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Euell Gibbons: No Grape-Nut He

THE AUTHOR AND FORAGER Euell Theophilus Gibbons once served as the folksy face of Grape-Nuts, the breakfast cereal that contains neither grapes nor nuts. The television campaign featured Gibbons delivering his now-famous “Ever eat a pine tree?” line, which catapulted him from darling of the back-to-nature movement to an unwitting victim of America’s pop culture. The script was penned, of course, by Madison Avenue pitchmen, lampooned by late-night comedians, and even parodied in later television shows and Grape-Nuts ads by Gibbons himself. (“You know, the other day I ate some goose poop I found on my lawn.”)

Sadly, the series of Grape-Nuts ads upstaged the lifework of a naturalist nonpareil, whose books sold well enough to provide him with financial security as well as fame among those interested in sating their appetites using the most basic of provender, such as the weeds that sprang up in their backyards. One autumn day in the late ’60s, the writer John McPhee set out with Gibbons to forage the wilds of Pennsylvania for

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Irv Oslin: ‘Euell’ never know who you’ll meet in the column writing business

For me, writing is an adventure.

When I set out to write my outdoors column — generally in the quiet of a Sunday morning — I don’t know where it’s going much less where it might end up. Or who I’ll meet along the way.

Last week, while writing a column about foraging, I met Euell Gibbons.

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'Ever eat a pine tree?'

Like a lot of folks my age, I knew him only through his iconic Post Grape-Nuts commercials, which aired in the 1970s. They typically depicted the robust, outdoorsy Gibbons foraging in the countryside then sitting down to enjoy a bowl of Grape-Nuts.

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In the commercial for which he’s probably best remembered, Gibbons asks, “Ever eat a pine tree?”

His eccentric ways and folksy persona made him the butt of jokes. From the Carol Burnett Show to the PBS children’s program “The Electric Company,” on-air personalities poked fun at him. Sometime

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The New Yorker, April 6, 1968 P. 45

PROFILE of Euell Theophilus Gibbons, who has written 4 books on the gathering & preparation of wild food. He lives & writes in a farmhouse near Troxelville, Pennsylvania. He is a Quaker. He has been, among other things, a school teacher. All his life has been a forager, becoming in this pursuit an excellent general naturalist. His first book "Stalking the Wild Asparagus", came out in 1962. He is at work on a volume covering every edible plant in N. America. He is not trying to prove anything except that there is a marvellous variety of good food in the world & only a modest part can be found in markets. Inadvertently, studying edible wild plants for years, he has become an expert on the nourishment aspects of survival in the wilderness. The writer tells about a six-day trip, in early Nov., with Mr. Gibbons, partly by canoe on the Susquehanna River and in part on the Appalachian Trail. They spent the first couple of days on a survival diet, then gradually extended the ways they prepared their foraged foods, introducing ce