Robin Greenfield at United Plant Savers. Earth Provides Us with Everything We Need!

Robin Greenfield visited United Plant Savers on his Earth Provides Us with Everything We Need Tour October 26th, 2025.

In this talk he shares his journey of awakening from the destructive ways of society and his transformation toward living in harmony with Earth. This was day 18 of his year-long immersion of foraging 100 percent of his food and medicine.

Transcript: The following is a transcription of Robin Greenfield at United Plant Savers. Earth Provides Us with Everything We Need!, part of Robin’s foraging series during his Foraging 100% of My Food for a Year.

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Well, it’s wonderful to be here with all of you here at United Plant Savers. I first met Kelsey and Susan three or four years ago at a conference and have been talking about coming and visiting. And so glad to be able to bring this into my “Earth Provides Us with Everything We Need” tour. It was a joy to be out on the land learning about more of the plants that we share this home with.

So, my name is Robin Greenfield, for those of you who don’t know. And right now I’m on a year-long project of foraging 100 percent of my food and medicine, down to the salt, the oil, the spices, the calories, the fat, the protein, the water. And so, I’m deeply immersing with the plants. I think today is Day 17 of the year, so I still have a long way to go. And before I dive into sharing about all of these plants, mushrooms, also animals that I have foraged and gathered, and this experience, I want to go back a little bit further to what led me to this point. If you can all hold some of your anticipation for learning what’s in all these jars.

So, in 2011, I was 25 years old. I was living a fairly typical US American lifestyle. I was very focused on material possessions and financial wealth. I had set the goal of becoming a millionaire by the time I turned 30 and I was on track to accomplish that goal. I was running a marketing company that had a bunch of people out selling ads to get people to buy stuff they didn’t need. And I was traveling the world, which had always been an ambition of mine. I was … I had many … I had friends, I had romance, I had the material possessions I was seeking. And all of this was accumulating a great deal of health and happiness actually. This was not … I was not doing that and feeling this depression or sadness. I was happy and I was healthy, and I could have kept doing that for the rest of my life. And life would have been excellent.

And then something happened and I realized that I wanted to totally transform my life. Some people would expect that it would take some sort of near-death experience, maybe a death of a family member or maybe some sort of moment of enlightenment or something like that, but actually, for me, all that happened was I started to watch some documentaries and I started to read some books, read some articles online, make some new friends, and I learned that the way that I was living was causing such incredible destruction to this Earth that we live upon. And such … that I was wrapped into this intricate web of exploitation and oppression and extraction through almost all of my daily actions. So, the food I was eating, the car I was driving, the stuff I was buying, the trash I was creating, the money I was spending, the money I was investing, the money that was sitting in my bank account. Even the water that I was drinking in San Diego where I was at the time I realized was part of systems of extraction and destruction.

So what I realized was, I had woven my web … woven myself into a web of consumerism. And, at that time, I could have felt total helplessness and hopelessness, doom and gloom. I mean, I realized that the corporations were lying to me, governments were hiding the truth behind closed doors of our actions. Society was not telling me the truth of our lives. And so, I could have … I could have felt, and I did feel some of that hopelessness and helplessness, overwhelm, some anger, depression, disheartenment, like I know … I’m pretty certain everyone in this room has felt some and some of us feel every single day right now, especially in the times that we live in. And while I did feel some of that, I also felt even more so, inspiration, empowerment, excitement. Because these books I was reading, these documentaries that I was watching, these organizations I was learning about – they weren’t just telling me the problems that existed, they were also sharing solutions for a new way forward. I was learning that we could … we can live … the word for me at that time in 2011, was ‘sustainably.’ To live sustainably. And so, I became over … not overnight, but very quickly, deeply passionate about transforming my life.

So, what I decided to do was that I was going to one step at a time take my life back. And at the core of all of this was learning about our food system: the global industrial food system which I was getting my food from and which the majority of human beings on this Earth do get their food from. So, I became the most passionate about my food. I was passionate about every way in which I could live in harmony with the Earth, but my food was one of the really big ones. In a way that I learned that I could take my power back. Documentaries like “Food, Inc.” and books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan were some of the ones that really shook me at my core. And I started to learn about permaculture. I started to make friends with herbalists. I started to learn about the reality of the pharmaceutical industry. And so, I started with small changes to take my life back. Instead of going to Walmart, where almost all of my food came from, I started to buy my food at a local grocery store. I also went to Trader Joe’s, then I learned that Trader Joe’s does a whole lot of greenwashing. There’s nothing sustainable about it. It’s just good advertising. And so, I started to go to the local food co-op. I would buy my food in the bulk sections so I wasn’t creating all of this garbage. I started to buy my herbs there to make herbal tea. I started to go to the local farmer’s market and connect with the farmers and the growers. I started to grow a little bit of food in my backyard. I found an old bookshelf and laid that down and filled that up with soil and started to grow some tomatoes and I think there was some kale in there and a couple different herbs. I started to harvest rainwater to water that garden. I started to harvest grey water, so the water from my sink, I would … instead of sending that down the drain to go to waste, I could use that to water my garden to grow food. I remember experimenting with some aquaculture, so raising tilapia, and I was raising black soldier fly larvae to try to feed the tilapia. That experiment never produced very much except a lot of critical thinking, and a lot of motivation and inspiration.

And then I also learned about foraging. I learned that food and medicine is actually growing all around us. I was in San Diego at the time, so I learned about nasturtium and lamb’s quarters and guavas and citrus. These were some of the foods that I was starting to forage. Just a little bit of here and there. And … so what I was doing was one step at a time unraveling this web of consumerism, because each of these new changes that I was making were breaking me free from the global industrial food system, from corrupt corporations, and instead, plugging me into my local community. That was a big part of what was happening. I was starting to walk to places and ride a bike instead of getting in my car as much, and starting having a deeper connection with Earth. I stopped buying cheap booze and instead putting that money into really high quality foods and medicines.

