Goodbye Grocery Stores! A Year of Foraging 100% of My Food!

This is goodbye to the grocery store!
For one year I will forage every bite of my food and medicine from the land. Nature will be my garden, my pantry and my pharmacy. Each day I will deepen my connection with Earth and bring you along on this journey.

In this video, I show you the food and medicine I’ve harvested and stored during three months of preparation.

Transcript: The following is a transcription of Goodbye Grocery Stores! A Year of Foraging 100% of My Food!, part of Robin’s foraging series during his Foraging 100% of My Food for a Year Immersive Campaign.

Well. This is it. This is the last moments before a year of foraging every bite of my food and medicine from the land.

So this is all my food that came from the grocery store, local farmers’ markets and gardens. This is all food that I didn’t forage and this is all going away. So, my calories … down to my calories. Goodbye rice and oatmeal. My vegetables. All the vegetables and fruits. So goodbye to these beautiful big onions that are from the local farmer’s market. No garlic. But I can harvest ramps. Oil. Even my oils. So goodbye to the olive oil and the coconut oil. My homemade sauerkraut. Goodbye sauerkraut. I have to find hearty vegetables I can make kraut from in the wild. My vinegar? I’m going to have to make my own apple cider vinegar. And that I did, which I’ll show you. The … down to the protein. So, I’ll have to harvest my own protein from the wild. Goodbye eggs. I’ll show you what I’m going to be doing for that. The herbs and the spices. So, I’ve got cardamon and nutmeg and curry and black pepper. Down to all of the herbs and spices. There’s sugar. This is local maple syrup, but I didn’t harvest it. I didn’t forage it. So goodbye to that. And I’m probably not going to have sugar until the springtime. So this might be six months without sugar. These salts. Even the salt I have to harvest on my own. So goodbye salt from the store. I’ll be harvesting my salt from the Atlantic Ocean when I get there. So, the fat, the protein, the calories, the vitamins, the minerals, all the nutrients. The spices. All the flavors. Every bit of it. I have to harvest. I don’t HAVE to. I GET to harvest from the land.

And, my medicine as well. So this is tincture from a local herbalist. I have to harvest all of my medicine. Every single thing that I put in my mouth. Even my toothpaste for the year, I’m going to be foraging. So, goodbye to all of this. I’m, like … a lot of you know I’ve done the year of growing and foraging all my food, but this is just foraging. So no gardens this time. Nature is my garden. The Earth is my pantry. The Earth is my garden. The Earth is my pharmacy, as well. So, this is goodbye to all of this! Goodbye to the grocery store, the pharmacy. Not that I went there anyway. The restaurants. And hello to this! My food and my medicine from the land!

So, I’m going to show you what I have. I am just moments away from entering into the year. And, I do not have nearly as much food as I was planning for. But I have a fair bit of food. So, I’m going to show you what I have on my pantry, in my pantry, and in the freezer and whatever other foods are laying around here.

First, I want to show you my herbs. I have about thirty different herbs. Basswood flower, heal all, sweet fern, basswood leaves, goldenrod, mullein, comfrey, yarrow, pineapple weed, mint, sweet gale, sweet clover, mugwort, blueberry, fireweed, red clover, catnip, hops, cattail pollen, rose. There’s a few here that are unlabeled. I know what they are. Peppercress, boneset, hawkweed, Joe Pye weed, motherwort, St. John’s wort. So this section is a lot of herbs for making teas. Some of these are more specific medicines, if I actually have an ailment. And a lot of them are very generalist herbs. So a lot of herbal teas are in store. That’s the area where this summer I probably spent the most time, was building up to make sure that I have a lot of my herbs, which I won’t be able to harvest in the winter at all.

Now, as far as my flavors … my seasonings … that? I am not so sure of. When I did my year of growing and foraging all my food, I was able to rely on a lot of domestic herbs for flavoring my food. Now, it’s just wild. So, I’m going to have a really different palate. I’m going to have a really wild palate. I am rewilding my palate. So. My number one herb is monarda, or bee balm, or wild bergamot. This has oreganol in it, so it’s very much like oregano. And then, I do have some onion. This is dehydrated onion. And actually, you know what? This is fermented onion. And, I’m going to open this up. Oh! Yeah. Wow! See that level of bubbling there. This is about a month-and-a-half fermented. Wild onion. In clearweed juice. Alright. I’m going to give this a sip. That’s life there. That’s some serious life. Oh! That’s an experiment that’s probably going to bring in a whole lot of flies. They love this fermentation. Not my best, not my worst. And the flavor is going to be the hardest part. It really is.

