It was just a technique for catching fish: ‘It doesn’t mat-
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ter if we’re gonna hit it in the head with a rock or whatever;
we’re gonna bring you dinner tonight.’ There wasn’t a cul-
ture built around it.” Yet the nothing-if-not-colorful culture
that now exists is at the root of noodling’s equally unclear
14 future, fraught with controversies—not the least of which is
its newfound status as a cult phenomenon (based in large
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part on the success of Beesley’s own documentaries).
Before there was controversy (of which more later), how-
ever, there was the first annual Okie Noodling Tournament
and Fish Fry in 2000, founded by Beesley himself in
the course of making his first film with the help of Phil
Henderson, one-time fisheries biologist and current owner
of Bob’s Pig Shop in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, on whose
premises the tournament is set every July. Now approaching
its twelfth anniversary, the event sheds a very public (not to
mention scorching) light on a very private pastime.
gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.11, no.2, pp.14–18, issn 1529-3262. © 2011 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to
photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press ’ s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2011.11.2.14.
This year, as the clock nears noon, you wouldn’t know
from a glance around North Ash Street that the tournament
was already underway at fishing holes across the Sooner
State. Sure, the setup is complete: there’s the weigh-in tent
with its scale, chalkboard, and holding pools; the demon-
stration tank brimming with 3,500 gallons of water, pumped
in that morning by the fire department from the hydrant
across the street; bleachers, a stage, and a few kiosks have
been erected. Yet the mood seems as sleepy as it does on
any other day in this small town, with only a couple of kids
running wild and a pair of cowboys striding by on horseback.
Only inside Bob’s do you begin to get an inkling of
what’s to come. Already a few tables are ringed round
with good ol’ boys yukking it up amid too many cans of
Budweiser and rib platters; already the cooks and servers are
picking up the pace with expressions somewhere between
grins and grimaces in preparation for the “bizarre chaos”
Henderson guarantees will ensue with his usual cheer.
Sure enough, fast-forward an hour, and it’s like some-
thing out of Hitchcock’s The Birds: from out of nowhere,
scattered individuals have multiplied into throngs at the
intersection of Ash and Agnew. Some are setting up camp
under trees—precious property in the one-hundred-degree
heat—with lawn chairs and coolers; some are staking their
claims on the bleachers; a line is already stretching out
the door of the Pig Shop from the order counter, and the
first pickup trucks are beginning to pull up to the weigh-
in tent with contestants waiting for aquatic biologist Joe
Bidwell and his team of graduate students from Oklahoma
State University to record their catches. Meanwhile, a
dense band of spectators is gathered around the tank as a
red-bearded, bandanna-capped guy in trunks emblazoned
with the words “Noodlers Anonymous” lowers himself into
the water for a demo. Slogan notwithstanding, there aren’t
many among them who don’t already know that this is none
other than Lee McFarlin—being about as close to famous
as fishermen, especially handfishermen, ever come: the star
of Beesley’s documentaries has gone to appear on espn, the
Discovery Channel, celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay’s bbc
series The F-Word, and more.
If you can make your way to the front, you’ll get an
eyeful of flurry: Lee on one side, his partner on the other,
maneuvering and grabbing at the twenty-pound flathead
trapped in a box between them. If you can’t, there’ll be
other chances; the weigh-in deadline of 7:30 p.m. is hours
away yet. Nothing to do but kick back with a Sno-cone
and a pulled-pork sandwich or a plate of catfish fresh
from the giant, bubbling fryer out back. (When the tour-
nament started, the contestants donated their catches to
the for-profit fish fry; now, farmed fish is offered for free,
Henderson explains, because “this game warden came up
to me a couple of years ago and said, ‘You aren’t selling
those fish, are you?’ And I said, ‘Oh, no, we’re just selling
the plates the fish are on.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s good,
because you can’t sell wild-caught fish in Oklahoma.’”
Oops.) Buy a souvenir T-shirt from Henderson’s daughter
Heidi, as filled with as many deadpan quips as her dad
about the “crazed grab-bag of happenings” she finds herself
helping to assemble every year. Check out the materials
at the promotional booth for women’s roller derby. Watch
the photo shoot as noodlers by the twos and threes—sweaty,
grimy, bleeding, and grinning in their fishing caps and
Above: A noodler takes to the stage with his winning catch.
photograph by brit withey © 2010
cargo shorts—pose for the camera, the ones that didn’t get
away dangling from their fingers. And just let the afternoon
melt away in the heat, still swelling along with the crowd—
which, of course, is prime for people-watching. In fact, what
distinguishes this “little fiesta,” in Henderson’s words, from
SU M M E R 2 011
other fishing contests is something I’ll call the Fearless Freak
Factor, described by a friend of mine as “the rednecks
ogling the hipsters and the hipsters ogling the rednecks.”
