John Muir, Gourmand

By Paul Rauber

February 6, 2015

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John Muir ponders whether he should dine at Shuko or Cherche Midi.

Sierra Club founder John Muir was not exactly a bon vivant. The austere Scotsman would hike his beloved Sierra Nevada for weeks at a time, subsisting on little more than bread and tea. A high point of the online week, then, was Mallory Ortberg's inspired "Restaurant Reviews of John Muir, Conservationist" in The Toast: 

Root & Bone, 200 E. 3rd St

I grow weary of this life of hotels and chatter and shoe-horns and turn-keys. It was my hope that in its very name, Root & Bone could return me to the solider things in life.“I wish only for the simplest roots,” I told my waitress, “and the merest sliver of bone. I have brought my own marrow knife – a man’s hands. They will suffice.” I received what I asked for. Five stars. I wish to be buried in the heart of a star.

Ever ahead of the times, Sierra published an in-depth examination of Muir's actual eating habits 21 years ago: j. parker huber's "John Muir's Menu":

Many hikers and climbers know of John Muir's minimalist approach to preparing for a wilderness adventure: "I rolled up some bread and tea in a pair of blankets with some sugar and a tin cup and set off." (In this he resembled the South African Bushmen, who make ready for a journey of a thousand miles in 90 seconds.) A closer examination of the dietary habits of the Sierra Club's founder suggests a connection between Muir's Spartan fare and the elegiac quality of his prose: the great man was starving to death . . .

Fasting was an intrinsic part of Muir's explorations, so much so that he resented the necessity of eating. "Rather weak and sickish this morning, and all about a piece of bread," he complained in 1869. "Can scarce command attention to my best studies, as if one couldn't take a few days' saunter in the Godful woods without maintaining a base on a wheat-field and grist-mill. Like caged parrots we want a cracker."

On rare occasions, Muir was known to eat relatively heartily (if not quite the hamachi crudo and homemade lobster ravioli at Cherche Midi). 

Another rare recorded instance of the stirring of Muir's gastronomic juices was when dining with the Indians of Admiralty Island. There he ate gull eggs and wild celery ("the petioles were hollow but crisp, and tasted well"), liked the potato-salmon stew, but was most pleased--wouldn't you know it?--by the turnips they served peeled and sliced. "These we ate raw as dessert, reminding me of turnip-field feasts when I was a boy in Scotland."