Everyone knows that with traditional archery and instinctive shooting your brain plays a crucial role, along with your eyes, fingers, arms, and shoulders.

But here’s the thing…your brain will almost always miss.

The brain is remarkably good at getting you close. But it is surprisingly poor at being precise. A weird quirk that most people can’t ever really get away from.

The same thing happens everywhere in life. “Eat healthier” rarely works. It is simply too big a target. Conversely, the goal to “eliminate sweets” can accomplish the same thing with much more consistency and less hardship.

So here is my advice when it comes to archery. Aim small, miss small.

If you simply shoot at a standard paper plate, just the entire plate, from 20 yards, you will most likely miss that plate, or at least your arrows will be more loosely grouped in and around it.

By the way, do you know why you should shoot at a paper plate when learning to bowhunt? Answer in the comments…I’ll join you there.

Your brain simply isn’t wired to perform at partial focus. It is why you forget where you left your keys or your glasses, or perhaps why you drift off while performing menial tasks.

We all experience a percentage of error in almost everything we do. There is no getting away from it for the average person. Shooting at a plate alone, I will completely miss it at 20 yards 2 or 3 times out of 10.

True story.

But here’s a trick when it comes to increasing projectile accuracy while practicing at the range. Try this.

Make a small mark on the centre of that paper plate, on the target butt. Something you can see from 20 steps away. If you are truly focused on that tiny mark while executing your shot, you will hit the plate way more consistently.

When I switch my focus to that small spot, the same margin of error occurs, magnified significantly, but because it is such an intense focus on the centre of that same target, I now hit the paper plate 10 times out of 10!

The same brain that struggles to hit a tiny aim point without pure intention is the one trying to read a river, a beach, a mountain drainage.

if you look at a hillside, you’ll see…a hillside. If you look at one patch of oak, one game trail, one broken shell, one change in current…suddenly the landscape is talking to you.

Keep your focus small in the field. You are a predator in every wonderful sense of the word. This predatory focus will help your hunting, your wildlife encounters, your tracking and ultimately blood-trailing and game recovery.

Let me know if this helped you with your traditional archery. I’m excited to see your results!

John

Kevin and I spend several autumn days wandering Alberta’s grasslands in search of waterfowl and upland birds. We hunt geese, flush sharp-tailed grouse from roadside cover, prepare our first sandhill crane, and end the day around the grill trying to answer the question everyone was asking:

“What does crane taste like?”

Along the way, something else emerges.

We talk about missing easy shots. About learning new skills. About hunting without the pressure to fill a limit. About finding simple ways to get started without thousands of dollars in gear. We discover that curiosity is often a better guide than expectation.

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One conversation in particular has stayed with me over the years. We both realize that we don’t actually need a full game bag to call the trip a success. One bird is enough. Sometimes no birds are enough if the day has taught us something worth bringing home.

I still believe that.

Food Afield has never been about collecting limits or chasing trophies. It’s about learning to see landscapes differently, understanding the lives of the animals we pursue, and bringing wild food into the kitchen with care and curiosity.

Listening back, I realize those ideas were already there. They just hadn’t fully found their voice yet.

If you’ve been with the podcast from the beginning, I hope this episode feels like revisiting an old campfire conversation. And if you’re new to Food Afield, I think you’ll hear the roots of where this journey has gone.

Thanks for coming along.

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Are you new to Food Afield? If you are you should Start Here.

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I covered ground quickly, eyes fixed on the places where I hoped to find clams or crabs, convinced that success belonged to the person willing to search the hardest. If a beach didn’t produce something within a few minutes, I simply kept moving, certain that the next cove might hold the answer.

It wasn’t impatience so much as purpose.

I thought I was there to gather food.

Somewhere over the years, without really noticing, that changed.

Now I often spend the first ten minutes doing almost nothing at all. I stand quietly, watching the tide slide over the sand. I notice where the wrack line has settled after the last high water. I look at the rocks before I look at the beach. I wonder why oysters have claimed one shoreline while another, only a hundred metres away, remains bare. Small things that once seemed like background have become the very reason I came.

The shellfish can wait.

In times past, I would actually get anxious around wild food “success”. Where are the harvestable mussels? The oysters? The Lingcod? I must find them! The only thing that seemed to matter was the outcome—the walk home with my arms heavy from the day's harvest. I was the emperor returning to Rome, convinced that the trophies mattered more than the journey that produced them.

I have changed.

Now I search for relationships instead of shellfish. Oysters cling to rocky shores for a reason. Manila clams seem happiest where broad sand flats lie beside oyster-covered rocks. Butter clams favour different ground than cockles, but I often find them nearby to each other. Gravel gives way to sand, shell fragments gather where currents slow, and each change tells me something about what might be living beneath my feet. None of these things exists in isolation. The shoreline is a web of connections, and the longer I stand still, the more those relationships begin to reveal themselves.

I don't need to read another book. I need to read the landscape.

I’ve also found myself looking for my own place within the landscape. Not as someone passing through, intent on taking something home, but as another living creature trying, if only briefly, to belong there myself. Where can I sit quietly? Where does the wind carry the scent of salt and cedar? What happens if I stop trying to make something happen and simply pay attention?

Whether I return with a bucket of shellfish has become almost secondary. What stays with me now is a deeper understanding of the place itself. Every beach has its own character, its own rhythms, its own quiet logic. Learning to recognize those has become far more satisfying than simply walking home with dinner.

Perhaps that's what the coast, and W. Grebe, has been trying to teach me all along. Wild food was never just something to gather. It was an invitation to slow down, to ask better questions, enjoy the journey, and to learn the language of a place that had been speaking long before I arrived.

That sounds almost ridiculous when I see it written on the page, rather like admitting that a fisherman doesn’t spend much time looking for fish. Yet somewhere along the way my attention drifted away from antlers and ears and movement, settling instead on the country itself. These days, if you were to peer over my shoulder during the weeks before hunting season, you wouldn’t find me studying photographs of trophy bucks. You’d find me staring at topographic maps and satellite imagery with the same quiet concentration that a chess player gives a difficult position.

I’ve learned that the landscape almost always gives away the answer long before an animal ever does.

Aerial photographs have become one of my favourite forms of reading. I can lose an evening tracing creek bottoms, studying marshes, following the soft folds of ridges across a valley and wondering why one patch of timber feels alive while another seems strangely empty. To someone else it probably looks like little more than a green and brown jigsaw puzzle. To me it has become a story whose plot reveals itself slowly, one contour line at a time.

I begin with security because every wild creature wakes each morning with the same objective: survive until tomorrow. A mature doe doesn’t choose a bedding area because it offers a pleasant view. She chooses it because the landscape itself becomes an ally. Thick wetlands, steep draws, tangled willow bottoms and patches of timber bordered by open country all reduce the number of directions from which danger can approach. If I can identify those places on a map, I have taken the first step toward understanding where she lives.

Only then do I begin looking for food. Agricultural fields, grassy meadows, willow flats, fresh clearcuts—whatever the season happens to provide. The groceries are usually the easy part. The interesting question is how an animal travels between the pantry and the bedroom without advertising its intentions to every predator in the valley.

That is where the landscape begins to whisper.

A narrow timber finger reaching toward a field. A shallow saddle joining two ridges. A brushy creek bottom winding through open country. They are the sort of details most people glance over without a second thought, yet they remind me of hallways in an old house. Animals seldom move at random. Given enough years, they discover the routes that require the least effort while exposing them to the least danger, and they use those routes with remarkable consistency. I don’t need to know where a deer is standing this afternoon. I need only understand where it makes sense for one to walk.

By the time I shoulder a pack and leave the truck, I’ve already built a working theory of the country. The hunt, at least in my mind, has been underway for days. I know where I believe the does will bed. I know where I expect them to feed. I know the corridors that ought to connect those places, and I know how the prevailing wind will influence where I can sit without announcing my arrival like an uninvited dinner guest.

People often ask whether I’m hunting a particular buck.

The honest answer is no.

I’m hunting does.

That statement usually earns a puzzled look until I explain myself. Does are the constant. They are the foundation upon which everything else is built. Find the places where they feel secure and feed comfortably, and sooner or later the bucks will have compelling reasons to visit. The same is true of elk. Magnificent bulls may dominate magazine covers, but cows explain the landscape.

