- What does squirrel taste like?
Squirrel tastes like squirrel.
(Rob laughs)
(upbeat instrumental music)
For one year, I only ate foods that I grew and foraged.
One year without grocery stories or restaurants,
nothing packaged or processed,
nothing shipped long distances.
Literally, everything I ate for the entire year
came from my garden or that I harvested from nature.
My name is Rob Greenfield.
I'm an environmental activist who embarks
on extreme adventures to bring attention
to important environmental and social issues.
Basically, I believe that our current global industrial
food system is broken.
Everywhere you look, it's causing severe destruction
to people, to other species, and to the earth as a whole.
And so I wanted to do something extreme.
I've always had the question, would it be possible
to step away from big ag,
step away from the global industrial food system,
and could I exist without grocery stories and restaurants
and actually grow all my own food?
I couldn't find people that had done it,
so for me, the solution was to do it myself
and see if it was possible.
When I started, I didn't know how much sun
does a carrot need?
How much water do you put on your collards
or your Swiss chard?
I was just literally on the internet researching
every plant and how to do it.
Food didn't get bland because I ate over 300 species
of food, I grew over 100 different foods,
and I foraged over 200 different foods.
That's almost a new species for every day
of the entire year.
I made my own flour by dehydrating cassava and yam.
Then I could make my own tortillas and bread.
I fermented a lot of foods and made things
like sauerkraut and honey wine and ginger beer.
I ate dozens and dozens of different meals
throughout the year that were really varied.
It really didn't get boring.
I chose Florida because as someone
who had minimal experience, I did want to be somewhere
where I could grow food year round.
It can be done in colder climates,
but I wanted to choose an easier place
since I was just a beginner.
What I chose to do was not live on a farm,
not live out in the countryside, because I wanted
to impact people, I wanted people to see me growing
my food, I wanted to interact with the community.
When I arrived in Florida,
one of the first things that I did
is I connected with the local food growing movement.
I went to the community garden.
So I just really immersed in the community
and got to know people, and I asked people
in the community if they would like to have free food
growing right in their yard rather than just grass,
and the people lined up to have me turn their yard
into a garden.
I ended up having six front-yard gardens,
and they were available for anyone to eat from.
Quickly it went from grass to having really enough food
for dozens or even hundreds of people to eat from.
And they were basically community gardens.
Anybody could walk in and eat the food.
For the year, I lived in a tiny house that I built
out of 99% second-hand materials.
It's 10-feet by 10-feet, so very small.
My arm span is six feet, so I span across most of it.
Basically it was a bed, a desk with a chair,
a freezer to store food, a couple of shelves
to store a lot of food, and then under the bed,
there was storage as well.
Being in Florida, I was able to utilize outside as well.
My kitchen was an outdoor kitchen,
and that was powered by rain water, so my sink was
just rain water for washing dishes and hands,
and I also had an outdoor compost toilet
where I would compost my poop and pee,
and turn that into fertile soil rather than
wasting water and shipping it off
to be someone else's problem.
That fertilizer is used on fruit trees,
so not on your kale and stuff on the ground,
but on fruit trees where the fruit is high above.
And then lastly I had an outdoor shower as well,
and the water from that was harvested from rain,
and then the water would be used to water banana plants
to grow bananas.
I gave myself six months to prepare,
but that ended up being ten months before I actually
started it, and I started from scratch.
I had to get seeds and soil
and figure out the absolute basics.
My basic strategy was to plant way more than I would need
so that way I would have enough.
That meant more work, but it ensured the success.
I talked to the local gardeners and farmers,
and I asked, "What grows so ridiculously well
"that even if you barely know what you're doing,
"it's not just going to survive, but it's actually going
"to thrive?"
I asked what has the fewest pests, what produces
a huge amount of food, and what can handle neglect?
And that is what I planted.
Most of these were foods that I had never eaten before,
you don't see at the grocery store, and a lot of them
I didn't even know the name of.
Things like chaya or moringa or katuk.
There were dozens of plants that became my staple foods
that are staples for people around the world,
but that were pretty much unknown to me
and most of the people I was around.
A year is a pretty long time.
Imagine taking any sort of diet and doing it
for an entire year.
Through the year, I had my ups and downs.
At times, felt my absolute best,
and then there was times that I was worried about my health.