And so, after about a year-and-a-half of making changes, I had made over 100 changes in my life. My goal was one positive change a week for two years. So that’s the trajectory that I set out on to sort of radically transform my life. Well, not sort of. Radically transform my life. But sort of quickly, but also sort of … for some people that would be very rapid, impossible if you have maybe a full-time job and multiple kids and a mortgage and such, but I made it my full-time job to be transforming my life. So, it was rapid, but at the same time it was step-by-step. And so, what happened is, I unraveled that web of consumerism and I created a new web. A web of interconnection. A web of relationships. A web of skills that was much more localized. And it was more and more based around plants, which was very different from my upbringing, which was the only plants I really knew were the ones that were going to poison you, stick things to you, make you itch, and now I was learning, wow, the abundance that exists all around us. And really getting passionate about that.

At that time though, most of my food was still something I was buying. I grew a little bit of food and I foraged some of my food, but I hadn’t dived in too deep. In 2016, so five years later, I took my permaculture design course. That was a big learning point for me. In 2014, I biked across the country and we were planting trees and helping to start gardens. I created the Free Seed Project to provide seeds to people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to food. But, I wasn’t usually around to experience the whole process of seed to food on my plate. Just a little bit. So, it was in 2019 that I decided I was going to deeply immerse in my food and really break free from the global industrial food system.

One thing I didn’t mention is I had been dumpster diving a lot for the last years. I learned that we waste about $165 billion worth of food in this country that we call the United States per year, while one in seven Americans … US Americans are food insecure. So, for years I lived off of that waste. And that was great. I was diverting food from the landfill, and I wasn’t supporting that industry. But now I wanted to see could I break free from it completely and actually grow and forage all of my food and medicine from the land.

So that’s what I set out to do in 2019. And, I was in Orlando, Florida, at the time because … primarily because I wanted to be somewhere warm. I’m from Wisconsin … northern Wisconsin. That’s where I was born and raised, and I personally just really like to be warm. So that’s where I set out on that endeavor. And also, it’s nice to be able to grow some food year around. Plus, there’s coconuts and mangoes. Some wonderful things like that. Yes, the mangoes. So, I started out though …. So, when I started that, I went online and typed in “How much water does a carrot seed need?” and “How much sunshine does kale need?” I really did not know what I was doing. I showed up there with … in Orlando with just a backpack of everything I owned, a few thousand dollars and started to make connections in the community.

And, what I did was, I turned people’s front yards into gardens. So I turned six yards into gardens. And that’s where most … that’s where probably 50-75 percent of my food would come from. And then I shared that food with the people who owned that land. And they were all in front yards where others could access that food as well.

And so, I started to take classes. I would go to permaculture classes. I would go to local nurseries and … and go to different gardening classes, go to the community gardens. I went on my first plant walks with Andy Firk and a guy named “Green Deane” as well, who are foraging teachers down in Florida.

So, I gave myself six months to go from zero percent to a hundred percent of my food coming from what I grew and foraged. And I wasn’t ready after six months, partly because we were planting so many gardens for other people. We were really working hard on helping others to grow food as well. So it ended up being ten months. So, after ten months – it was November 11, 2019, my first breakfast of that year was my first meal ever that was 100 percent homegrown and foraged.

So I dived in pretty deep that day, and for the next year that’s exactly what I did: every breakfast, lunch and dinner came from the gardens that I had started or from foraging. Every snack in between, no stopping at a grocery store or restaurant. No dumpster diving, although some people call that “urban foraging,” that‘s a different type of foraging. Even if I wanted to, say, if I wanted to … I was looking into maybe going wild boar hunting. I would have had … if I was going to bait them, like most people do, I would have had to have used my own sweet potatoes, or food that I had foraged. So, all the food … I was very deeply looking into that. Like. And seeing: can I meet all of my needs from the land?

Now some people would say, “Why would you do that when you can eat from others’ gardens?”
Well, one reason is because I had a lot of friends with food forests. And if I ate from their food forests, I wouldn’t have to learn how to do this. I wouldn’t have to learn all of these skills.

So at the core of my message is community. It’s growing food together. But this was a way for me to deeply immerse, to learn all the skills. And also, my activism is designed to create a story that can bring people in. People who are often totally disinterested in their food, in environmental and social issues. So when people hear “He’s growing and foraging all of his food,” it’s a way to bring people in. It’s also a way to bring the media in.

So, that’s what I’ve been doing for the last ten years as I was transforming my life. Also immersing in this activism. These activism campaigns where I was living my message in a very, very outward way to bring people into the story, that brings people into … questioning. Questioning our societal ways. Questioning our personal ways. Questioning our own minds and our own actions.

The main question is: “Am I living the life that I truly want to?” Another way of saying that is, “Are my actions in alignment with my beliefs?” And, if the answer is “Yes, I’m living the exact life that I want,” and “Yes, my actions are in alignment with my beliefs,” then great. No further … nothing needed. But, if the answer when we ask that question is we feel a little bit of, like, a kink in our stomach, or a little bit of something here in our chest, then it’s, “Okay, what can we do differently?” And then it’s about exploring the solutions.

So, that year? I came out of that year in one of the healthiest states of my adult life. I managed to complete the year. I foraged 200 different species of foods and medicines from the land and grew over a hundred different species in my garden … gardens. And, I came away from that really seeing that the Earth can provide us with everything that we need. That we can exist outside of the global industrial food system.