One habit has become almost ritual. I never begin by walking directly into the place I believe is best. Instead, I start on the edges, collecting information the way a naturalist fills a notebook. Fresh tracks. A newly used trail. Droppings that weren’t there yesterday. Beds tucked into the grass precisely where I imagined they might be. Every observation either strengthens my theory or quietly dismantles it, and I adjust accordingly. After a day or two I work farther inward, allowing the country to correct my assumptions before I commit myself. The more I intrude with my scent and sign, the more likely it is that the animals will adjust their behaviour.

That process has become one of my greatest pleasures afield. Having a huge buck walk down the trail to my stand, exactly where I predicted it would, provides a satisfaction that is difficult to describe. It isn’t triumph so much as confirmation, rather like solving the final clue in a crossword after an hour of patient thought. The animal is certainly part of the reward, but so is the realization that, for a brief moment, I managed to read the landscape correctly.

I’ve come to suspect that this way of thinking extends well beyond hunting. We are encouraged to chase outcomes in almost every corner of modern life, yet the natural world has taught me that outcomes are poor things to pursue directly. Conditions matter more. Understand the conditions, and the outcome becomes increasingly probable. Ignore them, and success feels indistinguishable from luck.

Perhaps that’s why I find myself slowing down a little more with each passing year. I’m less interested in covering another mile than I am in understanding the mile beneath my boots. The landscape has become less like a backdrop and more like a conversation. It speaks in contours, prevailing winds, browse lines and forgotten game trails, and if I’m patient enough to listen, it usually tells me exactly where to look.

The deer, I’ve discovered, are almost beside the point.

The real hunt has always been for understanding.

“If you’re anticipating the release, repetition strengthens target panic.”

Most of us are taught that improvement comes from repetition.

More arrows. More casts. More shots.

And often that’s true. Repetition is how we build familiarity. It’s how awkward movements become natural.

But repetition has a flaw.

It doesn’t distinguish between good habits and bad ones.

If your grip is inconsistent, repetition reinforces inconsistency. If you’re anticipating the release, repetition strengthens target panic. If your mind drifts into autopilot, you’re simply getting better at not paying attention.

I’ve found there are seasons when the opposite approach produces better results.

Shoot one arrow.

Then walk down and retrieve it.

Every shot stands on its own.

There is no immediate second chance. No rapid-fire adjustment. No opportunity to bury a poor shot beneath the next ten arrows. Every release carries a little more weight because it has to.

That changes how you approach the bow.

You become aware of your stance before you draw. You settle into your anchor instead of rushing toward it. You notice the pressure in your grip, the rhythm of your breathing, the quality of your focus. Small details that disappear during volume shooting suddenly become impossible to ignore.

The entire process slows down.

By the time you’ve walked to the target and back, you’ve had enough time to replay the shot honestly. What did it feel like? Did you execute the process you intended, or did you simply launch another arrow?

This isn’t how I’d recommend learning to shoot from the beginning. A new archer still needs enough repetition to build the movement patterns and muscle memory that eventually become instinctive.

But once your basic form lives in your muscles, there is tremendous value in reducing the number of arrows.

Not because fewer arrows are inherently better.

Because each arrow receives your complete attention.

One of my favorite practice sessions is deciding before I begin that I’ll shoot only one arrow that day. Just one.

It sounds almost absurd until you’re standing 20 yards away from the target. Suddenly that single arrow feels much closer to the one you’ll eventually release from a treestand or while kneeling beside a game trail. You don’t get warm-up shots in the field. You don’t get a quick correction after the first release.

You get one opportunity.

Practicing this way changes your relationship with every shot.

Sometimes the fastest path to improvement isn’t increasing the number of repetitions.

It’s increasing the quality of each one.

And that lesson extends far beyond archery.

Many of the things worth mastering don’t require us to do more. They require us to pay closer attention.

After 5 decades of shooting a bow and arrow, I want to share some of the tips and tricks that I’ve used to become successful in the field.

if you find value here, please share and subscribe.

Another good source of information is, of course, the Food Afield Podcast. I hope you’ll follow along there too.

John

The path to the life I want has never been paved and gentle.

It has been rutted and rotten, winding and steep.

Whenever it begins to feel easy, around the next bend, I come to a peaty quagmire of mud and blood.

The thing is, though, I am filled with gratitude for this.

“Here’s to the peaty quagmires of mud and blood that leave us wondering if we’ve taken a wrong turn.“

I became aware, many years ago, that the more difficult the journey I face, the greater the reward of the destination.

Every single time.

There is a peculiar promise that we make to ourselves when we’re young. We convince ourselves that life is difficult because we’re inexperienced. We tell ourselves that if we work hard enough, endure enough hardship, and make enough wise decisions, one day the road will level out. The difficult years will be behind us. The storms will become less frequent. We will finally arrive.

For much of my life, I believed that.

When I looked at people a generation older than me, I imagined they had somehow earned an easier existence. They had already fought the battles that lay ahead of me. Surely there came a point where the climbing stopped and a man was allowed to walk on level ground for a while.

It has taken me nearly sixty years to realize that no such place exists.

Life has a habit of waiting until you’re comfortable before revealing another bend in the trail. Beyond it there is usually another climb, another uncertainty, another season that demands more of you than the one before. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the challenge arrives through work, relationships, health, or simple circumstance. The landscape changes, but the journey never really becomes easier.

For a long time I mistook those difficult stretches for interruptions. I thought they were standing between me and the life I wanted to live. If only I could get through this problem, I would finally arrive at the chapter where life could simply be enjoyed.

Looking back now, I can see that I misunderstood almost everything.

The difficult stretches were never standing in the way.

They were the way.

When I think back over my own life, I don’t remember the comfortable years with much clarity. They blur together in a way that surprises me. It is the demanding seasons that remain vivid. Long days guiding in the North. Building a business with more optimism than experience. Watching that chapter close. Learning that health is never guaranteed. Beginning again when I thought I had already earned the right not to.

Most recently, it has been this strange and wonderful decision to step aboard an old wooden sailboat and build a quieter life on a small island at the edge of the Pacific. On paper, it makes very little sense. It is slower, less convenient, and certainly less predictable than the life I left behind.

And yet I cannot remember a time when I have felt more alive.

That realization has forced me to ask an uncomfortable question.

If the most meaningful chapters of my life have always demanded sacrifice, uncertainty, and perseverance, why have I spent so much of my life wishing those things away?

Perhaps comfort isn’t the prize I imagined it to be.

Perhaps the satisfaction we seek doesn’t come from avoiding hardship at all. Perhaps it comes from discovering that we are capable of more than we believed. Every worthwhile pursuit I’ve known has required patience before reward. A clean cast into a difficult current. A long stalk with a bow. Learning the tides well enough to gather a meal from the shoreline. Restoring an old boat. Building a marriage. None of these things can be hurried, and none of them are made richer by becoming easier.

They are valuable precisely because they ask something of us.

That is not to romanticize suffering. There are seasons I would never wish to repeat, and losses I would gladly have avoided. But I can no longer say that I wish for an easier road. An easier road would almost certainly have led somewhere else.

It would not have led me here.

These days, when I feel the ground becoming soft beneath my boots once again, I try to greet it differently. I remind myself that every meaningful chapter of my life has begun with uncertainty. Every worthwhile destination has first required me to cross a patch of difficult country.

I still don’t enjoy the mud.

I still question the climb.

But I’ve stopped questioning whether the journey is worth it.

It always has been.

So here’s to the rutted roads. The rotten bridges. The steep climbs and the uncertain weather. Here’s to the peaty quagmires of mud and blood that leave us wondering if we’ve taken a wrong turn.

And here’s to discovering, somewhere beyond the next bend, that we hadn’t lost the path at all.

We had simply found the one that was always meant to be ours.

Here’s to harrowing journeys.

It doesn’t.

Your first successful shellfish harvest can happen this weekend.

Clamming Beginners Checklist

Before heading to the beach, make sure you have:

✓ A valid tidal waters fishing licence

✓ Current shellfish opening information

✓ A tide below 1 metre (negative tides are even better)

✓ A small clam shovel or sturdy garden trowel

✓ A bucket or mesh bag

✓ Rubber boots

✓ A measuring gauge

✓ Drinking water

That’s all you need.

This guide won’t make you an expert, but it will help you bring home your first meal.

Step 1: Check That Harvesting Is Open

Before you touch a clam or oyster, check current closures.

In British Columbia, shellfish openings and closures change regularly due to:

• Biotoxins

• Sewage contamination

• Water quality concerns

Always verify the beach is open before harvesting. In Canada, there are two sources. I’ve listed them below.

