 The family vacationed on the Pacific coast in Gearhart, Oregon, where Beard was exposed to Pacific Northwest cuisine.Common ingredients of this cuisine are salmon, shellfish, and other fresh seafood; game meats such as moose, elk, or venison; mushrooms, berries, small fruits, potatoes, kale, and wild plants such as fiddleheads or young pushki ("Heracleum maximum", or cow parsnip).Beard's earliest memory of food was at the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition, when he was two years old.