In his collection A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles, the great New Yorker writer John McPhee included an impressive profile he wrote about the outdoorsman and naturalist Euell Gibbons. A very well-known public figure during the ’60s and ’70s, Gibbons guested on the Tonight Show and starred in TV commercials, but he isn’t exactly a household name today. Gibbons, who was at different times in his life a Quaker, a tramp and a communist, wrote several food books and came to prominence for advocating the use the natural foods that grow wild all around us, whether it was weeds in a vacant lot or flowers from a box at Rockefeller Center.

The piece by McPhee was originally written for the April 8, 1968 issue of the New Yorker (paywalled here). In it, the two men spend a week together, living off the land in Pennsylvania. An excerpt:

“Gibbons interest in wild food suggests but does not actually approach madness. He eats acorns because he likes them. He is neither an ascetic nor an obsessed nutritionist. He is not trying to prove that wild food is better than tame food, or that he can survive without the assistance of a grocer. He is apparently not trying to prove anything at all except that there is a marvelous variety of good food in the world and that only a modest part of the whole can be found in even the most super of supermarkets. He is a gourmet with wild predilections. Inadvertently, the knowledge that he has acquired through years of studying edible wild plants has made him an expert on the nourishment aspects of survival in the wilderness, but the subject holds no great interest for him and in some ways he finds it repellent, since survival is usually taught by the military and he is a conscientious objector. Nonetheless, he is given his time to assist, in an unofficial way, at the United States Navy’s survival school in Brunswick, Maine. He has also taught survival techniques at the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School, off the Maine coast. It was in Maine that I first met him–in summer and only briefly–and not long thereafter I wrote to him and asked if he would like to take a week or so and make a late-fall trip to central Pennsylvania living off the land. I apologized that I would not be able to make such a trip sooner than November, and I asked him if he thought we can find enough to eat at that time. His response was that we could stuff ourselves, if we wanted to, right up until the time of the first heavy snowfall.”•

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Euell Gibbons is mentioned on Match Game in 1975: