In defense of foraging

We should feel free to go out and (responsibly) harvest food from the wild

Free food! Sochan (also called cutleaf coneflower) growing in a park in Mount Rainier, Maryland

It’s spring; the green world has awoken. Daffodils and tulips are popping and fading; wildflowers are seizing the brief window before greedy trees leaf out and hog the sunlight; bees and butterflies are appearing out of nowhere; migratory birds are returning from the tropical vacations and setting up shop. Trees are flowering, to the delight of some and the dismay of others, and setting seed before entering the long leafy season.

Spring also means an explosion of free food. You wouldn’t know it from the non-existent botanical education most of us receive, but many of the green plants that emerge from the warming soil make for good eating. Pictured above is one standout example — a common native plant often used in landscaping. If you live in the eastern half of the United States, it’s probably growing in a garden or park near you. Right now, while the greens are young and tender, is the time to pluck a few stalks for a delicious stir-fry or side dish.

All this is preamble to explain why I was deeply disappointed to see the New York Times publish a recent piece admonishing those of us who choose, from time to time, to escape the modern world by going out and plucking a few nibblings from nature. Times gardening columnist Margaret Roach argued that we should grow edible plants in our gardens, rather than harvest them from the “wild,” to avoid depleting wild populations.

I fear that this message, while well-intentioned, could harm both foragers and the very wild nature Roach is hoping to protect. Many people who had probably never given a thought to foraging now have a negative impression of it. This will make things harder for foragers around the country and dissuade many others from taking up this activity in the first place, and reaping all its benefits. It’s just one more wedge driven between humans and nature.

So in this post, I’m coming to the defense of foraging. I believe that if each of us went out and responsibly harvested food from the wild, both we and nature would be better off, not worse.

In defense of foraging

First off, I’ll address a question you might be asking: Why even bother coming to the defense of a seemingly primitive, marginal practice like foraging? I’m a modern, technologically empowered human; surely I can buy my food from grocery stores, as I’m sure you do.

Indeed I can, and I do. Despite that, I believe foraging has a lot to offer anyone, from the casual day hiker to the devoted practitioner. For one thing, our modern industrial diets have become shockingly narrow, resting on just a few dozen highly manipulated species. Such low diversity creates vulnerability: If even a few major crops were ravaged by pests or diseases, our diets could shrink substantially. So it’s essential to our resilience as a species to keep wild plant knowledge alive. Moreover, if you actually want to eat any of the other 99% of edible plants — and the incredible diversity of flavors and nutrients they offer — the grocery store is not going to help you. You will need to go out to the woods, or the meadow, or the wetland.

Foraging can connect us to traditions thousands of years old. Whoever you are, your ancestors foraged food from the wild. These traditions persist more than we might think, even in rich, industrialized countries. Countless Germans, one of the most modern and wealthy people on Earth, spend their weekends in the woods gathering mushrooms. In the U.S., where property law and cultural biases work against foragers, we seem to lack a national foraging culture, but the practice persists in innumerable subcultures, and from time to time it experiences a wider revival. Perhaps this is one of those times, at least judging from the wild popularity of the Black Forager and her 4 million-plus Tiktok followers and recent Jimmy Kimmel appearance.

Lest I make foraging sound like a deadly serious homework assignment, let me also mention that it can be a ton of fun! I mean, who doesn’t crave an excuse to slip the bonds of adult responsibility and play in the woods? The other day, while waiting for some friends to join me for a hike, I wandered down a trail and spied some onion-like greens emerging from the forest floor. I was pretty sure they were ramps, but having never seen ramps in the wild, I pulled out my phone and started checking the plants I’d found against photos of ramps and toxic lookalikes. Once I felt confident in my ID — red-stemmed leaves emerging separately from the root — I tore a leaf and inhaled a delightfully pungent, onion-y aroma. Finally, getting up my courage, I nibbled on it, and a sharp, tangy onion taste filled my mouth.

I then investigated how to harvest ramps sustainably. I learned I should take only one leaf per plant, harvest from the center of a patch and avoid disturbing the roots. When my friends arrived, they found me on my knees among the ramps, deep in foraging bliss.

I have to admit that it took me a while to really embrace foraging. I’ve always enjoyed hiking and spending time in the woods, but for a long time, actually eating things I found there seemed a step too far — perhaps a bit too animalistic, a bit too weird. Those feelings haven’t entirely gone away, but I’ve decided that life is too short to worry about them, and I’ve embraced the pleasures of eating new foods and sharing them with others. (It turns out the Jewish tradition even has a celebratory prayer for new experiences — the Shehechyanu.) Foraging has expanded my culinary and cultural world and made me a much keener and more engaged observer of the natural world.

With all the problems in the world, why would anyone spend their time opposing this nourishing, joy-creating activity? I mean, even if foraging isn’t your jam, why berate others for engaging in it?

I learned just how many foraging opponents are out there after I wrote a piece last summer about wild foods for the Washington Post Magazine. When I posted my story to a local nature-themed Facebook group, it sparked a heated debate between foragers and their supporters (including me), and those who believe we should leave wild plants to wildlife and limit our food provisioning to grocery stores.

