Robin Greenfield in Ojai, California — The Year of Foraging Day 224

Robin Greenfield at Sane Living Center in Ojai, California on May 22nd, 2026 — Day 224 of the Year of Foraging. This talk is part of his West Coast Tour.

Gratitude to:
Carol at the Sane Living Center for creating spaces for free community gatherings: saneliving.com
Peter Deneen for organizing the event and helping me connect with the local community: Instagram @dancin.pete
Zoya and Matai for filming the talk and creating this video: YouTube @ZoyaandMatai

Transcript: The following is a transcription of Robin Greenfield in Ojai, California — The Year of Foraging Day 224.

[Robin:] Good evening, Friends.
[Attendees:] Good evening.
[Peter:] Thank you all so much for coming. Raise your hand if you were here around this time last year when we hosted Robin for his talk on owning nothing. Dispossession of ownership. Alright. A few returnees. Raise your hand is you were here at the light in space talk that we did before that. A few more of us. Awesome. Welcome back. It’s such a pleasure to re-welcome back my friend, Robin, to Ojai.
Last year, in January, just after the fires were calming down in Los Angeles, I got a text from a friend that there was a man who was passing through town who had walked here from Canada. With a pushcart. With a few dozen belongings that he was in the process of shedding along the way. I was not a follower of you at that time, Robin, but I had seen photos of you when you were doing your trash experiment and he was walking around with all the trash that he produced, he would put in a bag and walk around with on his person, on his body, which was an experiment that really spoke to me at where I was in my life at that time, which is I was living a life of zero, single-use plastic when I was living in New York City. And so, I was, like, here’s a guy who’s also doing everything he can to live in alignment with his values, which I don’t come anywhere near to. But the beautiful part about Robin is that he doesn’t judge you for it.
What I learned in hosting Robin last year when he came through town was that we are all more or less living in a system where we feel, or I feel and I think a lot of us often feel, maybe hypocritical. We’re kind of living … we’re forced to live in a situation where we feel some sense of hypocrisy where we have to violate our values because of the system that we live in. Whether that’s producing waste, whether that’s consuming things that aren’t grown or cultivated with an ethic that concurs with our being and our values. We are all more or less forced to be in this system where we are constantly feeling some level of hypocrisy and a compromising of our values. And when you live in alignment and full integrity with your values, you end up looking pretty radical. You end up looking pretty ‘out there,’ because that’s … that is how … how in order to actually live in alignment with your values and integrity, you have to be such an outlier in society as to appear like you are … you are a madman. And, I don’t if I’ve come across … I definitely have not come across anyone in my life, Robin, like, that actually lives in accordance with their values the way that you do.
[Robin:] So no one more mad than me?
[Peter:] No one more mad. [laughter] When Robin came to town last year, we had a lot of late night talks at my cabin about this and about, you know, does your message get lost if you appear so radical to society that it seems like it’s impossible to actually do what you’re doing. Is it possible to live without possessions? Is it possible to forage your own food for a year of your life? And we just got these close … these little vignettes of what that looks like inside of Robin’s car. And … and, for example, Aubrey brought this beautiful foraged platter that her husband foraged from their land and around, but it wasn’t quite aligned with … with the ethic, which is Robin has to forage that food himself. And so, he can’t enjoy that food, right? So, when you’re living in alignment with your values, you can appear quite radical. And, I just want to say, Robin, it’s so great … great to have you back in town. I get so inspired for you. [applause] Thanks for coming back. [hugs]
[Robin:] Thanks, Brother.
[Peter:] Yeah.
[Robin:] Alright! Hello, Dear Friends.
[Audience:] Hello!
[Robin:] It’s very nice to be here with all of you in Ojai. Where a radical person is far more accepted than in some other places. [laughter] And where I get the opportunity to go maybe a little deeper than I do in some of the communities that I visit. So, I’m grateful for this opportunity to go deep tonight for those of you who are interested in that. And if you’re not, well, we’ll see what happens. [laughter]
So, thank you … I really want to say thanks to Peter for having me here. It’s … I’ve been now … this is the third time we’ve done an event here in Ojai and it’s a little home for me. I feel comfortable and I feel connected here and this is a … a dear community for me. And, we have had many conversations about the radicalness of what I’m doing and is the message lost or is it really, you know, gained … it it really found and really reaching people. And so, it’s been a … it’s been a beautiful time together. And, always thanks to Sane Living Center for having the space be what it is and for having me back, even when there are some people who say, “that guy is too much!” [laughter] “I don’t know about this!” So, thank you to Sane for … for having me here.
Tonight I’m going to share about my current year of foraging 100 percent of my food and medicine. Today is Day 225 without a grocery store or restaurant, which means nothing processed or packaged, but also no farmer’s markets and no garden even. So, just harvesting what, you could say, the earth is, you know, freely and abundantly providing outside of domestication. Which, I’d like to take the opportunity to say that I am 100 percent fully in support of growing food and gardening. That’s equally as important as foraging. But, for this year, this is my experiment. This is my deep practice. By having to forage every bite of my food and medicine, I have to learn. I have to build the relationships with every single one of these plants. Because if I just ate what other people foraged, well, I have a very large network of people that would be happy for me to sit on a couch and to bring food to me. So, this forces me to learn every way in which I need in order to meet my … my basic human needs for calories, fat, protein, salt, oil, and all the spices. And, the way that works when you go to the grocery store is you just buy it. But, when you need to do this, it means I need to build a relationship. A relationship with another plant and the ecosystem in which that plant lives and the relationship often that plant has with other plants. So, this is a very deep, immersive experience for me in foraging. And then, along with that, as much as this is about the foraging, which I LOVE what I’m doing … this is … this is a way of going really deep into some of the … some of my beliefs. Like, for example, I believe that humans are from this Earth, and that we belong here on this Earth, and that we’re not separate from this Earth. And, I believe that right now, one of our greatest threats to humanity is this belief that we’re separate. We’re separate from the Earth, we’re separate from the plants and animals, and we’re separate from one another, our global neighbors, and even … we’ve compartmentalized ourselves and we’re separate within ourselves. And this experiment of foraging 100 percent of my food is designed to dissolve the illusion of separateness, to have to go out into the world and build these skills and relationships that actually, practically dissolve these … this illusion of separateness and help me to really find a deep home here on Earth. And then, the goal of my life is always to immerse in what I love and what’s so deeply meaningful to me, but in a way that creates a story: a story that other people can get interested in and decide to … to join whether from afar or in person. And so, I do things that are kind of extreme because they’re designed to catch the media’s attention. And that’s … that’s why on the ride up here today, the local NPR station met me at the park and I was able to share all these radical ideas, because I take things in this sort of extreme way that help to get into the media and talk about some things that we don’t talk about nearly enough.
So, that’s just a little bit about … a little prelude as to some of the why behind why I’m foraging all my food and medicine. And, before I go into this year, I’d like to share a little bit of the backstory that got me here so that you can see the transformation and the sort of awakening. Would that be of interest to any of you?
[Audience:] Yeah.
[Robin:] Okay. I know some of you have been here before, so some of this may be a repeat, but I don’t remember what I said last time exactly.
So, to go … we’ll go back … we’ll go way back first, and that’s to my childhood. I grew up in northern Wisconsin, in a small town called Ashland. Population was about 8,000 people. On Lake Superior. It’s a place of … of deep wilderness, deep beauty and connection. So many of the people live there because of the draw to the lake and to the forests there. And, I grew up to two, you could say hippie parents. They were Hari Krishnas. My mom and my dad. They met in Eugene, Oregon, and they moved up to northern Wisconsin to homestead basically. But my dad, well, he had good ideas, but didn’t really so much follow through. And it ended up being my mom and us four kids with three different dads actually, living in a little two-and-a-half bedroom duplex with paint chipping off the walls, rust on the car, living off of food stamps and support from the government as well as my mom’s family. And so, from a young age, I did not want that life of hippies. I wanted the plastic life. My best friend, Paul … his dad was a lawyer. My best friend, Kyle, his dad was an anesthesiologist. Jeffrey’s dad … another doctor. I was surrounded by affluence and I compared myself to this. So, from this young age, I had this deep hole inside of me, never feeling like I belonged or that I had enough love and that I always felt like an outsider. Also, my mom’s ethnically Jewish in a Catholic, Christian dominated northern Wisconsin and so we were outsiders in that way as well.
So, from a young age, I had my feet in two sides of the world. There was this love for the Earth that my parents did instill in me and that the land I grew up on instilled in me and then there was this other pursuit of what I saw as basically the American dream. The American dream basically is … is normalcy, like, you have to fit in and be like others. And I saw that you would accomplish that through having a good amount of money so you could have the nice house, the nice car, the nice clothes, a nuclear family and, of course, lots of plastic. Plastic, plastic Tupperware. I loved plastic Tupperware. [laughter] And Febreze. I loved Febreze. All the things. [laughter]
In middle school, I joined Boy Scouts, which was a wonderful way for me to continue connecting with the Earth. We camped 12 months of the year, even in the dead of winter. And I, in high school … in middle school, I had a job as a paperboy, bringing the papers around. I sold Kool-Aid in elementary school. I played poker. I had a job at Hardee’s in 9th grade, became a lifeguard. I was the best popcorn salesman that we had in our troop. So, this was … I had this … and, at the same time, in my junior year of high school, I fished 180 days of that year. So, I was both in this world of money and then this love for the outdoors.
In University, I went to school for biology with a concentration on aquatic science. So, continuing this path of wanting to work in the outdoors and … and be in service in some way. And, freshman year, I’ll be completely honest, I realized I wasn’t there for aquatic science, I was there for alcohol and sex basically. [laughter] And, I realized that, actually, while I was visiting LaCrosse as a senior in high school. And, that’s where I was. Why? Because I was watching movies like “American Pie” that were the playbook of what it meant to be a loved man in this society. Like, a man was what they were worth because of who they were having sex with, and their clothes, and money and all of this. So, the red Solo cup? This was now, like, my pursuit of the American dream. This was, like, how you prove your worth was how many beers that you can drink and how long you can do the beer keg stand and such.
And then, during that time, I became … freshman year, I was approached to sell educational books door-to-door in my summer vacations for a company called Southwestern Company. And so, I gave up my summer vacation, which was a big deal, because if any of you have ever lived in Wisconsin, you know summer is THE time of your life. But, I was told I could make $9,000 a year, which was a lot to me as a college student in 2006, twenty years ago. And that summer, I actually worked in Burbank, right here in California. I worked 84-90 hours a week selling educational books from about 7:00 a.m. ’til 9:30 p.m., 14 1/2 hour days, and I made $20,000 that summer. So, I really saw those popcorn skills paid off from Boy Scouts. I could … I could take this to the next level and sell some real, you know, something that would bring me some real wealth. And, that’s what I did. Every summer of University, I made about that same amount, every summer of University. And, I quickly decided I wasn’t going to go into marine biology or aquatic science. Instead, I would sell stuff, make a good amount of money in a short period of time, and spend my free time pursuing my … my dream, you know, my connection to the Earth and my travel … traveling the world, exploring, going off. Bear Grylls was one of my biggest inspirations at that time. So, just going off into the wilderness and eating things, which kind of will bring us back to here, I guess.
