Foraging 100% of My Food and Medicine for a Year — The Guidelines

For one year, I am foraging 100% of my food and medicine. Earth is my garden!
But what exactly do I mean with this statement?
In this article I break it down with precision.

This article is not for most people. Primarily it is for those with deep interest in this immersive experience. As I take you into the depth of this experience, I welcome you, too, to question your food. Where does it come from? How does it get to you? And what is the impact that it has on Earth, our fellow humans and the plant and animals we share this home with?

As I analyze with a fine tooth comb exactly what I will and won’t be eating, I encourage you to use this as a medium of exploration, seeing the interconnectedness of humanity with the environment in which we live, and dissolving the illusion of separateness.

The Basic Rules of What is “Foraging”

First, when I say 100%, I truly mean it. Every bite of food. Every drop of liquid. All the flavors. Every element of nutrition, too. From the building blocks of a diet that nourishes, to the details that make it a completely foraged diet. I won’t be growing any food like I did in my year of growing and foraging 100% of my food.

Before I define exactly what foraging is, I’ll cover the easy rules I’ve set for myself.

• Obviously, I won’t be buying any foods from anywhere: not a grocery store or restaurant, not a farmer’s market, nor food from someone else who foraged it.
• I won’t trade for any food and I won’t accept any food as gifts.
• I won’t eat food or drink served at a gathering, even my mom’s or your mom’s home cooking. All pantries are off limits for the year, except my own.
• I won’t be dumpster diving either, although many do call that ‘urban foraging.’
• I’m not using the last of the staples I had stored before the year began. I gave it all away.
• Medicine. I am foraging all medicine that I take internally. Primarily my food is my medicine, and most herbs I work with are gentle, generalist herbs, all of which I forage. Even if I do get sick, I’ll only rely on the plants and medicine I’ve foraged. This also includes plant and mushroom medicines like marijuana and psilocybin. On the other hand, external medicine such as salves and balms, I mostly source these from herbalists and I am not exclusively foraging.
• My foraged diet supplies all my vitamins and micro-nutrients. I will take no multi-vitamins or supplements of any sort.
• I am sourcing all of my drinking and cooking water from springs, wells, rainwater harvesting, and natural bodies of water. Although not exclusively foraged, coming from wells that have already been tapped, I am harvesting it myself. I will drink no water from municipal, on-the- grid sources or any water that has had anything added to it, including chlorine, fluoride, bleach, or nutrients; or any that has been altered in any way. Just water straight from Earth, unadulterated. Generally well and spring water does not need to be filtered or purified, but, in some instances, it will be.

What IS and IS NOT Foraging

Now, on to what exactly is and is not foraging.

Foraging includes fishing and hunting. If you’d like, you can consider me as a hunter-gatherer. The main reason why I don’t say “foraging, hunting and fishing” is for the ease of using one encompassing word. In all honesty, it’s also because hunting and fishing is a quick turn off to many people who have a limited perspective on our food system and I want to avoid them applying a label and writing me off too quickly before they have the opportunity to go further with me. (Further reading My Thoughts on Veganism … and Why I’m Not Vegan.)

My attempt at a simple definition of foraging is:
“Harvesting of food or medicine — including plants, animals and fungi — that is growing independently of domestication by humans.” Here, I am primarily trying to differentiate between foraging and domestication, which includes farming and gardening. Domesticated foods — those that are planted, bred, raised and/or tended by humans — would not generally be foraged foods.

But if only it were that simple. There is a term “tending the wild” that melds those two together. There are thousands of years of Indigenous lifeways that never had the illusion of separateness, living interconnected with their foods and medicines. Some still do today. There was a time before the words ‘foraging,’ ‘farming’ or ‘domestication’ were used. It was when people just called it all ‘eating.’ I now live in a society that largely has bought into the illusion of separateness and has attempted to control and compartmentalize just about everything; including the plants, animals, mushrooms, the people and, yes, our food and medicine.

Although a definition of foraging is not really needed for most people today, it is needed for the sake of this endeavor of attempting to live a year on solely foraged food — independent from farmed and gardened foods.

So, now onto some clarification of what I will consider foraged versus domesticated.

Again, I am not planting any of my food for the year and I’m not tending a garden. That’s easy. But with the interconnectedness of life, how am I always to know if I’m in someone else’s ‘garden’?

Let’s talk about eating the ‘weeds.’ I eat dozens of species of ‘weeds’ from all over the place. Many of them grow in places that have been disturbed by humans because they thrive in those soil conditions. A lot of these weeds aren’t really fully ‘wild,’ but certainly I call it foraging. Dandelions, plantago and violet growing in a yard — I’ll forage them. But how about growing at the edge of a garden or a farm, growing there likely from tilling and enriching of the soil? That’s a gray area. And how about the vibrant weeds growing right in the rows of the domesticated foods? That’s a ‘no-go’ for this year. Many of my friends have food forests and practice a very ‘wild’ gardening style, letting the weeds pop up in their garden. That feels more like foraging to me, but this requires diligence in making sure they didn’t plant them. A bird pooped a ground cherry seed into their garden and it grew on its own? Clearly foraging but certainly it is muddled. I’m mostly avoiding harvesting from within areas that are being actively cultivated for food and medicine.

And how about foraging out of a compost pile? Those volunteer squashes or tomatoes? Absolutely not, that’s clearly domesticated food. But lamb’s quarters? That’s tempting, but I’m avoiding that.

At my friend Eric Joseph Lewis’s place that I visited this fall, there’s an abundance of stinging nettle growing that wasn’t planted. He’s a master forager and he absolutely considered that foraging for me. But they do chop it back sometimes, causing a new flush of growth, which I harvested. This is an example of ‘tending the wild,’ which, for this year, I’m minimizing, but foraging with selectivity.

Fruit and Nut Trees and Shrubs

Now I’d like to discuss fruit and nut trees, which is perhaps the biggest gray area of all. There are a few classifications that I’ll touch on here.
Category 1. These are a clear ‘yes’ for me.

• Trees and shrubs that were not planted, but rather grew on their own, whether on public or private property, but not a clearly ‘wild’ space.
• Trees planted by someone in the past for food and no longer being tended to. This would include some trees in abandoned orchards, old homestead sites, empty lots in cities, and on lots currently being lived on by a new resident who does not tend the tree.
• Trees and shrubs planted as landscaping, not as a food source: in city parks, residences, businesses and any place that landscapes.

Category 2. These are a gray area for me.

• Trees and shrubs planted intentionally for birds and non-human wildlife to eat from.
• Community Fruit Trees planted though the program I started specifically to be publicly accessible for anyone to harvest from.
• Trees and shrubs planted intentionally as edible landscaping, with the intention for the public to forage.

Category 3. This is a clear ‘no’ for me.

• Trees planted by someone for food and being actively tended to by them.

Notes on Category 1.
If a fruit tree comes up on its own and isn’t being tended for food, it’s foraging. Plants don’t acknowledge the illusion that land can be ‘property’ and ‘owned.’ But I am respectful of people’s personal space, of course. There’s serviceberries, a variety of cherries and autumnberry, just to name a few that spread on their own all throughout urban spaces. They are often thought to be ‘poison berries’ by the majority. If a tree was planted for food purpose in the past, but is being neglected and is now existing on its own, I consider that tree to have reverted from ‘domestication’ to ‘wildness,’ and to generally be foraging.

There are so many trees planted by city landscapers and citizens who aren’t even aware they are planting a food source. The mighty oak producing acorns, crab apple trees, aronia, yaupon holly and loquats are just a few examples that I happily forage from.

Notes on Category 2.
I’ll happily share with the birds if I’m confident that they have plenty of food (which one can learn through years of observation). I’m torn about whether to harvest from edible landscaping and Community Fruit Trees. But outside of this year, that’s a clear ‘yes!’

Next, another gray area I’ve run into is prairie restoration areas. I generally do not forage from them because humans have actively planted them and I do not want to disturb the restoration. That said, at the end of season, it can be in alignment to harvest a small amount of plants that are nearing dormancy, if it is a medicine I can’t generally forage elsewhere such as echinacea or anise hyssop.

Fishing and Hunting Notes

A Note on Fishing
There is even a gray area here when it comes to hatchery raised fish. Many of our fisheries that people assume to be natural are actually artificially abundant through stocking.
The coho salmon that I catch in Lake Superior were introduced many years back and are now naturally reproducing and have a stable population. That is true enough foraging for me. If they are stocked as even fingerlings and take years to develop living wild, that feels true enough for me, too, although not as ideal. On the other hand, many streams in southern Wisconsin are stocked with full-sized trout, ready to be caught the next day. It’s the equivalent of releasing a cow into the woods and ‘hunting’ it.
This is not foraging for the purpose of this year.
Is your interest piqued on this topic? Watch the documentary Artifishal.

I also want to mention that these fish are raised their whole lives on domesticated foods, generally very low quality food, including GMO corn. I don’t want to be eating these fish anyway.

A Note on Deer
A note on deer, specifically harvesting car-killed deer. This makes up a substantial portion of my food and I feel great about it. I haven’t prioritized hunting because there’s such an abundance of car-killed deer. This is a bit of a gray area because someone else killed the deer with their car. My rule is I need to pick it up: someone can’t drop it off to me.