In 2022, I decided that I was going to forage all of my food for one month. So, this time, no gardens. Nature would be my garden, my pantry and my pharmacy. That was the fall of 2022. I started in Wisconsin, and I was actually on a one-month tour from Wisconsin to Washington, DC, with cities in between. So for that, now I had to learn how to meet all of my … all of my needs, not from the garden. So that meant no more could I rely on rosemary and oregano and thyme and basil for the culinary herbs. Now I had to see if I could make tasty meals, nourishing meals, satiating meals just from what is growing wildly and abundantly from Earth. And I struggled, definitely. One of my … my main struggle was getting enough fat, getting enough oil. That was my main struggle on the first year as well, but this was definitely a struggle. It was day … I think, 27, it might have been 17, that I finally made oil from the bitternut hickory, or the yellowbud hickory, and I had harvested my salt and I had my different wild herbs, and I remember I was filming a video while eating that meal, and it was so hard not, at every single bite, to just exclaim how delicious it was after … after that time without … without oil. Oil was so important for me to … for a truly whole meal.

So, that was 2022. And, so now, three years later, I am immersing in this year of foraging all of my food and medicine. So, what does that look like? This is my pantry right here. So this is what it looks like. I started …. So. Just a small background. I am now living in my homeland of northern Wisconsin. I’m exploring the possibility of putting down roots there long term, after 19 years of living in different places. And so, my diet is based around my homeland where I grew up, which is the shores of Lake Superior. And, it’s a very cold climate up there. It’s Zone 4. 4A, 4B, and then a little bit further south, 5, depending on where you are. So, a lot of the plants that I eat up there are plants that won’t be growing all the way down here in southeastern Ohio. But, I’m also traveling as I’m doing this as well.

So, to give you an idea of what’s making up my diet …. Well, I’ll start down here at the bottom actually. I drink a lot of herbal teas. Herbal teas make up a substantial portion of my medicine. So, here we have fireweed. How many of you have had fireweed before? A couple of us. This is a new one for me this year. This is a … this is a plant that is one of the first to come up often after fires. So it grows in areas where you have forest fires. And … and you actually ferment this and it tastes very similar to black tea. So it’s a unique one. I’ll pass this around so you can smell that’s fermented. That, to me, really does have a smell of a … of a black tea.

Here we have mint. This is from a place called Beaver Hollow. This is a wild mint and I’ll pass this around as well. We’ll pass around a whole bunch of things to smell. So that I harvested this summer. So I started preparation for this year on July 1st and I gave myself three months to prepare before starting the year. I started the year on October 9th and today’s October 26th? So about 2 ½ weeks in.

This is one of my favorite teas. And this is sweet fern. How many of you have had sweet fern? Does sweet fern grow down here? Does anybody know?
[Audience:] “Not as abundant.”
Not as abundant but it does grow? Nice.
This is a plant that I’m not 100 percent sure about so I’m just going to ignore this one for now.
Here we have evening primrose seeds. So these are high in omegas. They smell and taste like hemp. So they have a similar situation to hemp going on.
Over here I have seaweed. So, I harvested seaweed from … when I arrived in Portland, Maine on this trip. So, I harvested a years’ supply of seaweed. This here is rockweed and bladderwrack. So they’re very high in nutrition. This is going to be a wonderful source for me. So, those are some of my herbs. There’s also some spices.

So moving up here, we’re into the fruit realm. So fruit makes up a large portion of my diet. This is plum sauce. The American plum. And that grows by the thickets where I am. I’ve never really, really been able to harvest gallons and gallons and gallons of plum, but enough to be able to make some sauce.

Here we have blueberries. These are canned blueberries. So what we’re talking about here: these are all water bath canned. So foods that are high in acid can be water bath canned. This only needs about 15 minutes in just boiling water. Water bath canning is very simple, very easy and works for all of the acidic foods.

What we have here is choke cherry leather. So choke cherry is a very important staple for Lakota people, but many Indigenous cultures have made choke cherry leather. The pits of choke cherry are high in cyanide, but when you smash up the pits with the fruit and dry it out, that denatures … basically off gasses the cyanide and then you are able to eat both the seed and the fruit. You’re getting the … the nourishing oils and protein of the seed and the … getting to eat the fruit at the same time.

Here we have elderberry. This is one of my most important medicines. We see there’s a lot of that growing here at United Plant Savers. And this has been a long-time important medicine for me.
Now, here we have autumn-olive. How many of you here are familiar with autumn-olive or autumnberry? You have this growing around here, right?
[Audience:] “Tons.”
[Audience:] “Birds stripped every one of them around my place.”
Yeah. That might been me actually. So, autumnberry or autumn-olive. Now this is a plant that people would use the term ‘invasive.’ And what I would like to say instead of ‘invasive’ is a plant that has been introduced from another ecosystem now grows in this ecosystem in a way that it is displacing the native population and doing a disservice – doing harm to the local ecosystem. When we just sort of use the term ‘invasive,’ we tend to be making an ‘other.’ Saying that, “This plant is bad.” But there is no such thing as a ‘bad’ plant. So, I … I like to … instead of saying ‘invasive,’ have that bigger picture context. And we’re going to talk a little bit more about that actually shortly.

Here is my sea salt. So this I harvested in Maine as well. So, when harvesting sea salt, I harvest from the cleanest waters that I can find. And we’ll talk a little bit about the issues of pollution and the environment and that concern.

Hazelnuts. And because I love these hazelnuts so much, and they’re just so fun, I’m going to pass these around so you can get to see these. These are the American hazelnut. There’s the American hazelnut and the beaked hazelnut. So those are the American hazelnuts.