And, then in 2009, I graduated from University and I started a marketing company shortly after that. I was about 25 years old. I moved out to San Diego, California, and I set a goal very quickly of becoming a millionaire by the time I was 30. Which … this was 2011, back when being a millionaire actually was a little more meaningful than today with the, you know, extreme wealth changes that we’ve had. But, within … within about a year, I had 20 independent contractors that I trained to go out and sell advertising. Our ads were on the grocery store shopping carts. On the back of the receipts, we’d put coupons from local businesses. And then, eventually it ended up being hotel key cards.
So, that’s what we were doing. And, within two years, I was on track to become a millionaire by the time I turned 30. I was living in a three-bedroom apartment a couple blocks from the beach, which for a Wisconsin small town boy, this was the dream. I was surfing, I had romance. I had friendship. I was traveling all over the world. I really was living a very meaningful, purposeful life. I was happy. I was healthy. There really wasn’t much going wrong at all. And then I realized that I wanted to radically transform my life. And, that even though this was everything I wanted at the time, it was no longer for me anymore. And, what a lot of people imagine with something like that is near-death experience, moment of enlightenment, you know, something like that. But for me, it was really simple. All that happened was I started to watch some documentaries, read some books. It was “The Story of Stuff” by Annie Leonard, and documentaries like “Zeitgeist” and “Food, Inc.” and “Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Paul in the book. I just learned that the way that I was living was causing such destruction to the Earth, to the people, to the plants, to the animals. Basically, the food I was eating, the car I was driving, the stuff I was buying, the … the money I was making and spending and investing, even the water that I was drinking, it was all tied to systems of exploitation and oppression. And, I learned that even this nation …. You know, this country is founded upon the genocide of hundreds of Indigenous cultures. It’s founded upon the enslavement of over seven million people stolen away from Africa. And this stuff is baked into the Constitution of our nation. It’s very much who this nation is at a … at a core level. And, there’s a lot of absolute hiding that behind closed doors, avoiding conversation about it, pretending things never happened, when not only is it our past, but it has formed our present.
So, I realized I was living a lie, to a large degree. A lie sold to me by government, by corporations that wanted me to just kind of exist in a sleepy state so I’d keep buying their stuff. And, at that time, I definitely felt some real overwhelm, you know, disheartenment, pain, anxiety. You know, things that I’m sure every single one of us has experienced. I would imagine all of us experienced it, you know, with some level of frequency. And also anger. Anger with realizing all of these untruths that have been fed to us. But, at the same time as I felt all of that, there was actual feelings that I had even stronger. And that was … I was inspired. I was invigorated. I was excited. Because these documentaries and these books and these people … they weren’t just sharing the problems, they were sharing solutions. There was already millions of people who had learned this that I was only learning now who were doing the work to create a world that is really more for everyone and for all the plants and animals that we share this Earth with.
So, I decided to put all my energy into solutions. I was educating myself on the problems. Yes. But, once I educated myself on the problems, to stick with that day after day was not productive. I wanted to be a part of the solutions.
So, I made a goal that I would make one positive change per week for the next two years. And I listed out those changes. I hung it up … hung them up in my kitchen with a pen tied to a string right next to that list. And I made the very, very concrete goal that I would make one positive change per week for the next two years. And so, that’s what I started to do. And some of them were really small changes, like, I ditched my paper towels and I just started to use reusable washcloths instead to minimize garbage in that way. All the, you know, most of my food was wrapped in plastic packaging. Walmart was my grocery store of choice at that time. And so, I started to shift away from Walmart and I started to go to the local food co-op. We have People’s Organic Market in Ocean Beach. That’s where I was. We had the local farmer’s market. So, I started to source my food locally.
At first, I was pretty hesitant about this whole buying organic food because it seemed way too expensive. And then I realized, well, I am spending $50 a week on alcohol at the bars. [laughter] What if I stopped doing that and bought more nourishing food instead? And, I then realized, it’s not actually really much more expensive to eat organic. It is if you want organic frozen pizzas from that aisle. But, if you’re … I based my diet around the bulk section of the co-op with the … the grains and the nuts and the seeds and the oils and all of that from there rather than all the packaged stuff.
I started to stop using my credit card and use cash and put that into local businesses rather than shipping … shipping it off to multinational corporations. I started to ride my bike more and drive the car less. I started to grow a little bit of food in a, you know, an old flipped over bookshelf. Filled it up with soil and I had kale and tomatoes. You know, that was just the beginning of the journey. I started to compost.
I looked at all the products that I was putting on my body and I realized they were full of petroleum byproducts and really genuinely toxic chemicals. And, I said to myself, “Why am I putting this stuff on my body?” And, the answer was simple. The Old Spice deodorant was going on my armpits because I had been convinced by their multi-million dollar advertising budgets that I needed Old Spice in order to be loved by society, in order to be accepted by society. And, I thought to myself, “Haven’t human beings existed for, like, something like hundreds of thousands of years prior to Old Spice?” Couldn’t I, too, actually exist without Old Spice? So, I put it on the curb. That was 15 years ago, and if any of you want to see what 15 years … or smell what 15 years without deodorant is like, come up and share a hug and you can experience that experiment. [laughter] Anyone here more than 15 years without deodorant? Do we have anyone? Okay, a few of us. Alright. Right on. So, there are some people who are even more radical than me. [laughter] And anyone who’s never worn deodorant in their life. [one hand up] There you go. You were never indoctrinated by the Old Spice. Very nice. It’s always, like, one person. So, if you’re looking for some real insight, follow her. Okay, not follow her home, [laughter] but you know what I’m saying.
So, I let go of those things and, you know, some of it was I replaced it with more natural items, and then a lot of it was just realizing I just don’t even need any … I just don’t need these things anymore. For me, it was simple living was the answer. I quickly learned that true sustainable living isn’t having huge solar panels and the newest electric car, and replacing every, you know, greenwashed item with a new item. The answer really to this, what we call … we call this the American dream. And what I realized is it’s the world’s nightmare. The answer, to make this not the world’s nightmare, isn’t to replace this with all sorts of items. It’s to realize we just don’t need nearly as much as we think we do. And to embrace simple living as a way of finding a … a deep home and a deep level of satisfaction. And, what I’ve found is that when we focus on living simply, and we focus on building wholeness and completeness within, so many of the things that we think we need just fall away. We just don’t … we realize we just don’t need those things anymore as we develop a deeper relationship with ourselves and the Earth and the plants and animals around us.
So, at the beginning, if you watched my videos on YouTube, like, way back in the day, you may have, if you were still in the drinking game, started a game where you would drink every time you would … I would say the word “simple” or “sustainable.” That was … I saw those in the comments, because apparently I would say those words a lot. That was my passion: living simply and sustainable living with the focus on the environment. But same thing. It’s like all of this is tied to breaking free from system … of systems of exploitation, oppression and destruction. It’s all interconnected. Some people look at environment and they separate it from humans, right? But we are nature. We’re a part of this. And every war that we have causes incredible destruction, not just to people but to the Earth as well. And so, for me, it was really seeing the interconnectedness and breaking free from the systems that no longer serve and replacing that with systems that truly do serve. Some people look at that journey and they think, “Wow, what a sacrifice.” Like, you were giving up so much. But those … those who are closest to me will tell you I am not sacrificing. I’m actually kind of selfish. I do what I want to do. I’m living the life that I want to live with few willingness to make exceptions. What I decided though is I was no longer willing to get my fulfillment at the expense of others. I still was going to work toward these basic human needs for connection, for love, for belonging, for meaning, for purpose, for success. But, no longer was I willing to do it in a way that placed the burden of accomplishing those things on others. And so, it was basically this unraveling the web of consumerism and creating a new web. And that was a web of community, of connection, of living simply, of living sustainably and … and so on.
And so, after about two years, making one positive change per week, that’s a hundred changes. So, I was able to quite radically transform my life in a short period of time, but doing it step-by-step at my … at the pace that worked for me. And, I’ll acknowledge, like, I was 25, young, didn’t have kids or a mortgage or a job, since I ran my own company. And that gave me that freedom to make it my full-time job to take my life back. It’s … this web of consumerism is so … we’re … we’re so wrapped into it that it’s incredibly hard to get out. It’s designed to not let us out. And, I have a substantial amount of … of privilege to be able to have so quickly been able to … to get out of it.
From the beginning, I knew that my objective was to be the change that I wished to see in the world. That’s what I learned from Mahatma Gandhi. He’s been an influence on me even before this awakening. He was always present in my life a little bit. And, the other thing I learned from him was not just to be the change I wish to see in the world, but this concept of letting your life be your message. That being a form of activism. So, to … to lead by example and to live it out loud. So, at the very beginning, I had … that’s what I was doing. I documented this whole transformation. The original … one of my original articles was called “From Drunk Dude to Dude Making a Difference.” And that’s what I did. I documented each of these changes, step-by-step. It was a timeline of transition that you could see the change. And then, as I … as I continued on that, my objective was to do environmental activism, to do adventures, environmental adventures, that were designed to catch people’s attention, to catch the mainstream media’s attention, and to reach a lot of people. From the beginning, I knew that’s what I wanted to do — reach a lot of people.
So, my first … and I’ll just acknowledge that part of the reason for that was because that’s just who I’ve always been. I’ve always been an entertainer. I’ve always been someone who likes attention. So, how could I use those gifts? We all have our own gifts. Those were gifts I had. How could I use them in a way that was … instead of just pure comedy through catching people’s attention? Now, whenever the attention would be on … be on me, it could be a meaningful message.
So, my first adventure was to bike across the United States on a bicycle made out of bamboo to live sustainability to the extreme, and in doing so, all across the country from San Francisco to Vermont for 4,700 miles, and bring people in to all of these little tidbits of my life. Like, where is my water coming from? How am I interacting with electricity? Where’s my food coming from? And I set all these rules to the extreme where I was living off the grid while traveling across the country. And if I wanted to go into a building that only had automatic doors, I had to wait until someone else walked in and then walk in with them. [laughter] I couldn’t push the crosswalk button because that would be using electricity from on the grid. So, like, the … to the deepest level that I could go. And, I had no following when I started really. And, this was 2013, before YouTube was what it is today. Instagram was barely a thing. Facebook videos weren’t really a thing even yet. But, what I did is, I basically just posted in the Facebook groups. Here’s what I’m doing and just built it up, little by little.
And then as I crossed the country, what I started to do was I’d ride my bike up to the local news stations. And, I’d say, “Hey, I’m biking across the country for sustainability with a bike, you know, a bamboo bike covered in solar panels.” And, I’d say, “Would you be interested in doing a story?” And, they would say, “Well, this is Holdrege, Nebraska. There’s nothing else going on here tonight, so absolutely, we’ll do a story.” And, it was found very quickly, I was able to reach thousands of people, then tens of thousands of people, then getting to New York, millions of people. And, from a very beginning, I was able to reach a lot of people. And I decided very quickly that the way that I was going to reach people was not through guilt or shame, not through saying that there’s a good way and a bad way, not that there’s a right way or a wrong way, but just that there’s another way. Here’s the way that our societal norms and structures are set up. Here’s the truth behind that, or a truth behind that. And here’s another way of doing it.