I understand this point of view, but I believe it embodies a number of troubling assumptions and blind spots. It separates humans from nature and rejects a planet’s worth of food gathering traditions. It also fails to balance foraging’s environmental impacts against that of the industrial food that fills our grocery stores. After all, every farm field, distribution center and supermarket sits on land that was once “wild.” Worst of all, it threatens to exclude millions of people who don’t have access to private land from foraging at all.

A threat to wild plants?

As did many of the Facebook commenters, Roach’s column argues that by collecting plants and other edible species from the wild (which I take to mean anywhere on public land), we could deplete their populations. This in turn could deprive wildlife of needed food.

To be fair to Roach, whose writing I generally like, the most explicitly anti-foraging parts of the column are the headline and sub-head, which bluntly instructs, “don’t forage for wild edible plants.” It’s likely Roach didn’t write these words, and may not have even seen them prior to publication. I’ve had a few of my own stories appear with embarrassing or misleading headlines, and it’s frustrating to know that far more people will read and react to those few big bolded words that than the far more numerous and better-researched ones I actually wrote.

Also to be fair, worries that plant populations could be depleted are worth taking seriously. A small handful of species for which there is a commercial market — ramps and ginseng, for example — are threatened in the wild.

But these are very much the exceptions, not the rule. I’m not aware of foraging for personal consumption endangering any species anywhere. (If it is, I’d like to know.) I read a lot of scientific papers and articles about threats to plants and biodiversity, and I can’t remember a single one mentioning harvesting of wild plants as a significant factor.

I call the view expressed in Roach’s piece the “scarcity mindset” — the belief, often abetted by alarmist media stories and environmental NGO messaging, that humans have so severely ravaged the natural world that hardly any of it remains.

The best antidote to the scarcity mindset is to stop doomreading and doomscrolling, and spend more time in actual nature. The ramps I found the other day, for example, were just a few feet off trail in a popular, heavily used national park. Thousands of people have walked right by them. Yet as I stood among them, I discovered not just one patch, but patch after patch, stretching as far as my eye could see. At least in this spot, natural abundance is far outpacing human voraciousness — and remember, we’re talking about one of the most popular wild edible plants in our part of the world. If ramps are flourishing here, less famous edible plants likely are, too.

(Per the forager’s code, I’m not revealing the exact location. And in case you’re wondering about the technical legality of foraging in this spot, the answer is: I’m not sure, and no one else is either. Federal law gives park superintendents discretion to regulate activities like foraging in a so-called “superintendent’s compendium.” Unless you happen to be a public property law scholar, you’ve probably never looked at or even heard of a superintendent’s compendium. I just dug up the one for this park — it was not easy to find — and while it explicitly permits foraging of fruits, nuts, berries, and mushrooms for personal consumption, it doesn’t address ephemeral greens. And foraging is such a niche activity that it’s rarely addressed in posted rules at park entrances.)

The scarcity mindset reflects a people for whom nature and food production have become largely abstractions. And when projected onto socioeonomic realities, it can end up reinforcing privilege and inequality. Most obviously — or at least, it seems obvious to me — only people who own homes with yards can grow edible plants in their gardens. That happens to be the wealthiest (and probably the whitest) segment of our society. And while some countries, such as Germany, protect the public’s right to forage even on private property, in America, if you wander onto someone’s property in search of a meal, you’re putting yourself at risk of being shot. Without public land, millions of apartment dwellers, homeless people, people who live in HOAs that restrict what you can grow and others would have no access to wild food at all.

By and large, this would do the most harm to the people who have the most to gain from access to free-growing food. Foraging has long supplemented deficient diets and provided critical nutrition for people during hard times. We may struggle to imagine that it can do so today, but I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t. Wild plants are generally more nutritious than cultivated ones, and many species grow abundantly without human help. While it may be unrealistic for someone today to subsist entirely on foraged foods, they can certainly enhance the quality of anyone’s diet — but only if people have access to those foods and a society that supports foraging.

A ruptured relationship

The most frustrating thing in Roach’s piece itself was a quote attributed to the botanist Jared Rosenbaum, Roach’s main source: “With foraging, the connection can be very one-sided. It’s not relationship, and it’s not interdependency.” I spoke with Rosenbaum, who told me the quote doesn’t reflect how he feels and that he regrets how it came out, which I sympathize with both as a writer and as someone who doesn’t always express himself as eloquently when speaking as I might wish. He assured me he is absolutely not against foraging.

Far from rupturing relationships, foraging gives people a reason to have a relationship with wild plants and places — and to care for them. Most people today, at least in the U.S., have little direct personal connection to nature. We largely live in cities and suburbs; we spend our working lives staring at glowing screens and much of our “non-working” lives driving from home to the store to the soccerplex. We may go for an occasional hike in the woods, but we mostly don’t know what plants we’re walking by. It might as well be a field of undifferentiated green.

There’s no better way that I know of to cultivate closer relationships with plants and the natural world than to become a forager. If you’re looking at plants as potential food, and not just decoration, you look much more closely. You slow down; you research; you investigate. You engage your senses: touch, smell, taste. Your fingers intertwine with plant stalks, leaves, branches and fruit. Wild plants literally become part of your body; you might find yourself becoming a bit wilder.

