My father's naturalism

I always thought my mother, with her family roots in the woods of Michigan, would be the source of a true connection to nature; and that my father's naturalism was adopted. And he adopted vigorously, and passed it on to me. But I find Russian colleagues at work who used nature to feed themselves and medicate themselves - so much so that I joke how Americans go the doctor but Russians go to the kitchen. In fact my father's naturalism may well have come from his father, who enjoyed toying with the fermentation process, and may have been close to nature in the same way as these modern Russians.