Though the diversity actually extends to bikers, families,
and, increasingly, tourists from as far away as Norway and 15
Japan, the description is not inaccurate. The Fearless Freaks
GASTRONOMICA
is the title of another documentary by Beesley that features
The Flaming Lips, the only rock band out of countrified
Oklahoma to achieve megastardom. Known worldwide for
their psychedelic sound and surreal live shows involving
dancers in bunny costumes, bouncing balls, fake blood, and
fire, they were known as heroes to those of us who grew up
in the 1980s on the outside of the dominant local culture.
Me, for example—the daughter of liberal, secular-Jewish
intellectuals who couldn’t wait to get out of the reddest of
red states in the Bible Belt.
 What I didn’t know until Beesley made it clear to me
in Okie Noodling—underscored by a Lips soundtrack—was
that even some of those rural folk with monotone drawls
SU M M E R 2 011
and cowboy boots, the ones who personified rampant
provincialism for us hipster-prototypes, felt like outsiders,
too. They were and are noodlers. As McFarlin put it rather
poignantly during an interview for the film, “Noodlers are
16 like carp or drum. They’re the bottom-feeders, they’re the
trash, they’re the scum-suckers…They’re the lowest on the
GASTRONOMICA
totem pole as far as the bass fishermen, your tournament
trout fishermen…Noodlers are the very last to be talked
to or heard about.” A decade later, all the recent fanfare
notwithstanding, their struggle for respect continues—most
notably in Missouri, where, as in the vast majority of states
(excluding Oklahoma), handfishing is illegal; the Missouri
Department of Conservation (mdc) holds that it depletes
local catfish populations.3 The implication of the depart-
ment’s position, explains Mary Grigsby, a professor of rural
sociology at the University of Missouri who is working on
Above: With a Band-Aid on one arm and a catfish on the other,
Buster Garrett of Eufala, Oklahoma, flies his colors.
photograph by brit withey © 2010
a book about noodling culture, is that “noodling is not fair
play. Fair play is not going into the hole when the catfish
are trying to reproduce, blocking the hole, and grabbing
them off their nest.”4 Champions of the sport dispute that
perception fiercely, citing as the real reasons for its prohibition
politics and a trial legal season that was badly managed and
failed to generate revenue from fishing licenses. Recalls Gary
Webb, at sixty-six a fiery yet affable spokesman for the afore-
mentioned Noodlers Anonymous, “The [mdc] didn’t exactly
treat us right. At first they compared us to poachers, shooting
turkeys off the nest and spotlighting deer.”5 And the stigmas
handfishermen face go far beyond their perceived lawlessness,
Grigsby notes: While they see themselves as courageous and
self-sufficient, living a lifestyle that sensibly values frugality,
responsibility, and intergenerational community above all,
“noodlers are portrayed as crazy, ignorant, backwards rednecks”
 by a media that privileges the urban/suburban, middle-class
norm. In short, the noodlers emphasize their fearlessness;
the media, their freakishness. (Indeed, the potential for eye-
popping and jaw-dropping is undoubtedly why newsmakers
turned their attention to the admittedly unsightly sport at
all, from the 1989 appearance of Jerry “Catfish” Rider on
Late Night with David Letterman onward.)6
Granted, such tensions are inherent in the sport. On
the one hand, noodlers prize the intimacy it entails, the
direct contact they have with both the fish and their noo-
dling “clan.”7 With “no hooks, no bait, [and] no fear” (to
use the tournament’s official slogan) between them, they’re
equipped with nothing but their wits, their bare hands—
and their comrades, whom they literally trust with their
lives. After all, the dangers of noodling are very real. You
can get bitten by a poisonous snake. In certain tight holes
a catfish can clamp down on your arm and, as veteran
noodler Clarence “Scooter” Bivins puts it, “you’ve basically
just stuck your hand in a vise.” You can get trapped in crev-
ices. Without your buddies to watch out for you, you can,
in short, drown. (It’s telling that most of the noodlers I’ve
interviewed hold day jobs with high risk factors as well:
Bivins is an assistant fire chief; McFarlin is a burner special-
ist, fixing gas pipes; his son-in-law, Joshua Garcia, works
in surveillance at a casino.)8 Meanwhile, says Grigsby,
“you also trust others to keep their mouths shut”—whether
because what you’re doing is illegal or because fish-rich
locales constitute prime real estate. When he first started
filming, remembers Beesley, “It took me about a year to
find guys who were willing to take me out” and make their
favorite holes known: “A lot of them have spent decades
cultivating these spots.” On the other hand, now that
handfishing is in the spotlight, the noodlers are caught
between a rock and a hard place like none they encounter
underwater. Should they milk their minor celebrity and
prove they’re not just “poor hayseeds,” in McFarlin’s words,
by promoting the sport they love, or will promotion itself be
noodling’s downfall? “It’s kind of a secrecy thing,” admits
Bivins, “and when all of your places are being discovered,
it just kinda shoots you out of the saddle.”