Let’s see. What else do we have here? So. Greens are important. I made a fair bit of green powder. But not enough, so I’m going to be harvesting my greens through the fall. And then, I have a few things here like choke cherry leather. I have hazelnuts, which I have about two gallons of hazelnuts. Wild rice, and I’m going to show you my wild rice. This is just a tiny little sample of it. So, that’s a bit of my herbs and spices section.

And then, over here is mushrooms. So this is all dehydrated mushrooms. Some of this is edibles and some of this is medicinals, for making tea. So, I have reishi, and I have … so this is for medicine, king boletes. I have puff balls. I have chanterelles. Maitake or hen of the woods. Chicken of the woods. This is my medicinal tea blend. So this is a blend of five medicinal mushrooms, which is: turkey tail, reishi, maitake, chaga and boar’s head, which is like lion’s mane. Which is right here. I got this in small quantity. That’s precious. I don’t have a lot of that. So, that’s one of my key medicines, right there. Birch polypore, hedgehog, turkey tails; and then, of course, I can’t miss wood nettle and stinging nettle. These are wood nettle and stinging nettle, which are two of my top ten plants for living off the land. And so, I eat a lot of wood nettle and stinging nettle. I have an overflow of food and medicine over here that I’m going show you. But, I’m going to show you what else is here.

So. Next. Venison. Venison is one of my key food sources. So I picked up one deer that was hit by a car and I got forty pounds of meat and bones. The bones I’ll make bone broth with. So this is canned venison. You can see the fat in there. So there’s quite a bit of fat. As far as fat: I’m looking at hickory nuts and acorns as my potential oil. And then, of course, fishing as well. And I haven’t had success fishing, so it’s going to be a slow start with that, but I’ll be fishing more. I may hunt a deer, but if there’s so much that I harvest that have been hit by cars, I won’t. And then over here is actually something I’m pretty excited about. This is all of the organs of that deer: the heart, the liver, the kidney, and the lungs. So that’s four pounds of organs that were dehydrated down into a pint and a quarter pint.

And then over here also is my vinegar. And this is apple cider vinegar. You can see the ‘mother’ floating there on the bottom. So that’s the ‘mother,’ which for me is a sign that I got a good vinegar. Oh yeah. I got a stronger kick than I was imagining. I started this about two months ago. And, take a look at my vinegar section right here. I’ve got a good amount of vinegar. Apple vinegar. And plum vinegar. And there’s no guarantee that all these others are going to be good, but I’ve done some taste testing and I’m looking good in the vinegar world. And so, I started all of these from scratch, just from fruits that I harvested from the land, no sugar added, no yeast added. Just pure, wild fermentation. So. Yeah. So this is the amount of venison that I have. I have more in the freezer. And I’m going to show you the freezer in a bit.

Over here, we’re moving onto the fruits. So I got 28 quarts of pear sauce, like applesauce, but pear sauce. And I’ve got seven quarts of applesauce. So you can see the pear sauce. The pear sauce is chunky and that has the skins in there. And then the apples were actually put through a fruit mill. So that’s strained. Generally, I like to go chunky. It saves time and there’s a lot of nutrients in the peels. So, I was planning to have 128 quarts. I’ve got some in the freezer. About 45, so maybe a third of what I was planning for. Down here I have plum sauce. So this is wild plum. This I don’t have nearly as much of. Seven pints. But that’s a treat. And then here is … I have just nine half-pints of blueberries. Those are from the Moquah Pine Barrens. So, this is a sweet treat that maybe I’ll just have one a week for nine weeks. So that’s what I have up here. I have a lot of space to add more.

Down here: this is mushroom central. So I have a LOT of maitake mushrooms. I probably harvested about a hundred pounds of maitake. You might have seen the video showing the 40-pound one that I harvested. So this is all dehydrated maitake. And that’s what you have there. So this is medicinal for making tea, but it’s great for food. So I’ll be eating a lot of mushrooms. And probably the most abundant thing I have is mushrooms. These are chanterelles. And I got 42 pounds of chanterelles. Two jars. Two gallons of dehydrated and some in the freezer. And then, all of these jars here: wild rice, one gallon; two gallons; and then one, two, three, four, five, six half-gallons of wild rice. Which leads us over to here. This is wild rice in here. And, so I harvested 75 pounds. Is what I ended up getting. There you go. And I had a local processor. Thank you so much, Maria, for processing this rice. I harvested this with a couple of partners; Roy, was one of my ricing partners, and Molly was a ricing partner. And so, ricing is a communal event. It’s something we do together. I really want to thank Nick Vander Puy for putting up rice camp and having me out there for a few days and getting out ricing together. And this year I riced solo for the first time and I have to say, it was a joy, but much more tiring. So, I got 75 pounds finished of wild rice. Which, at 700 calories a day of wild rice, we’re talking about … I was hoping for 125 pounds and I ended up with 75. But this is one of my main resources. This is a serious calorie staple here. And, I’m becoming more and more a person of the wild rice. So I want to say a very deep gratitude to the Anishinaabe people for serving as stewards to the wild rice for the last thousand years and sharing their knowledge so that we can harvest it, we can have a relationship. And you have my full commitment that I am going to continue to be a steward of the rice.

