Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Well, hi. Thanks for coming today.
My name is Kevin Feinstein, and today's talk is about foraging.
Before we get into the details of that,
I'd like to just take some time to share with you my story
of how I got into this in the first place.
So ...
It was the late 90s, and I just graduated from college,
and I was thirsty for knowledge.
The internet was new,
and I was following the rabbit hole of research
to find out more about the world.
What I found was very disturbing.
What I found was we were destroying the planet
by the way we were growing our food.
And I also was disturbed to find out that I knew nothing about food -
where it came from -
and nobody around me seemed to know anything about it either.
So I set out on a journey, that I'm still on,
to find out all I could about food, where it comes from,
and how to create a sustainable food system for our planet.
So, one of those facts that I learned in my research
was that it takes up to 10 calories of fossil fuel
to make 1 calorie of food.
And also all of these toxic chemicals
and labor and input and energy and time and all these things,
when in water, went into growing even the most basic of food.
This didn't seem right to me - it seemed like it was backwards.
Because we need energy from the food in the first place to do all these things.
I was driving in the South, where I'm originally from,
southern United States,
and I was contemplating these things,
and I made a discovery.
And that discovery is that food just grows.
I was - I know the picture is pretty small here -
but I was looking on the side of the road,
seeing all the lush plants in the South,
and the weeds on the side of the roads and meadows and forest,
and I said, "Hey, those plants are growing,
and they don't need all these inputs and toxic chemicals and everything to grow."
So, I got an edible wild plant guide
because I knew that some of those plants had to be edible.
In some ways, my journey began right then.
But at the exact same time,
I got into something called "permaculture."
And permaculture, if you don't know it,
is a design philosophy
that mimics natural ecosystems to provide the needs for humans.
So it regenerates the environment
at the same time it's providing food and materials and things for us,
and it supports itself, just like a natural ecosystem will.
One of the aspects of permaculture that I really was drawn to
was called a "food forest,"
which is depicted here -
this is one that I designed in Lafayette.
A food forest is like it sounds:
it's you design, basically, a forest that eventually supports itself
with all the elements of a natural ecosystem,
but it's meant to provide food for people.
So I was, you know, very excited about all of this -
this is the solution to all our problems, right here.
So I wanted to go out and put in food forests for people
and put in gardens for people.
And I did, to some degree.
And what I found was that the clients that I had,
they would spend lots of time and money and energy
to set up the gardens and plant the trees and all this,
but when it came time to harvest, they just let all the food go to waste.
So I was like, "This is kind of like wasting my time growing rotten veggies,
so to speak."
So I started focusing on the harvesting end of the whole equation,
which ultimately became foraging.
So you could say that I got into foraging because of all the rotten veggies.
So, this harvesting end of the equation
sort of became foraging from gardens and permaculture systems and what not.
At the same time,
I was very much a naturaIist, and hiker, camper,
and everytime I went out on my wilderness excursions,
I noticed there was food growing everywhere.
Remember I had my edible plant guide with me,
so I was eating a lot of these foods too.
It's like "There's all this out here,
so we need to eat all the food that's out there first,
before we start, you know, trying to grow more.
But this also brings us to, I think, the more common definition of foraging,
which is gathering food from the wild.
And I teach wild food walks,
and I give, you know, foraging tours,
regularly for the last, you know, gosh, eight years.
And I think that's what most people think foraging is.
So, we're going to look at some images now and talk a little bit about that -
I think it's the more sexy aspect of this equation
that's more and more popular these days.
So, this is miner's lettuce.
You may have eaten it before.
It's a very delicious wild green that grows here in California.
These are acorns from an acorn-processing workshop
that I gave a few years ago.
These are hackberries - wild hackberries - from the eastern U.S.
This is me climbing up this huge hill to pick wild yarrow for beer brewing.
Picking wild huckleberries in the forest.
Getting lost in the dense wilderness, looking for rare, edible mushrooms
that only grow in the wilderness -
such as the matsutake -
taking it home and making matsu tacos.
Beach foraging for nettles and other greens and herbs.
Wild hazelnuts -
it's so dark that the camera didn't focus, because the forest was so dense.
And this is yellow-foot chanterelles next to a wood rat's nest.
Wild persimmons in the East Coast
that I had to go through a field of ticks, chiggers, and poison ivy to get to.