But for now, at least, camaraderie still trumps compe-
tition, and the romance of living off the land—or rather
on and in the water—endures. Though “the omnipresent
theme among the noodlers is the adrenaline rush,” as
Beesley puts it, the joys they describe are as meditative as
they are physical. As McFarlin is fond of saying, “When
you’re out there [noodling], it’s you and Mother Nature.
You can kinda see our ancestry. You can see where we
evolved from before there were tools and guns. I’m happy
when I think, hey, I coulda made it then.” Beesley agrees.
“For me it’s so exciting when you’re just about to catch a
fish with your hands or you walk down the riverbed and you
start getting butterflies, exploring these creeks and rivers
and seeing the things only twelve-year-old boys get to expe-
rience.” Meanwhile, Mary Grigsby cites “reciprocity and
interdependence” as core values of the noodlers she works
with, whose skill allows them to “share with their commu-
nity, feeding people at fish fries” and in private, for instance
by providing for the elderly. And sure enough, to ask Bivins
what he loves about noodling is to learn first and foremost
not about the activity per se but about the conviviality it
engenders: “For one thing, I keep a deep-freeze full of meat,
and I can give it to my friends. I’ll have them come and
haul hay or something”—he lives on a ninety-acre farm—
and I can pay them in fish. And we have fish fries.”
A typical fish fry reflects as clearly what noodling’s all
about as the sport itself. As Bivins explains:
My thing is, “Tell anybody, tell all.” Anybody’s welcome as long as
they respect the property and the people around them. I prepare [my
catfish] perfectly, better than any restaurant would consider cleaning
it…It gets to where you’re preparing the meat so that you cut all of
the red out, down the backbone, distinguishing the fat versus the meat,
and cleaning it all away. Some people watching might think you’re
wasting a lot of fish, but it’s not worth saving that extra few bites so
it’s gonna taste bad whenever you eat it. Whenever it’s cleaned, it’s
nice and white, no red and no black, and that way it’s just 100 percent
better. People will come out and say, “Oh, I don’t like fish,” and I’ll
just say, “Well, that’s fine, but try mine just this once.” And they’ll say,
“Oh my God, I never knew it tasted like this.” We kinda got the batter
to the way we like it. We use cornmeal, flour, garlic salt, and pepper,
and sometimes we’ll even add some cayenne pepper. The tartar sauce
SU M M E R 2 011
we make homemade, because there’s no comparison to storebought.
That’s something that everybody looks forward to.
Then my wife usually puts on a huge pot of red beans with ham.
For sure we’ll have french fries, usually made the old style, where we’ll
just wash [the potatoes] and run ’em through [the dicer] so they’ll be 17
square and natural. And my friends will bring chips and hot sauce or
GASTRONOMICA
something to snack on. I don’t try to tell anybody what to do. There’s a
few that might sip a little whiskey, a few that might drink a little beer,
and we always have some iced tea around.
Also we play country music. We have a drummer and a fiddle
player and I play acoustic guitar and sing. So we have a good little
group. My dad played music, too, and there’s one guy that played with
him that still plays with us. It’s old-time country music, like Merle
Haggard and George Strait. You respect your elders, and that’s what he
loves, and he still feels good enough to do it, so we’re gonna make him
happy. When he leaves we’ll venture into the more upbeat stuff.
 So is this an adults-only affair, I ask? “Oh, no,” Bivins
assures me. “A babysitter out in the middle of the country
is something you can only wish for. So yeah, there are lots
of kids. They just get right out in the middle of everything
and play while the adults sit around and talk about the next
grabbling trip.”
Back at the tournament, Bivins’s description echoes even
as the tv camera crews descend and the mood begins to
shift from one of mellowness to mania. By six, the motorcade
at the weigh-in tent stretches for blocks. If you nudge your way
through the crush of bodies toward the roped-off entranceway,
you might just catch a glimpse of three ham-shouldered,
sun-reddened guys in ripped-up T-shirts, gingerly making
their way off a truckbed; slung over the collarbone of one
is a bespeckled, bewhiskered creature that looks as though
it hasn’t evolved in millennia. It’s behemoth. It’s ugly. And
you have to admire it. Sure enough, everyone cheers—as
much, it seems, for the fish as its catcher; for the primordial
death-battle that must have ensued; for every pound it was
about to officially weigh—representing as each one does,
according to Phil Henderson, a year of hard-fought life on
the mean streets of rural waterways.