So, so far we’ve seen herbs. We’ve seen spices. We’ve seen fruits. And now we were talking a little bit about nuts. Here we have here pecans, gingko seeds or gingko nuts, acorns, black walnuts, chestnuts, and hickory nuts. So nuts are becoming a staple portion of my diet. They are not nearly as prominent as some of the other foods because they take a bit more skill and effectiveness and efficiency with time and I’m just really starting to develop those skills.

Here’s green powder. So green powder is … I harvest many different edible leaves. So basswood and mulberry leaves. Those are two trees that you can harvest and enjoy the leaves. Dandelion and plantago, for example. So I harvest the leaves, I dehydrate them, stinging nettle, of course, as well. And then I turn them into a powder. So many of us go to the grocery store and we buy the green powder or we order it online. You can make your own green powder in a very, very easy abundant way, save a lot of money, and this stuff is just as nourishing as what you can buy as supplements. Often more nourishing because that stuff has been shipped around and sometimes it’s sitting for quite a period of time.

I have a friend in Asheville who takes … he harvests 30 different plants for his green powder and makes just the ultimate, super vitamin. And so, with this, wherever I’m traveling, if I don’t have access to fresh greens, I can take a spoonful of this, add it to my meal, and then have my … my greens.

So here’s my spice mix. My most challenging part is … my most challenging part of all of this is the flavor. That is the part that I don’t have the skills yet because I was so heavily reliant on the garden herbs, like rosemary, thyme, oregano, etcetera, that I’m only starting to really rewild my palate, break free from a domesticated palate. And one of the things that I’m so interested in is where I’m from is the land of the Anishinaabe people. I would have loved to have tasted their meal. What that flavor would be. I mean, talk about probably one of the most unique flavors I ever would have experienced would be what all the different herbs that they would harvest. And … so that’s something that I’m tapping into … is rewilding my palate.

So, oh, this one is definitely one I’ll pass around. So this is just monarda and fermented onion. So the monarda is from my homeland and the onion is from Madison, Wisconsin area.

And if we end up with a lot more jars, you can just set them right there, too.

So this is my herbal tea for the morning. This is my herbal tea for the evening. This is basswood or linden flowers. Pineapple weed or wild chamomile and catnip. And, I recently realized that catnip is a little bit too strong for me. And, unfortunately, I mixed it all in there, so I tend to be a bit groggy if I take this, I realized. The other two are much more gentle, sleepytime, relaxing ones.

So here I have mushrooms. Mushrooms make a very staple to my diet. This is a mixture of king bolete and maitake. And then this here is chanterelles. So I harvested 42 pounds of chanterelles this summer. Some I dehydrated, some I froze. And I probably harvested about 100 pounds of maitake. So I’m very abundant in mushrooms. They’re the thing that I’m most abundant in is mushrooms and I eat mushrooms every day at almost every single meal.

Do you have a question?

[Young girl:] “Do you ever eat lion’s mane?”

Okay. If I was a richer man, I would eat a lot more lion’s mane. But I’ve only found lion’s mane a few times. But, oh my gosh! You read my mind! This is the jar with lion’s mane in it! So actually, technically it’s the bear’s tooth … bear’s head tooth. It’s like there’s three that are in the Hericium genus.
[Audience: unintelligible]
Okay, so this is not technically true lion’s mane, but it works. It’s in the same realm. So this is my medicinal mushroom tea. This is maitake, reishi, turkey tail. This is chaga, from the birches of my homeland. Turkey tail, which I find on different fallen trees. Actually, I’m not sure which trees I find that on. I’m not interconnected enough yet to know that. Reishi, this is again a Ganoderma species which grows in my homeland on the dying … not alder.
[Audience:] “Hemlock?”
Hemlocks! Thank you. And then, yes. And then the maitake, which I don’t have that with me in the large form, and then the lion’s mane. So, I boil this for about 45 minutes. You want to … you want to have your mushroom teas at a high temperature for an extended period of time to make it the most medicinal. Some of the herbalists here can give you much more details why that is. I don’t need to know. I just do it.

And this jar represents a tea that is very important to me that I haven’t gotten around to yet. And that’s my root tea. So, dandelion, burdock and chicory that I need to harvest, roast and have as my morning … a lot of people use it as, like, a coffee substitute. I’m not a coffee drinker fortunately. But … so, I don’t, like, I don’t need it, but this is … aww. I can’t wait to have this! It is root season. So it’s … it’s time. I still have time before the ground freezes to be able to harvest.

Here’s the apple cider vinegar. So, where I live we have such an abundance of wild and feral apples. And so. I’ll have a little swig of this right now. I didn’t get the … I didn’t get five percent acidity, but it’s got a kick. I give it about three percent. And, I’ll pass it around and if anybody wants to take a little swig, you’re absolutely welcome to. But no gulps. It’s not that abundant. No. If you gulp this, whatever. I do have a couple gallons at home.

Who knows what this is?
[Audience:] “Garlic!”
Kind of. Yeah. Same family. So this is ramps. This is lactofermented ramps. So this is in my … in the salt water that I harvested. And this is a … this is a wonderful, wonderful herb for me.

Okay. We’ve made it to the top. I designed this so sort of the staples that provide the most calories and, like, that we’re most dependent upon, at the top, which generally you would think of those more at the bottom, but this is the way that I did it. But, really, all of this is very important.