These deer are clearly ‘wild’ animals, but upon looking closer, many of them eat a substantial amount of corn, whether from the farm fields or from bait piles. That takes away some of the wildness to me and is just one more example of how challenging it is to define what is a truly foraged diet, because no doubt some of the fat on that deer is the direct product of domesticated corn.

One more note on hunting and fishing is that if I bait the animal or use bait for fishing, I must have foraged the bait.

What is Wild?

Through this exploration, I have found that it is rarely possible for me to define what is or is not truly wild.
For example, I think few would take issue with calling wild rice ‘wild.’ To me, it is a beacon of wildness. THE wild food of wild foods! But again, I look deeper. The Anishinaabe people have been stewards to their rice beds for over 700 years. They developed practices that helped the rice to thrive and to spread. So when I’m harvesting wild rice, is it foraging, or am I in their garden? And even today the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC) and the DNR help to seed the rice bed. Wild rice is still truly wild to me and absolutely is foraging, but this example really illuminates the illusion of separateness we’ve been sold. I am a giver and receiver to the rice. I tend the rice and the rice tends me.

It goes the other way, too. There are plants that I thought only existed in domestication, like papaya. But on my recent visit to Everglades Natural Park, I found hundreds of papaya trees producing tiny green papayas all along the cape.

I also harvested an abundance of coconuts on these shores. Some food is so abundant and so easy to harvest in quantity that it feels like I’m cheating. I really felt this when I harvested a year’s supply of seaweed in Portland, Maine. Earth is abundant!

Where Can I Forage?

That brings up the point of where I can forage, and the answer to that is everywhere. I contemplated staying in Wisconsin or at least a cold climate for the whole year, but instead, I decided to travel the country extensively and teach foraging and live by example everywhere I go.

One thing I am keeping completely wild is my fermentation. I am making vinegars and lacto-fermenting greens and vegetables. For this, I use no domesticated yeast or starters. Wild fermentation uses only the bacteria and yeast that are naturally present in our environment. Interested in learning more? Read Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz.

What Help Can I Receive?

The last aspect that I’d like to cover is what help I’m receiving and willing to receive.

This is a community endeavor. I’m not doing this alone. I couldn’t do this alone, and I don’t want to. The purpose of this is to get more people connected with food, and dozens of people have given me support while growing their knowledge and skills.

For this year, my hands need to be involved in the foraging, but others can forage with me and we can share what we forage together. Sometimes I may take more and sometimes they may take more of what we harvest together. At the time of this writing, it’s generally been me who’s taken more, and this has given me the time to lead foraging walks, give talks, host foraging schools and create educational videos.

I’m conscious about receiving only a reasonable portion more than I foraged, but in some instances people will be along just to drive, hold the tarp while I shake the tree, or just to observe and learn, and in these instances, I may take the whole harvest. I’m happy to have people along to get support and support them in foraging the abundance for the years ahead.

I don’t find all the food myself either. When traveling, I have friends take me to their abundant spots. At home, people call me to tell me of bounties they’ve come across, like the puffballs growing in their yard, or the car-killed deer they passed on the roadside.

I received a lot of support with processing the foraged foods, too, from Jennifer and her kids processing a deer for me, Brad cracking and drying my acorns, Angelica dehydrating my seaweed and Cristina and Patrick canning apple sauce and storing mushrooms in their freezer.

This is a community endeavor and although I am not foraging a lot of food to give to others directly, I hope that thousands of people will have more foraged abundance in their lives as a result of the knowledge and inspiration I share.

So those are the guidelines behind this year of foraging. I’m grateful to each of you on this journey with me, whether by my side or from afar. I hope reading this has provided you the insight into this immersion that you were seeking and that reading this has stimulated questions about your own food and given you motivation to break free from the destructive global industrial food system and reconnect with Earth through a relationship with the plants.

The Exceptions I’ve Made

Day 26: I went for a walk in the neighborhood with my mom and I ate an apple from two different front yard apple trees that had hundreds on the ground. These were both domesticated and likely being currently tended to.

~Day 50: I sampled some black walnuts from the tree in my mom’s front yard that she had harvested while I was on tour. I really wanted to know how they compared to other wild black walnut trees. Had I harvested them with her, this would not have been an exception, but the season for them was while I was gone for five weeks.

Day 118: I was leading a Foraging Walk in Gainesville, Florida and teaching about wild onions. While I was speaking, a child plucked an onion from the ground and gave it to me as a gift, which I immediately put in my mouth before realizing and exclaiming, “I just broke my year of foraging. I didn’t forage that onion!”

Last updated February 5th, 2026 (Day 120)