The rules of the contest are few but crucial. There
are monetary prizes for the largest natural-caught fish, the
largest natural-caught stringer (a group of three fish), the
largest fish caught using scuba gear, and the largest stringer
caught using scuba gear, as well as a separate category
for female noodlers.9 The fish must be flatheads, the only
type of catfish that may legally be noodled in Oklahoma;
they must be caught in-state; and they must be brought in
live—dead fish are disqualified. So how do the organiz-
ers know the contestants followed the rules, that the fish
weren’t line-caught or driven in from Texas? Well…they
SU M M E R 2 011
don’t. “We really have to kinda go by the honor system,”
admits Henderson. Adds Beesley, “Every year somebody
accuses somebody of cheating, and I’ll be like, ‘Well, he
has to sleep with himself.’” Ultimately, he insists, “It doesn’t
18 matter to me who wins or loses. The purpose of the tourna-
ment is to bring together these guys who kind of have been
GASTRONOMICA
overlooked in the fishing community.” Needless to say,
most noodlers, for whom trust in community is so essential,
wouldn’t have it any other way.
Suddenly a buzz runs through the crowd as Joe Bidwell
writes a number on the chalkboard: 59.24 pounds. Folks, we
have a winner! (It just so happens to be Scooter Bivins.)
And so the attention turns to the stage, where prizes
are announced and the Okie Noodling Queen is crowned
by her predecessor with about as much articulate poise as
you’d expect from someone whose only duties today appear
to have involved knocking back her weight in beer. To be
sure, a sizable majority of attendees have been keeping
close pace all day. And so, many begin their loose-limbed,
sun-spent shuffle toward home; and so still others start to
move, almost involuntarily, to the music as a band takes the
stage, playing red-dirt rock as only alt-country Oklahomans
can. And so another festival winds down as the sky darkens
and the heat wanes. As Phil’s daughter Heidi succinctly
puts it when she steals away from the souvenir booth to
whisk me into the Pig Shop’s walk-in cooler for a quick nip
of our own: “It’s a slice of Americana you will not forget. I
can tell you that.”g
notes
Many thanks to Bradley Beesley, Scooter Bivins, Rebecca Eskreis, Joshua Garcia,
Mary Grigsby, Heidi Henderson, Phil Henderson, Lee McFarlin, and Gary
Webb for their insights.
1. Burkhard Bilger, Noodling for Flatheads: Moonshine, Monster Catfish, and
Other Southern Comforts (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 20. The varia-
tions in terminology are, of course, regional.
2. So Bilger concluded in the course of his research; for more on indigenous
handfishing methods, see Noodling for Flatheads, 19.
3. See “Why ‘No’ to Noodling?” http://mdc.mo.gov/fishing/regulations/sport-fish-
regulations/why-no-noodling.
4. Grigsby is understandably adamant about maintaining her own neutrality
on this issue.
5. Reasoning that “they don’t want some poor redneck trying to tell the legislature
what to do,” McFarlin highlights the role played by lobbyists for the sporting-
goods industry in ensuring that handfishing remains illegal. One can certainly
sympathize with such conspiracy theories.
6. Rebecca Eskreis, a filmmaker at the University of Southern California who is
currently working on a feature narrative titled Noodling that is set in Pauls Valley,
became fascinated by the sport after reading about it in the New York Times,
in all its “zany, macho” glory. Without discounting that aspect, she quotes the
observation of an Oklahoman friend that “Whenever there’s a tornado, [the news
crews] always find the one guy with no teeth” to interview. A New York native
herself, Eskreis aimed to avoid such stereotyping by shooting her film in Pauls
Valley, using a cast entirely made up of locals.
7. Some Missouri noodling groups “call themselves clans, as in kin and friends
of kin,” explains Grigsby. “It’s this idea of shared experiences, norms, and values
that they associate with noodling.”
8. “I think most noodlers find a trade where they use their hands a lot,” Jerry
“Catfish” Rider concurs in Okie Noodling.
9. The majority of noodlers are men, to be sure. Referencing her interviews on
the topic of fish fries, Mary Grigsby observes that their self-perception as big-
game hunters is borne out in interesting ways: while, traditionally, men went out
to get the fish, women foraged for wild mushrooms and the berries with which
they baked pies.