In her best-selling book Braiding Sweetgrass, the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about how even by the time her students have arrived at college, they have already been so inundated with negative stories about the relationship between people and plants that they cannot imagine how we could act in ways that benefit them. An education in foraging turns this on its head. Many plants have evolved to grow best under moderate harvesting pressure, whether from wild animals or humans.

Kimmerer and her students showed through their research that sweetgrass grows most abundantly when foragers take some leaves, stimulating the plant to grow fresh ones. Unharvested sweetgrass plants in their experiments, by contrast, stagnated. Research done by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina has revealed that sustainable foraging can similarly benefit ramps and sochan. (Sochan, by the way, is the Cherokee name for the plant in the above photo. In the landscaping world, it’s more commonly called cutleaf coneflower.)

Sam Thayer, one of the U.S.’s most prominent foragers, has written about how foragers often tend the wild plants they harvest, because they’re motivated to do so. It’s a relationship of reciprocity, to borrow Kimmerer’s language — a concept that has largely disappeared from the mainstream environmental discourse, to our detriment. Margaret Roach’s column is a symptom of a much larger cultural deficit — one that stems from our alienation from the natural world.

Creating abundance

In our stunted environmental discourse, the mode of caring for nature that most Americans recognize today is simply to keep our hands off of it — the “fortress conservation” model that began in the U.S. with the creation of national parks and has since been exported around the world.

While this approach has prevented exploitation of certain areas, it just as often ends up harming the very places we think we’re helping. When we’re prohibited from interacting with nature in meaningful ways, we also stop caring about it in meaningful ways.

Not surprisingly, even though many of us profess to care deeply about nature, and the media regularly remind us that nature is under threat, our natural areas are grossly underfunded and neglected. Think about the parks and green spaces near your house. I’d guess that much of the ground is covered in lawn that gets mowed every few weeks during the growing season. There may be some woods, but I can almost guarantee those woods are full of invasive vines and plants. If any areas are showered with attention and money, they’re probably the playgrounds and sports fields.

If we’re really worried about the depletion of wild plants, there’s a radically simple and powerful solution: Grow far more of these plants in our public parks, forests and wetlands. There would be enough for everyone to forage and have plenty left over for wildlife. How do I know? Well, for one thing, because my friend Lincoln Smith has spent much of the past decade turning a 10-acre abandoned farm field into one of the most nutritionally and ecologically productive places in the DC region. Smith’s success inspired me and some others in Mount Rainier, Maryland, where I live, to do the same thing at a smaller scale, converting an underutilized one-acre city park into a lush food forest where dozens of edible plants now grow. The sochan pictured above is thriving there, and I’ve been harvesting it regularly throughout the spring.

These examples represent just the tip of the iceberg of possibility. We’re blessed in the U.S. with abundant land. Park and preserve managers could learn from the successes and failures of folks like Smith and start rewilding land far more efficiently and at scale. This would probably require hiring more land stewards and making landscaping and gardening much higher-skilled and higher-status careers than they traditionally have been. But given that we’re likely to soon be facing massive artificial intelligence-driven job losses, why not elevate nature-based professions, which robots and AI are unlikely to master any time soon, as reasonably compensated alternatives for displaced workers?

This will require a movement for more imaginative and productive use and management of public land. Governments and the agencies they run respond to public priorities. If they hear that people want more soccer fields, they create more soccer fields. If they heard instead that large numbers of people wanted edible landscapes, they might develop different priorities. As Thayer points out, there are public lands devoted to just about every imaginable activity, from hiking to hunting to timber to golf, but almost none devoted to foraging. I hope the folks who have spent time online chastising foragers will devote equal energy to pressuring their public officials to rewild parks and preserves, so we no longer need to worry about depleting plant populations.

It also baffles me that no major environmental organization seems interested in cultivating these sorts of landscapes. Every time I speak with anyone from an environmental or conservation group, they tell they’re now a climate group. I recognize that climate is where the money is right now, and climate change is no doubt an urgent problem. But it seems we’re losing something important by viewing forests and other ecosystems through a narrow and technocratic climate-focused lens, rather than celebrating the full array of benefits that a closer relationship with nature has to offer. Perhaps someone could start an organization dedicated to growing edible plants on public land and educating people about them.

To be clear, I’m all for filling our yards and gardens with edible plants and not just the boring, sterile things sold at garden centers, as Roach and Rosenbaum suggest. (Rosenbaum emphasized to me that he also supports growing edible plants on public land.) Private land has an important role to play. I’ve spent the last six years rewilding the one-eighth acre of the planet I’m fortunate to control, aka my yard. But that’s a limited effort that benefits mainly me.

Bottom line: There’s no need to couple edible plant gardening with a call to end foraging in the wild. Let’s ditch the scarcity mindest, expand our imaginations and fill the world with beautiful, edible plants, so that everyone can partake in their abundance.

Wild persimmons foraged from my yard and a nearby public park