And this is here in California in the springtime -
a whole field of edible greens and flowers.
Most everything you see there is actually edible.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Think we should be realistic.
Foraging as such - gathering food from the wild -
cannot feed 7 billion people.
At best, it can feed 10 to 100 million people.
And overharvesting and improper foraging can be very ecologically devastating;
there's no question about that.
So, overfishing the world's oceans is a huge concern for global ecosystems.
You know, someone armed with a little bit of knowledge can go in
and do a lot of damage really fast -
picking the wrong thing and not being aware of the life cycle
of the plants and things that they're foraging.
So, another poignant example is this creature,
which is no longer with us.
This is the passenger pigeon, which is now extinct.
Many say it was made extinct by over-foraging
because it was a delicious bird and it was regularly eaten.
Other people say that it was because of habitat destruction -
is why the passenger pigeon ultimately went extinct.
I would say that felling of the old-growth forest
and that habitat destruction
is a form of over-foraging and improper foraging.
So, there's no question that I could give a whole talk on the dangers of this,
and how we don't need increasing numbers of people
going into the few wilderness areas we have left
and, you know, decimating those places.
But there's a whole other end of the equation I do want to talk about,
which is something I call "regenerative foraging."
Regenerative foraging is as it sounds,
which is a foraging practice
that actually regenerate the plants you're foraging for
and increasing biodiversity in the greater ecosystem.
This was practiced by native peoples all over the world for thousands of years.
There's just countless examples of this,
but I'm going to give you one really simple example
based on a California wildflower.
This is the Brodiaea; it's a native California wildflower.
It produces a corm about this big, or bulb, that's edible,
and for many native peoples, it was a staple of their diet,
like potatoes are for some tribes.
And the act of harvesting it -
they used a digging stick.
So they'd dig into the ground and loosen the soil,
and then they'd pull out the corm and put it in their baskets.
And then the little cormlets
would break off and fall into that loosely dug soil,
and then it would help the populations of the plant spread and grow.
So the act of cultivation and the act of foraging were one and the same.
So, if you look at this picture here -
it was taken just a few years ago in the Bay area, in an open space.
And you count, I don't know,
one, two, three, four, maybe eight, nine little Brodiaea clusters sticking up there
amongst all the nonnative grasses.
Well 300 years ago, this was likely all Brodiaea
because it was foraged for thousands of years to get the populations up.
So nowadays, it's somewhat of a rare wildflower;
it's no longer a viable food source
because it hasn't been foraged in the way that it had been before.
Another example of regenerative foraging
is stinging nettle.
This is a simple, basic example.
I mean these can get really complicated, but this one's very simple.
Stinging nettle is like basil,
in the sense that if you keep cutting it back,
it will produce more food for you.
You can greatly increase the amount of food you get from one plant or a patch,
and then, also, how long you can get it,
so we increase the season too,
and it benefits the health of the plant.
There's lots of examples of this kind of thing,
and a lot of the scientific studies have been done on grazing animals
rather than human practices,
but there's many of those too.
So, switching gears just a little bit,
another way that we can incorporate foraging into a sustainable food system
is the harvesting of what are considered to be invasive weeds.
Most of the plants that I forage for
and I teach in my classes and wild food walks
are considered to be invasive or noxious weeds.
And thistle is a great example.
This is a common thistle that grows all over the world,
and it's considered to be a pest species for most farmers and gardeners,
but it's actually quite edible.
Here's a huge hillside full of thistle,
and this is in Walnut Creek,
and I'd say that is about 80% thistle in that picture, believe it or not,
and so it's a very, very abundant foodsource.
Overharvesting is not an issue when it comes to this.
Some people think it should be eradicated from certain places,
so forage away.
Thistles are an extremely edible plant, despite what many people believe.
The only part you can't eat are the spikes.
So what I recommend eating is -
it sends up its flowering stalk as you can see in this picture,
and you take that flowering stalk,
you peel it,
and you're left with crunchy delicious vegetables.
And you can cook them, and they get quite soft.
And it's one of the best-tasting vegetables I've ever had.
So I highly recommend you try it.
The season for it is kind-of right now, so be on the lookout for them.
Another part of the thistle plant that I highly recommend eating
is the sprout.
So this is the newly growing thistle plant from the seed.