And if you’re excited to do that other way, I am filling my website with all the resources you need to be able to go down that rabbit hole that I’m in as well. So, plugging people into the solutions with no guilt or shame, no right or wrong, no good or bad, no ‘have to’ or ‘should.’ Just here’s another way. Here’s alternative ways of doing things.
In 2016 … so, a few years in … Peter at the beginning mentioned one of my projects which is, for one month, I lived like the average person. I actually set aside my ethics for the month, and I lived like the average person in New York City — eating, shopping — just like most of us are used to, which, that adds up to creating 4 1/2 pounds of trash per day. That’s what the average person makes. That’s 135 pounds per month. So, what I did is, I lived that way, but I had one big exception and that was that I could not … I had no garbage can. Instead, I had to wear every single piece of trash that I created. And I had a clear plastic suit that was designed to be able to hold 135 pounds through 160 hours of someone creating a suit with a backpack frame inside, that could support all of this weight where … where I could put the plastic straw here and the Starbucks cup here. And, I just … I just went grocery shopping like the average person. I … I took the Metro around, and each day I got larger and larger. When I tried to go to the movie theaters, they did not let me in. [laughter] I think maybe they thought I was hiding some snacks in there. [laughter] And, people would walk up to me. I remember Day Three, a woman, she was probably in her fifties. She walked up to me and she said, “I know I’m from New York City and I’m supposed to have seen it all, but I have to ask, “What are you doing?” [laughter] And, my answer was, “Well, I’m just living like the average person, but I’m wearing all of my garbage.” And, you could see the light bulb would go off. “Oh, that’s me.” “That’s what I would look like.” So, without the judgment or the guilt or the shame, the walls are down and there … people are more often open to receive messages that they wouldn’t otherwise be open to receive.
So, that’s the design of my activism and my activism is also designed to be very visual. We live in very visual times, and so, I always have visuals with me, generally, in order to help to make stories easier to tell. And, what I really like to do is, I like to go on to the local news stations and newspapers and talk shows and things like that and be able to create pretty easy-to-understand narratives that, like, I start out kind of at the base level, but then we can go deep. So, for example, with wearing all of my trash, it’s, like, you don’t have to be interested in waste in the slightest to be wondering, “Why is this … what’s going on here?” And, then we get to say, “Oh yeah, the average person creates this much trash.” Interesting. And then we get to go to this idea, well, we have the … we have the term ‘throw away,’ but we now know that there is no such thing as ‘away’ on this Earth. We’ve seen the oceans filling up with garbage, and we now know that a … a landfill is just a nice way of saying “organized littering.” It’s just a hole that we’ve said, “This is where we’re going to put our garbage.” We live on what Carl Sagan calls a ‘pale blue dot.’ That’s us. Eight billion of us living on this, basically marble, in the grand scheme of things. We’re all global neighbors. And in the past, this world seemed like an infinite place. It was reasonable, because it wasn’t that long ago where if you tried to travel across the ocean, the good chance you were going to die. This was a big, big place. But now, anyone of us here with a credit card can buy a ticket and we can fly around the entire globe in 48 hours, while actually gaining weight eating the food that they provide to us, while being connected to the ground below via high-speed access, and watching latest movies on the TV right in front of us. That’s how tiny of a world that we live in. So, that’s where I really like to go with my activism is, it’s, like, alright. I bring … I do these interesting things, but then all of a sudden people are, like, “Whoa! I wasn’t expecting that’s where I was going to be today on Instagram!”
So, over the last ten years, that’s what I’ve done — these immersive activism campaigns that are always authentic. It’s me living my life. It’s me. It’s me exploring what exactly would I want to be exploring, but with this element of showmanship, you could say, or … yeah, there’s this element of, like, ‘stuntness’ to it. That’s always been me. And, I guess that’s starting to bring us to here. What I’ve consistently come back to, over and over and over through my activism is food. I never planned that to be the way, but it keeps coming back to food.
In the beginning of my activism, I did a lot of raising awareness about food waste, because I like to dumpster dive. I learned how to dumpster dive, and I learned that one in seven US Americans are food insecure while we throw away about 165 billion dollars’ worth of food per year. Enough to feed two entire US American populations while so many of our neighbors are food insecure. So, for a long time, that’s where most of my food came from — grocery store dumpsters. I was eating like a dumpster king — very, very well. And that’s where, for a long time. I loved it. Kip just mentioned we did a Food Waste Fiasco in 2014 in San Diego. We would collect thousands of dollars’ worth of perfectly good food, lay it out in a public park, and show people: this is the tip of the food waste iceberg. It’s happening right here in our community.
And then we’d talk about solutions. What we can do for breaking free from that system. After five years of doing that, I really wanted to see: could I … could I break free from that system? I was happy with what I was doing because I was not supporting the system, I was living off the waste of it, which is actually a very environmentally-conscious way of living — you’re diverting this food waste from the landfill, you’re not putting any money into the system. But, I wanted to see: could I live independent of that system? The way that I came up with for doing that was to grow and forage 100 percent of my food for an entire year. I had just left San Diego in 2016 after five years of living there. I traveled for sometime, and in 2017, I chose Orlando, Florida, as my place to settle down for this experience. And, a lot of people are, like, “Orlando, Florida! Why would you go there? That’s like the consumer capital of the world.” That’s Disney World, or Disneyland, whichever it is. And the reason why is that I was traveling through on a little speaking tour and I met the community of Orlando Permaculture. And there were over 100 people who were turning their yards into food forests. And I was just embraced by that community and I found there was so much knowledge there. And that’s where I decided to do this.
I had two main obstacles to overcome. First, I didn’t know how to grow food or forage really. I had a little experience working in community gardens, planting community fruit trees and such, but I have never been around much to see something grow from, like, seed to fruit or veg. And the way that I remedied that is that I got there and within days, I just soaked in the knowledge. I went to the Orlando Permaculture Group. There’s a Fleet Farming nonprofit. The local community gardens, the nurseries, YouTube channels, books. And, I asked questions like, “What grows so well here that you have so much that you have to give away?” Not, “What do I want to eat?” But what’s … what … what takes over the garden with so much abundance? And, I just really tapped into the community.
I gave myself originally six months to go from zero percent to 100 percent. The reason why is because I was … I’m quite the traveler, and if I gave myself too much longer than that, I was afraid that I would be wanting to, you know,
uproot myself. So, I gave myself just six months to prepare — to go from zero to 100 percent before the year would begin.
Six months didn’t turn out to be enough. And the reason mostly is because we started four community programs: Community Fruit Trees, which we hopefully will talk a little bit about tonight; Gardens for Single Moms; the Free Seed Project; and Community Compost. Because the goal wasn’t just for me to grow and forage all my food, but to be a part of a movement of … of helping to build this community of growing and foraging and food sovereignty.
So, six months … it was … took ten months before the year began. But, the other big problem when I started was I didn’t own any land. I had no land to grow my food on. So, the way that I solved that is I put the word out in the community that I was looking for yards to turn into gardens. And, quickly, I had a list of over three dozen people who wanted me to turn their yard into a garden. So, I learned that it turns out there’s a lot of people who are very tired of their lawns and they would rather have an abundance of food and medicine growing right outside of their doors. I turned six yards into gardens, and over that year, I foraged 200 different foods and medicines, between plants and fungi, as well as fishing. And then, I grew 100 different foods in my gardens. And, the year went very well. I can easily, you know, talk about that year for an hour-and-a-half, but I am going to share just two takeaways … two of the biggest takeaways. It was toward the end of the year and I was standing in the frontyard garden where it all began. Actually, I have my book here from that year and I can show you this garden. Where I started was … was this. You can see it’s just an empty lawn. Just grass, nothing else. If any of you have the book in front of you, it’s page 66. Within four months, that went to this. So, you can see the green, you know, the change in the scene. And within four months, we had enough food to be already sharing with a lot of our neighbors. And then after — toward the end of the year — this is the garden here. And, so, I’m standing in this frontyard garden, and I realized that I’m almost a foot higher up from the sidewalk than I was when I started. What that was is bringing in mulch from companies that chop down the trees and trim the trees. That mulch is a waste product. But, I would just have them dump it in the yard, and that mulch turns into soil. So, that’s all carbon sequestered, because it often … sometimes it goes to the landfill, and then that turns into soil. So, I realized I’ve been harvesting hundreds of pounds of food and medicine, a wide diversity of dozens of plants, and there’s not less to give them than when I arrived, there’s more to give. So, this for me, was the realization of reciprocity. Each of us as human beings can actually be stewards to our little patches of land and help there to be more abundance. Which is a very different story from the idea that we are a cancer upon this Earth. If this is cancer, this is the type of cancer that I want to be for this Earth.
The other big realization: in the past, when I was driving down the highway, I would see the billboards for fast food and, you know, all of that. The blizzards at Dairy Queen, the ice cream cones at McDonald’s — those were the billboards that would catch my eye. And now, I saw the billboards for Mother Earth. Everywhere I went. I saw the mulberries and the loquats and the Surinam cherries and the elderberry, the black walnuts, the stinging nettle. I saw goldenrod, the vervain, everywhere that I went. I saw food and medicine growing all around me. And this was the Earth, saying, “Here I am to provide you with your needs.”
That was in 2019, when I finished that year. And, in 2022, I set out for a similar project, and that was for one month … just a month this time. I would forage all of my food and medicine. So, no gardens this time. And I set out … I started in my homeland of northern Wisconsin, and I did a trip to New York, teaching along the way. I gave myself just nine days to … just to harvest and prepare before the year began … before the month began. And, at the end of that month, I went straight to the grocery store and I bought myself some pints of pecan butter. I was depleted. That was it. That was all I had in me was just one month.
So, fast forward to now, three years after that, and I am now immersed in a year of foraging all of my food and medicine. I would absolutely not have been able to do that then. That was just a little prelude. And, this idea really came to me while I was here in California, last year. I was … I was actually sitting — I think in 29 Palms in vipassana meditation, and I asked myself, “What do I want to do with my life more than anything in the world right now?” And, it came so clear that I want to move back to my homeland, the land that made me, and I wanted to immerse in a year of foraging all my food and medicine. And, I wanted to do this as an embodiment of love. That’s like … that’s … that’s part of this experiment right now is …. I’m … I’m wondering, “What if … what if my job is just to love?” “What if my job was to exist in a state of love?” And, some people do that through purely mental, through meditation and putting this energy out, which has its place and is wonderful, but what I’m experimenting with is living in a state of love through every single one of my daily actions. Like, what if … through my … and then, through that, what if through embodying that love, other people around me feel it and they start to love the Earth more as well? So, that’s kind of the deeper element of … of this … of what I’m doing. And then, the other element is, I from … I’ve always had this desire to really find a true home on this Earth in the deepest way. We are kind of taught that we each have our home. It’s this box, or in Ojai, you might have a dome instead of a box. That … that’s our home. We go out and, you know, we’re not home. Maybe we’re at home in Ojai, but you, you know, you go out there and it’s, like, you’re not home anymore. But, I am experimenting this … with this … this idea of feeling at home here on Earth. And that’s a deep part of this practice.
Besides that though, I also just really like food. And foraging provides some of the most delicious and nutritious foods on Earth. So, on that note, is anybody interested in hearing about what’s in these jars and what I’m eating?
[Audience:] Yeah.
