All right Rob,
what do you want to share with the world?
Well, for the last decade I have been
on a mission to break free from Big AG,
to never have to go to the grocery store
or a restaurant again.
That is where this next big journey began.
For 1 month, I decided that I was going to
forage 100 percent of my food.
Food that I harvested from the fruits of the Earth
in a way where I was able to reconnect with the plants
while living in harmony with the Earth.
This is the story of the last month.
I am elated for you to be here
to share it with you.
Rob Greenfield's
Month of Foraging
[Acoustic music]
A lot of people have said to me
"Rob, all the food we need
is already in the grocery store.
Why would you even go to
these extreme measures to do this?"
My answer is very simple.
The global industrial food system
that we depend on for our food,
it is a destructive food system.
It is one where every single bite that we take,
we are taking a bite out of the planet.
I have a desire to live
deeply connected with this Earth.
For me, I find that connection through foraging.
But this is not just about me.
I want to help others reconnect with the Earth.
By embarking on this,
honestly, sort of extreme project,
the idea is to take you along on this adventure
and ask these questions,
go deeper into our food.
When I say food
I am also talking about my medicine.
Our food is our medicine.
So that means no pharmaceuticals,
no pharmacies.
Breaking free from that as well,
and finding all of my medicine
growing on the Earth as well.
Believe it or not,
the preparation for this journey
only began 9 days before the month.
I arrived in my homeland
of the state of Wisconsin.
I started there with no food.
As much as I was excited about the fun,
I had a lot of work to do.
I had to harvest my calories,
my fat, my protein, my nutrients,
salt, herbs, spices.
I had just 9 days
before I was about to have to eat
a hundred percent from the land.
My work was cut out for me.
Over those first 9 days
and over the entire month,
I harvested about a hundred
different foods from the land
so my diet was diverse.
Diversity is absolutely, in my opinion,
the key to meeting our basic needs
to having a truly healthy and vibrant diet.
My focus was to choose the plants that are
abundantly growing
that are growing in large quantities
and that can meet my basic needs.
Number 1 for me was wild rice.
This was my absolute go-to.
It is called monomen,
the food that grows on water,
the good berry.
In 1 day, I was able to harvest 30 pounds of it.
Manomen is an important traditional food
of the Anishinabe people,
who are the original stewards
of the Great Lakes region
where I am from.
It is one of the most calorically dense foods that exists.
It is also one of the most special foods that exists.
I harvested apples, pears, and plums.
With them, I made really filling
and nourishing applesauce and fruit sauces.
I harvested a lot of high vitamin fruits
like aronia berry, cherries,
autumn berries, and grapes.
I turned a lot of them into fruit juices.
At the heart of my diet was greens
packed full of nutrients, like watercress
from the springs where I got my water;
weeds like dandelion, plantago,
and lamb's quarter from parks and front yards;
and stinging nettle from farm fields,
just to name a few.
I harvested medicinal herbs for teas
like bee balm, catnip, mint, goldenrod,
mugwort, and so much more.
I harvested plants that would add
a lot of flavor to my meal
like wild onion, wild leeks, and mustard.
I harvested both edible and medicinal mushrooms
like puffballs and maitaki
and chicken of the woods;
and medicinals like turkey tail and reishi.
I harvested deer that were hit by cars
this was one of my main sources of protein
in a way that I could harvest meat
that I felt truly good about.
I harvested nuts like hickory nuts
for making nut milk,
and black walnuts and butternut
for eating straight from the shell.
I harvested new things
and some things you have probably
never heard of eating
like stinky ginkgo fruits
and roasting up their nuts.
I pressure canned the fish that I caught
which actually softened up the cartilage
and the bones to be able to eat the entire body.
I even harvested all of my own water.
No tap water, no chlorine,
or fluoride, or other chemicals.
All of my water came from beautiful springs.
I found most of these using a website.
findaspring.com
There was a very common misperception
of me just being out every day,
nibbling off the trees,
eating off the ground,
and having to forage
everything that I would need for that day,
but that is not how it works.
If you want to be able to
live off the land,
the key is storing your food.
So my main means of storage
were dehydration.
This was done both by
dehydrating with the sun,
the free energy of the earth,
I am talking about.
I also carried an electric dehydrator with me.
Things like wild rice, nuts, and seeds,
a lot of these can be stored just at room temperature.
And then of course, there is your cold storage
your freezer, or your refrigerator.
I carried a cooler with me.
As I traveled to different places
I often use the fridge or the freezer
of where I was staying.
Next, equally important
was pressure canning.
This is how I stored my venison and my fish
so that I had this readily available
for me everyday.
If I had to summarize the whole experience
in just one sentence,
it is "Food is growing everywhere."
The most challenging part
was not finding the food.
The most challenging part was just
having the time to harvest all of the food.
Even more so, to process it.
People often ask me,
how many hours per week
does it take to forage all of your food?
I do not have a clear answer to that.
Because again, the key is storing that bounty.
Some days it was zero.
Some days I was just able to sit back
and eat what I had harvested.
Some days it was morning until night
foraging, processing, preserving.
And at the end of the day
I was completely exhausted.
Now when I say food is growing everywhere,
I really mean it.
It is growing in
what we consider to be the wild or nature.
It is growing in our front yards.
It is growing in our backyards.
It is growing in our city parks.
It is growing along the sidewalks.
It is growing out of the sidewalks.
It is growing in very large populated cities.