Resources:

• Fisheries and Oceans Canada⁠

• BC Centre for Disease Control Shellfish Safety⁠

Step 2: Start with Manila Clams

If you’re new, Manila clams are often the easiest target. They're one of the best beginner species because they check almost every box.

Why?

• Abundant in many coastal areas

• Easy to identify

• Excellent table fare

• Accessible at low tide

• An introduced species, invasive. Eat them guilt-free

You don’t need a boat. You don’t need scuba gear. You only need access to a suitable beach.

Did you know?

Manila Clams are an invasive species from across the Pacific. They were introduced here in the 1920’s when people introduced the Pacific Oyster…also invasive. Follow the regulations, but this is one of the few wild foods that need to be harvested regularly!

Step 3: Read the Landscape

When I arrive at a beach, I don’t start digging. I start looking. Good shellfish beaches leave clues long before you ever put a shovel into the sand.

Learning to recognize those clues is one of the biggest shifts a new gatherer can make.

Clue #1: Oyster-Covered Rocks Nearby

This is one of the most useful indicators.

Many productive Manila clam beaches are located adjacent to rocky shorelines covered in oysters.

If you find oyster rocks beside a sand or mud flat, pay attention.

Clue #2: Firm Sand or Sandy Mud

The best beaches are often:

• Firm underfoot

• Sandy

• Sandy mud

Pure mud is usually less productive.

Large cobble beaches are harder to work.

Clue #3: Paired Holes

Look closely at the surface.

Manila clams often reveal themselves through two small openings in the sand.

These paired siphon holes are one of the best signs that clams are present.

Step 4: Five Mistakes I Made

When I started gathering shellfish, I made nearly every beginner mistake.

Fortunately, they’re easy to avoid.

• Digging randomly instead of looking for signs.

• Arriving on mediocre tides.

• Ignoring nearby oyster-covered rocks.

• Digging too aggressively and breaking shells.

Every one of these slowed me down far more than a lack of experience.

Step 5: Time the Tide

The lower the tide, the more beach becomes available.

Every 20 or 30 centimetres of additional tide height can expose an enormous amount of new habitat.

For your first trip, look for tides below 1 metre, and if you can plan around a negative tide, even better.

Arrive early. Good shellfish beaches don’t stay exposed for long.

For beginners:

• Aim for a low tide below 1 metre.

• Negative tides are even better.

Arrive early.

Many good harvest areas are exposed for only a short window.

Step 6: Dig Carefully

Tools:

• Small clam shovel

• Garden trowel

• Bucket

Start where you see signs. Dig slowly.

Many clams are found within the top 10–20 cm (4–8 inches). Don’t stab downward aggressively. You will break shells. Rather than stabbing straight down, slide your shovel underneath where you think the clam is and lift gently. You’ll recover more intact shellfish and damage far fewer.

Step 7: Keep Only Legal Shellfish

Know:

• Species limits

• Size limits

• Daily possession limits

Regulations change. Check your current regulations before harvesting.

Step 8: Purge Your Clams

Once home:

1. Rinse off mud.

2. Place clams in clean saltwater.

3. Allow them to purge for several hours.

4. Change water if necessary.

This helps remove sand from the digestive tract.

Purging Clams Podcast Episode

Step 9: Keep It Simple

For your first meal:

• Butter

• Garlic

• White wine (optional)

• Fresh bread

The goal isn’t a gourmet recipe.

The goal is to eat something you found yourself.

What Successful Clamming Looks Like

Success isn’t filling a bucket.

Success is standing on a beach that once looked empty, noticing the clues, digging your first clam, and realizing the food was there all along.

The meal matters. But the bigger reward is learning to see something you couldn’t see before. Once you begin reading landscapes instead of simply walking through them, every beach, river, forest, and hillside becomes more interesting.

That’s the journey Food Afield is really about.

You dug the clams. Now what?

One of the most common questions from new shellfish harvesters is what to do once the clams come home. In this Field Note episode, John Fraser takes a closer look at the process of purging clams, why people do it, what it actually accomplishes, and some of the misconceptions surrounding it.

You’ll learn:

• What purging is and why it matters

• Whether purging removes contaminants or simply reduces grit

• How clams feed and filter water

• Different approaches to purging shellfish at home

• Common mistakes that can kill your harvest before it reaches the table

• Practical handling tips to improve eating quality

This short Field Note episode fills in one of the gaps left from our clam harvesting documentary and provides practical information for anyone interested in gathering shellfish for themselves.

Food Afield is a documentary-style podcast exploring wild food, traditional skills, hunting, fishing, foraging, and the stories that connect people to the landscapes they inhabit.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Host: John Fraser

Follow along on Instagram: @johnfraserswildlife

If you enjoyed the episode, consider following the show and leaving a rating or review. It helps more people discover the world of wild food.

In this first episode of Food Afield, John Fraser heads onto the beaches of the Gulf Islands to gather butter clams and basket cockles while exploring the deeper relationship between tides, food, and coastal life.

This episode explores:

• Butter clams and basket cockles

• Reading productive beaches

• The role of tides in coastal gathering

• Shell middens and Indigenous sea gardens

• Why shellfish became such reliable protein sources

• The atmosphere and sound of gathering food from the edge of the Pacific

Food Afield is a documentary-style podcast exploring wild ingredients — hunted, fished, and foraged in their season.

Hosted by wilderness guide and writer John Fraser.

Your First Shellfish Harvest

Full Episode Transcript

I know, right?

Is it a rock or a clam?

That’s a clam, I think.

Oh, right on.

This is the Food Afield podcast.

A show about wild food ingredients and how to gather them.

And now, from the edge of the Pacific, your host John David Fraser.

Getting to this beach is a wonderful little experience in itself.

I’m parked up on the road and right in front of where I’m parked is this old wooden trestle bridge that goes over a channel and there’s a boat going through the channel right now and it’s just a wonderful dark sort of gentle experience.

Except for right now.

The channel breaks up Pender Island into a couple of distinct pieces of land.

You walk down beside this bridge and it’s just cool and dark and rainforesty and the sounds and smells of the wood from the bridge and the cars going over top of you and the birds singing and the water gently lapping on the shore is really quite magical and then it opens up into this hidden little beach here where we’re going to find clams.

I don’t know if you can hear that or not.

But I’m down here in the mid intertidal zone.

The tide is slowly starting to come back in.

But if you just slow down and stay quiet, you can hear the beach alive beneath the surface.

You can hear what sound like little squirts like, you know, I don’t know how to describe it.

It’s like a water pump that’s running out of water where it’s a combination of air and water that’s being squirted.

There, there was one right there.

It’s a little chirp almost.

And they’re all around me.

I hope you can pick it up, but I doubt that you can.

It’s very soft.

But those are clams.

And then just in front of me here is a tall spurt of water just shot out of the beach.

Right where the beach meets the water.

Clamming is this beautiful way of collecting wild food that if you just slow down and get down to the level on your hands and knees, things are a lot different than they appear.

The harvest here is not above you or around you.

It is beneath you.

And maybe that is the part of why clams matter.

They pull you down into close observation.

They make you slow down.

They remind you that gathering is not always pursuit.

Sometimes it is patience.

Sometimes it is pattern recognition.

Sometimes it is simply an honest look at the ground around you.

Today’s episode is about clams.

What we gathered, where they live, how the shore is structured, the long food history behind them, and what it means to collect them properly and cook them well.

This is where the clams live.

I see Mary digging, Kevin digging, and I see spouts of water coming up all over the place.

Oh, there’s one.

I’m going to mark it.

Walk up to it.

Oh, wow, good for you.

There are probably five or six of them right here that I can see.

I think the game is going to be getting onto easier to dig gravel.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Some tough stuff there.

Did you get one already, Mary?

No.

We both got one, but you broke that one?

I broke it.

I broke that guy.

So we got them, but the shovel was too harsh.

I think the rake is going to be helpful.

Yeah, maybe.

Can they hear us?

I think so, yeah.

So I’m going to shut up.

There’s one.

There’s another one.

This episode centers mainly on two types of clams.

The first is the butter clam, one of the classic clams of this coast.

Thick-shelled, heavy, substantial.

A clam that feels like real food in the hand.

And butter clams can vary enough in size that, at first, smaller and larger ones can almost seem like different things.

The second is the basket cockle, also called Nuttall’s cockle.

A different shell entirely.

Rounded, smaller, ribbed.

Distinctive once you know it.

Oh, right on.

He’s a little open though.

See if he’ll close up again.

He’s still squirting.

Yeah, I think it’s fine.

There is a way to test.

But no, good job, babe.

That’s a different one.

This is different.

We have to, this is one of the problems, not a problem, it’s an interesting solve, is like the species.

Because this is definitely different.

Yeah, the other ones have the fins that radiate out from the back of the shell.

This one is all smooth.

Yeah, so this is definitely a different one.

So we will get back to the boat when we get back and we will look it up.

Yeah, look them all up and see what we’re dealing with for species.

But the limits on these things is crazy.

It’s like 60.

You know?

Oh, there’s another one.

There’s another right here, babe.

There’s like three right in here.

Yeah, I want to say right there.

Is that it?

Yeah, I think so.

This looks like a hole right here.

Yeah, it does.

You got what?

Oh yeah.

This matters because clam is not one generic category.

Different species sit in different parts of the shore.

They bury themselves differently.

They look different and they carry different histories with them.

He’s a little guy.

We’ll leave him.

He’s tiny.

To understand clams, you need a simple map of the beach.

The intertidal zone is the band between land and sea that is covered at high tide and exposed at low tide.

Within that, it helps to think in three sections.

The high intertidal, the mid intertidal, and the low intertidal.

The high intertidal is exposed longest.

The mid intertidal is regularly covered and then exposed.

The low intertidal is exposed only on the lower tides and covered again sooner as the water returns.

Below that is the subtidal, which stays underwater even at low tide.

These distinctions matter because different shellfish favour different parts of that vertical world.

Some tolerate more exposure.

Some want steadier immersion.

Some can be gathered on ordinary tides, while others need a beach opened more fully by the lowest tides.

So you are not only looking for a species, you’re looking for where that species makes sense.

Right there.

Right at the edge of the water.

There’s another one.

There’s another one.

There’s one right there.

Right here.

Right there.

There’s the hole.

You got one, Kev?

Over here.

No, it’s right here.

I’m on it.

Sneaky little devils aren’t they?

Yeah it’s funny yesterday we could get them you know Kevin got a couple with his hands.

Oh, there it is.

Got it.

Woohoo!

Nice.

Here’s a good one, Kev.

Oh, that’s perfect for going down the gullet.

That’s a guzzle one.

Yeah.

So the shovel did work.

There is a tactile pleasure to clamming that is different from most food gathering.

You are not plucking fruit or cutting greens.

You are simply working by feel as much as sight.

You notice the texture of the beach.

You can see the shell fragments.

You can see whether the sediment is coarse or fine, whether it holds firm or gives way.

Whether a patch of ground seems dead or promising.

Sometimes the signs are obvious.

The sound of gurgling beneath your feet or the sight of a spout of water shooting three feet into the air from the beach.

Sometimes they are much more subtle.

A slight depression, a fragment of shell, a softness underfoot, a place that simply feels right after you have seen enough of them.

And then there is the reveal, that moment when the clam comes free from the beach and turns from possibility into certainty.

That is part of why shellfish gathering still feels old.

It carries that simple human satisfaction of finding hidden food in a place many people would walk across without ever noticing.

Yeah, and then this one looks like this little one that we found.

Looks different again.

Mary got this one.

Yeah, nice.

Butter clam?

Yeah, these are different.

They’re all different, eh?

Isn’t that interesting?

That’s super cool.

Look at that.

Nice.

Right on.

Winning so far.

Yep.

It’s funny, though, how you can see the squirt out of the ground.

I got that guy from finding the hole.

Oh, yeah.

I just saw the hole and went for it.

Yeah.

And in digging for him, found a little one, too.

Yeah, yeah.

I think if you were just an excavator digger Dan for an hour you’d do alright.

Here, take this with me.

This seems so civilized.

That big guy was like way deeper than you’d think.

Nice bottle of chilled white wine while we’re on the clam beach.

As one should.

Cheers.

I want to look at where the bucket is.

One, two, three, four.

One, two, three, four.

Yeah, and like right here?

Yeah, I was going to say that one too, but I didn’t want to.

So...

I’m really trying to be cautious to not go straight after them, because then my shovel is smashing them.

Gotta be a little more careful.

How far down are you finding them?

The big one was deeper than this.

Okay, I found something.

Here it is.

Yeah, you got him, babe.

Oh, but he’s open.

No, that’s the back.

Might be meat, yeah.

That’s the butt side.

Back of his hinge, yeah.

Yeah.

Right on.

That’s a big one.

There’s two of them.

Okay, so proof of concept that you just look for the hole, right?

Yeah.

And then go easy, I think is another takeaway for me.

Oh, yeah.

I just cracked it.

Easy to break them.

I don’t think you did.

Yeah, I did.

I broke mine just a bit, but he’s still fine.

He’s still alive.

He’s just got an alley.

What a beast!

Yeah, that’s a huge one.

Yeah.

Yeah, this is a big one.

So I need the shovel for that.

Yeah, if you just put it by the bucket.

I think I got a 75-year-old one.

Yeah.

Yeah, you got a tonk.

Tonk McGee.

You’re going to be there for a while.

Flip ball.

You want to go for it?

Yeah.

See it through?

Yeah.

Well, you’re moving them.

There you go.

You got him.

He’s slightly open, but let’s go rinse him.

Yeah, we’ll put him in the bucket.

Oh my god.

Isn’t that crazy?

This thing is a fatty.

Clams are not just a harvest.

They are part of a very long coastal food history.

For thousands of years, shellfish were an important and dependable food for Indigenous peoples on this coast.

Not novelty food, not secondary food, real food, managed food, understood food.

One of the strongest reminders of that history is the presence of shell middens, deposits of shell and other man-made material left by generations of harvesting and eating.

And then there are the clam gardens or sea gardens, Indigenous mariculture systems built and maintained to improve shellfish habitat and productivity.

These were not random beaches, they were tended places, food infrastructure on the coast.

This matters because it corrects a modern habit of imagining coastal abundance as being untouched.

In many places it was stewarded, shaped, known intimately.

So when we gather clams now, even casually we are stepping into a food story far older than recreational harvest.

Well I see a wooden trestle bridge that joins the island and I see a rock face with all the green moss and algae and a rocky beach in dappled light.

You know what I noticed about this beach?

Yeah.

What do you notice about this beach though?

Like if you were looking for beaches to dig clams again, what would you be looking for?

Well, clam shells.

A beach of shell.

Just tens of thousands of years of broken shell washed up high onto the shore.

There it is.

I found mine.

Did I break it?

It’s interesting, like, you gotta use your eyeballs here.

Yeah, because this shovel does crack them, right?

So they are down, I would say, two deep.

Six inches or so, at least.

Seven inches.

Oh yeah.

Yeah, I would agree.

Because that’s to the top of him, and then he’s another four or five inches up and down.

Yeah.

So you’re getting ready to have to get down there.

I definitely cracked it.

Shoot.

Found one here?

Yeah.

Right there.

It’s another big one.

Oh, here we go.

He just popped out.

That was satisfying, as it is every time.

Restore the habitat, fill back in all the holes.

The shellfish story on this coast is not only ancient, parts of it are also surprisingly recent.

In the early 20th century, especially through the 1920s and 30s, aquaculture brought in non-native shellfish through imported oyster seed and associated material.

This is part of how species such as Pacific oysters and eventually Manila clams became established in Pacific coastal systems.

But that does not replace the older Indigenous shellfish history.

It adds another layer over it.

Ancient stewardship, ancient harvest traditions, and then a more modern story of commerce, aquaculture, species movement, and changing shoreline ecology.

It is a huge reminder that coastal food landscapes are not static.

They are historical.

They change.

Once the clams are gathered, the work is not over.

Good shellfish handling starts immediately.

Keep them cool.

Keep them out of direct sun.

Do not leave them baking in a bucket on the beach or in the back of a vehicle.

These are living animals and quality begins to decline when they are stressed or mishandled.

Live clams should be closed or they should close when tapped if they are slightly open.

A clam that remains gaping and unresponsive is suspect and should not be trusted.

Storage matters too.

They are not meant to be sealed in fresh water or suffocated in a plastic bag.

They need cool, damp, breathable conditions.

Shellfish ask for attention, then they reward it.

We’ve got 52 more to go, John.

I think per person.

I think we got enough to feed us for sure.

But that only took 14 minutes.

There’s a lot of meat in these.

My guess is the size of them, the girth.

