I Grew and Foraged 100% of My Food for an Entire Year!

For one year, I grew and foraged 100 percent of my food. Every. Single. Bite.
No grocery stores, no restaurants, not even a drink at a bar. Nature has been my garden, my pantry and my pharmacy.

I lived in the city of Orlando, Florida, in a 100 square foot tiny house. With no land of my own, I turned front yards into gardens and shared the bounty of food with the homeowners. Over the year, I grew over 100 different foods in my gardens, foraged over 200 foods from nature and I even grew and foraged my own medicine and vitamins, too.

This project wasn’t just about growing and foraging all of my food though. It was about empowering others to take back power from Big Ag. I built gardens: 15 Gardens for the People; planted over 200 Community Fruit Trees; sent out over 5,000 seed packs to help people grow their own organic, healthy food; and taught free gardening classes to the people in my community.

I’ve been exploring food for nearly a decade and I believe the globalized, industrialized food system is broken. This was a personal quest to see whether I could step away from Big Ag and grow and forage every bite of my own food.

Here I am, one year later. I did it. And I feel healthier and happier today than when I started.
I’m here to share solutions for a more sustainable and just food system with you.

The Food Freedom book is out and it is a gift to you! Order here.

Transcript: The following is a transcription of I Grew and Foraged 100% of My Food for an Entire Year!.

It’s the dream of millions of people. Complete self sufficiency. To grow all of their own food and never have to take a trip to the grocery store. But for most people, it’s just that, a dream. The ease of our current global, industrial food system is just that — too easy. Too convenient. Too time saving and too alluring.

I’ve been exploring food for nearly a decade. And since the beginning, I’ve had the burning question: Could I step outside of the Big Ag system? Could I go without grocery stores and restaurants? Nothing packaged or processed, nothing shipped from a far off place. Could I grow and forage 100 percent of my food, everything that I ate, for an entire year? That’s exactly the journey and the quest that I decided to set out on and now I am here to share the story with you.

But one big thing: I had very little experience with growing my own food. When I lived in San Diego, I did have a few raised beds where I grew some greens, tomatoes and herbs. But as a traveler for the last seven or so years, I had never really settled in one place long enough to grow my own food. So, in order to do this, I would have to settle in one place. And the place that I chose is Orlando, Florida, where I am sitting right now.

Besides being really fresh to growing my own food, I was also fresh to the scene here in Orlando, in Florida. And I was giving myself just two years here before hitting the road again. So I had to get planting as soon as I landed here. But I didn’t have a garden, I didn’t own any land, and I had almost no experience with foraging in the state of Florida. I chose Florida so that I could grow food year round. And I chose Orlando because I had passed through here a few times and met a great community of permaculturists and people who grow their own food. Specifically, I chose the community of Audubon Park because that’s where Orlando permaculture and my friends at Fleet Farming were based and there was already a movement here of turning front yards into gardens. So I would have the support I needed in order to do it here.

I quickly got to work meeting people in my neighborhood and proposing the idea to them of turning their front lawns into gardens. It really wasn’t hard to find takers because it was a pretty sweet deal. Their boring lawn would be turned into a garden, I’d do almost all of the work, cover the costs and they could eat all the food they liked right from their front yard. In fact, I quickly had a list of lawns longer than I could handle. The transformation was amazingly quick and within just a few months, I was growing more food than I could eat myself, and sharing it with friends in the neighborhood. I ended up creating six small plots all within easy cycling distance of each other.

I was just figuring out what I was doing the whole time. I went to local meet ups like Orlando Permaculture, volunteered in the garden with Fleet Farming, visited farms, and gardens and nurseries, took foraging classes with local foragers, like Green Deane, read books by local growers, and watched videos online, and more. For a place to live, I built a simple, tiny house homestead in the backyard of a community member that I met. And in exchange for using their space, I turned their monoculture of grass into an at-home supermarket.

Starting from Scratch

Starting from scratch, it took me ten months to be comfortable and ready to begin my year. November 11th, 2018 would be my first day. It was now time to eat 100 percent from my gardens and food that I would forage. Now, when I say 100 percent, I truly mean it. No grocery stores or restaurants. No drinks at a bar. Nothing packaged or processed. Nothing shipped long distances. No farmer’s markets. Not even going over to my friend’s pantry or even going to their gardens or their food forests.

Why not share food from my friends’ gardens? Because I wanted to truly immerse in my food. I wanted to have to literally figure out how to grow every single food or ingredient that I needed or how to source it from nature. Many people know me for my dumpster diving to raise awareness about food waste. And a lot of people who follow me online assumed that I would still be eating from dumpsters. But, nope! No food from dumpster diving at all! I had already proven to myself that I could live off of the waste of our globalized food system. Now it was time to see if I could step away from that completely.

That included everything that I put in my body. Even supplements, vitamins and medicines. Now, you’d think on Day One, that maybe I’d have eaten a lot of 100 percent homegrown and foraged meals, but to be honest, my first meal on Day One was my first 100 percent homegrown and foraged meal of my entire life. It was Day One and I was in the deep end. But I had laid the foundation that I needed. My gardens, scattered across the neighborhood, were full of food and I had scouted out food, both in the city and the countryside, to forage. My supermarket was on nearly every street I could walk down and the shelves were stocked.

My Food

Over the last 365 days, I grew and harvested over 100 different foods from my gardens and foraged over 200 different foods from nature. That’s a new species for almost every single day of the year. I grew a dozen different greens packed with nutrients: moringa, katuk, chaya, purslane, collards, kale, and perennial spinach, just to name a few. I grew sweet potatoes, cassava and yams for my main caloric needs. Pigeon peas and southern peas for protein. Delicious fruits like papayas and bananas. Seminole pumpkins, carrots, and eggplants, just to name a few vegetables. And garlic, onion, peppers and many herbs to add flavor and nutrition to all of my meals. I raised bees for honey to satisfy my sweet tooth, which, believe me, I do have quite the sweet tooth. All of the bees that I stewarded were rescued with my friend, Dennis the bee guy, from locations where people didn’t want them living, such as in the side of their homes.

I harvested giant wild yams from the woods. Picked coconuts to make coconut milk, butter and coconut curries. Foraged from fruit trees in the wild, growing in public parks and in the city, with the bounty of fruit falling onto the sidewalks. And, of course, wild bananas, too. I caught fish from the oceans, lakes and rivers. And even harvested deer that had been hit by cars during my visit to Wisconsin. I harvested over 20 species of mushrooms in the woods. I picked nutritious plants that people call weeds, that they walk by unknowingly, or even constantly battle in their yards and gardens. My caffeine came from the native yaupon holly tree that I made a tea from. And I even harvested my own sea salt from the ocean by collecting the water, boiling it down in a pot, until I was left with just the sea salt for my meals.

I grew and foraged all of my own medicine and vitamins, too. I grew fresh turmeric and ginger in my gardens. Foraged elderberries from the wild. I harvested reishi mushrooms and herbal teas. And grew moringa, also known as the vitamin tree, to make a multivitamin powder that is easy to travel with. But most importantly, my food was my medicine. It’s a different way of thinking for most people, but even the weeds that grow just outside of our doorstep are some of the most nutritionally and medicinally dense plants on Earth.

For the last year, nature has been my garden, my pantry and my pharmacy. With the seasons, my foods varied greatly. I cooked up dozens of different healthy meals. Fermented foods, like sauerkraut, with my homegrown cabbage and herbs, and fermented delicious beverages like honey wine and ginger beer. And I whipped up delicious desserts, and ate the healthiest food of my entire life. This was food that I could feel truly good about eating. It was all local, all natural and all organic. I made it through the entire year without using a single pesticide.

Now sure, I had my problems with pests, like when the cucumber worms decided to attack my Seminole pumpkins. But when I was growing over 100 different foods, if the pests were attacking four or five of them, I still had 95 other foods that I could eat. Just as importantly, though, I chose to grow the plants that thrive in this environment. When I started, I didn’t walk down the aisles of the grocery store and ask which foods that I liked the most. Instead, I talked to local farmers and gardeners and my permaculturist friends and asked them what foods grow so ridiculously well and so ridiculously abundantly that I could hardly screw it up. And those are the plants that I chose to focus on, and that’s one of the main things that got me through this year.

My Experience

This was, without a doubt, one of the most challenging things that I’ve ever done. A year is a really long time and I had my highs and my lows. There were times when I felt my absolute best, and there were times when I just didn’t know if I could go on. Generally, I did get enough food. My weight stayed the same about the entire time, so I did have enough calories. But there were times when I felt like I was really deficient, mostly in fat and protein. Those were the times when I found it really hard to want to keep going. And there was the social aspect. I was on my own a lot of the times, not able to join other people for their meals and sort of isolated. Not being able to go to restaurants or eat with friends and family.

Overall, with all the ups and downs, the year went about as well as I could have possibly hoped. I maintained my body weight throughout the year and I never got sick once! And I really attribute that to my food being my medicine. I think that nature is able to provide for our basic needs and I trusted Earth. I trusted nature.

Now, I want to say though, that this project wasn’t really about my health. It wasn’t about a diet. And I don’t believe that this is the diet for eight billion people. I don’t actually think there is one diet for the eight billion people. I think we live in a diverse world where we have diverse cultures and people need to do things in a very different way. So I’m not trying to represent a diet for everyone or anything like that. This was just my own personal quest to see if I could step away from Big Ag. To step away from what I see as a broken food system. And instead, grow and forage 100 percent of my own food for an entire year.

Community Initiatives

This project wasn’t just about growing and foraging all of my own food, though. It was about empowering others to grow their own food, to take back power from Big Ag and, ultimately, to take back their health and grow their communities. So, during this time, I started a few community initiatives. We built 15 Gardens for the People, planted over 200 Community Fruit Trees, and sent out over 5,000 free seed packs to help others grow their own organic, healthy food. And I taught dozens of free gardening classes, in my gardens, to the people in my community.

I’ll be honest, though, I do have an agenda. I want you to question your food. Where did it come from? How was it grown? How did it get to you? And what was the impact that it had on the Earth, other species and the humans that grow that food? And if you don’t like the answers that you find, I want to empower you to change them.

The good news, though, is that you don’t have to grow and forage all of your food. The solutions are there in your community. You can grow a little bit of your own food. Maybe an herb garden on your window sill. Or some pots of tomatoes and basil on your balcony. Or a raised bed in your front yard. And if you don’t have any space at all, you can join a community garden. You can source your food locally. And purchase from local farmers and gardeners. The farmer’s market is a great place to start. You can buy whole foods and cook more, rather than packaged, processed foods that leave trash behind. And you can work with your community to make healthy foods for people in need. Grow a garden for your elderly neighbor, or start a grass roots organization to harvest the fruit trees in your community to distribute it to others. And this doesn’t need to be a lonely journey. For most of us, food is at the center of our lives. And we can do this together, in our communities.

My year is over, but my journey of food has just begun. A book is in the works and 100 percent of my proceeds will be donated to organizations working on food solutions. And I’ll be here, online, sharing inspiration and education on how you can get involved in gaining food freedom.