transfiguring food etc in DH

[montavilla47]

No: HPFGUIDX 179266

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "k12listmomma" <k12listmomma at ...> wrote:
>
> Sharon:
> It always bothered me that the trio found it so hard to find food when they 
> were first running/camping in DH. They were apparating from rural place to 
> rural place. Where were all the rabbits and other wild animals. Surely there 
> would have been more than wild mushrooms? It was hardly winter when they set 
> out -- it was really late summer. there should have been loads of edible 
> plants around, not to mention fish in the streams.  That part about them 
> living on nothing for days just never sat well with me.  What do others 
> think?  Not having lived in Britain I am unsure about what they could have 
> caught or picked, but it seems to me that England is hardly a barren place 
> with no wildlife?
> 
> 
> Shelley:
> I think this is more a matter that the author hasn't the experience of 
> hunting or fishing, and thus Rowling herself would have been out there 
> starving, not knowing what is immediately available to eat. Or, she was 
> trying to show that these kids were "city" kids, you know the kind who have 
> always seen turkey frozen and sealed in a package, and chicken already cut 
> up, so that they have never seen food in it's raw and alive state and the 
> process to get it to the table? The wizarding equivalent might be "conjured" 
> food, or whatever wizards do to normally get food. It's never really said 
> where Molly gets the ingredients for her soups and gravies that come out of 
> her wand. You would think they would know some spells for cooking, or 
> Hermione have researched that part before leaving. At the stream, couldn't 
> they have "Accio fish"ed?

Montavilla47:
But... isn't *Ron* the country boy, what with the burrow and the chickens
and the six older brothers?  How do you spend eleven years living in a 
rural house without knowing how to pick berries?

We have a vacation house in the country and every kid I know there spent
time fishing the streams.  We aren't into hunting, but that's because we 
are "city folk."  Our neighbors hunt.  

As a kid, I knew where to get mint, licorice root, and three or four kinds of
berries.  All wild.

The teenagers did a little mushroom hunting--or "shroom" hunting.  Not 
exactly for eating.  

Actually, I wouldn't go near a wild mushroom unless I had a guide.  There
are too many poisonous ones and if you don't know what you're doing,
you could be in real trouble.