So here. Venison. So we talked about the damage that the overpopulation of deer does on our forests. And, so I am very much someone who believes that hunting can be done as an ecosystem service. We have managed to hunt in a way that is harmonious with the lands and animals for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, and we can still do this today. I actually didn’t hunt this deer because there’s such an abundance of deer that are hit by cars that I haven’t needed to hunt a deer yet, but I’m hoping to do that this year. So some people say ‘roadkill deer.’ I say ‘a deer that was hit by a car,’ because it was a deer while it was walking along, and it’s still a deer after it’s hit. When we say ‘roadkill deer,’ we tend to ‘other’ it. We tend to create this story of, like this gross thing. But it’s a deer that was hit by a car. So this is one of my staple foods. I, unlike most hunters, keep the fat there, so I get a fair bit of fat from my deer. Unfortunately, a lot of the deer eat corn from the farmers’ fields, and that’s where some of this fat is coming from. So, it’s impossible to actually fully escape the industrial food system. That’s a … that’s a bit of a rabbit hole you may or may not dive into tonight.

And, I may as well mention, now that we’ve gone into that … this jar that I didn’t mention earlier … this is the organs of that deer. So this is the liver, kidneys, heart and lungs all dehydrated, ground up into a powder and this is super nourishing. So, I’ll add about a spoonful of that to most of my soups and stews. And, we might as well pass this one around and smell it, too. That, to me, is a strong smell and you may or may not enjoy it. And I invite you to see what you think. What do you think?
[Audience:] “Fish food.”
Aww, I can see that. Fish food. Probably has some meat ground up in there.

This empty jar also represents something that I haven’t harvested yet, and that’s fish. I struck out on whitefish three times in a row before this project started, so I am … I haven’t had any fish. I’ll be back in my homeland in about a week. The salmon are still running, and so, I will be hopefully nourishing myself with very fatty fish in about a week’s time.

Here we have Manoomin. Wild rice. The good berry. The food that grows on water. And tonight everybody gets to eat some of this wild rice. We have a pot of it right here. It’s warm and this is the wild rice harvested in my homeland. So, I want to give gratitude to the Anishinaabe people, who have been stewarding wild rice for at least 700 years, and this plant of all the plants, is the one that has changed me at the core more than any other plant. And the reason why is harvesting wild rice is so deeply healing for me. Because when I am in relationship with wild rice, I know that I am in relationship with a food that has had a deep relationship with humanity unbroken for hundreds and hundreds of years. We have the corn people, and the wheat people, and the acorn people and the teff or injera people of Ethiopia. We have the quinoa people in Bolivia and Peru, and where I’m from is the wild rice people. There’s a reservation near me called Manominee and that means “people of the wild rice.” And so, when I am harvesting this rice, I am connected to that. And there’s not too many plants where you get to be a part of that in this fragmented society that we live in. And what I … some people say, “Well, aren’t white people not supposed to harvest wild rice?” It couldn’t be further from the truth. There’s a coalition of Anishinaabe people and non–native people who are stewards of the rice, who protect the rice, who love the rice. And so, I want to name Maria Nevala is the person who processes this rice. Wild rice is built into every fiber of her DNA. She’s been eating it since the youngest age and she’s one of our local processors. So, she does the parching and actually, I’ll pass this around.

This is the rice as it comes out of the lake in the husk. That’s dehydrated, just dried in the sun for a day or a couple days depending on the scenario. You’re welcome to take a few of those and keep them as a little joyful, loving plant to carry with you. It’s then parched in order to heat up the husk … or to dry the husk and make it brittle. So it can then be put through a thrasher that will separate that husk from the rice. Traditionally, that would have actually been moccasins on feet dancing the wild rice. And some people still do that. But most of the time it goes through a machine. Small scale machinery that is often homemade on the reservation. But sometimes … the next machine actually … I’ll pass this around … is one that is interchangeable with other agriculture, and that’s the machine that then separates the chaff from the rice. And it basically is shaking back and forth and the rice is able to fall through and the husks separate out and then that leaves you with the wild rice. And so, here’s the wild rice in its finished stage. You can … actually, let me smell that. I want to see …. It’s got a pretty wild rice smell. Sometimes I put it in other jars that have smells to them, but that’s got a wild ricey smell.

So, yeah, when I was … while harvesting wild rice, I’m a part of this long-term culture that has existed for a very long time and helping that culture to thrive. So, very grateful to the Anishinaabe people for their … for their hundreds of years’ relationship with the wild rice.

Two more plants that are here. And this, of course, is … aww … my sauce. So, this is … this is pear sauce. Feral pear sauce. And I eat a lot of wild apple and wild pear sauce. And I like to eat about a pint of this a day. So a quart jar lasts me about two days. So I eat a lot of pear sauce and applesauce. This is one of my absolute staples.

And now here is … who knows what this is? Staple food, top ten wild edibles for me.
[Audience:] “Stinging nettle.”
Yes. Stinging nettle. This one’s stinging nettle. There’s also wood nettle. And this is a staple for me. I make tea from it. I make … I add it in with my rice and my venison. So, right now my primary meal is wild rice, venison, stinging nettle, mushrooms, the herbs, salt, and ramps will often go in there. When life is good, I’ll have some fresh aronia or autumn-olive that I’ll add in, on top. And then in each bite there’ll be a – black … black aronia mostly — there’ll be some fresh berries, which adds its own, like, pop – real nice flavor.

And then, what I’m missing right now is oil. So, here I have bitternut hickories, or yellowbud hickories. And, according to Sam Thayer, there’s enough bitternut hickory or yellowbud hickory – those are two names for the same hickory – there’s enough of this growing in what we call the United States right now to put a bottle of hickory oil on every dinner table in this country. And that’s without us creating an industry around it. Sam Thayer has a small … he has a small – I guess you could say industry – a press, that he then is able to sell this oil. And there’s a couple of people who do that. I have only harvested seven gallons of the yellowbud hickory, so far, and I need to harvest about 32, so if anybody knows of any nearby, very productive bitternut or yellowbud hickory, I have the day off tomorrow, and that would become my top priority. I’m getting late in the season. Yeah?