The first two leaves are called "cotyledons," or germ leaves.
They have no spikes, and they're succulent and delicious,
and the leaf in the middle looks like a thistle leaf because it's spiky,
but it's actually not sharp, so you can eat the whole thing.
But it's a great identification marker - that true leaf out of the middle -
and it's one of the best microgreens I've ever had.
I suspect you'll start finding them at farmers markets pretty soon.
Another way in which we can incorporate foraging into a sustainable food system
is the growing of weeds, so to speak.
Many wild plants and weeds want to grow naturally.
They don't require lots of input and labor
and, you know, fossil fuels or fertilizers or anything -
they just grow.
Dandelion, for instance -
it's far more nutritious than many of its domesticated relatives.
And most wild foods are.
So they're easy to grow, and they're more nutritious.
And in this situation here: this is a balcony in Oakland
that's north-facing and under an awning - so it's a small space -
way too small and shady to grow a conventional garden;
instead, I chose to grow some wild plants,
stinging nettle and chickweed,
and I got a tremendous amount of food in this very small, shady area.
And beyond that,
stinging nettle is one of the most nutritious plants ever studied by science,
and, you know, I just grew tons and tons of it there.
It's a great way to sustainably grow nutrition and food,
even in areas where you can't grow a lot of other things.
Another example is this plant.
It's called Aronia.
It's a wild plant to the Eastern U.S., and can be grown in much of the world.
It's the highest antioxidant content of any berry in the world.
And it grows like the Dickens, as you would say.
It just produces copious amounts of berries,
even on a small plant like this.
It's very, very drought-tolerant;
cold-tolerant;
it's a really tough and resilient plant.
And you eat that nutrition, and it makes you resilient too -
all the antioxidants.
Very sustainably grown.
Another way we can incorporate foraging into a sustainable food system
is foraging for the unused fruit in the urban wild.
There's food growing all around us.
Here in the South Bay, there's citrus, like, everywhere
that's being completely unused.
Here's some cherry plums in the streets of Oakland,
and here's more cherry plums
by the ballfield in the suburbs of Lafayette.
And here's wild elderberries
growing right out of the Iron Horse Trail in Walnut Creek.
But, there's apples and pears and pomegranates and persimmons
growing all around us,
and most of that, actually, does go completely to waste.
So that's a great place to forage.
I know it's not as sexy as wild mushrooms in the dense forest,
but it's definitely a food source,
and it's sustainable because it's being wasted for the most part.
This is very near downtown Walnut Creek,
and this is a trail.
And on this side, it's full of all sorts of edibles,
including salsify, or "salsifie,"
which is the plant you see featured there.
And on the back, over here, is where, unfortunately,
they doused the whole area with herbicides and killed everything.
So it just kind of shows you the juxtaposition
of what typical landscaping thinks is a good idea
and what a forager thinks is a good idea.
Because this is all food, pretty much, right here.
I mean, it's like an acre - along that strip, at least -
of just pure food.
So, just a transition here to close.
The foraging movement has grown by leaps and bounds
over the last five years - I've witnessed it first hand.
So there's more and more foragers out there
trying to do this and getting into it.
The biggest problem we have is access to places to forage.
Parks and public spaces,
for the most part, it's completely forbidden.
So it's either done illegally or on private land
which is also hard to come by,
places to do that.
So I suggest creating a permit system similar to a hunting/fishing license.
I think that would alleviate a lot of the tension around this subject.
But beyond that, I want to suggest something a bit more bold,
which is the creation of foraging parks.
So a foraging park would be like a normal park,
but it would be a place where wild plants, planted or allowed to grow,
that you can choose the species you want, or you can just let the species develop.
And people are allowed to come in, deliberately to forage.
And one thing I've learned over the years
is people that want to connect to nature and the natural world,
I don't think there's a better way to do it than eating wild plants
and connecting in that kind of way -
foraging.
So, that may sound like a fairy tale,
but Seattle is working on this right now.
They're developing a 17-acre food forest,
very near town,
where people can go in and eat the edible foods and fruits and things,
and gather them.
So, it's my contention, after years and years of research on this subject
and devoting my life to it,
that if we're going to have a sustainable food system of the future,
it's going to look a lot more like foraging than it is farming.
Thank you.
(Applause)