采集野生食材的乐趣与生态反思：Alexis Nikole Nelson 谈人与自然的食物连接

Well, your book, Happy Snacking, Don't Die, comes out in a few days. So, first, congratulations on that.

I

grew up at this kind of crux between my mom who loved all things plants and my dad who loves cooking and is a very accomplished cook. And so I was always trying to bring those two worlds together.

Now, of course, we have classics like Ule Gibbons, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, which of course I read as a kid, but as I got a little older, I really wanted there to be more books that kind of brought together what I felt like were the the two halves of my brain. the studious side that always wanted to be learning about new plants and then this kind of curious side that also wanted to be able to experiment with them in the kitchen. So, I was hoping that this book would fill that gap for other people. I also really wanted it to serve as, you know, foraging can seem a little intimidating when you're first getting started. I want to be able to be that person metaphorically holding your hand and saying, "You got this. We're going to go through this process together the first time." So then you can go and do this process and maybe even come up with your own household recipes

that this plant is in season.

was this lack of connection to nature

We went from food being something that everybody was pretty closely connected to just a couple generations ago to, you know, now you'll see Tik Toks where people will say, "I have a lemon tree in the yard of the house I'm renting, but I don't know if they're like edible lemons."

we've realized how fragile

this food system that we all rely so much on is. how getting rid of even just a few oversight positions and suddenly everyone is like having to pull up a list on their phone when they go grocery shopping to make sure they're not accidentally bringing something home that's going to make them or their family members sick. And not to say that I think foraging is going to take the place of every single thing that's on the recall list right now, but I do think there's a really good feeling that one gets from being the entire footprint of a piece of food. You're the one who found it. You're the one who gathered it. You're the one who took it home. You're the one who prepared it.

And I think in this day and age, we say that we're all super connected because of the internet, but everyone feels really disconnected. And I think foraging is an act of creating connections

with your like not human neighbors. I think it's just as important to know the names of the trees growing on your block as it is to know the names of your neighbors who live on your block. And I think your world feels fuller and your world feels brighter when you can do those things.

And I'll have everybody close their eyes, take a few deep breaths, really take a moment to notice the sounds of everything around them. And then we'll open our eyes. I will show everybody one plant. Sometimes it's as big of as a tree and sometimes it's as small as the grass beneath our feet. And I'll ask for people to just start saying things that they notice about that specific plant. And it usually starts very broad, which makes sense. We live in a society that doesn't place a lot of importance on plants. Um, in fact, plant blindness is very common in western society, which is where, you know, if it's big, it's a tree. If it's medium, it's a shrub. If it's small, it's a plant. And that's where the classification stops for a lot of people. But the noticing game invites you to kind of, you know, tick the big box and then zoom in a little and then tick that box and then zoom in a little to kind of warm up your noticing muscles before going on a walk through. You know, it could be a wooded area. It could even just be a grassy field like near a a school. and you will start noticing, oh, from a distance, this all looks like grass. But now I'm looking closer and I'm seeing that there's broadleaf plantain mixed in. I'm seeing that there's white clover mixed in. It's all about training your brain to notice all of these little things that are going on around you that, you know, in our very loud hustle and bustle lives are normally really easy to ignore. It feels meditative, honestly, especially for people like me who can't I can't do standard sit and be quiet meditation. My brain talks too much for that.

well, we've been getting questions in from the members and I want to start to

to share those with you. Um we have one from Antuinette who uh sort of along the lines of what you're sharing here. Antuinette asks, "Do you think learning to forage changes the way we experience the places we live? Has learning the names and uses of plants changed your own sense of belonging to a place?"

because your household usually doesn't need so much of something that you're going to eradicate an entire patch. But the second that you're just thinking of, well, if I just keep going for a little bit longer, well, if I just gather a couple more pounds, then I'll get a little bit more money for all of this. That's where I start to see the issues coming from. So, I live in central Ohio and we are very much in like the ramp belt of, you know, North America. Ramps, for anyone who doesn't know, are a type of wild onion, alium tricokum, and they are very prized at fine dining establishments in the springtime. So, New York restaurants will love being able to tell you that they have ramps on the menu. But the cost of that a lot of times is people coming into my neck of the woods with trash bags and poaching them off of public lands. you know, filling entire trash bags with them and then lugging them partway across the country for people in a completely different region to get to enjoy.