[Robin:] Did I hear a “finally?” Or a “hallelujah”? [laughter] I know at least one person out there was, like, “Finally, the jars!” I’ll share about what’s in these jars along with a few lessons that are inside of these jars for about 15 or so minutes, and then share a few closing remarks, and then open it up to questions. How does that sound to everybody?
So, first: wild rice. It’s hard to believe this, but last time I was in Ojai, I didn’t have wild rice, right? Unfathomable to me right now. Last time I was in Ojai, I had just finished the experiment of non-ownership. So, I was sitting in this chair and I still owned absolutely nothing. Now I own, like, 500 jars probably. I’m the jar man. Officially, the jar man. [laughter]
The experiment of non-ownership, for those of you who are wondering, is not the past. It’s still the present. I have … I do own some things and right now what I own is basically the bare necessities that it takes to … to live this life connected with Earth and the resources that I need to be able to share this message with people.
So, here we have wild rice. This is a staple food for me. I harvested about 75 pounds of wild rice last fall in the preparation for this year. Which … one other note. The preparation for this year began July 1st, about a month … two months after I left Ojai. And, I gave myself three months of preparation time. Anything that I have now, I could … I could only have because it came once that preparation period of July 1st started. Gave myself three months to prepare, and then October 9th was the first day of the year, and today is about Day 225. So, I’m about 7 1/2 months into the year. And, 7 1/2 months into the year means my wild rice is starting to dwindle. That 75 pounds is down to ten pounds. That’s what I have left. And this is my staple. I don’t know what’s … what life is going to … I’m not even going to think about that right now. [laughter] It’s a … it’s a little much to think about. This is … this is one of the most important plants in my life. I’ve said that this is the plant that has changed me at the core, more than any other plant. I could very much talk about wild rice for … for an hour. I’m going to share for a couple of minutes.
The reason that I love wild rice so much is because this is a plant that has … this is a plant that there has been an unbroken 700-year relationship with between the Anishinaabe people and Manoomin. That’s another name for wild rice. The good berry, the ‘food that grows on water.’ And, when I’m with wild rice, I’m taking part in that unbroken plant/human relationship where … where people have been true stewards of this rice and people of this rice. You have ‘people of the corn,’ ‘people of the wheat,’ ‘people of the potatoes,’ ‘people of the quinoa.’ Well, the land where I’m from — it’s the ‘people of the wild rice.’ You know, they are the people of the wild rice.’ And, to get to take part in that is a … is a very truly special experience. How it works is, you go out in a canoe, like has been done for a very long time. There’s regulations around it. It’s regulated by GLIFWC, the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission along with the DNR, Department of Natural Resources. You can start wild ricing at 10:00 a.m. The idea being that the dew has had time to come off the plant, evaporate off and the … the … the rice heads have had time to ripen more, to be ready for being knocked that day. You go out with your canoe. There’s usually two people. One person’s poling. There’s … you have, like, a 16-foot pole, standing in the back, poling along, and then the other person is — we call it ‘knocking,’ but, it’s not really a knock. It’s more gentle than a knock. But, so, it’s basically all day long. You’ve got a poler and you’ve got a knocker, and you’re bringing the rice heads over the boat. And with each time you do that, it’s a “whoosh,” “whoosh,” and with each “whoosh,” that’s another bite. “Whoosh,” another bite. “Whoosh,” another bite. Another bite. But, it’s not just another bite. It just takes you in. The redwing blackbirds and the muskrats and the bluegill and the muskellunge and the rice worms that bite you that most people don’t like, but I eat them. I bite them when they bite me. [laughter] It’s just this deep immersion with the plant. I mean, and from 10 a.m. ’til 9 p.m. — ’til sunset. So, about 9 1/2 hours that time of year, you’re with this plant just all day. And, it’s often these beds are hundreds of acres. So you can get … you can be just lost in these beds of rice. And, when the day goes, you know, really well, you … you can have a canoe that’s full. And, on my really good days out, I end up being able to take home 35 pounds of wild rice from one day of ricing. So, that’s some real sustenance. And, we love what sustains us. And this sustains me. I’m here today, having the time … having the availability to be able to share with you, in large part, due to the gift of wild rice. Because it’s so transportable, storeable, and I can bring this with me, and I can stand behind that door ’til 6:30 and eat my wild rice just before the talk begins. [laughter] So, it’s a truly joyful plant. And, I want to share just a deep level of gratitude to the Anishinaabe people for stewarding this rice. Some people say, “Well, you’re not native. Are you supposed to be harvesting the wild rice?” And the answer is, “Yes.” And, here’s why. Because there … there are a lot of people who know that the more people who love the wild rice and have a deep relationship with the wild rice, the more it will thrive. When we harvest wild rice, we do it in a way that every … every single one of those “whoosh” that I’m mentioning, their traditional ecological knowledge, bunch of those rice kernels … they don’t fall in the boat. They knock right into the water. We’re actually planting the rice with every single swipe. And that helps the beds to thrive. When I’m out with the wild rice, it’s a … it’s, like, if you’re foraging, right? That’s foraging, right? That’s wild. Definitely wild. Right? But, really, I’m thinking about it. If the Anishinaabe people have been stewarding this rice for 700 years, am I foraging or am I in somebody else’s garden? And that’s the real idea of foraging. It’s breaking down the separateness and seeing the interconnectedness between it all and starting to critically think and be a part of these ecosystems. So, I’m going to pass around this wild rice. Feel free to smell this wild rice. Feel free to put your fingers in there and feel the wild rice. And, even if you want to eat a grain of the wild rice, you are very welcome to do that. So, thank you Manoomin.
This is [one of] my top ten wild edible plants. This is stinging nettle. How many of you have been stung by stinging nettle? Alright. A good number of us. I can see we’re a community of people that like to be outside. And, how many of you, when you were stung, loved it? Okay, a few of us. So, my hope’s that you walk away from here with, for some of you, a new … a new thought about this and you might actually learn to love the sting of stinging nettle. First, okay. How do you eat this plant? There’s three different main ways you work with this in a way that doesn’t sting you. You can cook it. So, if you make tea, if you boil it to make stinging nettle tea, or you add it to your soups and stews, that destroys the stingers, so you don’t have to worry about getting stung in the mouth. If you dehydrate it like I have here, that also … they say it completely destroys the stingers, but sometimes I get a couple little stings. But, it basically destroys the stingers. Or, you blend it. A lot of people make stinging nettle pesto and that destroys the stingers as well. So, this is a wonderful food and medicine. It’s very high in minerals. That’s one reason that a lot of people love this plant. But, it is full of a lot that I can’t tell you all the details, but some herbalists would be able to tell you all the many benefits of stinging nettle.
Now, as far as the sting goes, there’s a couple … couple benefits of that. There’s the very known practice of urtication. That is the intentional stinging of the human body. Well, I say human body. I guess you could do it to animals, too, probably. But, it’s the stinging of the body and there’s two … among other ways that it’s worked with, when you sting … for people who have diabetes … when you sting the skin, it helps to stimulate blood flow — bring it to the surface. So, it’s used for working … for people with diabetes. And then, for people with arthritis, you can sting the joints and it helps with arthritis. I’ve talked to a lot of people who have actually said it helps with their allergies as well. I mentioned earlier that one of the greatest threats to our humanity is the belief that we’re separate. Along with that is this general feeling of separation. With that, you know, here we are. We sit in our air conditioned homes, watching the TV and often we feel kind of depressed, kind of alone, lonely when we’re doing that. And, stinging nettle … what’s interesting about this is when we’re stung, it actually releases endorphins into our system. So, it turns out the answer to that loneliness and depression sometimes may be to turn off the TV, go outside and get stung by a little bit of stinging nettle. [laughter] And then know, when you’re stung, really. When I’m stung, what happens is my body says, “I’m alive!” Our sleepy state is awoken by the stinging nettle. And I think that’s the true power of this plant.
Here we have venison. And, I have not hunted a deer. And the reason I have not yet is because where I live, 20,000 deer are killed by cars per year. I have to take that statement back. I don’t think a single deer is killed by a car. It’s humans driving the cars that are actually doing it, if I’m accurate with my words. But 20,000 deer are killed by humans driving cars per year. And so, I harvest my deer from the side of the road. Some people call that ‘roadkill.’ But, I call it a deer that was hit by a car. [laughter] And the reason for that is because when we say ‘roadkill,’ we other it. We create this gory scene. We create this, you know, we create this whole stigma around it. But, the deer was a deer while it was walking along, it was a deer when it was hit, and it’s still a deer when it’s laying on the side of the road. And, a lot of times, they look like a sleeping animal. They’re … you know, sometimes they’re damaged really bad and other times they’re not. So, this is a staple food for me. Car-killed venison.
I also eat a lot of fish. In this jar here, I have smelt. That’s a bait fish — smelt. You can harvest sardines. Well, we have smelt on Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin. And, each day, I generally eat about a pound of fish or venison. So, they’re very … they’re staple foods for me. Some of you might be thinking, “How does this guy have a jar of meat just sitting out here in the room not refrigerated?” This is called pressure canning. So, when you can this, it super heats it up, killing any bacteria, including botulism spores, and then when you take it out [of the pressure canner], it vacuum seals, keeping anything from getting in there, and then it stores long term. So, I carry it with me on this trip through California. I’m on a two-month tour right now. I have about 50 jars of fish, and I eat about a jar of it a day or so. So, I have my … I have my … my fish, my venison. Well, I need … I need to, hopefully, when I get to northern California find a deer. But, I carry a lot of food with me.
Now, here’s a plant that is not a dead animal from the side of the road and won’t sting you. This is just good old pear sauce. So, no controversy here, I don’t think. And, I eat a lot of sauces: applesauce, pear sauce and plum sauce are sort of my main ones. And for this, this top row in the quart jars, this represents my sustenance: calories, fat, protein. And the fruit, you know, that makes up a substantial amount of calories, but also, of course, a lot of nutrients. It’s all interconnected though. Every single food here is also a medicine. This is the way that I am practicing here: the concept of “let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food.” It’s all medicine — the deer, the fish, the ramps, the Brazilian pepper. Even this. Even this sugar is medicine. Maple syrup from the red maple trees of northern Wisconsin. I only got seven or so pints. [drinks] Ooh! [laughter]I did six months without sugar because I started in the fall and maple syrup doesn’t come ’til the spring. And, the first time this hit my lips, wow! That is truly good. If I end up sleeping over … which happens sometimes with people that I meet in the audience, you will get a sip of my maple syrup, but there’s not enough for this whole room. [laughter] But Pete … definitely some maple syrup is in store. [laughter] [audience response garbled] That’s all right. Thanks. Yeah.
