Foraging

Plant-based eating, the pandemic, and food justice have all culminated to create momentum around foraging. Foraging is finding and utilizing wild food resources. It can be a simple as picking wild raspberries on a hike, or full of complex cultural knowledge of what weeds, wildflowers, and other plants and fungi are edible, what parts are nutritional or beneficial, and when and how to best prepare them.

In 2020 when the world entered lockdowns and supply chain problems began to appear in grocery aisles, many people turned to their natural environment and began foraging. Amateurs found a wealth of resources from books, to apps (like Find Fruit), websites, (Fallenfruit.org) or foraging influencers who helped them in their discoveries.

Foraging was once an important skill of in most populations, beginning with indigenous communities whose knowledge and methods helped settlers, enslaved people and immigrants survive and supplement their supplies in a new landscape. Being in an active relationship with the land and its natural resources without having to cultivate a crop was a huge benefit to people. Then as the industrialized world grew and food production became quicker, easier, and relied less on personal resources, foraging fell away from common knowledge and became a skill that was looked down upon, sometimes with racist or xenophobic views. Luckily much of the wild food that was once available still exists today.

New aficionados have rediscovered that many common community plants can be used for food. Acorns from oaks, crabapples, cherries, dandelions and other park and boulevard regulars produce opportunities to experience found food. Mushrooms and fungi are a huge driver for more experienced foragers and can fetch a lot of money when the season and type is right.

With a growing focus on plant-based resources, foraging had become a method that some chefs and restaurants rely upon to create unique regional menus and meals. Chef Alan Bergo of Minneapolis learned of foraged finds his earlier restaurant jobs and it sparked a lifetime interest and passion around it. “We're all descended from foragers. It's hard-wired into our bodies and into our brains.” He released a cookbook focusing on Midwest finds called "The Forager Chef's Book of Flora" this summer.

Foraging for restaurants can be big business – some individual professional foragers were earning 6-figure incomes prior to the pandemic. Since then, some have formed CSAs, or other operations around the collection or cultivation of formerly wild found food resources. Mushroom farms have popped up in warehouse districts, native plant enthusiasts cull wild seeds and sell the plants to interested gardeners. “Wild foods have turned into gourmet foods,” said forager, Jess Starwood. Chefs and upscale home cooks are willing to pay top dollar for food found in the wild, but sometimes don’t realize that nature has its own timeline and schedule for when specific items are more readily available.

Foraging has also found a small resurgence in Black and Brown communities. By returning to the natural world they are reinvigorating ways of sustainability, seasonality, and self-sufficiency without relying on large scale retailers in their neighborhoods.

For some, including Alexis Nicole Nelson, the popular social media foraging star, it has also been an act of racial resistance in our country’s current climate. “For a lot of people who were enslaved, the way that you beefed up the meager meals or the scraps that you were given was often by supplementing with foraging, with trapping, with fishing. So that knowledge that was a huge part of early Black culture here in the Americas.”

She further explains, “After Black people were emancipated, suddenly laws were put in place very rapidly about only being able to reap the benefits of land that you owned. And if you are newly freed, odds are you do not own land. So if you can't hunt and forage on public property, and you don't yet have private property to your name, boom, that is a part of your life that you are not partaking in anymore. And it doesn't take a whole lot of generations passing for that knowledge to just fall away completely.”

Her enthusiastic and ultra-curious personality shines in her videos that have millions of subscribers on TikTok and Instagram. She makes foraging exciting, fun, and accessible, often starting with, “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god…” when she discovers a new food in the wild. She’s recently been interviewed by the New York Times, National Public Radio’s TED Radio Hour – The Food Connection, BonAppetit, and the Drew Barrymore show. She ends her TikTok videos with a robust and cheeky, “Happy snacking, don’t die!”

As native and regional foraged flavors and ingredients become more and more popular, especially in restaurants and home cooking, we might see a bigger shift in consumer behaviors and preferences as some lean into the rediscovered world around them.