A thing happens when you are foraging just for your own and your household's own sustenance, which is you start to realize very quickly that overconumption doesn't just become a problem for that specific thing you're harvesting or even just the other animals that want to eat from it that season. It also becomes an issue for you in the future. M

if you're going and overh harvesting everything, what are you going to do next year? What are your kids going to do in 15 years? What are their kids going to do? Are your great grandkids going to also be able to see that same plant?

You really start getting a very future focused mindset as a forager. And also, I like to think that the more you expand your foraging practice and the more you realize how many different things you could be foraging, the less you want to rely on one specific species. And when you also are aware of the diversity of what's around you, it tends to make you not feel so grabby or so territorial about say one special thing that you find. But I do think telling newbie foragers especially, you know, never take the first of what you see, you're always going to want to make sure that you confirm that a plant or a fungi is existing in more than just one space. Because what happens if you get so excited about it, you know, you just got out on your walk, you see a ramp, you pull it up, and then you don't see any more ramps.

So, I will also constantly be checking in on myself, you know, standing up, zooming out a little bit and asking myself, does it look like anybody has like been here and messing around? Cuz if so, that to me already means that I've done too much. And a lot of there are a lot of different indigenous practices all over the globe that also kind of implore you to exercise the same amount of restraint when you are when you are going and when you are harvesting. But I always tell people never take the first and take so little that nobody notices.

And if that means you have to cover more ground to harvest what you think you need to take home, then I guess you have to cover more ground. You know, none of us are more important than the ecosystem that we're living in. And remembering that also is a very good moderator.

And it sounds like these are are good rules to live by in in lots of areas of our lives, but definitely in in in forging, that seems like that makes a lot a lot of sense. Um

Another thing I I love to remind people when they're getting into foraging for the first time is it's not a race. You know, you don't have to be sprinting to put as many wild things into your mouth as you can. You're allowed to slow down and make sure that you purposefully feel completely comfortable with what it is you're harvesting. And I think that also means, you know, if you see a a certain species, our brains want it to be the most exciting thing so badly. That's just the way human psychology works. It's very important for you to pause for a moment and research whether or not it has any dangerous lookalikes. While we're talking about ramps, um, lily of the valley is poisonous, comes up at a similar time and very frequently gets confused for ramps. Like so frequently that I have friends who have made themselves sick to their stomach taking home and cooking lily of the valley instead of ramps. There's always there's always going to be another season to try something. So, my safety advice in terms of plant species would be go slow. And in terms of worrying about the safety of the space that you're foraging from,

you know, if you're foraging in your own yard, be mindful of whether or not you have sprayed any herbicides or pesticides in the recent past. That being said, I will have people message me sometimes and say, "Oh, the previous owners of our house definitely sprayed Roundup, so now I don't want to eat any of the dandelions growing in the front yard." Twitch, I'll ask them, "Okay, how long have you lived in the house?" And sometimes they'll be like, "Oh, a year or two." And then I'll get to put my scientist hat on and tell them glyphosate only has a halflife of 30 days in soil with microbes. So at day 60 it's completely broken down in the soil and that's a good thing to know because I think sometimes you can even air too much on the side of caution and then never participate at all and I don't want that to happen either. But in the book we also go over places that I don't think are great for foraging.

Golf courses are always a no for me. They just require so much chemical upkeep at this point in order to stay, you know, pristine grassy areas. So, golf courses and the areas directly around them are a no for me. super fund sites because a way that we re you know remediate a lot of super fund sites around the country is putting parks on them which is like great for the community maybe not as great for your digestive tract

and for you know the deeper into foraging the more you will learn about what you need to know about what you're harvesting when you move into things like freshwater plants

You have to start worrying about things like runoff. You have to start worrying about things like, have there been any chemical spills upstream of where it is that I'm harvesting. I I'm I'm very good friends with the EPA's reported spills website and have been for a number of years. So,

the great thing about foraging is it's very choose your own adventure. It's very go at your own pace. But I would tell people more knowledge is always better than less knowledge. You don't have to eat something today just because you brought it home today. It doesn't hurt you to do more research.