[Audience:] “You need to go out on the Solid Ground. I’ll get you [unintelligible].”
Okay. Wonderful. Thank you. So, yeah. Come talk to me afterward if you know of any productive trees. I’m looking to harvest about 25 more gallons. So, a pretty good amount. It’s out there. I just have a lot on my plate. So, it’s one of the …there’s so many things to bring together.

So, in here, we also have pecans. And, oh, the gingko seeds, which … these are on the small side. I like them when they’re bigger. But I’ll pass this around. There’s some more points that I’d like to get into now as far as foraging, but before we do that, I would love to take an opportunity for a short intermission to take three deep breaths together. And then do about thirty seconds of thinking about how much we love the plants. So, as we take these breaths, we can remember that all of these breaths are created by the plants that we are dependent upon. And not just the plants. The bacteria that live in the ocean. The plankton. And so, just think about the interconnectedness of life. Even just being here in this room, even though we are outside, there’s so much life in this room. So, think about that. We’ll take three deep breaths together. Then we’ll do another half-minute or so of silence. [Deep breaths] [Silence]

Welcome back. Thanks for taking that time with me. Umm. It does wonders for the nervous system. So, speaking of nervous system: some people might be quite concerned about foraging – about the safety of foraging. So, the world’s most famous forager right now, I would say, is Alexis Nikole Nelson. She goes by Black Forager on TikTok, and Instagram. And, she ends all of her videos with, “Happy foraging. Don’t die.” And I think that really speaks to the fact that she has 4 ½ million followers on TikTok, and the fact that she shares that probably speaks to a lot of people who are concerned about dying through foraging.

So, there’s one simple rule, the number one rule of foraging in order to not die, and that is: only eat a plant or mushroom, or anything, if you’re 100 percent sure of … of who this plant is, what this plant is and that you know that … how to eat it. So, as long as you follow that basic rule, you are in a safe place. Sam Thayer, who is one of the foragers who I’ve learned the most from – he has done a very deep level of research and has found there are very few documented cases of someone dying from foraging who was being diligent about what they’re doing. Most all people who are … who die from foraging or who are substantially injured are people who are just being careless. Putting foods, putting plants, putting mushrooms into their mouths that they don’t take the time to identify. They’re like, “Oh, orange mushroom. Must be chanterelle. It’s a jack-o-lantern.” And so, then they poison themselves. So, the number one rule of foraging is simply only eat something … a plant, a mushroom, etcetera, if you’re 100 percent sure of not just what the plant or mushroom is, but how to work with it. So, pokeweed, for example. Poke: you have to boil it in order to remove the toxins that do harm. And as long as you boil poke – and a lot of people will do a double boil – then you remove that and it’s a stable food that has been eaten by millions of people in the south for hundreds or probably thousands of years. If you don’t do poke right, then you can poison yourself. So, that’s one of the basic rules of foraging.

Foraging is far more safe than most people would … would believe. It is … it is actually a very safe passion and hobby to have. In my book, Food Freedom, which I’ll talk about a little bit at the end, there is … toward the back … a little foraging guide. Let me see if I can happen to flip right to it. Yep. So, there’s the foraging resources section that starts on page 192 that has “How to safely forage.” And then, if you go to my website: robingreenfield.org/foraging, that’s a beginner guide to foraging that also directs you to other foragers where you can learn many of these basic things.

Another rule of foraging is that whenever you try a new plant, you only try one new plant per day. Because, that way, if you have a reaction, you know which plant you’re having a reaction to. That said, one day I ate 12 species … 12 new species of mushrooms in one day, so I don’t always follow those rules, but as beginners, it’s best to follow those basic guidelines. Of course, we’re all adults, and one young woman here, but we are all, even you, are responsible for our own actions. Only we decide what goes into our own body. And so, on that note, there actually is no plant that can kill you. Because we put it into our mouths and we would kill ourselves. So, it’s an important note to take responsibility that if we die from a plant, it is us who did that, not the plant.

A little bit about the sustainability of foraging. So some people are quite concerned about foraging, and so they just stick to the grocery store because they don’t want to harm the Earth. And that’s very understandable and very reasonable. But the problem is that most of the time we’re doing that because we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that this food system is not harming the Earth and that foraging is detrimental. But, as we start to look at our food system, we realize that actually the food that we’re buying from the global industrial food system, and even a lot of the smaller farms, is doing damage to the ecosystem as well. But there’s some simple things that you can do if you’re looking to start foraging and you’re concerned about that.

One: Eat the weeds. So, dandelion and burdock and plantago, as a few examples. Or smartweed, lady fingers, ladies’ fingers, lady’s thumb … I always forget exactly which name that goes by. There are dozens and dozens of plants that I consider to be in such high abundance that you could not overharvest them. Lamb’s quarters is another example of that. If you’re in southern California, nasturtium. Nasturtium is not going to be eliminated by foraging. So, eating these weeds is a wonderful way to get started, where you can be confident that you’re not doing harm to the ecosystem.