I’m hearing a little chipmunk there. They’ve been eating my nuts. They’ve been really … which is fine. They’ve gotten a fair number of my nuts. So, speaking of nuts: black walnuts. I love these nuts. This year I will be becoming a nut person. I’ve been a nutty person, but I am officially going to be a nut person. Between hazelnuts, black walnuts and hickory nuts, and maybe pecans and acorns, I’m going to eat at least some of all of those this year. So, they’ll make up a good portion of my diet.

Right now I am in a good place where almost everything that I have to process, I have processed. This is one of the few things that aren’t tucked away. And then, I also harvested all this sweet fern today. And this is the dehydrator right here that I built for dehydrating on, as well as the electric dehydrator. I wish you could smell this. But this is tea that I’ll be bringing around the country. I’ll also be sharing my wild rice around the country. So, if you want to come down here, here is my overflow. These are all herbs that are on the shelf as well. I have a good amount of evening primrose seeds, which are very high in omegas. These are a very highly nutrient-dense food. And this is a choke cherry leather which I am very excited about. I meant to get gallons and gallons, but I have some here. And then here’s those hickory nuts you can …. Not hickory nuts. Hazelnuts. I love these hazelnuts. Not a main calorie, not a main source of food, but just a nice joyful thing through the winter. So, that’s what you have here.

And, of course, the mushroom abundance is not just in my jars. This is a lot more mushrooms. So this is full of boletes, and hen of the woods, and a few other things: more polypore, more birch polypore. So a lot more mushrooms added to that here. And you’ll see this plastic. I’ve honestly just kind of embraced that I’m going to have more plastic than usual. It’s just so efficient to use some plastic. So, mostly metal and glass, but some plastic as well. I think that’s everything here, so now I am going to take you up to the freezer to show you what I have there.

I showed you foods that I dried and canned, and now here’s the freezer. And the freezer is a really useful tool.

So, I’m going to show you what I have in here. As you can see, the freezer’s pretty stocked, which is good news. So, I’ve got a small amount of milkweed pods. I have a small amount of ramp bulbs: maybe about a pound-and-a-half of ramp bulbs. I have some of that frozen onion. This is maitake as well for tea. Here, I think this is a fruit box. This is grape juice. Just pure grape juice. And I freeze them into ice cubes and melt them and have a little shot of summertime grape. Or, add it to a glass of water and I’ve got grape juice. Ooh, look at that! These are my blueberries that I harvested from a farm this summer. So these are going away. I’m going to eat these … I might eat a bunch of these now. And that is the one thing in the freezer that is not foraged. Then I have some choke cherries. I have some monarda that I want to make a ferment with, so I wanted to freeze some. Now this is wild rice grubs. And this is about 0.2 pounds of wild rice grubs. So that’s going be a special meal for maybe a special somebody who comes over and has a wild rice grubs meal with me. I don’t eat grubs because I have to. I eat grubs because I love them. Then more of the evening primrose seeds, some berries.

Okay, what I have here is all high bush cranberry potent juice. There’s a little bit of water added just to get all the juice and the pulp out. But this is just potent high bush cranberry juice. I have a couple of gallons of pear juice, which I need to take out in order to show you what else is in here. And then, there’s aronia juice and grape juice and a couple gallons of apple juice. All that I pressed here. I have three bags of plums. Wild plums like this. This is my venison. That is a lot of the bones for making bone broth. So that’s a nice box of sustenance right there. And then I have a lot of frozen mushrooms. These are all chanterelles. It’s difficult when I’m freezing all this to freeze them in the right number of batches without getting too many bags, but I’m making things work. And also, I just remembered, I have, like, 20 pounds of maitake in another person’s freezer. So thank you, Christina and Patrick, for hosting some of my maitake in your freezer. And, I have just one pound of service berries, which I was planning to have about ten. But just one gallon of service berries. That’s probably about four pounds of service berries. And along with a large quantity of elderberries that I have down there, I have two gallon bags of elderberries. So. There’s also some frozen bags of applesauce when I was too busy to can it. So that’s more or less everything that’s in the freezer, my friends.

