Brambleberry vines clung to the sleeves of environmental activist Robin Greenfield as he reached down to uproot a green, leafy weed.
“OK, who knows who we have here?” he asked, holding up a plant that looked all the world like chard.
Someone in the group guesses “dock,” and Greenfield confirms. He’s leading a foraging walk around Davidson College with over 30 people in tow.
“So, the ones with the red, it’s not that they’re toxic,” asked Davidson student Sophia Knowles. She’s looking to start a foraging club at the college. “They’re just bitter?”
“No. Not toxic. Just bitter,” Greenfield said. “But if you did try to eat a whole bunch of this, you would puke. I’m almost certain.”
Greenfield is not only educating people about foraging — the practice of finding, identifying and eating wild things — he’s also walking the walk.
“For one year, I’m living without grocery stores or restaurants and not even a garden, just harvesting what I can forage from the land and the water,” Greenfield said.
It’s been over 150 days since he visited a grocery store or restaurant. He said that getting in touch with nature is more important than ever.
“I think in the times we live in, with our political situation and with the level of corporate control, people are feeling overwhelmed, anxious, depressed and really, truly separated from things,” Greenfield said. “I really see foraging as one of the remedies for all of that.”
It’s also a low-carbon way to eat, compared to commercial agriculture, which accounted for 10% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2022. Greenfield plans to go the rest of the year eating only what he finds. Despite losing a few pounds in the first month, he says he’s never felt better.
The ‘super food’ next door
Daphne Miller is a professor of family medicine at the University of California San Francisco. She said that as long as Greenfield is checking in with his doctor, he should be good to go.
“The risk is that you're going to end up malnourished if you really don't know what you're doing, or poisoned if you're going for mushrooms,” Miller said.
But Miller said there’s a lot to gain from learning to identify and cultivate wild plants, allowing folks to “discover new flavors that you certainly would never have in a grocery store.”
She said common plants like dandelions, mallow and slippery ox tongue not only taste good, but can be nutritious as well, containing more iron, fiber and vitamins than some staples like kale and spinach.
“They really are these kind of super foods,” Miller said.
A good rinse also goes a long way toward removing anything unsavory that might have been sprayed on the plant. Greenfield said that for new foragers, it’s best to start in places they know haven’t been treated with pesticides, like their backyard or garden.
“A lot of people imagine me out there just grazing and nibbling, but I harvest abundances of foods when I find them, whether it’s apples to make apple sauce, or dehydrating large quantities of mushrooms or stinging nettles,” Greenfield said.
Much of it, he cooks in his traveling Instapot. He said his go-to meal is wild rice from northern Wisconsin, with either venison or fish, various dried wild mushrooms, and a green stinging nettle powder he makes.
When asked if he’d been hunting during his trip, he said:
“I haven’t hunted yet, and the reason why is because — where I live — 20,000 deer are killed by cars per year. So, I harvest deer that are killed by cars, which some people call roadkill, but I call them deer that were hit by cars.”
He might have luck in North Carolina, too, where cars hit and kill a similar number of deer each year. The North Carolina Department of Transportation counted over 21,000 animal collisions in the state in 2024, 90% of which were deer.
Although WFAE is not advising people to eat roadkill, it is perfectly legal to salvage dead animals. Some require a permit to take.
‘Know one plant to eat one plant.’
Eliana Frahm attended the walk with her mother, Darci.
“I do a little bit of foraging as a hobby,” Eliana Frahm said. “I also wanted to bring my mom because she thinks I’m a little strange for getting excited about plants and running over and eating them.”
Darci Frahm told WFAE that she feels “more confident” in her daughter’s foraging after the walk. Charlotte resident Luz Miller was surprised to learn about Greenfield’s hygiene regimen:
“I knew about the pine needle tea, but I didn’t know you could use them to floss your teeth,” Miller said. “That was interesting!”
Greenfield concluded the walk in a lawn dotted with clover, henbit and chickweed — all edible invasive species.
“You only need to be able to know one plant to eat one plant,” Greenfield said. “That’s my objective here in North Carolina: to connect people with a few different plants.”
For more information on foraging:
- Robin Greenfield’s “Food Freedom” covers his experience of going a year without buying food, relying only on foraging and growing his own food.
- Berkeley Open Source Food compiled a list of some common edible plants.
- The Seek app, while not infallible, can help newbie naturalists get started.
- “How to Forage for Wild Foods without Dying” provides an intro to 40 edible wild plants found in North America. Durham resident Frank Hyman’s “How to Forage for Mushrooms without Dying” is another great guide for aspiring foragers.