So, here we have green powder. I take lots of greens and I dehydrate them, turn them into a powder and many people go to the store and buy green powder. You can do that with mulberries and basswood leaves, and wild mustard and plantago, nasturtium, dandelion flowers — dandelion greens. So many of the plants that are called weeds are … are super foods. You know, a lot of the weeds that we have are actually far more nutritious than the very foods that we’re cultivating in our gardens. So, I eat a lot of weeds. Weeds are just a human-made concept. There’s no such things as a weed. That’s just an idea. And, I eat a lot of those. And, ideally, I eat those fresh every day. Today, I harvested about a half-pound of wild mustard. If you’re looking for a great way to start foraging in southern California, wild mustard is [one of] my top three, maybe even my number one recommendation. The reason why is because this wild mustard is considered an invasive plant. And, we spend millions of taxpayer dollars trying to destroy these plants. But, we can literally just eat them instead. So, what an … what an invasive plant is … I don’t call plants invasive. The reason why is that that’s a label and it’s a label that puts this hate and this, you know, blame around it. What … what … what we’re saying when we are saying ‘invasive’ is a plant from another ecosystem was introduced to this ecosystem and being here is doing harm to the native ecosystem by outcompeting the native plants generally or other misgivings. But when we just label it ‘invasive,’ we’re not taking responsibility for the fact that a plant is the way that it is because most often human beings took it from one place and brought it to another place without doing their diligence, and it’s actually our out-of-balance relationship with the plants. So, that’s why I don’t use the term ‘invasive.’ However, with that said, for anybody that’s concerned about foraging who thinks to themselves, [aside: thank you] who thinks to themselves, “Ooh, I don’t know if I want to forage because there’s already not enough food for the animals, and I certainly don’t want to take from the animals when we’ve taken so much.” Well, the answer to that is to become … you’ve heard of an herbivore, an omnivore, maybe a locovore … well, you can become an invasivore. A person who focuses on eating invasive plants is one of the best ways as a forager to be doing ecosystem services with every single bite that we take. So, wild mustard. Leave here today, never look at wild mustard the same. If you’ve been looking at it with disdain, and start to look at it with …. Like, look at it like this. It’s like broccoli, but with a bit of spiciness and just … just better. Better than broccoli. Saute’ it up in some olive oil or whatever … whatever cooking fat that you use, or … or steam it or blanch it. You can also eat the pods … the wonderful pods. You can also harvest the seeds when they’re ripe and make your own mustard. So, that’s one of the wonderful plants of southern California.
Here we have seaweed. We definitely live in seaweed zone here in California. I harvested this in Portland, Maine on about Day One of the year of foraging all my food and medicine. In about 40 minutes, I harvested a multiple year’s supply of seaweed. This is rockweed and bladderwrack. Kelp is a really abundant one to harvest. How many of you have harvested seaweed in the Pacific Ocean? Alright. I might follow you home because I’m looking for the knowledge of how to harvest seaweed in the Pacific. I’ve only done it in the Atlantic. So, a wonderful, wonderful resource that is available.
This is Brazilian pepper. Which here, in California, you have the California pepper, the little pink peppercorns. The Brazilian peppers are considered invasive. How about the California pepper? Is that native? [audience member responds] Peruvian peppers! Okay. Most of the Peruvian. And that’s … is that considered invasive or … yeah, ‘ish.’ Not like Florida. In Florida, it’s extreme. It is really extreme. So, these are the peppercorns. You can eat the peppercorns of the Brazilian or Peruvian pepper. And, if you’re looking for black pepper, this is not it. It’s fruity. It’s floral with a kick of some sort of spice. Ad, traditionally, more used with meats, which is kind of one of the main ways to work with it. It took me awhile to really like it, and now [sips] I love it. And, this is abundant and I’d be very happy for you all to try a peppercorn if you’d like to. If you’ve already had one, have one anyway. And, I will just make one small note: this is in the Anacardiaceae family, which is the same family as cashew, mango, poison ivy, or sister ivy. So, if you’re particularly allergic to any of those, then, you get to choose what you want to do here. [laughter] What some people do here when they’re trying new plants like this is they don’t eat it. They just rub it up against their lips .. the inside of their lips. That’s one of the ways to allergy test with mew foraged foods. The problem with that is that when you’re foraging 100 percent of your food and you find something you really like, you, it never works. I always end up eating a lot of it. [laughter] So far, so good.
Okay. A note about salt. So, I harvest my salt from the ocean. Down to the … everything. Everything that I’m eating for the entire year is coming from what I’m harvesting. And, what I’m harvesting with others. I have had hundreds of people … yeah, maybe I’ve … maybe harvested with hundreds of people over the last 225 days.
So, how I make salt is really simple. I go to the ocean with a five-gallon bucket, or a jar, or any container, take that home and then, if you have the time, you can just dump that into glass baking trays, like the ones that are about that thick … and it takes about one week for that to evaporate down and be left with just salt crystals that have … where the water evaporates off. If you have a woodstove and you’re already heating your home, then you can just put that pot on there, the water boils off, you’re left with salt. Or, when I’m on the road and I need some salt in a more quick way, I carry my Instant Pot with me and I just plug that into a wall, turn it on, the water evaporates over time, and I’m left with salt. I always harvest from the cleanest beaches that I have around. And some people say, “What about the microplastics?” Well, there was a recent study that showed 26 of 27 brands of salt tested had microplastics in them. What do you know? The come from the ocean, too, just like when you harvest it yourself. Again, that’s … I think another big thing is people are really concerned about foraging because of pollutants and pesticides. But, you got to remember … a lot of our food is growing along I5 that’s at the grocery store. And, if anybody is saying, like, they’re concerned about this but then they’re going through the drive-thru at McDonald’s …. It’s, like, alright. The cognitive dissonance there. But, even if you’re, like, “Alright. I only buy USDA organic.” Who runs the USDA? Right now, it’s the Trump administration. But, even when it was the Obama administration, did they have permaculturists in that administration? Not many of them. And the USDA is a revolving door. Corporations like Monsanto who are going in, changing the laws for their own benefit at our expenses. So, when we are foraging, we have to ask … we have to be just as critical about the food at the store as we are when we’re foraging.
I’m going to move sort of quickly through these small jars. This is my main spice. And this is ramp powders. Or wild onion. There’s many different wild onions. We have a wild onion that grows here in California, but probably numerous. Is it numerous species of them? Yeah. Throughout the state, I would imagine. And, then, I also have bee balm, Monarda, which has oreganol in it, like, oregano? And that’s a strong oregano-type flavor. And, that’s my main spice.
Another one of my big flavorings is fermented foods. This is wild garlic/onion. And, this has changed in flavor and smell quite a bit over the last two months of sometimes being frozen in the mountains of North Carolina to crossing the desert where it was 100 degrees a week ago and sitting in a trunk in LA. So, let’s see how it tastes today. [takes bite] Very nice. Right off the bat. It’s, like, … it’s like almost got a cheesiness to it. I’m going to pass this around. [laughter] And I welcome you to smell it. I welcome you to smell it. I welcome you to take the deepest smell that you’ve ever smelled. That’s a salt brine. Two-and-a-half percent salt. That’s the typical of wild fermentation.
Okay. Thank you.
Okay, So, I am going to start wrapping it up here. One note about wild fermentation, if you’re interested in that. I have all … many of the books that I recommend that are in the realm of what we’re talking about tonight. For that, you have Pascal, How do you pronounce Pascal’s last name?
[Lanny:] Bodar.
[Robin:] And he has Wildcrafted Fermentation. We’re so grateful to have him as a southern Californian. And, his book is an incredible resource for that. And then, of course, the incredibly radical Sandor Katz. How many of you know Sandor Katz? Not enough. This is an incredible book. He’s been called the Johnny Appleseed of fermentation by Michael Pollan. So, if you’re interested in learning about wild fermentation, those are … those are great resources.
Moving quickly through the last jars here. Apple cider vinegar, mushrooms. I eat a lot of mushrooms, almost every single day. Not psychedelic mushrooms. Those are just something I microdose, which I foraged in Atlanta actually this year, which was … which was a wonderful thing. But, many edible mushrooms. These are king boletes, for example. This is maitake mushrooms in a … blended into a … a powder and I add this in with my wild rice and such. We have cattail pollen, which is a superfood.
This is a really unique one: roasted persimmon seeds. You can roast them, blend them up, and they make a wonderful, wonderful beverage. I’m not going to pass that around because I’m going to keep us moving. And then … and then down here … lots of fruits. So, I have autumn olive. I have elderberry, serviceberry. I have choke cherry leather. If you’re looking for a wild source of caffeine, yaupon holly. Genus and species is Ilex vomitoria. Doesn’t grow here, but in the Gulf Coasts. It is a very abundant plant. It’s a relative of yerba mate, which grows in South America. Well, we have a North American version of yerba mate. Similar nutritional profile to green tea. And, if you’re looking for the most sustainable source of caffeine, this would be it. There are companies that wildcraft it and sell it if you look it up online. So. Yaupon holly. And then, down here, lots of herbal teas. There’s probably … there’s about 50 different herbal teas that I’ve worked with this year.
So, that’s an introduction to what’s in here. I also have to eat a lot of nuts that are in these. Black walnuts, hickory nuts, hazelnuts, pecans and acorns … make up the majority of my nut eating.
So, there’s so much more to say, but I’m going to … I’m going to close so we can have some time for questions. And, in closing, I’ll say, “Foraging is safe.” The number one rule of foraging is only eat something if you are 100 percent sure you have proper identification. Foraging is not guesswork. The knowledge is all here. We have these four books for California which, we have … this is California Foraging by Judith Larner Lowry. We have Foraging California by Christopher Nyerges. Is that how you pronounce Christopher’s last name?
[Lanny:] Nyerges.
[Robin:] Nyerges. And then the very man who is helping me with pronunciation, Lanny Kaufer? Is that how you pronounce your last name?
[Lanny:] Kaufer.
[Robin:] Kaufer. So, want to come up for a second, Lanny, and tell people about this book and how people can take classes from you? [applause] Speaking of medicinal herbs of California, we have Lanny here and you have a great resource in this community for learning foraging.
[Lanny:] Thank you. Thank you for this opportunity. Those of you who know me know I’m very shy. I don’t like to talk. So, yeah, it’s only 8 o’clock. We’ve got an hour. [laughter] Well, I am happily celebrating this year fifty years of leading herb walks, starting here in Ojai and around. I see a number of familiar faces, but quite a few that I don’t recognize. Partly because I’m getting old, [laughter] but also maybe you haven’t been on one of my walks. So, I wrote this book in ’20-’21, Medicinal Herbs of California, and it’s like the companion volume to Christopher’s book on foraging California. Same publisher. And they’re great. They have great editors and they really worked with me to organize a book that I thought was what I wanted to present. And when I told them, well, there’s going to be about 350 citations in this book, to footnotes, to the sources of this information. “Oh, we don’t do footnotes in our guides.” Well, you’re going to have to this time. Because you wanted a book that said ‘medicinal,’ and I’m not going to say it’s medicinal if I can’t show people the proof. The proof is there. So, I’m … actually, I’ll just take a minute because my current obsession right now that I can’t think of much else is that my partners and I are putting on the Ojai Herbal Retreat next Saturday, the 30th. And some of our volunteers are here, and the volunteer coordinator is here. So, that’s on my other website, Ojai Herbal. But my main website is Herbwalks. Herbwalks.com. I know you can remember that. Go and check it out. You’ll see what I have coming up. And, I’m having a free event on June 27th, my fifty-year anniversary party at the … a few blocks from here at the Chumash Garden at the Ojai Valley Museum. So, we’ve been doing a lot of work on that garden and I’m really proud of what … what it’s turning into, and we’re going to have a little garden tour and some refreshments. So, you can RSVP for that also on my website. And, I’ll be happy, you know, to participate in the conversation about teas and things around here.
