The Year of Foraging — Two-Month Update

For one year, nature is my pantry, my garden and my pharmacy. I am foraging for every morsel and drop of my food and medicine, down to the salt, oil and spices. Join me for a tour of my foraged foods and medicines and a summary update as I’m nearing the two-month mark of the journey and winter has begun.

Transcript: The following is a transcription of The Year of Foraging – 2 Month Update.

Hello Dear Friends,
Today is Day 54 of my year of foraging for all of my food and medicine. It’s December 1st, so we have just begun real winter here in northern Wisconsin and today I’m going to show you what I have stored for the winter, what I am eating right now, and share about my health. How is the year going about two months in and what is the plan for the winter? So I’m elated to be able to share this update with all of you and to take you along on this foraging adventure.

This is my pantry of dried and canned foods. And there is a pretty large diversity of foods and medicines here. In fact, there’s over 100 different foods and medicines. Many of which are daily staples or multiple times per week. Others are more occasional and others I haven’t even worked with yet. The interesting thing for me is, I’m now almost two months in and it’s hard to even fathom that it’s already been two months independent of the grocery stores and restaurants. Nothing packaged or processed. Nature has been my garden. I’m not even eating from gardens. It’s only foraging: what is growing freely and abundantly. And the way that I know that it’s going well is that I’m not generally counting the days. Most days I’m not even thinking about the fact that I’m foraging all of my food and medicine. So things have been going quite smooth[ly]. The reason it’s been going quite smooth[ly] is I have what I need. So let’s show you what is in this pantry. Over here, close to the stove, are the foods that I work with the most. So we have wild rice, which is one of my absolute staples. I started the year off with 75 pounds. Apple cider vinegar. We have my salt that I harvested from the ocean on my trip to the east coast. A spice mix of Monarda and onion. Then we have stinging nettle and wood nettle. Here we have different herbs like bee balm. That’s one of my key herbs. And onion. We have seaweed, carrot seed. An interesting one is cattail pollen. This is a really unique, interesting food. Then we have some herbs that I don’t use as much. But we have sweet gale and northern bayberry fruits and spice bush beets, for example. And then this section here … a lot of this is herbal teas. So I have a few dozen different herbal teas that I work with: mint and mountain mint, fireweed. I’ve got my roasted persimmon seed tea. Now this is my roasted dandelion, chickory, burdock tea. So I’m drinking teas a couple times a day and that’s one of my ways of getting a lot of nutrients.

And then, continuing this way, we have a lot more of the medicinals. So a lot of these are plants that I have just if I have an issue. But a lot of them are general medicinals. So, for example, red clover and pineapple weed and basswood flowers. They’re very general herbs that I work with. But then I have stronger ones like white vervain, barberry leaves. Over here I have my medicinal mushrooms. With those, I blended that together to make my medicinal mushroom tea. This is a key staple tea for me. Down here, this is a lot of my fruits. So I’ve got applesauce and pear sauce. I’ve got blueberries. I have autumn olives. I have pear sauce. And, I wasn’t as successful in harvesting as much fruit as I had hoped, but I’ve had plenty of fruit up to this point, so things have been good in that regard.

Over here: this is some of my different mushrooms. So: chicken-of-the-woods, maitake, king bolete, chanterelles, puffballs, hedgehog, to name some of them. And then, over here I have some canned meat. So this is canned whitefish and this is canned venison. Ninety-nine percent of my fish and venison is in the freezer, which I’ll show you. More of my ferments: this is fermented wild onion and bee balm. We’re at the point where I don’t have much fresh food anymore. So, in the past, this was full of apples and different fresh fruits that I was eating, but now I’m in the stage of more preserved foods. Over here we have a lot of the larger stores, so we’ve got big jars of wild rice, for example, and mushrooms. One thing that’s really important when it comes to storing your foods is, you don’t want them exposed to direct sunlight. I actually have this here for you to be able to see without the cover, but I have this covered up whenever, well, basically, at all times. And I just uncover it to take the food out. So this is a wool blanket and this keeps the sunlight off and insulates it a little bit as well. So my pantry is covered almost all of the time. My apple cider vinegar … I am very pleased with. Whew! This is the most effective I’ve ever been at making apple cider vinegar.

