Foraging Movement: Meet the People Who Grocery Shop in the Woods
The Wild Side of Food Shopping That’s Taking Over
Forget fighting for parking spots at the supermarket or battling crowds in grocery aisles. A growing number of people are ditching traditional food shopping for something far more adventurous—they’re turning to the great outdoors as their personal grocery store. Foraging — the act of finding wild, edible food — is a lost art in modern society, but it’s making one heck of a comeback. These modern-day hunter-gatherers are discovering that Mother Nature stocks her shelves year-round, and the prices can’t be beat. From urban parks to suburban backyards, they’re finding fresh ingredients that would make any chef jealous. Think of it like this: while most people see weeds, foragers see a five-star salad waiting to happen.
Why People Are Trading Shopping Carts for Baskets
The wild foods market owes its momentum to various factors—rising interest in sustainable sourcing, a desire for food provenance, and a pandemic-driven spike in outdoor activities. When COVID-19 hit and grocery store shelves looked bare, many people started looking around their neighborhoods with fresh eyes. “A little afraid to go to the supermarket right now?” Nelson asked viewers. “That’s okay! I’m going to show you some things that are growing in your neighborhood that you can eat.” It’s like having a backup plan that’s been hiding in plain sight all along. Plus, there’s something deeply satisfying about finding your own food—it connects you to thousands of years of human history in a way that scanning barcodes just can’t match. But we have lost something essential once everything we eat comes ready to eat or wrapped in plastic.
The Social Media Revolution Behind Foraging
And judging by the millions of views these posts get on social platforms like TikTok and Instagram, I am not alone. The reigning queen of the online foraging kingdom is Alexis Nikole Nelson (@blackforager), who brings her 1.6 million TikTok followers (plus more than half a million on Instagram) along as she explores King-Lincoln, her Columbus, Ohio, neighborhood. There are several accounts on TikTok focused on foraging and a community of millions of followers ready to go outdoors and search for their own food in a nearby forest, park, or even parking lot! The interest in harvesting wild foods that grow without human intervention seems to be growing these days, not just on social media. Social media has turned foraging from a niche hobby into a viral sensation. This isn’t surprising as foraging fits social media surprisingly well: it produces a steady flow of highly photogenic and interesting plants, seaweeds, mushrooms, preserves, recipes and “moments” throughout the year. Platforms include Facebook Groups sharing learning journeys and group-sourcing identification help and recipe ideas; foraging teachers sharing free information and promoting their guided walks; Tik-tok influencers making fun and informative videos.
From City Streets to Dinner Plates
At its core, urban foraging is the practice of identifying and collecting wild foods (think tree nuts, plant roots, mushrooms and flowers) growing locally around your city. Believe it or not, but urban environments offer a surprising abundance of food for those with a keen eye and a sense of adventure. Even people living in dense U.S. cities are typically surrounded by edible vegetation. Look no farther than New York City, where 66 percent of the city’s 304 woody species provide edible goods. It’s like having a secret menu that most people don’t even know exists. Urban foragers know that you don’t need to venture deep into the wilderness to forage—you can explore the green spaces, parks, vacant lots and even sidewalks of your own city to discover a wealth of edible plants and fungi. Think of city foraging as the ultimate local eating movement—your food literally can’t get more local than the park down the street.
The Characters Leading This Movement
Meet the faces behind this movement, and you’ll find an incredibly diverse group of people. But about a year and a half ago, in the depths of the pandemic, I became aware of the Black Forager, a TikTok account started in early 2020 by Alexis Nikole Nelson, a Columbus, Ohio-based forager. The now-30-year-old Nelson makes videos about magnolia blossoms, maple leaves, dandelion fritters, even invasive species like Japanese knotweed. In Los Angeles, Jessica Tsae-Ni Lin leads foraging workshops focused on BIPOC and queer participants. And on her new plant and fungi walks, starting this month, Bay Area forager Cindy Li will share knowledge gained foraging with her immigrant parents. Steve Brill — known professionally as “Wildman Steve” — has been introducing New Yorkers to foraging for more than 40 years, and now co-leads tours with his teenage daughter, Violet. His popular tours take budding foragers not to the remote wilderness but to Central Park and other green spaces in New York City. These aren’t survivalists hiding in bunkers—they’re your neighbors, teachers, and artists who’ve discovered that grocery shopping can be an adventure.