[Robin:] Wonderful.
[Lanny:] Maybe we’ll get to go on a walk.
[Robin:] I hope so. I have some teas to learn from you.
[Audience member:] I have a personal testimony on Lanny. Took a walk through the chaparral and I’ll never look at it the same again. So, glad to be with him. Can’t thank you enough. [unintelligible]
[Robin:] Thank you, Lanny. [applause] I’m so glad for that opportunity, because that really is one of the best ways to start foraging — is to go out with other foragers. It helps to make things more comfortable and relaxed. And you can just learn … even if you just learn one plant during a plant walk. You could spend two hours watching a movie, but if you spend two hours doing a plant walk, and you learn one plant, and then you work with that, next month, next year, the next ten years, talk about a valuable usage of your time, just learning one plant at a time. So, I created a database: findaforager.com, which is … which includes over 500 different foragers who teach in every state and we also have an international database. So, if you’re looking to learn from foragers like Lanny and Pascal, then you can go there and … and find foragers. Does anyone … are there any other foraging instructors in the house or any that we want to give a shout out to so that people know about the … about other … other teachers in the area?
[Audience member:] There’s a guy I met last weekend in Santa Barbara because I teach fermentation and some foraging, like, work … workshops in Santa Barbara, but without huge knowledge of these other amazing people. And there’s a guy who used to work [unintelligible] there, and he takes people out on foraging walks in Santa Barbara, and then they do, like, cooking and sharing food, and again, it’s all donation or just maybe kind of totally free. I’m not sure if it’s even donation-based. But, I have his contact details for anybody.
[Audience member:] What’s his name?
[Audience member:] Daniel Geiger. G E I G E R. And I have his Instagram because he just messaged me about something he’s doing next weekend, but I’m actually going fly fishing for the first time, good or bad. [unintelligible]
[Robin:] Wonderful. He may even already be on findaforager.com. Wonderful. Thank you.
So. One plant at a time. You don’t need to know all the toxic plants in order to know dandelion. You don’t need to know all the toxic plants in order to learn plantain or sage or mustard. So, my encouragement to you is one plant at a time. One plant at a time. Break free from the systems that no longer serve. And one plant at a time, come into a deeper relationship with the Earth and all of the life around us. And, it only takes a few hours to connect with one plant. So, if you learn one plant per month for a year, that’s 12 plants. Imagine walking out your door and being able to have 12 plants that you work with as food and medicine, and even more-so, that you consider a friend. Twelve friends that are out there with you all the time, everywhere you go. And, if you do that for five years, that’s 60 plants. Now you are way beyond Muggle status and you’re the Harry Potter of your little community. Just one plant at a time. So. And, foraging is absolutely something that can be done sustainably. It’s something humanity has done for a very long time. Anybody who tries to persuade you otherwise does not know the reality of the way that this can be done. So, one plant at a time, we can reconnect and live the life that we truly want.
I’m very grateful to be here to share this all with all of you. If you got a lot out of tonight, I’m on a speaking tour right now and I’m giving talks tomorrow in Fillmore, a foraging school at Lulu Restaurant on Sunday in Los Angeles. That’ll be a talk. There’ll be some foraged foods there as well. And then, I will be in Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz, San Francisco and East Bay. Davis, Sacramento, Grass Valley, Mount Shasta; Eugene, Oregon, Ashland and Portland; Seattle, Whidbey Island and Port Townsend. And, I’m teaching day-long foraging immersions in northern California, in San Francisco, in Portland, and in Port Townsend, as well as some of these are foraging walks and … and talks. So, if you have friends in any of those communities, I welcome you to let them know and spread the word so that people can have access to this knowledge. And, on that note, I would like to take time to go ahead and open it up to any questions that you have. And, I’ll call on you first. And, I want to say with questions, any questions that you have, whether they’re the most simple and, like, you know, you think maybe mundane, to like, “I don’t think I’m supposed to be asking this question.” I’m for all of them.
[Audience member:] Hi. What a great … I’m so happy to come. Thank you so much for all of this. Two questions. First, when you walk around, like, you walk around downtown in the vicinity, are you just seeing food everywhere?
[Robin:] So, yeah. Am I seeing food everywhere as I walk around? Yes. Although I will so … will say that the dry season of southern California, which we’re moving into, is a challenging time for finding much food. It’s definitely there’s going to be more medicinals, but I don’t know the southern California medicinals as much, especially not the naive plants because it’s such a different ecosystem from so much of the country. But generally, that’s my experience as I travel all across the country is that I … I see food and medicine everywhere. And, it’s the reason why it’s very hard to be on time to anywhere I’m going, [laughter] because when you see the goods, sometimes you got to harvest them as you’re driving past. So.
[Audience member:] So, the part two in terms of the event tomorrow, just hearing about it, are you going to take people out to find food?
[Robin:] Yes. So, tomorrow, it’s … it’s 10 to 5 and about four of those hours are walking around and meeting plants. We’ll meet 15 or so, different plants. And really learn how to identify, how to … how to harvest, how to make food and medicine from them. So, it’s very much like the knowledge from tonight that we didn’t get into as far as how do you forage, what do you forage, how do you do it effectively and efficiently, safely, sustainably. We have talk … we’ll talk about preservation. So, it’s a … it’s a … it’s a both hands, well, it’s not so hands-on. We’re not going to do a lot of actual foraging. It’s more teaching the plants so that you can go home and you can forage and then lots of knowledge to go with it.
[Audience member:] But an active vicinity is going to be dried stuff. [unintelligible]
[Robin:] Yeah, but it’s also … Eden Forest Collective is an active food growing site, which is a place where you have a much longer extended season. You have a lot of weedy greens and herbs. So, there’ll be … I mean, I did a plant walk in Griffith Park yesterday or the day before and I found 11 plants to teach. Well, I found 11 easy plants to teach and then there were ones beyond that. So, there’ll definitely be … okay, I’m not going to say definitely, but I’m, like, 99 percent sure there’ll be more plants than we have time to talk about.
[Audience member:] Thank you.
[Robin:] Yes, you’re welcome. I hope to see some of you there. Okay. Let’s go over here. Sure.
[Audience member:] Are they on your website?
[Robin:] Yes, the dates are on my website for everything. Good point: robingreenfield.org/schedule, has all of the locations, dates, registration, everything. Thank you for asking that. I … I forget that often. Yes. Uh, oh, yes. We’re doing questions. I forgot. In the back.
[Audience member:] There are countries in the world that have maybe a similar ecosystem, where people are food short, starving. Is there a way your program could develop something in these different places with … through some bigger organization, like, well, I don’t know who would … the … the government, not … not this government, but where they can learn to feed their children by going out and foraging?
[Robin:] Yes. So, the question about being able to share foraging knowledge in places where people are very food insecure, you know, where we have actual starvation and people’s lives are … are, you know, depending on … on a food source and often not having access to it. With that, first thing I want to do is I … I really like to … want to acknowledge my privilege in that regard. I often feel somewhat self-conscious. Here I am, a person of … of great privilege, spending so much of my time harvesting my own food and medicine while there’s all these people who are food insecure. And, I could, instead, be growing a garden, or harvesting food to give to other people. And here I am, you know, eating all this food. And, the reason that I choose to do this is because, you know, one of my teachers, and the teacher of many people in this room is Robin Wall Kimmerer. How many of you are familiar with Braiding Sweetgrass? She teaches us that one of the most important things we can do is to come into relationship with this Earth and help people to see the power of that relationship. And so, I come back to that even though there’s that struggle around it. I think it’s one of the most important things that we can do today is to truly embody that and deepen those skills and relationships. And then, so, as far as foraging in these countries, of course, foraging is still a … the more … the poorer, like, ‘monetarily poorer’ a place is, the more likely people are to be still foraging, because if there’s food around, people are going to eat it. You know, it’s we even as this nation, if we stopped having access to this influence, we would start foraging. We’d have to because, you know, death is the alternative. So, there is a lot of foraging in these countries already that’s not even called foraging. It’s just called eating. You know, foraging is just a word that’s used. But as far as programs that particularly teach foraging, I do not know of any. It’s a very interesting thing. I think what I would lean into doing to start is we have the international database of Find A Forager. And I would look through that and see if there’s foragers who that’s what they do. Like, going through there. That’s the most likely way we would find them is looking on their websites and seeing if they have any programs like that that already exist. And, there are … I do have friends that, in this country, focus particularly on teaching foraging to low-income communities who don’t have access to, you know, food from the grocery store as much. So, I
appreciate that question very much and it’s something that I am going to take the time to look into more. So, thank you for asking that.
[Audience member:] Could I add something in response?
[Robin:] Sure.
[Audience member:] We recently got to take a trip to Ghana to a friend from Ojai’s family village. [unintelligible] And there are mango trees abundant everywhere, but no one had tried dry mango other than one local who was dehydrating mango. And we would take it to our hotel staff and they were amazed at how good it was.. And so, just simply setting up solar dehydrators was a big change. I saw some new articles about how they were setting up some large-scale government dehydration programs and how much that was changing supporting. And we actually funded the ability to buy a peanut processing machine for the village. Ground nuts and peanuts are one of the main staple food sources for their people. And, with a few thousand dollars, all of a sudden they have this whole micro peanut processing business where people are coming from two hours away with giant bags of peanuts they used to shell by hand to this crazy contraption and all of a sudden splits your shells, your peanuts. And there are probably people in this room who donated to this, so thanks for helping make that possible. And so, my answer to foraging, they know what to eat, but sometimes helping them process for longer parts of the year can help.
[Robin:] Yeah. Basic food preservation technology can go so far with that. Thanks for sharing. Over here next to Matai.
[Audience member:] Thanks, Pete. Thank you so much, Robin. It feels beautiful for a human being to live with integrity, to what is resonating deeply with them, and to search outside and to find beauty and sustenance with whatever is growing. So, thank you for sharing that. And, to me, I felt that, all of us, we came to this room, you know, we actually slowed down in some ways in life, slowed … slowed down enough to listen to you, but also slowed down enough in our life to sort of let things percolate and let things settle down and all the nonsense in the world to just sort of compost away so that just the bare essential truth is revealed. So, I think that that is you … we mentioned about some of the larger, deeper things. Somehow to me that’s what I’m … it’s speaking to me is how we can actually slow down and even our nervous systems and our neurodiversity and how that also has connections with the world around. And, in foraging, you must be in a beautiful grounded state wherever you go and delight. And so, thank you for showing that.
[Robin:] You’re welcome. [applause] [sings] It’s the bare necessities, the simple bare necessities. How about here in the front? That … you … you just exactly what you spoke of. Thank you. I slowed down. That was very nice, my Friend.
[Audience member:] Before you started this journey, you mentioned the anxiety, the anger, the relationship with the parents. I was wondering how food and the relationship you created with all those plants help you to transform the relationship with people around you and especially with yourself and with your family.
[Robin:] Hmm. Yes. Thank you for asking. So how the relationship with plants transforms my relationships with the people around me?
[Audience member:] Yes. And yourself.
[Robin:] And myself.
[Audience member:] And your family.