Oh my god, this is getting easy now.

It’s find the hole, dig down gently until you see it and then just excavate around it.

Yeah.

I found one.

It’s almost as big as yours.

Oh look.

So Mary’s holding one that’s, you know, half a pound and four inches across and Kevin’s got one that’s the size...

So we’ve got a few different species going on.

And you know what’s interesting is like you can see from the old shells that there are even more species that we’re not digging up yet.

Like this one looks like a...

Is it deeply ribbed?

Yeah.

Cockles.

These are the cockles.

Yeah, you bet.

I picked some of those yesterday.

We haven’t seen one yet.

Yeah, haven’t got one yet.

Purging clams is often misunderstood.

Purging is not a magical sanitation step.

It does not make unsafe clams safe.

It does not remove toxins and it does not replace harvesting from approved legal areas.

What purging does is much simpler.

It helps some clams shed grit and sand from inside the shell.

Think of it as a quality step.

A kitchen refinement, not a safety guarantee.

That distinction matters because shellfish safety starts on the beach with legal closures, approved harvest areas, and careful harvest decisions, not later in a bowl on the counter.

Look at this.

One, two, three.

Right there.

Oh yeah.

Interesting.

Makes you wonder about whether you’re exploring each hole enough, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

Once you get into a pocket, go for it.

I mean, this looks rare.

There’s three right next to each other.

You’ve interrupted the clam orgy.

Oh, that was part of the spout.

Ouch.

Alive, alive, alive, John.

All three of them were alive.

Nice.

Alright, we’re going back to my hole.

Alright.

I’m having all the fun, dude.

It’s like, I dig hole, I make food, and dig hole.

It’s so good.

What a great combo.

Hi, this is John Fraser.

I hope you’re enjoying these Food Afield episodes.

The main episodes, the big documentary episodes, these will occur less frequently, perhaps once a month.

In between these longer episodes, more cinematic episodes, will be what I call the Field Notes.

They will fill in the blanks and talk about some of the details of each food ingredient as we go through the seasons.

They’ll be shorter in duration, but they’ll just be filled with some of the more interesting facts that surround that ingredient that we talked about in the main episodes.

So I hope you stay tuned for both of these styles of podcasts.

I’d love to hear from you.

So please do leave a review wherever you’re listening to the show.

And don’t be afraid to get in touch with any suggestions, questions or comments.

Thanks.

Again, there’s some nice oysters on the rocks, embedded themselves in the rocks.

I don’t see, because this little beach is just pure shell, I don’t see any holes.

You know, like where it’s sand, there’s some structure and tension where holes can exist.

This just looks loose and crumbly.

So I don’t see anything obvious.

Yesterday we were seeing them spout here.

So, I don’t know.

I’ll give it a try.

And the first shovel full yields a beautiful little cockle.

Whoa, really?

You got a cockle?

Clams have probably always invited both simplicity and ingenuity in the kitchen.

At the simplest end there is steaming.

Clams opened with heat, a little liquid, maybe aromatics, maybe not.

Straightforward, honest, often the best place to begin.

Then there is chowder, one of the classic clam preparations.

Clams lend themselves to broth, cream, potato, smoke, onion, and all the old comforting structures of a coastal soup.

There are grilled and baked preparations too.

Clams with breadcrumbs, herbs, garlic, butter and heat.

And in other traditions, clams move into pasta, rice dishes and broths where the clam liqueur becomes part of the architecture of the meal.

Historically shellfish could also be roasted or steamed in simpler camp or shore-based contexts where the point was nourishment first, refinement second.

This is part of what makes clams such enduring food.

They can be humble or elegant, beach food, working food, festival food or restaurant food.

Underneath all of it is the same appeal.

Salt, sweetness, texture and the taste of a place.

One of the things I love about clams is that they recalibrate your idea of abundance.

They ask less drama from the gatherer, less myth, less performance.

No casting, no stalking, no heart-pounding pursuit.

Just a tide, a beach, some knowledge and the willingness to work slowly.

That makes clams a good ingredient for a project here like Food Afield.

Because this show is not just about trophies or spectacle.

It’s about wild ingredients and the real ways food still lives on the land and along the shore.

Clams fit this perfectly.

Not glamorous in the usual way, but honest, ancient, practical, and when handled well, excellent food.

Man, I’m digging right where there’s a spout.

And I’ve gone down, and I’ve gone down.

A beach at low tide can look empty until you learn how to read it.

That may be one of the recurring lessons in wild food.

The world feeds us more quietly than we expect.

Not always in the obvious places.

Not always in the dramatic ones.

Sometimes just under the surface.

Waiting for someone patient enough to notice.

These clams, the butter clams, the cockles, the long history behind them, the stewardship, the introductions, the handling, the cooking, all of it adds up to more than a harvest story.

It becomes a way of seeing the coast properly.

And maybe that is the real value of learning an ingredient well.

Not just that you can gather it, but that once you know it, the whole shoreline changes.

Food Afield.

Here’s where I used to go wrong: I thought the hunt ended when the animal hit the ground. All of my preparedness went into the actual hunting process.

It was late October, and the air had that sharpness, that brittle edge. The cold air that carries sound farther than it should. The forest was grey, along with the sky. The leaves that were green, and all around me, at the beginning of the season, were now laying crisp on the ground, like a multitude of Corn Flakes spilled on the kitchen floor.

I was young, carrying an old Bear recurve bow that had already been in existence longer than I had. After weeks of patient sitting, when the arrow found its mark and the deer went down, there was no clean transition into confidence or competence. What I felt instead was a kind of disbelief—followed closely by a sense that I had stepped into something I wasn’t fully prepared for.

It was a big-bodied whitetail doe, my first animal, and I remember standing there for a moment longer than I should have, unsure of what should come next. Then instinct took over in a different direction entirely. I ran.

My grandmother’s house was not far from where I was hunting, and I remember bursting through the door, still carrying the energy of it all. When I told her what had happened, she looked at me and said, “No you did not.” Not dismissive—just genuine disbelief. It took a moment for it to settle in for both of us that something real had just happened.

And then, just as quickly, another realization followed.

Now what?

I knew how to find deer. I knew how to move quietly, how to watch the wind, how to take a shot that mattered. But none of that knowledge extended into what came after. Standing over that animal again, with the initial shock wearing off, I understood that I was at the beginning of something I hadn’t learned yet.

At the time, I treated that next phase as something to get through. Field dress it, get it hung, figure out the rest as best I could. It was functional, but it wasn’t skilled, and it certainly wasn’t deliberate.

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That changed over time—and more decisively when I took the Retail Meat Cutting course at Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.

The setting couldn’t have been more different from the bush, or my grandparents’ rustic garage. Bright lights, stainless steel, measured cuts instead of improvised ones. But the principles translated directly. You learn to see an animal not as a single outcome, but as a series of distinct parts, each with structure, purpose, and potential. You learn where to cut, but more importantly, where not to. You begin to understand that a good portion of the value in wild meat isn’t just in taking the animal—it’s in what you preserve afterward.

When that understanding settles in, the entire process shifts.

The moment after the shot no longer feels like an ending. It feels like the start of a different kind of work—one that demands patience, attention, and a willingness to slow down.

The first real change is learning to look before you cut. Muscle groups reveal themselves if you give them the time. Natural seams exist for a reason, and a knife that follows those seams does far less damage than one that forces its way through. Done properly, the work becomes quieter, more controlled. You’re no longer breaking an animal down; you’re taking it apart with intention.

As you move through the hindquarter, the structure becomes clearer. Individual muscles separate cleanly when you let them, and each one carries its own character—different grain, different use, different outcome on the plate. It becomes difficult, at that point, to treat the entire animal as generic “meat.” You start to see where the quality lives, and how easily it can be lost.

That awareness carries into the slower parts of the process as well. Trimming connective tissue, removing silver skin, preparing cuts for the freezer—none of it is difficult, but all of it requires attention. Shortcuts show up later, usually at the worst possible time. Toughness, off flavours, wasted portions. The work always comes back to the level of care you put into it.

Even something as simple as wrapping becomes part of that standard. Air, moisture, time—these are the quiet forces that either preserve your effort or undo it. A clean, well-wrapped cut of meat months later is not an accident. It is the result of doing a series of small things properly, when it would have been easier not to.

What I didn’t expect, when I first began to take this part of the process seriously, was how much it would extend the sense of success.

The shot is a single moment. Brief, intense, and then gone.