And I’m going to look around to see if I have more to show you. And about six pounds of vacuum-sealed chicken of the woods. This is really juicy, tender chicken of the woods. And, I got this, I think in a cemetery. I’m having a hard time remembering all the foraging that I’ve done.

So, all of this started on July 1st. That was the beginning of the project, just about three months ago. And every bit of food and medicine that I’ve harvested is from July 1st or later. So, no food from before that. Just three months of prep before launching into this year of foraging all my food.

Now. I set myself up for a real challenge here because that whole freezer full of food? I’m not going to have access to that for the first month. I’m going on a month-long foraging tour and leaving here in the morning, and once I arrive at the Atlantic Ocean in Portland, Maine, and harvest my salt, that’s the moment when I’m going to begin. So, I have a three-day trip out there, and then once I arrive, the year of foraging begins.

Now, I’m going to bring a lot of this food with me: the applesauce, the venison, a lot of the herbs and spices. But on this trip, I’m going to be harvesting a lot of my food and medicine. I’m doing plant walks and giving talks in cities from Portland, Maine, all the way down to Richmond, Virginia. Plus United Plant Savers and Cincinnati and Columbus in Ohio, and Chicago. And then finishing off with a talk in Washburn, Wisconsin, which is my homeland in the Chequamegon Bay area. And, so, if you want to come out and see me in person, you can go to robingreenfield.org/foragingyear and that has the details about the tour: Boston, Providence, New Haven, New York City; Washington, DC. Eric Joseph Lewis and I are doing a plant walk in Frederick, Maryland. So, a lot of opportunity to come out and to be involved. And I’ll be harvesting food probably every single day: my greens, my herbs, my spices, fruit, hopefully.

Today is about October 4th. I’ll still be able to get into the nuts. And there’s a lot more harvesting to do. I really set myself up for a challenge because I’m going to be doing this on the road, with limited resources and limited storage. So I’ve set myself up for a real challenge. And then this winter I am going to be taking a trip to Florida. So I’ll be doing a lot of foraging there. I’ll spend a good amount of the winter here as well, in northern Wisconsin. But I’ll spend a good amount of it down there in Florida as well.

So, do I have as much food as I was hoping? Or planning? No. Do I feel confident in the year of foraging ahead? Yes. I feel confident there’s going to be some struggles. I feel confident that I’m going to have to work hard. But I feel confident in the year. I’m going to be tracking my gut microbiome. So I’m really interested to see that.

And, why am I doing this? Well, I am breaking free from the global industrial food system. I want to eat in a way that is in harmony with the Earth. I want to live in reciprocity with the plants and animals that I share this home with. And to forage every bite of my food and medicine for a year is a stance against systems of destruction and exploitation and oppression to say we can step outside of those systems. And instead, create that harmony, create that peace, create that balance in our own lives. So, all of the political destruction, the corporate destruction, this is my way of stepping outside of that. And this is also my way of saying that I believe in the Earth. I believe the Earth can provide us with everything we need. I believe that the Earth has my back. I believe that I am a whole and complete human being and I don’t need all these products they’re trying to sell.

I want you to see that food and medicine is growing freely and abundantly all around us. And I want to help you, if you want, to break free from the grocery store. I want to help you take your health back, your happiness back, your power back. And I want us to put this power into the hands … into OUR hands and into the hands of our community. And so, foraging is a gateway. The gateway into rethinking everything. Rethinking our societal structures, rethinking our relationships with the Earth, with the plants, with the animals, with our fellow humans and with ourselves. I would say, for me, this year of foraging is a way of finding a home … a deep home here on this Earth, and a deep home inside of myself.

And, to say goodbye, I want to show you one last thing. I’m dyeing with natural dyes. I’m about to get green. I dyed with buckthorn. Excuse the piles of stuff as I’m heading out to tour. Let’s see. So this is glossy buckthorn with a homemade sweater by Sonia. Ooh. That’s looking interesting. It’s a greenish … greenish, yellowish. And then, this is going to be my tee shirt. Ooh! That’s looking green! Friends. I think I might have my own 100% homemade natural fiber, naturally dyed green shirts! So, the foraging is not just food. Not just medicine. It’s clothes. And it’s foraging a deep relationship with the Earth.

There’s so much more that I could say. I’m going to be doing a weekly update with the details of the last week. So be here with me, friends. I would love for you to be. I would love for you to be. And, if you love this, share it with others. Let others know they can join us on this journey.