Now, another way that I mentioned earlier: we have autumn-olive here. And so, you can become an invasivore. So, you’ve heard of locavore, carnivore, herbivore. Well, an invasivore is a person who focuses on eating plants that are considered invasive. By doing so, you’re doing an ecosystem service with every single bite you take. That being said, if you DO eat the seeds, you’ve got to chew them up. You can’t be pooping them out and spreading those seeds. So you have to … there’s still some critical thinking that’s required as an invasivore. Now, for those of you who flush your poop down the toilet, that’s less of an issue. But I compost my poop. So, that could be potentially an issue. But I chew up all of these seeds because they’re actually high in … I believe it’s omegas … GLAs. I can’t remember right now. So I actually chew up the seeds of the autumn-olive. And on a note of chewing, I’m going to open this up and pass it around. I’m abundant in this and I’m not abundant in a serving device, so you can use your fingers or someone can find a device as you please, but this is just autumn-olive, nothing else. And so, yes, you can start to eat plants that are considered invasive. If you are really looking for a way to make certain you are doing an ecosystem service.

A lot of people would say, like, that foraging is inherently destructive. But the reality is foraging can be inherently beneficial. So, one of the books that changed my life and the humans who changed my life is Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Her new book, The Service Berry, although short, is very powerful as well. And she really … she … if you’re really looking to … because once you do get into the native plants, that is where you start to need to have a much deeper knowledge. If you’re starting to harvest roots or barks, or the inner layer of trees, like I think the slippery elm comes from the inner layer, for example. I don’t know that because I haven’t gone there yet. But this is a book that can change you at your core. And help you to tap into what she calls “the honorable harvest.”

So, and living in reciprocity. Some people use reciprocity as a buzzword, but it’s a really meaningful word. Many of us truly want to and are working toward living in reciprocity. Which means learning to give to the plants as we receive. So when we harvest the ramps, for example: many of us harvest the ramps in the spring. Well, we can go back to that patch in the fall, we can harvest the seeds, and we can enjoy that abundance of ramps. Some people would say that you absolutely can’t harvest ramps sustainably, but you can. There’s forest floors that have acres of ramps where you can harvest selectively, thin it selectively, and actually be beneficial to that ramp patch and help to spread it to other areas. So, that would be an area where it’s a little bit more challenging. So maybe you don’t start with ramps. You start with the dandelion. You start with the plantago. You start with the nettles. You start with these easier ones.

So these books that I have here are some of the foraging books that I recommend. Sam Thayer’s – he’s got three books: The Forager’s Harvest, Nature’s Garden, Incredible Wild Edibles. These three books can tell you everything you need to know. You go on here, this talk – although it has some wonderful essence to it, everything you need to know is right here in these three books. And then his newest book, this field guide has 750 different plants and has really upped my game.

Now, I’m in the midwest, so I use Lisa Rose’s Midwest Medicinal Plants and Midwest Foraging. And those are the very helpful books for me. I guess I’m back in the midwest right now. I was just in the east this morning, until this afternoon. So I use for my mushrooms: Mushrooms of the Upper Midwest, Wild Berries and Fruits of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, and then I also work with Trees of Wisconsin. So, numerous … these five books here have more regional options as well. And there are many books, but these are the ones that I use and really, these nine books accomplish what I’m … they really accomplish things for me. I don’t actually rarely have anything more than those. So, and then with that, Braiding Sweetgrass is not teaching you how to forage, but it really instills wanting to be in harmony with the land. And there’s a couple other books that I have there that are slightly off topic. And I won’t dive into those right now.

So. Some people say, “What if everyone started to forage?” “Wouldn’t the ecosystems be decimated overnight?” And, you have to also ask the question, “If everybody wanted to start foraging, wouldn’t it mean that we were critically thinking about our industrial food system?” Wouldn’t it mean that we were questioning the societal norms and the status quo? The answer is “absolutely.” People who begin foraging start to look at the world in a different way. Sure, some foragers become just takers. Usually it’s when they’re making money off of it. You don’t usually have people who are foraging just for their food and medicine, that over harvest. It’s more of the harvesting of a lot of the medicines that we talk about here at United Plant Savers.

But the reality is that the more that we forage, the more that we start to fall in love. We start to fall in love with the plants, with the animals, with the Earth, with our fellow humanity, with the ecosystems that we’re a part of. We start to fall in love with ourselves and have more respect for our very own being. And so, if everybody started to forage, I would deeply embrace that, because it would mean that we were having a radical transformation of our relationship with the Earth.

Foraging is, as Linda Black Elk puts it, an act of resistance. It’s an act of resistance against systems that result in human beings no longer thinking, no longer having critical thought. It’s an act of resistance against dominator cultures that have intentionally destroyed cultures that have existed in harmony with the land. When settlers came from Europe over to this land, one of their strategies for destroying the cultures was destroying their food and destroying their connection with food. In the plains and all the way to the east coast, that’s the buffalo. When you destroy the buffalo, you destroy the culture. You destroy relationship. And as much as we aren’t taught this, that’s been done to cultures around the world and not just Indigenous cultures, but it’s being done to us every day, every one of us here no matter what culture we’re from. We’re taught to fear the Earth. We’re taught that we’re separate from the Earth. We’re taught that we don’t belong here on Earth. We’re taught that we don’t belong in the forests and the fields and the waters. And so, for me, this year of foraging all my food and medicine is a deep practice of belonging. It’s a practice of saying, “I am a human being. A human animal. And I am a part of this home.” It’s about finding a home here … a deep home.

And my belief is that our greatest threat as humanity is the belief that we’re separate. When you look at most of our exploitation and oppression and extraction, we do it because we believe that either we’re separate or we’re superior. And that comes to racism and sexism and the destruction of our ecosystems. And so, I think one of the most powerful things we can do is dissolve the illusion of separateness and embrace that we are interconnected with it all. Which is why I am carrying Thich Nhat Hanh. He uses the terms ‘interconnected’ and ‘interbeing’ a lot. He’s one of the deep, deep teachers in my life. He’s not a forager. Definitely not a forager. But his practices … he teaches us how to walk as if each step is a greeting to Mother Earth. Or actually, what he says is, “Walk as if you’re kissing the Earth with each step.” Walk as if each step is a kiss to Mother Earth. And if we do that when we’re foraging? Wow. We’ll take things up to the next level.