But the work that follows—cutting, wrapping, cooking, sharing—stretches that moment out over time. It returns to you in small, tangible ways. A meal pulled from the freezer in the middle of winter. A cut that cooks the way it should because you handled it properly months before. A quiet recognition that you didn’t just take an animal—you followed through on the responsibility that came with it.

I don’t think everyone needs formal training, and I don’t think the process needs to be overcomplicated. But I do think that anyone who chooses to hunt owes it to themselves, to learn this part of the work. It is an addition to the experience of obtaining wild protein.

Because the truth is, the kill is only the beginning. The follow-through, that is where a whole other skill lives, and over time, it becomes clear that the skills acquired are where the real reward has been all along!

If you enjoy this content, or want to learn more, consider following the Food Afield Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. The show is also hosted here. All of the photos in this article that are of me were taken by my great friend, Kevin Kossowan.

Food Afield explores wild ingredients-hunted, fished, foraged, and cooked in their season and place. Subscribe for field notes, podcast episodes, and practical stories about turning wild food ingredients into meals.

It’s always something small.

A stick breaking. A careless movement. A step taken too quickly. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that would matter almost anywhere else. he kind of thing modern life allows us to ignore without consequence.

Out here, it ends the opportunity to feed ourselves.

There is no warning and no opportunity to recover. One small mistake and the animal is gone. The fish won't take. The beach comes up empty. It happens quickly, and it’s final. That’s the difference with wild food. It doesn’t tolerate distraction.

Small Errors, Immediate Consequences

Most of life is spent buffering. You can be rushed, half-present, thinking about something else, and still get what you need. Every thing we need is expected, easy and automatic. Systems are designed to absorb error. Timing is flexible, outcomes are predictable, and attention is optional.

Wild food removes that buffer entirely.

Miss the tide and there are no clams. Drag the fly across the eddy with a bad drift…the fish simply ignores what you’re offering. Take one careless step and the Elk vanishes into the distance without hesitation.

It is harsh and unforgiving.

There’s no adjustment period and no opportunity to correct the course. The environment is exact in a way most people aren’t used to. Small mistakes don’t accumulate out here. They end things. Quickly.

Stalking Makes It Obvious

Nowhere is this more apparent than in a stalk, where everything depends on your ability to manage small details under pressure.

I once watched a massive white-tailed buck—perhaps the biggest I had ever encountered—walk steadily toward me across roughly 800 yards of open pasture. It was late November, around minus 20 Celsius, and the cold made everything sharper. Sound carried differently. Even the smallest movement had significance to it.

The only tree available to me was a thin, wind-blown poplar. I was maybe eight feet off the ground. Just high enough to be exposed if I made even a small mistake.

The buck closed the distance without hesitation. When it reached me, it came right to the base of the tree and started smelling my steps! Its head was up, stretching, testing the air. I could have reached down with an arrow and touched it. That’s how close it was.

At that distance, there’s no room for error. Every movement has to be controlled before it happens. Not during—before.

The deer shifted slightly, further away towards the trail it should’ve been on, and I still didn’t have a shooting lane. To take the shot, I had to reposition in the tree, slowly and silently, with the animal only yards away. I was shooting a 1957 Bear recurve, which means no mechanical advantage—just draw, anchor, release. Any unnecessary motion, any sound, and the opportunity was gone.

That moment wasn’t about skill in the abstract. It was about whether I could maintain presence across everything at once—my body, the bow, the angle, the animal’s awareness, the noise I might make without realizing it.

I made the shot, and it was clean. But the outcome wasn’t decided at the release. It was decided in how I managed every small detail leading up to it.

The Pattern of Presence Holds Everywhere

That same structure shows up across everything tied to wild food.

On the coast, success is tied to a narrow window where tide, timing, and location align. Outside of that window, there is simply nothing to find. On the river, it’s precision—drift, current, angle, and what the fish are feeding on…the presentation, all of this, it all has to come together. If they don’t, there is no take.

Different environments, same underlying rule: the food is there, but only if you meet the conditions with your attention to detail.

Wild food doesn’t reward effort on its own. It rewards your detailed presence.

Attention Is the Requirement

This is where most people misread the situation. They assume the solution is to work harder or spend more time. But time and effort without attention don’t produce results consistently.

What matters is whether you are actually tracking what’s happening in front of you in real time: what the wind is doing as it moves across terrain, what the ground looks like two steps ahead, how light and shadow affect your visibility, how the animal or the water is behaving in that exact moment. How prepared your equipment is.

Attention isn’t optional here. It’s the condition that a successful food outcome depends on.

Forward, Not Reactive

Over time, out in the field, making the mistakes, the shift is subtle. You eventually stop reacting and start anticipating. A sort of sixth sense begins to emerge within you.

The mistake isn’t the stick breaking—it’s failing to see it before you stepped. The wind doesn’t suddenly betray you; you just weren’t tracking it closely enough. The fish doesn’t refuse without reason; your drift was off before it ever entered the strike zone.

What feels sudden is usually just something you failed to notice early enough.

You were behind it.

What To Pay Attention To

This doesn’t require tracking everything at once, but it does require tracking the right things consistently.

Look ahead to where your next steps will land, not just generally but specifically. Check the wind more often than feels necessary, especially as terrain changes. Move based on conditions rather than impulse. Slow down earlier than you think you need to. And assume that every opportunity is fragile, because it is.

You don’t need more effort. You need fewer missed details.

Why It Matters

This is why wild food feels different.

It isn’t just the result—it’s the process required to get there. You have to be present in a way that most modern systems don’t demand. You have to notice what most people overlook. You have to align yourself with conditions instead of forcing an outcome.

There’s no shortcut to that.

And because of it, when it works, the result carries weight. This is why I love the pursuit of wild food!

The Throughline

Across everything—shellfish, fish, birds, big game—the same principle applies.

Small details decide the outcome, and those details only show up if you’re paying attention.

That’s the exchange.

You bring your full, undivided attention, and the environment gives you a chance. If you don’t, it remains closed.

Continue Reading

If this essay changed the way you think about attention in the field, these articles take the idea further.

Read the Landscape (Coming Soon)
Learn how to recognize the clues the landscape is offering before they become opportunities.

I Hunt Landscapes
Why the best hunters don’t simply hunt animals—they learn to hunt places.

Learning the Grasslands
What cranes, grouse, and geese taught me about seeing a landscape differently. A podcast epsisode.

If this is your first visit, welcome.

Food Afield is for people who want to become more capable outdoors.

Whether you’re hoping to harvest your first oyster, understand where trout feed, learn to process a deer, or simply see the landscape differently, you’ll find practical field knowledge grounded in real experience—not theory.

Over time, you’ll learn:

• How to find and harvest wild food safely and ethically.

• How to read landscapes instead of relying on luck.

• How tides, weather, habitat, and season influence success.

• How to process and cook what you bring home.

• The natural history behind the animals, plants, and places that shape every story.

The longer I’ve spent outdoors, the less interested I’ve become in simply finding food.

What fascinates me now is learning why food is found where it is.

A clam beach isn't just a clam beach. A trout isn't simply holding in a pool. A current seam isn't just moving water. A hillside isn't just a place to hunt. Every landscape is communicating something. Learning to recognize those patterns has made me a better hunter, fly fisher, gatherer, and cook—and that's the journey Food Afield explores.

I’m John David Fraser, a wilderness guide, writer, and lifelong student of wild food.

Every Podcast Episode, Field Guide, and Journal Entry is drawn from time spent on the coast, in the mountains, on the prairie, or around the table. Rather than focusing only on success, I try to share the observations, mistakes, and small discoveries that gradually build lasting field skills.

If you’re wondering where to begin, here are a few good places.

New to Shellfish?

• Your First Shellfish Harvest – A practical introduction to gathering your own wild food.

• Purging Clams – How to prepare clams properly after harvesting. Podcast Episode

• Oysters: How to Find, Harvest, and Eat Them on the Pacific Coast

• Clams of the Pacific Coast

Interested in Hunting & Fishing?

• One Arrow – Why slowing your practice often makes you a better archer.

• Learning the Grasslands – A beginner’s journey through Alberta’s bird country.

• I Hunt Landscapes – Why the landscape often matters more than the animals themselves.

• The Trout Isn't the Story Here – Learn why understanding water and habitat matters far more than simply finding fish.

This Isn’t Really About Wild Food

People sometimes assume Food Afield is about hunting, fishing, or foraging.

It isn’t.

Those are simply the ways I’ve chosen to explore something much older.