What’s Actually Growing Out There
You’d be amazed at what’s growing right under your nose. In cities, you can find a variety of edible plants such as dandelions, chickweed, plantain, purslane, wild garlic, nettle, lambsquarters, burdock, shepherd’s purse, and mallow. These plants aren’t only rich in vitamins and nutrients but also offer health benefits and medicinal properties. Teeny, bright red wild strawberries pop up on the ground in June in parks all across the city. These are a treasure to find and are sweeter than sweet. The first to greet me after the winter rains are cheerful bunches of three-cornered garlic (Allium triquetrum). Their pungent odor and waving white flowers make them easy finds. At home, I mix and blend the leaves with olive oil and nuts to make pesto. It’s like nature’s been running a free farmers market this whole time, and most of us have been walking right past the produce section.
The Rules of the Wild Grocery Store
Just like any good shopper knows the store layout, successful foragers follow their own set of guidelines. Remember to check all rules and regulations if you are on public lands and ask before foraging on private land. Make sure you are in an area with no runoff from farms or factories and not close to industrial pollution. Have a light footprint — take a little and leave enough for all the other animals that live off these foods. It always helps to find an expert, or a friend, to help introduce you to edible wild plants. Think of it as shopping etiquette for the natural world. Don’t Over Forage: The whole point of foraging is to live a more sustainable life. Only take a small amount of what you find and leave the rest behind to grow and set seeds for next season. It’s about being a responsible customer in nature’s store—you wouldn’t empty all the shelves at your local market, would you?
The Economics of Free Food
The wild foods and foraging market has been steadily gaining traction among consumers, fueled by the allure of locally sourced and unique ingredients. Not only does this trend tap into the essence of sustainable eating, but it’s also a market projected to soar financially, with the mushroom market alone forecasted to hit a staggering $110 billion by 2030. Wong, who is based in New Jersey and runs the wild food business Meadows and More, forages for restaurant chefs based in New York City and elsewhere, and for online grocery businesses like FreshDirect. When we met, she giddily showed me a text conversation in which she had told one of her chefs that she was headed out for brassica that morning, and he replied with a meme of a jubilant Oprah. Some foragers have turned their hobby into a business, selling their finds to high-end restaurants where a single mushroom can cost more than a full grocery cart. “We used to forage for fun because the food in the grocery store was really expensive and half rotten,” she said. “We could go out and pull a crab pot, or gather raspberries”.
The Flavor Revolution Nobody Saw Coming
The taste was intense — bitter and complex, like eating mustard greens or broccolini, but concentrated and amplified. Wong and her chef clients were in on a secret: Part of what has been tamed in our domesticated crops is flavor. And foraged foods are often more nutritious than their store-bought counterparts, rich in vitamins, minerals and antioxidants—not to mention medicinal properties. Certain plants have been used for centuries in traditional medicine to treat various ailments and promote well-being. It’s like comparing a black-and-white TV to 4K ultra-high-definition—once you taste truly wild food, the grocery store versions seem pretty bland in comparison. Golden chanterelles, pine mushrooms, fragrant spruce tips and juicy wild berries added uniquely local flavours to dishes. The wild-foods spirit soon extended to my pantry, with packages of dehydrated wild morels, seaweed flakes, kelp blades and stinging nettle tea.
Learning the Wild Food Language
Just like learning any new skill, foraging has its own learning curve and community of teachers. The Great Lakes Foragers Gathering is the largest annual gathering of wild food enthusiasts in the Great Lakes region. You can look forward to a variety of classes and workshops covering foraging, cooking with wild foods, and other traditional skills. Classes will be taught by herbalists, naturalists, ecologists, wild foodies, lifestyle foragers, hunters, trappers, bushcrafters, and wildcrafters from around the Great Lakes region. There will be edible and medicinal plant and mushroom walks, and classes on a wide range of topics including cooking with wild foods, herbal medicine, plant and mushrooms ID, sustainability, ecology, wilderness skills, bushcraft skills, and much more. Across the country, foraging tours run by experts with local area knowledge provide an accessible entry point for those interested in learning how to gather their own food. And according to some of the people who run such tours, they are becoming more popular, especially after the pandemic. It’s like taking cooking classes, but your classroom is the entire outdoors.
The Unexpected Community of Wild Food Lovers
Our results indicate high ethnic diversity in gathering communities. We found bimodal income distribution—highest use with the highest median household income category (>$100 000) followed by the lowest income category ($0–$24,999). The demographic variability of gathering communities implies a range of drivers motivating urban foraging—from sustenance to recreation. This is a community. So we will also have group foraging, a potluck, a scavenger hunt, multiple cooking contests, open mic, weekend long projects to participate in, and space for participants to vend and shop each other’s wares. Stimpson, too, appreciates the companionship he has found on social media around foraging. He has used social media to connect with people in the Portland area, starting a barter group he uses when he has extra mushrooms to trade for food. “I’d say 90 percent of my friends in Portland are due to foraging and Instagram; I’m so thankful for them,” he said. Who knew that hunting for mushrooms could be the ultimate social activity?