It is growing in the rural areas,
the small towns.
It really is growing everywhere.
I harvested it from all of these places,
except the interstate.
I do not harvest my food from the interstate.
Except maybe an occasional deer.
When I set out on this journey
I did not set out to prove
that this is a diet that is best for the world,
or even best for me.
So that is a reasonable question.
Was I able to meet all of my needs?
The answer is "yes..."
but maybe not "Yes!"
So calories, no problem.
I was absolutely able to get enough calories.
The vitamins and the minerals;
I absolutely feel like that was there.
The protein absolutely was there.
But where I lacked was fat.
I was not able to get enough fat.
This fat it creates the caloric density
to have really filling meals.
So, because.... I had enough food.
It was just hard to eat enough.
I did lose some weight.
Over the month, I lost about 5 pounds.
If you think about it
that is about what you would expect.
No ice cream, no junk food,
no alcoholic beverages.
I myself am a fan of eating
relatively the same meals
day after day after day.
I will say that I struggled with flavor.
That really changed on day 19
when I harvested my salt.
All of a sudden I tasted
all these flavors inside of the pot
that were there the whole time,
but I just could not taste them.
The salt just absolutely brought it out.
Then, day 27 is when I made some
hickory nut oil.
You add that oil and that salt, the herbs,
and the spices to the wild rice,
and the venison, and the fish broth,
and then it was hard not to say,
"Oh my gosh!" with every single bite.
By day 27 I really had
that truly complete meal.
I have to say,
that is exciting!
Because with just 9 days of preparation,
and then just a few weeks into it,
I was able to meet all of my needs
in a truly nourishing, delicious, joyous way.
I know some people see me and they say,
"Oh look at this white guy
running around forging all of his food.
Not very important."
I completely understand that
in the world that we live in today
and all of the challenges that we are dealing with.
I really want to share again
that I do have a lot of privilege
and that includes the amount of time,
resources, energy that I have
to be able to do something like this.
The reality is that I would not
be doing this unless there was a much
bigger picture behind this
whole immersion.
What it is really about
is it is about reconnecting with Earth.
As I was traveling across the country
immersing in this project,
I was also leading plant walks
and helping others to learn the foods
that are growing freely
and abundantly all around them.
People from all walks of life
coming out to learn the basics
whether it was Central Park,
or the capital in DC,
or in Chicago, Philadelphia.
Across this region,
I brought people out to help them reconnect,
reconnect with the Earth,
because if we can find our food
growing around us,
and we can reconnect with our community,
we do not need capitalism and consumerism.
I believe this is part of overcoming colonialism.
Colonialism is all about removing us from the land,
removing us from our community,
removing us from sovereignty
over our bodies and our health.
Part of foraging
is about reconnecting to this.
It is about taking the power back.
In these plant walks
I introduced people to a dozen or so
different easy-to-identify
foods and medicines
that are growing all around us
in our cities and in the countryside.
I shared with them basics of foraging;
how to identify plants,
how to know which ones are safe to eat,
how to forage in a way that is
ethical and sustainable,
and also how to reconnect
with the people that have been
stewards of this land for thousands of years
where this knowledge that we have today
exists from them.
Today we are foraging on stolen land,
land that is here....
It is what it is today
because of genocide that happened,
but still continues to happen here
in what we call the United States
also called Turtle Island.
I think it is a really important thing
to acknowledge that
and acknowledge the land that we are on.
Because if we are out foraging
and we are connecting to these plants,
but we are not connecting
to the history of this land....
That is a pretty big important part
of equality, and justice, and regeneration
of our Earth and community.
Now, with that being said,
one of the most common things that I hear is,
"Well Rob, if everybody wanted to forage their food,
nature would be destroyed overnight."
The truth is, that is not what would happen.
Because, think about it
if the whole world decided that they wanted
to start connecting with the land,
and harvesting their food,
and creating relationship with these plants,
what we would have
is a revolution of the mind,
a revolution of the way society
wants to interact with this Earth.
That to me, is what a forager does.
When I look back at this chapter
this month of foraging all of my food,
I feel the power and the connection
to the Earth that we can all experience.
To know that I can go out
and I can meet all of my basic needs as a human
without money, without corporations,
and to be able to do it in a way
where I am giving back to the Earth
that is the power that I want to experience.
Not power OVER anything
but power WITH these plant and animal relatives.
When I look back at the last decade
of breaking free from Big AG,
from this global, industrial food system,
I feel excitement,
because although I just finished
this month of foraging all my food,
I think it is more or less
still the beginning stages.
It was just a month.
I am ready for a year.
I am ready to see
if I can meet all of my needs
harvesting the food that is growing
freely and abundantly from the land,
and doing it for an entire year.
I think that is what is next.
Thank you for still being here with me dear friends.
It means a lot
to be sharing this journey with you.
Sharing this thing that I am so incredibly
inspired and excited about.
If you want to break free
from the global, industrial food system,
and you want to create
food sovereignty in your communities,
and you want to live a life of deep joy,
health, and happiness,
then I really encourage you to
keep coming back here.
Also, my website is a great resource of information.
So subscribe to this channel
if you have not already
and you would like to.
If you want to see this video
get out into the world, comment,
that helps the algorithm.
Like it, and of course,
share it with the friends,
the family, the people in your life
who you want to help break free
from the global industrial food system
and find freedom in connecting
to the plants that are growing
freely and abundantly all around us.