For most of human history, the outdoors wasn’t a destination. It wasn’t somewhere we escaped to on weekends or photographed on vacations. It was home. We belonged to it, depended on it, and understood it in ways that are becoming increasingly rare.

I don’t believe we’ve lost that relationship entirely. I think we’ve simply forgotten it.

Every time you learn to recognize a productive clam beach, read a trout stream, notice the movement of deer through a hillside, or cook a meal you’ve gathered yourself, you’re rebuilding a connection that has always been part of being human.

My hope isn’t that everyone becomes a hunter or a forager.

My hope is that more people discover just how capable they really are—and how much the landscape has been trying to teach them all along.

Looking for the Bigger Picture?

• The Shellfish Can Wait

• Harrowing Journeys

• I Didn’t Understand This Before My First Deer

These pieces explore why wild food has become about much more than bringing something home.

Whether you’re starting from scratch or refining skills you’ve spent years developing, I hope Food Afield helps you become a little more observant, a little more capable, and a little more connected to the places that feed us.

Welcome aboard.

— John

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We’ve spent decades engineering a system built on excess—more production, more convenience, more consumption. Food stopped being something we gathered, prepared, and respected. It became something we bought, stored, wasted, and replaced without much thought.

“What’s emerging now is a quiet divide: people who are learning to step back into food—and people who remain dependent on a strained system.”

Now the consequences are visible.

Prices rise, quality drops, and the middle class—once buffered—is exposed. Not just to higher costs, but to a deeper dependency. When you can’t grow it, can’t source it locally, and don’t know how to prepare it from scratch, you’re no longer participating in a food system—you’re subject to it.

And the cost of food hasn’t just “gone up.” It’s aligned itself with everything else that’s been inflated beyond reason. Groceries now sit in the same psychological category as lifestyle purchases—something you budget stress around, not something you simply secure. To complicate things we’ve been conditioned to eat “safely”.

“You can eat that? Is it safe?!” Is one of the more common questions I get. Super weird considering how many recalls and food borne illnesses we see in the mainstream food industry.

What’s emerging now is a quiet divide: people who are learning to step back into food—through fishing, hunting, foraging, small-scale growing—and people who remain fully dependent on an increasingly strained system.

This isn’t about romanticizing the past. Ok, maybe it is a little, but it’s mostly about capability.

Knowing where your food comes from. Knowing when it’s available. Knowing how to turn it into something real.

That knowledge used to be normal. Now it’s rare.

And anything that becomes rare tends to become valuable.

Most people think oysters are something you order.

They’re not. They’re one of the most accessible wild foods on this coast—if you understand where to look, when to go, and how to do it properly.

This episode was recorded on Pender Island, British Columbia. A short walk down a public beach, the tide dropping, and within minutes we’re standing on productive ground. No boat. No complicated gear. Just some rubber boats and a little awareness.

Where oysters actually live

If you walk a sandy beach, you’ll miss them.

Oysters hold on structure. You’re looking for:

• jagged rock

• broken shell

• white clusters along the shoreline

When you start seeing shell fragments underfoot, you’re close. When the rock turns sharp and irregular, you’re in it.

That’s the difference between wandering and gathering.

Timing matters

Oysters aren’t hard to find—but they’re not always accessible.

The window is the tide.

• Aim for a low tide between 0 and 1.5 feet

• Plan your approach so you arrive as the tide is dropping

• Give yourself enough time to work before it turns

You don’t need perfect conditions. You need a workable window.

Before you take anything

This part matters.

Shellfish can carry risk, and it’s your responsibility to check.

Before harvesting:

• Confirm the area is open (DFO shellfish closures)

• Check for PSP (paralytic shellfish poisoning) warnings

• Make sure you have a valid fishing license

This is non-negotiable. Clean water doesn’t always mean safe shellfish.

Taking what you need

Once you’re on a good beach, it becomes easy to overdo it.

Don’t.

Take:

• what you will eat

• what you can process properly

Leave the rest. There’s no shortage of oysters on this coast, but there is a difference between harvesting and stripping a shoreline.

Tools

You don’t need much.

• A basic prying tool (oyster knife or even a sailing spike)

• Gloves or a towel for grip

• A bag or container

That’s it.

From beach to half shell

There’s a moment that happens when you open one right there. Cold water. Clean shell. The smell of the ocean still in it. You don’t need to complicate it.

Eat them raw on the half shell, or add something simple:

• vinegar

• finely chopped onion

• cracked pepper

A basic mignonette does everything it needs to.

From there, you can push it further:

• mezcal and chili-lime salt

• a bit of sea lettuce

• whatever you’ve got on hand

But the oyster is already complete.

What this is really about

This isn’t about oysters.

It’s about realizing how close food actually is.

You don’t need:

• distance

• expensive gear

• a perfect plan

You need:

• awareness of place

• understanding of timing

• a willingness to go look

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

If this episode was useful, pass it along to someone who should be out there with you.

A short introduction—what the show is, and what’s coming next.

Most people don’t realize how close they are to real food.
Not in theory. Not in books. Right where they already are.

This show is built around that idea.

Each episode follows a single ingredient—or a single meal—from start to finish.
Finding it. Understanding it. Cooking it.

Sometimes that’s shellfish on a tide line.
Sometimes it’s trout from a cold mountain stream, or birds and big game from the fall colours of the prairie

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Getting to the places where these ingredients exist might come in the form of a sailboat, an adventure motorcycle, or a long hike into the backcountry.

What matters is knowing what’s available, when it’s ready, and how to bring it home.

The first episodes start on the Pacific coast—working with shellfish and shoreline food. From there, the story moves across the continent and beyond.

If that’s something you want to understand better, you can follow along here.

By the time most people were pouring coffee, the water had already turned and was on its way back in—never really leaving in the first place. On paper, it looked like a low tide. In reality, it barely exposed anything.

That’s the thing about tides.

They don’t always give you much to work with.

Today’s Read

March 28 on Pender Island isn’t a “clam tide.”

• Morning low: sitting around 3.3 metres

• Afternoon: brief and rising again

• Evening: the only real drop, down to roughly 1.4 metres

Nothing dramatic. No wide-open flats. No easy picking.

If you showed up expecting a bucket-filling dig on soft sand, you’d walk away thinking there’s no food here.

You’d be wrong.

What “sitting at 3.3 metres” actually means:

When a tide chart shows a low tide of 3.3 m, it’s not saying the water is “low” in any meaningful sense.

It’s saying:

The ocean is still sitting 3.3 metres above chart datum—a fixed baseline used for coastal measurements.

In practical terms:

• 0.5 m → The ocean has pulled far back (huge exposure)

• 1.5 m → Good working tide

• 3.3 m → The water never really left

So this morning, the shoreline didn’t quite open up.

It just slightly gave up some territory.

Most of what you’d want—sand flats, deeper clam beds—remained underwater.

The Only Question That Matters

A tide chart isn’t about time. It’s about vertical drop.

Two “low tides” can look identical on paper and be completely different in the field:

• Low tide at 0.8 m → You can walk, dig, explore

• Low tide at 3.3 m → You’re confined to the margins

Same label. Different world.

So the real question isn’t:

“When is low tide?”

It’s:

“How much of the beach is actually exposed?”

A Simple Read for This Coast

If you spend any time on the Gulf Islands, you start to feel this instinctively. But until then, here’s the working model:

• 0.0 – 1.0 m → Prime digging tide

• 1.0 – 2.0 m → Good, but selective

• 2.0 – 3.0 m → Marginal

• 3.0 m+ → Edge work only-oysters and mussels

Today sat firmly in that last category for most of the day.

What the Tide Actually Tells You

A small tide like this is a filter.

On big swings, the coast opens up.

On small ones, it narrows your options.

You don’t get access to everything.

You get access to what can live higher on the beach.

That means adjusting your approach:

• Rock instead of sand

• Edges instead of flats

• Structure instead of open ground

Oysters don’t wait for perfect tides. They sit where they can survive exposure. Mussels do the same. Even butter clams—if you know where to look—can be found higher than most people expect.

But you have to be deliberate.

The Mistake Most People Make

They wait.

They wait for the perfect tide.

The perfect drop.

The day when the ocean pulls back far enough to make everything obvious.

That day comes—but not often.

And while they’re waiting, they miss the workable tides. The quiet ones. The ones that don’t look like much, but still hold food if you know how to move.

A small tide forces you to learn the shoreline.

Where the shell hash collects.