Now, if you come over here. Down here is the overflow. So these are all herbs that I have in small quantities over here. Wow! I have way more herbs than I need. I’ve spent a lot more of my time than needed when it came to harvesting, processing and storing some of these herbs. So I have plenty of herbs to share, for people to come over and in my travels. And then in this bucket here, this is hazelnuts. And then in here, this is all dried mushrooms as well. Mushrooms were incredibly abundant. I harvested in the multiple hundreds of pounds of mushrooms. And I have plenty of salt as well. Numerous jars of salt. So, in the … in the realm of herbs, I easily have a multiple years’ supply of some of my herbs.

Now, nuts are an area where I have … I’ve done very well. So, these are black walnuts. These are from a tree down in Madison. That’s a nice large one. And then up here … these are pecans. These came from my trip to the east coast. And I’ve been eating pecans mostly every day. Those have been adding real joy and real nutrition to my life. And then here: more black walnuts. So, this is a perfect time to point out my hands. They’re not “dirty,” as a lot of people have been commenting. They’re stained with black walnuts. So. These clothes are dyed with black walnuts. I just dyed more clothes. And then processing these. I don’t wear gloves and the stain lasts for a couple weeks. So, I am often stained with black walnut. And then we have … these are hickory nuts. And with these I make hickory nut milk. And I have both shagbark and shellbark hickories. This is just a sampling of the nuts that I have. I have a much larger quantity of these stored inside of the house on the property. And then here are hazelnuts. These came from right here in northern Wisconsin. Some of my nuts have come from my travels and some of them from this area.

I’m drinking a lot of juice. I store my juice in the freezer. This is … aaah. This is aronia, pear and high bush cranberry. So this is a very potent, nourishing juice and I keep this in this area of the house. At night, it gets down to about freezing. So I … I can keep this out and this is quite cold right now even though it’s fairly warm in the house. My water comes from the well here on site. And if I’m traveling, it comes from different springs that I harvest from.

And then, I’ve mentioned this a couple times already, but I can just not stress enough the importance of wild rice. This is just one of my absolute staple foods. There’s other staples. You don’t need wild rice in order to live completely off of a foraged diet, but I’m from the land of the wild rice. This is the land of the Anishinaabe people, and I want to give such a deep level of gratitude to the Anishinaabe people for being the stewards of the wild rice for hundreds of years.

A new staple food for me is wild parsnips. And I’m storing these in sand. It’s supposed to be wet sand and honestly I didn’t get around to wetting it. But they seem to be storing well still. These are delicious. They’re the same as your domesticated parsnips. They’re the exact same plant, but these grow by the hundreds of thousands of pounds in the roadsides and the farm fields around Wisconsin and many other places. So. Wild parsnips. A new food for me.

I harvested these wild greens about a week ago, just before our ground got covered in a foot of snow. This is wintercress and I’m also harvesting watercress and this is my main fresh vegetable right now. And tomorrow I’m going out to see if I can harvest this from underneath the snow. Very grateful to still be eating fresh greens.

So speaking of cold and frozen weather, I’m going to take you outside to the cooler and to the freezer, where a lot of my food is. For the last week, it has not gotten above freezing. The daytime highs are in the twenties. And lows are generally in the teens or the single digits, which means my cooler is a freezer. In here, I’ve got juices like grape juice and high bush cranberry. I have … well, greens are frozen in here. I’m mostly eating my frozen mushrooms right now and using most of those up and saving my dehydrated mushrooms because they’re so easy to travel with. These are frozen chanterelles. And chicken-of-the-woods. We have bones. This is venison bones for bone broth. And there’s also salmon in here. This is actually the organs of salmon, as well as the semen, which is a very nourishing food. The season has wrapped up when it comes to harvesting very many greens. There’s still plants to harvest in this, which I’ll learn more about, but the season is really wrapped up and I’ve finished almost all of my processing. I’m really grateful to be done with all of the processing. The main foods to be harvesting now are venison and fish. Those are two of the key staples to still be harvested. And the 15-day forecast does not show us getting above freezing. So. It’s pretty cold out.

Here’s the freezer. Actually, I would say that the space inside this freezer has opened up substantially over the last month of me being back from my tour. I’ve eaten a lot of food from in here. In here, there’s a lot of fish, venison, a lot of juices, some fruits, the onions, the ramps. So, this is an area where I can see that I’m … I’m eating a fair bit of my staples here.