[Robin:] Sure. Well, our relationships … a lot of us have this idea, like, if only they would change, everything would be all right. [laughter] But, the teachings that I’ve taken in are if we can … if we change ourselves, then that’s what we’ll have more around us. So, if we become peace, there’ll be more peace. And one of my teachers is Thich Nhat Hahn and one of his last books before he passed was Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet. And, that’s one of the teachings, that if we embody peace, there will be more peace around us. And, with that, for me, I have the practice of developing wholeness and completeness within. A human being who is whole and complete makes whole and complete relationships. A human being that is operating in a lacking and in a grasping, craving state is going to have more of that in their relationships. So, the big practice for me is to develop wholeness and completeness within not only for my own health and well-being, but also for every human being that I interact with. And that is very closely connected to the plants because the plants … what I found is the plants are part of that wholeness and completeness and the plants are everywhere. And so, when we’re with the plants, we’re never alone. Everywhere we go, we have our family and friends. And they don’t argue with us. So, it can be kind of easier, these relationships sometimes. They can help to they can bring us that peace, that wholeness and completeness, and then we can go into society, to our more difficult relationships with them. And then, of course, every person who you can bring in to this journey of the plants … the plants are healing. Amanda David, she runs an organization called Rootwork Herbals over in Ithaca, New York. She has that BIPOC community garden. She says, like, every ailment in society, the plants have the medicine for that. And that’s definitely what I feel. The plants are a great medicine.
So, they deeply … they deeply intertwine. And, a deeper … a deeper note on that is, 3 1/2 years ago, I decided to do a one-year break from sex, from romance, and, you know, a whole … a year of … of practicing wholeness and completeness within. And putting my … really putting my time and energy into that. And, that year went so well, I just felt I got so much gain that I was seeking — clarity and focus and connection and just … yeah, that feeling of wholeness and completeness that I didn’t need anything else outside of myself. And, part of the practice of it is to develop universal love with the simple concept that if we’re putting so much love into one individual entity, it’s hard to put that same amount of love into the everything. So I … I decided, I’m going to take my love out of that sexual, romantic form of love and where I put a lot of that love was into the plants. And that’s where the love’s been for the last 3 1/2 years because I continued that experiment of nonsexuality. And what I feel for trees now. It’s, like, it’s the stuff that I could have only felt for a woman in the past. I can now feel for a tree. It’s pretty … it’s pretty … it’s not intense though. It’s just nice. You know? It’s just a wonderful, wonderful connection. And so, yeah, the relation … it’s real relations. What I’ll say is, like, to say I have a relationship with plants. It sounds so ‘woo woo,’ which most people in Ojai might be, like, totally cool with it. You go out there though, you leave this realm, and some people are, like, “Relationship with the plants? Who are you? What do you think you are?” But the only way human beings exist is through relationships with the plants. It’s a complete grand illusion to think that we exist out of relationship. So I … I just am, like, alright, whatever. Some people are going to think I’m a hippie, but I’m just going to speak the truth. We’re in relationship with the plants. So, I’m not sure if that answered the question, [laughter] but I hope that gave some insight into the … into the question. Wonderful. Right here?
[Audience member:] I have a question. Thank you so much for this talk. It’s amazing. I have a question about the medicinal side of the plants. Have you found that while you’re on these 225 days that you are experiencing less illness or any issues with your body through the diet that you’re on? And, or have you had an illness or a cold or a virus or something? And if so, what was the worst thing that has happened to you medically and what plants or what approach did you use with your food as medicine to cure yourself?
[Robin:] So, the two books that I rely on for my medicinal herbs are Rosemary Gladstar’s Medicinal Herbs A Beginner’s Guide. Rosemary Gladstar — she’s been at this for a long time. She’s … she’s known around the world, around the country. There’s literally thousands of herbalists who are just as knowledgeable as her, though. Many of whom are right here in southern California. But, I love this book because it’s … it’s just a real nice intro beginner’s guide. So, this is a book that I go to. And then, for foraging, it is Midwest Medicinal Plants and this is by Lisa Rose. And this is 109 wild herbs for health and wellness. And so, this is what I refer to. I have this next to my little apothecary in … in northern Wisconsin where I currently live.
And so, a couple of the basic simple things. Have I been sick? The answer is “yes.” There was norovirus going around in Florida when I did a weekend-long foraging school there and a lot of people got it. I actually made it through foraging school without getting sick, which was, to me, like, a great testament that what I was doing was working. And that was interesting. The … the, you know, the 100 percent forage diet’s got me strong and stable. But, about a week later, I ended up getting the … the norovirus. And, I said to myself, “I am human. Therefore, I get sick.” Whereas, a lot of people say, “I’m not supposed to … you’re not supposed to get sick. If you get sick, that means there’s something wrong with you.” But, I say, “I am human. Therefore, it is part of the human experience to get sick sometimes.” And, what’s my number one medicine? Time. Time is one of those important things to heal sickness. And sleep. Rest. I found that when I get sick, it’s almost always because I’ve run myself thin. It’s I’m not getting enough sleep. I’m not taking care of myself. I’m stressed. I’m overwhelmed. So, I … when I got what was probably norovirus, I had, you know, I didn’t throw up, but I had a lot of nausea, some diarrhea, and I didn’t actually take anything. I just kept eating nourishing foods, drinking lots of herbal teas, all the herbal teas that I’m used to, and I just let it pass with time. I didn’t take any painkillers or anything like that.
Now. That’s just norovirus. Now you have much more extreme things that can happen. And, I’ll say I’m not … I’m not anti-Western healthcare. I’m anti-Western healthcare that is completely disconnected and destructive to the human body and to the ecosystem. So, I’m for doctors and going to doctors, and I have friends that are doctors, but minimizing it. And the way that I minimize it is through preventative healthcare. And, in this society, that’s so far from the norm. The norm in this society is get health insurance so you can basically burn your body to the ground and then you can go and get it fixed. I don’t have health insurance. I haven’t had it since … over ten years ago. And, because of that, I take care of my body, because I know I’m the one who’s going to be responsible. I’m the only one who’s responsible for my own body.
So, I haven’t really had any sicknesses … anything of meaning in the last 15 years or so. And, we’ll see what happens in time. You know, time will be the … the real test of this philosophy. And, what I know for sure … and I write about this in my … in depth on my website and I have a 45-minute video called “On Health Insurance, Age and Death,” which dives into this matter quite a bit. And that’s at robingreenfield.org/healthinsurance. But, in there, I say that I’m not ever going to get chemo if I were to have cancer. I’m not going into that realm of Western healthcare. And some people say, like, “We’ll believe it when we see it.” Or they … more-so, they just say, “You’re delusional. You’re young.” And, only time will tell. We’ll see what the .. what the years ahead of … of this practice … what it yields whether I end up with really difficult situations where I have to decide or not.
And, I’ll say … the last thing I’ll say on that is that for those interested in getting involved in natural, you know, herbalism, plant medicines, you know, mind-altering plant medicines, or well, every … every plant is mind altering. Mint is mind altering as well. It’s very simple stuff. I’m … I just make lots of teas. Lots of herbal teas. That’s my … my real medicine I just do lots of different herbal teas. So.
And then, if you’re interested in my health, I am doing bloodwork. And, all of that is published on my website, unedited. So just the raw information is on my website and I’m also tracking my gut microbiome. All of that published right on my website at robingreenfield.org/foragingyear. I have developed … I have high mercury. I have actually low hemoglobin and hematocrit, which means a mild anemia. As well as low B1 or Thiamine. And, I talked to a few herbalists and it seems pretty clear that the issue is not that I’m not getting enough of anything, it’s actually the mercury which is causing the problem that’s preventing the B1 from absorbing and that has something to do with … I don’t know the details, but my main issue right now is mercury, because of my … likely because of my high fish diet. And, I’m not going to stop eating the fish because I don’t really have an alternative right now. My diet is very based around … around fish. I can eat fish that are lower in mercury and, fortunately, smelt are. But, unfortunately, they’re higher in PFAs, it turns out — forever chemicals of sorts. So, it’s tricky. We live in a world with a lot of pollution, and I am … I am taking in that pollution as we all are. And, it’s a difficult balance of … of the times we live in in that regard. So, I’m just taking it as I go. For me, my biggest medicine, I would say, is the practice of non-attachment, knowing that every single one of us here is one in eight billion, including me. I’m no more important than any one of the other eight billion people, and two people die every second. So, two people just died. Two people just died. Two people just died. Two people just died. Two people just died. And I’m no more important than any one of those two people. The eight billion, And that is a wonderful medicine because it says I can go at any moment and it’s okay. And, I know, again some people are, like, “Oh, that’s called being young and delusional.” Or it’s called not buying into the Western fear of death and, instead, being aware that there’s many cultures that aren’t afraid of death. And see it as a natural part of life.
[Peter:] In the back here?
[Audience member:] [unintelligible]
[Robin:] Fermented food. Oh, get rid of the PFAs. Interesting. Well, the good news is I have a lot of those.
[Audience member:] I’ve written a book called Magical Trees and in it, it has all … all the trees. I think there’s 50 or 60. What they do, the medicinal benefits, recipes and things, and I would like to gift it to you, but where may I send it since you’re on the road?
[Robin:] If you have it now, I would take it.
[Audience member: I do not.
[Robin:] Otherwise, you can send it … let’s do an experiment. Send it to the Vaughn Public Library in Ashland, Wisconsin and tell them it’s for me. They’ll know who I am. I’m talking there in September. And they’ll get it to me. Vaughn Public Library in Ashland, Wisconsin.
[Audience member:] Alright. And my friend in Port Townsend has a radio show and I’m going to try and hook you up with her.
[Robin:] Send it to her.
[Audience member: Yes. So that you could … So I’ll send it to her so that you can do an interview with her and get people up there.
[Robin:] Wonderful. Thank you for sharing.
Okay. Right next to her.
[Audience member:] So, I have a question in how you eat. I have a sister who’s vegetarian. I have friends who are vegan. I consider myself still omnivore. It’s bucket-listed that I’ll go vegan, I hope. I love fish, too. Could … would you recommend this way for someone who doesn’t take in animal protein? How would you worry? And you yourself said that you have some anemia, right? What would be some of the sources of protein maybe without me taking one of your classes, I guess?
[Robin:] So, the concept of trying to … let’s say … we’re talking about specifically a 100 percent foraged diet and doing that either as vegetarian or vegan. What I’ll say is that in my decent amount of research, I have seen no society that has … that has done that. It doesn’t … it’s not something that I see in existence. For people that have seen that … and I’m talking pre-industrialization, because once you get into industrialization, it’s very different. Once you have a lot of machinery and you can plug into fossil fuels and things like that, it’s very different. But as far as most people that have lived connected to the Earth in a way where all of their food is coming completely locally, generally there’s animals involved in the system, whether it’s eating them or harvesting different foods from them. If you were to … if you were to do that … if you were to try to eat 100 percent ‘wild,’ let’s call it, then … and without any animal in it, then what I see is that generally the most feasible place for that is in warm climates, not cold climates, and tropical climates being the place where you’d have that being the most feasible. But, I have a lot of people who are very knowledgeable and no one has ever come up with it or showed me that it can be done. Which I would love … I would very much love to see. So, I would … I would say, just about any modern person who attempted to do it, I think would most likely have an extreme struggle and would become deficient in numerous things. But, if you’re growing your food, and you are tapped into, you know, some of the industrial system, then it’s, you know, very manageable to be vegan or vegetarian. One note on that is just that, legumes — there are a lot of wild legumes. It’s one of the more … families with more toxic plants. So, as a forager, you really need to know what you’re doing when you’re working with the wild legumes. But, we have, you know, traditional cultures that have eaten a lot of wild legumes and have been big staples in their diet. So, in summary, I certainly wouldn’t be able to do it. I don’t know anybody who has the knowledge or the experience to do it or recommend it to anybody. And I would be … I would love to, you know, see human beings have that knowledge and share it. Does that give some insight into the question?