Where the current turns.

Where the rock holds heat and life.

It’s slower. Less forgiving. But teaches much.

Where to Look on a Day Like This

Forget the idea of wide, empty flats.

Start tighter.

Look for:

• Broken shell underfoot—old beds, not random debris

• Slight depressions near the upper edge of the intertidal

• Rock shelves with pockets and uneven faces

• Areas where water still moves, even when the tide slows

You’re not harvesting a field.

You’re picking your way through it.

Timing Matters More Than Depth

The best opportunity today isn’t about how low it goes—it’s about when it reaches its lowest point.

That evening tide, dropping toward 1.4 metres, is your window…with a headlamp.

Not because it’s extreme, but because it’s the most exposure you’ll get all day—and it comes with fading light, cooler air, and less pressure.

You don’t need a perfect tide.

You need to understand the one you have.

The Coastal Myth

There’s a persistent idea that you need a boat to eat well out here.

You don’t.

There are full meals sitting along the shoreline—oysters on rock, mussels in clusters, clams beneath your boots, seaweeds in the shallows. The tide decides how much you see at once, but it never takes it all away.

Even on a day like today, with limited exposure, there’s more food than most people would know what to do with.

What This Is Really About

A small tide doesn’t reward effort the way a big one does.

It rewards attention.

You slow down.

You read more carefully.

You notice what others walk past.

And over time, that’s what builds real confidence on the coast—not the big hauls, but the quiet ones where you had to figure it out.

What We’ll Be Getting Into With Food Afield

This is where the show starts.

With imperfect conditions…what’s actually in front of us.

We’re going to break this down in detail—how to read a beach, how to find food without chasing ideal tides, and how to come home with something real without a pile of gear or accessories.

Because the truth is simple:

The tide doesn’t need to be perfect.

You just need to understand it.

If you’ve ever stood on a beach, and thought, there’s nothing here, stay with me…you were probably standing on dinner.

Even as a kid, it wasn’t the gear or the mechanics of it that stayed with me. It was the meal. The simple fact that you could walk out into the world—into a stretch of timber or along a piece of shoreline—and come back with something that would feed you.

That idea settled in early and never really left.

It’s a strange thing, the way people imagine this hunting and wild food lifestyle.

There’s a tendency to picture it as complicated. Expensive. Dependent on the right equipment, the right vehicle, the right set of exotic circumstances lined up just so. As if food from the wild exists somewhere farther out—past where most people are willing or able to go.

But most of it isn’t far at all.

It’s closer to the surface than that. Like trout holding in a seam you’ve crossed a dozen times without noticing. Like clams buried just deep enough that you’d never know they were there unless someone showed you how to read the ground.

Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee. A stretch of beach at a low tide begins to look different. The edges of a field start to feel less empty. Even a dock or a rockpile takes on a kind of quiet potential.

Food isn’t scarce in the way we tend to think. It’s just easy to overlook. Like walking past a tree heavy with fruit because you’ve only ever known fruit to come from a store.

That’s the shift.

Not a change in location. A change in attention.

I think that’s what I was really drawn to all along.

The idea that a meal could have a place tied to it. A time of year. A set of conditions that had to come together in a certain way. Something a little closer to the tide than to the clock.

You begin to notice patterns. Water moving a certain way. Birds working a shoreline. The feel of the ground under your boots. It’s not complicated, but it does take time—like learning the cadence of a river or the way wind moves through a valley.

And once it starts to come together, it feels less like acquiring a skill and more like being let in on something that was there the whole time. These days, that’s what I keep coming back to. Food that has a season. Food that asks something of you. Food that’s gathered a little at a time, in the margins of a day. Nothing elaborate about it. Just kind of primordial. Old. Familiar.

If any of that resonates—if you’ve ever had the sense that there’s more out there than what ends up on a plate—then you’ll likely feel at home here. There’s a simple way into it.

You just have to learn how to see it. Food Afield Podcast.

They imagine offshore fishing boats, remote islands, expensive gear, and years of hard-earned experience.

I understand why. For a long time, I assumed the same thing.

The irony is that many of the ingredients I gather most often are found within walking distance of a public parking lot.

The greatest barrier to gathering wild food isn’t usually money.

It’s the belief that this way of eating belongs to someone else.

The Myth of the Boat

I own a sailboat now. Grebe has become an important part of my life, and she has certainly opened doors to places I couldn’t reach before.

But she didn’t introduce me to wild food.

Without needing the boat,

I still spend countless, enjoyable, hours wandering beaches, turning over rocks, watching tide pools, and learning to recognize the subtle clues that tell you life is hiding just beneath the surface.

All of my favourite shellfish beaches can be reached by foot.

Many productive fishing spots sit alongside beach access or municipal docks.

Some of the richest marine ecosystems I’ve explored are only a few minutes from busy roads.

The Pacific coast is remarkably generous.

You just have to know where to look.

The Myth of Wilderness

Social media has a way of making every outdoor experience look remote and inaccessible.

It often feels as though wild food only exists beyond mountain ranges, deep in old-growth forests, or on islands reached after hours of boating.

The truth is far less intimidating.

Some of the best learning happens close to home.

A ferry terminal.

A marina breakwater.

A public beach.

An estuary at low tide.

A rocky point beside a campground.

These places may not look wild enough to appear in a magazine, but the animals don’t seem to mind.

Oysters don’t care how far you’ve travelled.

Neither do mussels, sea lettuce, rockweed, crabs, or Manila clams.

Nature has never been particularly concerned with our ideas of adventure.

Learning to See

The landscape is constantly offering clues.

Most of us simply haven’t learned its language yet.

Years ago, I would have walked across a beach seeing little more than sand and rocks.

Today, I notice patterns.

Oyster-covered rocks beside firm sand.

Tiny paired holes scattered across the beach.

Broken shell fragments washing into the tide line.

The way the water drains through a flat.

The colour of eelgrass.

Each observation tells part of the story.

Individually they don’t mean much.

Together they begin to reveal where life is likely to be.

Gathering wild food isn’t really about becoming better at harvesting.

It’s about becoming better at noticing.

Your First Three Trips

One mistake I see beginners make is feeling that they need to learn everything before they begin.

You don’t.

Instead, think of your first few outings as lessons rather than harvests.

Trip One: Go Without a Bucket

Visit a shoreline at low tide.

Leave every tool at home.

Walk slowly.

Notice the oysters clinging to rocks.

Watch tiny crabs disappear into cracks.

Find patches of sea lettuce.

Look for shell fragments in the sand.

You’re building a mental map.

This is the beginning of fieldcraft.

Trip Two: Harvest One Ingredient

Bring a bucket.

Choose a single legal, abundant species.

Maybe it’s sea lettuce.

Maybe it’s mussels, where regulations and water quality allow.

Take only what you’ll cook that day.

Go home.

Prepare it simply.

Success builds confidence far better than complexity.

Trip Three: Find Your First Clams

Now you’re ready to start putting observations together.

Look for oyster-covered rocks.

Find the adjacent stretches of firm sand.

Watch for small paired holes in the surface.

These clues don’t guarantee Manila clams, but together they dramatically improve your odds.

This is where gathering begins to feel less like luck and more like understanding.

What You Actually Need

People often ask what equipment they should buy before getting started.

The list is surprisingly short.

A pair of rubber boots.

A bucket.

A small shovel or clam gun.

A valid fishing licence.

A tide app.

The current shellfish harvest map.

Perhaps a pocket knife.

That’s about it.

Most people already own half the list.

The rest costs far less than a tank of fuel for a boat you’ll probably never need.

The Real Investment

There is one thing gathering wild food does require.

Time.

Not time spent travelling farther.

Time spent paying closer attention.

Spend enough mornings walking shorelines, and you begin to recognize patterns.

You’ll notice why oysters grow where they do.

You’ll understand how tides shape a beach.

You’ll start predicting where clams are likely to be before you dig your first hole.

That’s when something interesting happens.

You stop searching randomly.

You begin reading the landscape.

The View Changes

Learning to gather wild food didn’t change what was around me.

It changed what I could see.

The shoreline I once hurried past became a pantry.

The rocks became habitat.

The tides became information.

An ordinary walk became an opportunity to learn something new.

A boat can certainly expand your horizons.

So can expensive equipment.

But neither is where this journey begins.

It begins with curiosity.

It begins with slowing down.

It begins by discovering that the landscape has been quietly speaking to you all along.

You simply hadn’t learned its language yet.