Right now, my meals revolve around what comes out of my pantry and my freezer. A lot of wild rice. That is my staple calorie. A lot of mushrooms, whether dried or frozen. Stinging nettle is one of the key nutrient-dense foods that goes into many of my meals. A lot of herbs and spices. And what brings a lot of solidness to most of my meals is either venison or fish. Mostly, that is salmon and whitefish. And I eat a lot of bone broth. Drink a lot of bone broth. Eat the bones as well. And make a lot of broth from the salmon heads and tails and the body of the fish. I also eat a lot of nuts. I’m generally eating some nuts every single day. And then my fruits: my applesauce and pear sauce and plum sauce. That adds a lot of both calories and sustenance and just joy into my day. And there’s some snacking each day. Of course, also, is the fresh greens. That’s been a key staple and we will see if I’m able to keep that going.

So, again, I’m 54 days in … about two months in to eating this diet with nothing from the grocery store or restaurant. A lot of foods that are unfamiliar to the average person. And having to bring it down to even the flavors. The spices. The herbs. The salt. To bring it all together takes a wide variety of skills: foraging, processing, harvesting. And, I’m happy to say that overall I’ve had very few cravings. I’ve had very little yearning. Which means that I’ve been able to make very satiating, complete meals. I’m eating a lot of my favorite food on Earth: wild rice, fish, venison, greens. Also, of course, all of my herbal teas, the fruits, the roots. This really is a lot of my favorite food on Earth. Some of the most delicious and nutritious foods that exist on this Earth. And I’m eating what would be thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of food, but it’s not costing me a penny. That’s the food and medicine that’s growing freely and abundantly all around us.

Many of you, of course, wonder how my health is. So, I last weighed in at about 150 pounds and I started off at around 155 pounds. I haven’t had exact scales or measured myself on the same scale, so it’s a little hard to keep track of exactly. But, I’ve lost some weight. What are you … you’re going to expect to lose some weight giving up the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and all of those snacks. The area where I haven’t succeeded so far is the oil. I harvested some bitternut hickories to make hickory oil, but I haven’t processed that into oil yet. I have lost some weight. And as far as my muscle, I notice that my muscles have shrunk some. I’ve probably lost a couple pounds of muscle, which I was a little bit surprised by considering the amount of protein that I’m getting. But I’ve also been a lot less physically active actually. I’ve been very busy between [my] numerous different projects, and my speaking tours. I’ve just been less physically active as well. But overall, I would say that I’m in good health. I’m happy with where I’m at, and I really think that I am meeting all of my needs. Now, I’m doing bloodwork at the beginning, middle and end. I’m also testing my gut microbiome. We will, in time, be able to look back and see if, indeed, I am meeting all of my needs and all of that information is going to be tracked on my website.

A question is: “Am I getting enough food?” and that’s even a question that I ask myself sometimes. Because of how busy I am between all of the foraging and processing and everything, but also the 1 Million Community Fruit Trees Initiative, my speaking tours; making these videos takes a good amount of time, and managing the team at my nonprofit. Many days I don’t necessarily eat as much as I’d like to because I am cooking everything from scratch. So it takes quite a bit of time to do all of the cooking and the eating.

Overall, I do think that I am and do I have enough food to last me through the winter? Well, the way that I’ve designed this is that I don’t need enough food to last me through the winter because I’m going to be in Florida for January and February. Absolutely, it’s possible to live completely off the northern Wisconsin diet, besides harvesting salt from the ocean, and that would have just meant harvesting more of many of these foods. But I am someone who likes to be in a warm place for part of the winter, and I’m going to be teaching a foraging school there, as well as doing a month-long tour of activism and speaking tour. If you’re interested in going to Florida this winter, or if you’re in Florida, you can go to robingreenfield.org/foragingschool and that’s going to be a weekend-long immersion in learning a lot of this. And the website will tell you all about that.

And tomorrow, I’m going on tour in Wisconsin. I have about a 12-city tour throughout Wisconsin and Minnesota. So I am keeping very busy in this year of foraging all my food. I’m very hopeful for the next ten months. I am continuing to deepen my relationship with the Earth. I see … I knew theoretically that the Earth could provide me with everything that I needed freely and abundantly, but I am really, truly experiencing that. Abundance is very real. All over. Abundance is real throughout the world. And there are areas of scarcity, absolutely, but there is such an incredible abundance. And it takes real skills in order to be able to do this. I did not learn all of this overnight. This was a deep amount of practice. But through all of this, I am deepening my relationship with the Earth, deepening my relationship with the plants and animals, and deepening my relationship with humanity. So, I’m grateful to be on this journey with all of you and very excited for the next ten months to come. I love you all very much and I’ll see you again real soon.