Year of Foraging – Day 200 Update

It’s been 200 days since I broke free from the grocery store! I’m over halfway into my year of foraging all of my food and medicine. Today I’m giving you an update on what I’m eating!

Transcript: The following is a transcription of Year of Foraging — Day 200 Update.

It has been 200 days since I broke free from the grocery store. I’m over halfway into my year of foraging all of my food and medicine and today I am going to give you an update on what I am eating.

Nuts! I am eating lots of nuts. These are shellbark hickories, and after breaking them open, they go into the mortar and pestle to make hickory nut milk, which I love. Above me, I have baskets full of nuts. I dedicate a portion of just about every day to cracking nuts open and eating them. These are pecans I harvested in North Carolina, and these are hazelnuts I harvested here in northern Wisconsin. And these are black walnuts from Madison. I am officially a wild nut person. They are really changing my life. Fat, calories, protein – I am absolutely falling in love with nuts. And a book that I’m reading right now is called Feed Us With Trees. Oh, this book is getting me excited about nuts and the future of food.

This is the wild rice that I have left. Just 16 of the 75 pounds that I harvested. At about 700 calories per day of my staple calories, I’m looking at having only about two months left, which means I’m going to run out of calories, which is one reason that eating these nuts is so important. Honestly though, running low on wild rice is actually really wonderful. And the reason why is it forces me to get to know more wild foods, build more relationships. And one of those is acorns.

I harvested about 25 pounds of acorns in the fall. I’m just getting around to leaching them. I’ve been leaching them for about 48 hours. I’ve drained the water and this is the acorn flour here. I’m removing the tannins. I think I’m getting pretty close to having acorn flour. Boy, am I excited about what I’m going to make with that.

I’ve been doing more wild fermentation, or lacto fermentation. This is garlic pennycress. I’ve been enjoying this this week. This is probably six weeks fermented. I harvested this in Asheville, North Carolina. 2.5% salt and that is absolutely … I’m going to go as far as to say incredible. I love it.

Here, these are fermented wild onion bulbs. You can see the colors. Some of them are shades of blue or pink. They almost look like some sort of Easter egg colors here. Not the best smell. I’m just going to give one of these a bite. That’s nice. It’s got a … something to it. Wild ferments!

It’s spring here in Wisconsin. Late April. Which means it is root harvesting season. I’ve been eating a lot of wild parsnips, which I’ve just about finished. This is the last one. Also, burdock. This is evening primrose root. That’s been a really wonderful vegetable that I can harvest in pretty large quantities. And that also helps my wild rice to go a lot further. Now, I got back from my trip to Florida and the South. After being gone for three months, this is some parsnips that I left behind that I harvested and stored last fall. These are parsnips stored in sand. These have been down to negative 30 degrees, up and down temperature fluctuation. I’m interested to see – are they still edible? Nope. They completely melted. Here’s a chunk … and then it’s just gone. There’s almost like a ghost of some of them. A little smelly. Sometimes you don’t get to eat everything you harvest. That’s just part of being a forager.

I’m eating a lot of fruits that I stored away in the freezer. These are wild plums. Just frozen whole. They come out wonderfully. I’m also eating a lot of serviceberries and persimmons, as well as fruit juices. I’m really enjoying my wild juices. So, this is grape here, and this is just potent wild riverside grapes. Lots of antioxidants, lots of vitamins in there. And this is highbush cranberry. And I’m also drinking pear juice and a couple other juices in there.

Wild greens make a substantial portion of my diet. This is watercress here. And this is a bountiful watercress patch that grows in Prentice Park, my childhood park. It’s really wonderful, fresh, and has a nice spicy kick. But I eat a lot of it, and mostly to do that, I cook it. Throughout the year, to the best of my ability, I try to take in a good number of pounds of greens per week. A few pounds of greens a week.

And yes, this takes time. Breaking free from the grocery store, living in close connection with the Earth, actually having a relationship with each of the plants, mushrooms and animals that are a part of my life, takes time. A quality existence takes time and sometimes it’s a struggle. I have a lot going on and it takes so much work just to simply nourish myself. But this is such a deep practice of love and connection to the Earth, through every single bite of food that I’m taking, and every single plant that I’m coming into relationship with through food and medicine.

Tonight for dinner, I’ll be having coho salmon, which I’ve caught in abundance this spring, thanks to my friend Tom. I am just so incredibly grateful for the salmon as well as all of the fish and the venison that I’ve been eating. They have continued to be staple foods throughout this whole year. I’ll also be having maitake mushrooms, wild ramps or leeks that are coming up right now, and some different wild onions, a nice large amount of watercress, a serving of wild rice, along with some herbs and spices, some salt to go along with this.

I made it back north in time to harvest maple syrup for the first time in my life. And this is a true joy. In fact, I went six months without sugar. The longest in my life, because I had no sugar to harvest. And the first sip of maple syrup that I had … ooh, wow! I have never tasted maple syrup, or any sugar for that matter, that has been just more incredible. The complexity of the flavor, ahh … what a true joy it is. And I’m so grateful to have gotten to connect with the red maples, the maples that I harvested from. And to have this wonderful treat. I’m working with this more medicinally. I don’t have endless quantities, so it’s something that I need to ration.

It is wild ramp season! I’ve been able to harvest enough wild ramps to make about one pint of ramp powder, and down to the spices, the salt, the calories, the fat, the protein – everything.

This is 200 days into a year without grocery stores or restaurants, really, really seeing if the Earth can provide me with everything that I need. And I’m feeling very solid. I’m feeling a deep connection with the Earth, and I’m really, really feeling just grateful to be here. You’ll see that I have lots of herbs, so as far as herbal teas go, my medicines — those I have in abundance and probably wouldn’t have to harvest more of that this year. I still have lots of dried mushrooms. So there is still a lot of abundance.

As many of you know, I am just absolutely in love with Earth, and this is a practice of living in love. And I want to be here with you, in person. So, I am traveling the West Coast coming up, from San Diego to Seattle, and many cities in between, leading foraging walks, doing daylong Foraging Schools, as well as giving talks. So, I invite you to come out, let your friends know. Come out, build the skills, grow the knowledge, connect with your community. Foraging is an act of connection. Foraging is an act of resistance. Foraging is an act of joy, an act of love.

So, you can go to robingreenfield.org/schedule and come out friends. I love you all very much. Let’s forage together.