One of the most interesting times was just
at the very beginning.
It was just about a week and a half in,
and I realized that my digestion was the best
that I had felt it in my adult life.
By the middle of the year, I found that I had
a deficiency I thought in fat and protein.
That's one of the hardest things to really get.
For me this is really funny because I was plant-based
fully for two years, and I didn't eat any meat.
I was trying to grow plant-based protein.
I was growing beans and peas that did really well,
but I was trying to grow peanuts and sunflowers.
And I was really excited to make my own peanut butter.
Literally from soil to the jar of peanut butter.
I was so excited for it.
But the problem was the squirrels wanted my peanuts
and they wanted my sunflowers.
I grew, I put a lot of energy into it,
and I almost, I barely ate just a few,
because they would eat them long before they were even ready
for me to eat them.
So in permaculture there's a saying, and that's,
"Turn your problem into your solution."
The squirrels were my problem.
They were eating my plant-based form of protein.
So I ate the squirrels.
(record scratches)
In doing so, I got protein that I needed,
and I took care of something that was causing me
a hard time in my garden.
I definitely had some controversy over that
in the neighborhood, but for me,
it's not about black and white.
We look at our food on our plates, and because it's
a grocery store or because it's a restaurant,
we just trust it.
We don't think about where it came from,
the impact that it had on other people, other species,
and on the land.
You can look at what I'm doing is you see it direct.
You see I ate a squirrel.
But if you are getting food from a farm,
even if it's vegan food, there's a good chance
they're killing squirrels or rats or mice
that are eating the food.
So for me, I'm in the direct fire.
You see these things that I'm doing, but the reality is
that we're all doing this; we just don't see it.
And so it makes it a very different thing.
When you're immersed in your food, you start to understand
the reality of the dinners that we're eating.
And then also, I was in Wisconsin at that time,
on a trip for the summer.
I went fishing, and I caught fish,
and particularly lake trout,
which are one of the fattier fishes that are out there,
and I actually ate literally the entire trout,
even the head, the eyes, the brain
because that's where so much of the fat is.
Also, deer that were hit by cars,
so some people would call that road kill.
I call them deer that were killed by cars.
That was basically, between the fish and the deer,
that was what brought me back into balance
and gave my body the nourishment
that I wasn't getting otherwise.
By the end of the project, I did a body fat composition,
and I had 15% body fat,
so I was able to work my way back up.
And at the end of the year, I felt honestly better
than I had recalled in my adult life.
I was healthier and I was happier,
and I didn't get sick once throughout the entire year.
The ironic thing is I have a little bit of a cold right now
after this and getting back into the food system.
My experience was that this created some of the happiest
and healthiest days of my life so far.
My goal wasn't just to grow and forage all of my own food.
My goal was to help other people do so as well.
During the year, I started Gardens for Single Moms,
and we built gardens for five single-parent families
in the neighborhoods and helped them grow their own food.
And we planted over 200 fruit trees
that were publicly accessible for everyone to eat from.
And then Free Seed Project,
and we sent out 5000 garden starter kits to people
to grow their own healthy food across the country.
A tomato is good on a plate when you get it
at the restaurant or a grocery store,
but to plant that from seed,
to watch it grow, to see it be this little green ball
that you can't eat, and then bigger,
and then this ripe, juicy, plump tomato,
and then to pick that, and to have picked off the insects
to the point where you can actually get to eat it
because the insects didn't, and you went through
all of those times together with that tomato,
and then you get to eat that tomato.
It might not actually taste better, but it tastes better.
There's just that love that went into it,
and you feel it, and you're like,
"This is the best tomato I've ever had."
Most of the food that we buy at the grocery store today
is shipped long distances, often from halfway around
the world, if not halfway across the country.
It's packaged in plastic that will be around
for hundreds of years, either in the landfill
or in our oceans and our lakes and our forests.
It's processed and filled with ingredients
that aren't really good for us.
Ingredients that we can't name that aren't real food,
and it uses a ton of pesticides and herbicides
and fertilizers that run off and pollute our water.
This food, although it appears harmless on our plates,
has so many repercussions to people, to other species,
and to the world that we depend on for our existence,
and that's why I think it's important to know that.
And if that doesn't match your value system,
to find food that doesn't cause that destruction
to the world that we live on.
(upbeat music)