Ditch your Grocery Store. Go Foraging Instead.
Our bodies are built to consume nature’s bounty and turn it into more of ourselves. According to researchers at Kew Gardens in Britain, humans are capable of finding sustenance in more than 7,000 species of plants, each packaging its own unique amalgam of flavors and nutrients. Yet if you are American — or, increasingly, a resident of any other country — you probably subsist on a tiny fraction of those: corn, wheat, soy, rice, potatoes and a few dozen standardized supermarket vegetables. The rejection of 99 percent of the world’s edible plant biodiversity is part and parcel of much of humanity’s recent rise to extraordinary wealth. While much of the tropics still consumes a diverse, partly wild diet, eating wild has become “taboo” in the so-called developed world, where parents have “taught their kids that this is poor people’s food,” says Alex McAlvay, an ethnobotanist at the New York Botanical Garden. In short, we convinced ourselves that the more we could separate, physically and psychically, from trees, weeds and soil, the better off we would be.
This story, written by Gabriel Popkin, is published in the Washington Post Magazine.
Tama Matsuoka Wong, founder of Meadows and More, poses for a portrait in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
Ethnobotanist Alex McAlvay forages Brassica rapa in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
Tama Matsuoka Wong holds garden shears to forage Brassica rapa with in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
Brassica rapa is pictured after being foraged by Tama Matsuoka Wong in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
Lincoln Smith, founder of Forested, poses for a portrait in Bowie, Maryland.
Forager Derek Carty forages field pennycress in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
Ducks are seen at Forested in Bowie, Maryland.
Lincoln Smith works at Forested in Bowie, Maryland.
Tama Matsuoka Wong, poses for a portrait in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
Foraged Brassica rapa is pictured in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
Field pennycress is pictured in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
Gloves are seen at Forested in Bowie, Maryland.