The Challenges of Shopping in Nature’s Store
By Emery’s estimate, most U.S. municipalities currently have laws on the books that restrict or prohibit foraging on city property. But these rules seldom apply to all accessible land in a city. “The whole conversation about legality in urban environments is super complex,” Emery says. I worried about the risks. What would happen if I grabbed a basket and headed into the woods for supper? Blame the “poison berry” incident from my childhood, a leftover memory of having my stomach pumped as a preschooler after my mom discovered me nibbling berries from neighbour’s shrub. With the yields we observed, it is unlikely that foraging of tree fruits and nuts can contribute meaningfully to food security for a non-negligible portion of the Syracuse population. Seasonal mean yield estimates were low relative to orchard crop yields, as many trees produced no fruit. Nature’s grocery store doesn’t always have everything in stock, and reading the “labels” (plant identification) takes some serious study.
When Foraging Meets Fine Dining
Foraged foods are increasingly visible. In the fine-dining world, chefs have been crafting menus that are not only sourced locally from agricultural producers but, in some cases, sourced in the regions around a restaurant. Foraging hopefuls can also find an approachable entry point through businesses like farms and restaurants, where foraging tours can be a way to diversify income while getting new audiences interested in wild foods. In California, Ancient Peaks Winery recently launched foraging tours on its 14,000-acre Santa Margarita Ranch. Ecological gardener, educator and Founder of Hara(me), Kush Sethi, conducts foraging tours in Lodhi Gardens in collaboration with Perch, a wine bar in Delhi, to create gourmet dishes from foraged wild edibles. Sethi defends that while “food-based experiences are mocked in every Netflix documentary” for being flippant, his focus has been on making foraging tours as academic as possible. Fancy restaurants are literally sending people to the woods to find ingredients—talk about farm-to-table taken to the extreme!
The Mental Health Benefits of Wild Shopping
Beyond the thrill of sourcing your own food, urban foraging offers a myriad of health and wellness benefits. Foraging can be a form of mindfulness, allowing you to engage all your senses. There was this glorious wild free food.” · Over time, she found the process of finding her own food deepened her relationships with every aspect of where she lived. “Wild food is building relationships with the ecosystem around you,” she says. For example: It wasn’t just picking fruits. When I would go to pick fruits, I was looking for something different… We just wanted something close to nature. It’s like meditation, but instead of sitting still, you’re actively exploring the world around you. Urban foraging is an intimate study and interaction with the living world around us, singling out a flower or a berry, learning its name and properties, what it tastes like, when and where it grows, how to cook with it or preserve it. There’s something deeply therapeutic about slowing down enough to notice what’s been growing right under your feet all along.
The Future of Wild Food Shopping
While there are too many of us to forage for survival these days, we can do it responsibly for fun and food, forging a connection to the seasons and our local ecosystems. Foraging will of course never replace agriculture. Meeting the calorie-intensive diets of 8 billion people with wild foods is impossible. Wild foods can quietly change lives, one by one, in ways that skirt rather than depend on the consumer economy. They certainly have changed mine. Foraging enthusiasts and some researchers contend that access to the land and its resources promotes environmental awareness and investment from city residents. Also, many targeted invasive plants threatening U.S. habitats, such as garlic mustard and mugwort, are edible and frequently foraged — so harvesting those does the environment, and landowners, a favor. The foraging movement isn’t trying to replace Whole Foods, but it’s showing us that maybe we don’t have to be completely dependent on traditional food systems. Seattle’s seven-acre Beacon Food Forest was a forerunner that launched in 2009 and opened to foragers in 2012. The success prompted city policies to recognize human foraging as a benefit to urban forest management.
So next time you’re stuck in grocery store traffic or fighting over the last organic kale, remember that there might be something even better growing in the park you drive past every day. The foraging movement is teaching us that sometimes the best shopping experiences don’t involve shopping at all—they involve remembering skills our ancestors took for granted and discovering that nature’s been running the ultimate local food co-op this entire time. Who knows? Maybe the future of food isn’t about bigger stores or better apps, but about learning to see the abundance that’s already all around us.