[Audience member:] Yes, and I guess I have a Part B, which is, what about insects and things like that? Does that come into your world? I know in France and Italy, they eat snails and you kept talking about eating some kind of a worm.
[Robin:] Yeah. Yes. Insects. I definitely eat insects. The reason I don’t eat a lot more insects is time. They’re not the most time-efficient compared to a turkey or a deer or fishing. I can catch 100 pounds of smelt in a night. Or, a 10-pound salmon. It takes a lot of crickets to equal a 10-pound salmon. So, I eat insects as … as something that many cultures have done and is something that I absolutely love, but most of my insects that I eat are incidental. I eat a lot of insects on the flowers that I’m eating, in the greens, in the nuts, you know, I eat acorn grubs and … and hickory nut grubs and so on, but I don’t … I don’t seek out a lot of insects. Yeah. We’ll do two last questions, I think. Over here?
[Audience member:] Okay. So, besides fermenting, how much cooking do you do as opposed to sprouting and soaking?
[Robin:] How much cooking do I do? So, generally, the raw diet does not go hand-in-hand with the foraged diet. We …
forage people may eat a lot of raw foods, but not exclusively raw. Those are two different … quite different things. The reality that I’ve learned is that most, like, most traditional cultures didn’t eat salads. They cooked their greens. When we cook the greens, we’re able to eat a lot more of them. It makes it more bioavailable, easier to digest. I love sal … I love salads. They’re wonderful. And, and, it’s easy to eat a lot of wild greens that are … that you can eat raw. But, a lot of the times, there’s not a lot of greens that you can eat raw. Like, right now, in the dry season, you’re not going to get tender greens to eat a lot of. You’re going to get really spicy mustard. Try eating a pound of mustard uncooked. It’s going to be very hard. Cooking it is the way to go. So, I eat a substantially cooked diet, and I eat a lot of raw foods as well. And, most … most foragers who are eating a large portion of their foods foraged are … cooking foods because it’s, I would generally say, what it takes in order to be able to do this. Cooking is a big part of it.
[Audience member:] The other question I have, since you mentioned the mercury? I mean, there are certain things like cilantro that removes metals from your system. Aren’t there some herbs that could be researched to pull mercury out of your system?
[Robin:] Yeah. So, the idea of getting mercury out of my system through herbs, the main herb that I’ve been recommended for that is called ground ivy. Some people call it creeping Charlie. It’s not really a southern California plant, but it’s one of the most common weeds in the midwest and so I am having ground ivy most days right now. And, the reality of the matter is I just have limited time, and I have … I have not taken the time to put in all of the work to both harvest and educate myself on that matter. So, there’s certainly more that I could be doing, quite likely. And, I just haven’t made the time to do it. Lanny?
[Lanny:] Yeah. I … I do have a question. But, I wanted to respond to a couple things about local foods.
[Robin:] Sure.
[Lanny:] We have, basically, two main kinds of mustard around here. Closer to the coast, we have the true Brassica, black mustard, that the hot spicy mustard seed comes from, that grows eight, ten feet high sometimes. But, here in the inland, we have another one called, various common names — Hirschfeldia is the Latin genus. So, it’s in the mustard family and the flowers look like mustard. It looks like a short mustard flower plant, right? But, it’s not spicy. It tastes like broccoli. Where, the other mustard is spicy. And those greens are … they’re hot. But cooked? They’re the best. But, these greens here on this inland one? They’re kind of bristly, you know, you can, like, cook them down to a mush and, you know, find a way to eat that, not that great texture. But the flowers? The little flowerheads? You know, they’re delicious. So, you can eat a lot of those. And that’s some protein right there, too.
[Robin:] Thanks for sharing.
[Lanny:] As far as wild plant foods with protein, acorns are a complete protein.
[Robin:] Really?
[Lanny:] So, I make … I like pancakes about once a week. Whole wheat … whole grain pancakes with acorn flour. Or, my other go-to is buckwheat flour. Buckwheat is a complete protein. It’s not a grain, which are lacking in lysine and, you know, other amino acids that would make them a … a complete protein. And, we have lots and lots and lots of California buckwheat in this state.
[Robin:] When is that ready?
[Lanny:] What?
[Robin:] When is that ready? [laughter]
[Lanny:] September. Depends where you are, but generally … well, you’re heading north, so it’s going to be later and later, the further north you go. But, it … it gets ripe here in September.
[Robin:] Okay.
[Lanny:] And then it just … it’s on the bushes for months after that. Even through the winter. And, it’s … you know, the flowerheads …. You know the plant I’m talking about?
[Robin:] I know of buckwheat, but I am not knowledgeable on it.
[Lanny:] How many people here are familiar with California buckwheat? Yeah. So, the flower heads are mostly dried flowers. So, kind if astringent, not that great. And, like, Christopher you mentioned? You know, he doesn’t bother winnowing out all the seeds out of the buckwheat, but I do. And, I … but, I’ll be honest. I just buy organic buckwheat flour most of the time because it’s a lot of work. And, like, you say, time. I’m not … you know, I don’t have that kind of time. You know. I do it and I enjoy doing it and I wish I had more time to do that …. So, buckwheat is a good one for anybody that wants to learn how to eat a wild food that you can just get the seeds out, then grind it to flour, and you’ve got buckwheat flour.
[Robin:] Wonderful. The wild rice of California, basically. I mean, that’s what I would maybe eat a lot more of if I was here.
[Lanny:] Yeah. Well, there are other grass seeds of California that are actually native grass seeds. There’s a giant carrizo grass. It’s a …. They call it giant wild rye. It’s a common bunch grass that’s a native grass. It’s big. And it has edible seeds. There’s a lot of others. So, but I … first, I wanted to … first of all, just commend you on what you’re doing, and your teaching and your philosophy. And, I’m just very impressed and inspired by what you’re doing. And, I’m not surprised that Gandhi was one of your influences, because Gandhi was a major influence on my life. As a teenager, I read his autobiography for a term paper, and that changed my life. I became a conscientious objector during the, you know, the Vietnam War, etc. But, the main thing I learned about him was I had no idea how much of a nutritionist he was. How much he was interested in diet and so much about foods that … the foods for the people. Foods that everybody could live on. And the … and the salt marches, to go and get the salt and show that we can be independent. We can get our own salt. We can grow our own neem leaves and have food and medicine and so on. And another one that I just want to mention … another shoutout is Ben Frankin. Because you reminded me of him in the way that you’re so organized in making your … your commitment to this, you know, I’m going to do this plant a week and so on. He was very much like that. So, his autobiography is required reading and you’ll find out how he became a meat eater after being a vegetarian. So, it’s an interesting story which I won’t go into. So, but my question is, because I do teach foraging and … and collecting plants, is the issue of where can you do it? So, first there’s the … there’s the personal, ethical, spiritual side of it which you referred to. You mentioned Robin Kimmerer and you talked about, you know, the first step is knowing that you’re identifying the plant correctly. And my … my Chumash teacher, Juanita Centeno, said the next step is to give thanks, make an offering to the plant. And an offering can come in all different forms. It can include, you know, making a donation to Robin’s website, you know, whatever. And then, the next step is look around. Is that the only one growing there? And if it is, then you don’t collect from that plant. You keep going until you find it in abundance. So, just those simple steps. But then, beyond that, in the modern era … because that’s the ancient Chumash way … we have to consider, well, can I legally collect food here, collect plants here? So, I was going to ask you how you go about navigating that in your travels, but I do want to give a tip out to people that, as citizens, not … we don’t even have to be a citizen, I guess … anyone can collect small amounts of above-ground parts of plants in the Los Padres National Forest. You used to have to get a permit. It was free, but you had to get a permit. But, thanks to the dismantling of the Forest Service, there’s not enough staff anymore to give out those permits. The only people still working are the ones who give permits for … commercial permits for grazing and mining and so on. But, but so, they … they just have sort of a rule of thumb now. You can collect whatever you can carry in a shopping bag for personal use. And keep it above ground. You’re not allowed to dig up plants. So, you know, that’s something good to know.
[Robin:] Yeah. Thank you for sharing that.
[Lanny:] It’s a great resource, because we are right up against hundreds of thousands of acres of national forest here.
[Robin:] Yes. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. And, as far as the simple question of where to harvest? Really, my … for people that are new to foraging, my encouragement is really to start with the weeds in our yards and our gardens and the plants that are, you know, growing out of control that have been introduced from other ecosystems. Start with those plants and that way you don’t have to be so incredibly knowledgeable. And. Because when you get into the native plants, you want to know more of what you’re doing. We live in some delicate ecosystems here in southern California. Of all ecosystems, this is one of the more delicate ecosystems with the number of people that live here. So my gateway is starting with these weeds, starting with the fruits, a lot of urban foraging. You have the loquats that are growing all over Ojai. And I just drove through Ojai and what do I see? Lots of loquat trees with shriveling, dead loquats that were never harvested. Where were you all? [laughter] So, starting with the loquats and all of this. And then, as you develop those relationships and you get more skilled, then get into the more complicated stuff.
So, on that note, I want to share one last small note, and that is, have any of you been thinking, “What’s in this bucket?” It is: MY POOP. [laughter] So. This is the reason that I want to end with this is very full circle. I talked about that I am in love with these plants. That I am in relationship with each of these plants, right? That I go out and I learn how I’m living in harmony with these plants. I know them. I honor them. I respect them. And, I’m not willing at the end of the relationship to flush them down the toilet. [laughter] I will not turn them into a burden on a taxpayer system by sending them off to a wastewater treatment plant where there is no love and no respect for the plants at that point and where they … where they become a problem that must be dealt with. Instead, I’ve made a long-term commitment to taking my poop, returning it to the earth, and right now, I am 12 months without using a flush toilet. [“Whoo!”] So, everywhere that I go, I am carrying my poop with me. [laughter] Up until a few weeks ago, there was no sign that said ‘My Poop’. I did not tell everybody, but I am fully out of the closet. [laughter] And I will be carrying this Poop Bucket with me everywhere that I go. If you want to learn about what I’m talking about, The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins is an incredible resource that teaches us all about this. How many of you here compost your poop? Okay. Only a couple. That, to me, is one of the true radical acts that takes you out of the societal norms. It took me five years of transformation before I got to what I call the ‘Holy Grail’. [laughter] And, if I was looking for a Gandhi-esque move in this society, it would be to compost our poop. It’s so full circle. It’s so full of love.
So, I love you all very much. So grateful to be here together. And, what I’m going to do now is, I’m going to stay right here and sign books for anybody that would like a book signed and share hugs until we’re leaving at about 9 o’clock. So, we only have a little while. [applause/whistles/cheering] Thank you for going on that journey.