So, let’s see what else did I want to mention here. Yeah. So reconnection is the remedy to our separateness. That’s something that I deeply, deeply feel. And a note about that: take this to the next level where I’ve been going, and this is … this is a really interesting practice, but we now know that this body, all bodies here, are more bacterial cells than we are actual human cells. So, each of our bodies has around three pounds of bacterial cells. And our bodies are more bacteria than they are human cells. You really start to wrap your head around and you go, okay, then what ARE we? When you start to realize that there’s one different unique species of mite that lives here, that doesn’t colonize your chin, it has a relationship to this portion of your body, you realize that you are interconnected culture in your very essence and being. And that if all of that were to die overnight, WE die. So what ARE we? What IS a human being? A human being is an interconnected culture in and of itself.

And so, when you go to that level, you start to be able to break down this illusion of separateness even more. Another way that I like to look at that is, when we take the water, from a creek or even from the tap, and we put that into the hands. That water … at that point it’s clear to say, is not us, for most of us. We put that water in our mouths, we swish it around. Okay, not us yet. We swallow it. It’s in our stomach. Is it us? Now it’s in our veins. Is it us? I sure would say so. We pee it out, onto the land. Is it us? Well, most people would say, “No.” But when you really look at it, you start to see that we are … we’re interconnected with it all.

So, the last few notes that I would like to leave us on before opening up to questions are:
1. Living simply so that others may simply live. That is something that I’ve taken away from Mahatma Gandhi and taken deep inside. And foraging is a way to do that. Foraging is a deep practice of living simply and closely connected to Earth.

I’d like to mention the concept of Earth Code. So, there are laws that are set up to prevent us from foraging. In those scenarios, what I do is, I follow Earth Code. Rather than blindly following a government code, most of which are designed to keep us separate, I will first follow Earth Code. Which is: Is this action harmful to the Earth, to the plants, to the animals, to humans? And if the answer is “no,” then I am going to follow through with that action. Better yet: Is this action beneficial to the Earth, to my community and to myself? So Earth Code is about critical thinking.

Another note that I want to make … I want to mention Lyla June Johnston … finished her PhD recently, and she has a really in depth thesis on the long-term Indigenous relationship with being stewards of this land that really is a beautiful exploration. Right now, I’m foraging all my food, but as you start to pay more attention, you have to ask, “What is foraging actually?” Like, this wild rice is wild, but when the Anishinaabe people have been stewarding it for hundreds of years, it’s also like a human garden at the same time. And, so, I think that’s a really beautiful thing to explore more of.

Land Back is a really powerful movement if you want to learn about that, you can go to landback.org. And that’s about putting land back into the hands of the original stewards of the land. I think the statistic is like 80 percent or so of all biodiversity is in the hands of Indigenous people, and so when we put more land back into the hands of Indigenous people, it accomplishes the goal of creating an Earth that is actually habitable.

One last note is: as I’m doing this year of foraging all my food, I’m launching … something that … that Chip was talking a lot about, and that’s planting trees. So, we recently launched the One Million Community Fruit Trees Initiative, where we’re going to plant, through a very grassroots collaborative effort, one million fruit and nut trees over the next decade. So, if you’re excited about that, and being involved, we’re looking for people to start little micro nurseries to grow the trees. I can see you’re into that idea possibly. So, people who are harvesting seeds and cuttings, growing them, and then we’ll be doing both people being able to pick them up at these local hubs as well as shipping them. And so, by doing this, we reduce the cost of buying trees and are able to produce that abundance ourselves. And then, having thousands of people all across the United States planting these trees for ecosystem stewarding, for food for the humans and food for the plants and animals. We’ll focus primarily on native … native fruits and nuts. So, you can go to robingreenfield.org/communityfruittrees if you want to learn about that.

For resources, if you want to go to robingreenfield.org/foraging, that will … that’ll plug you into all the foraging resources that you might be seeking. If you go to findaforager.com, that’s a database of over 500 foragers. So, one of the most powerful ways to really get out foraging is to go with others who know what they’re doing. So that’s a database you can use to find foragers to learn from.

And, then the last thing that I’ll say is I’m really excited to … well, actually I just want to make a note of this moment of realization. I have plants to my right, plants to my left, plants right here. It is nice to be surrounded by plants right now.

So, this book, Food Freedom, is all about my year of growing and foraging all my food. If you open the first page, it says, “This book is not for sale.” So this book is available on a donation basis. And that donation could be that you grow some extra kale and share it with your elderly neighbor who doesn’t have access to nourishing food, or you learn some plants and you teach others. So, I would love to share this book with anybody who would like to take this home. I’m happy to sign them as well. I’ll be hanging out for long enough to sign any books that people would like. I also encourage you to bring some back with you to put into your local libraries: school libraries, university libraries, community libraries like this, public libraries, and also to share them as gifts with others if you think this will be a transformational tool. So, it’s three parts. It’s the story of my year growing and foraging all my food. It’s a critique of the global industrial food system and it’s an empowerment manual for liberating ourselves and our communities through food. If you do have the financial means to make a donation, 100 percent of our profits go to getting this book to other folks who can’t … who don’t have funds, as well as Black and Indigenous-led food sovereignty initiatives. So, the resources that this book generates helps to proliferate exactly what this book is about.

So, I’m grateful for you all sticking with me. That was .. well, actually, not too long. That was only about an hour and ten minutes or so, but I know I packed a lot in. So, I’m really grateful for you being here and sharing all that.