Um, also my friend Jesse, who uh actually contributed a couple of the plant and fungi pictures to uh my book, has an app, Foraged, in which he has been going in and painstakingly adding all of these entries for different forageable plants and also finding out what time of year they are in season in different regions so that people won't have to do as much guesswork. Um, I know that it's a paid app, but also Jesse works really, really hard. So, I think of it more like you're purchasing a book that will magically get additional pages added to it as time goes on.

Um well I so I want to zoom out to talk a little bit more about the our sort of cultural relationship to food and how foraging fits into this bigger picture. You know you've talked about so far in this conversation and elsewhere just how many of us have been conditioned to think about food as something that comes from a store and and that the way that we eat is not really sustainable. Um, can you break down what does this actually mean that buying purchasing food from the store is just not a sustainable

way to consume food solely? It is

And that does not feel very sustainable both for the planet as a whole and for trying to keep emissions down, but also it's really done a number on small farmers. There's a reason why we've lost so many family farms. and they've all been bought up by a lot of these giant conglomerates.

And as we are now seeing in the United States, the bigger some of these farm conglomerates get, the easier it is for things to fall through the cracks. And when things fall through the cracks, people get salmonella or cycllospora or my ecoli, so many different things. So, and a thing that's really sad about how globalized our food system is is that we're losing a lot of those things, too. You're losing pieces of culture. My dad's family is from the American South, and poke salad, uh, cooked poke greens were extremely important culturally in the American South. Uh, and not just to black families, also to indigenous families, also to white families. And you know these days you can't buy canned poke anymore. You could up until about 20 25 years ago just because how is a small canery that has to rely on people going out and gathering it and bringing it in for a little bit of money in return. How are they supposed to be competing with these huge companies that can sell things for very little money because they're just playing a numbers game?

So I think you know in distancing ourselves from wild food, we have also in a way distanced ourselves from a lot of roots of American food culture and a lot of original American land values were created around the fact that the Europeans, specifically the British who moved here were sad that poor people could not be taking advantage of free good healthy food growing on land that belonged to the king or to other members of royalty. So when they came to the states originally the commons was supposed to be the way of the land. You know the common man of course and at that time they they meant you know truly the common man the common white man the man not a woman would be the person going out and being able to go and gather these foods even if they weren't landowners.

The first time I talked about these things, someone was just like, "Oh, but it affects everybody, so it's not a race thing." And I'm like, things that started as a race thing almost always end up affecting everybody because racism and classism are like this,

kind of severing us from this knowledge base that was supposedly so important to the inception of the United States as a whole. So, I also want people to know, especially here in the States, that they're doing a little bit of reclamation work, reconnecting with the seasonal foods that live in their area. uh because even now today it's way easier to be a forager if you're a rich land owner.

cuz it just makes me go, "Oh no, I hope no one has bought these because they could gather just as many leaves in such a short period of time for free.99

And in a lot of areas you know I where I live currently is a food desert. I was on the phone with my uh with my ph not my pharmacist with my psychiatrist a couple days ago and she's like I'm trying to write you a prescription that you can pick up in your zip code. And I was like oh I can't pick up a prescription in my zip code. I have no grocery stores.

You know I live in an area that is historically poor and historically black.

And I I think that people in my neighborhood knowing what foods are free and good and healthy is really important because of course a lot of the people who I see talking about the clean eating movement are the people who are not in as much danger of falling prey to how much we push hyper palatable foods. uh you know which I guess is like another word for processed foods but we don't even have time to get into what are we considering processing is grinding wheat processing is is your stone ground wheat bread considered a processed food

but a lot of people you see talking a big game about clean eating I'm just like okay cool you're actually not in the demographic that is suffering

at the hands of how striated our food systems have become.

So, I love when like the the kids and even just like my grown-up neighbors are asking me what I'm up to, what I'm eating, ask if they can try what I'm gathering because

I think our community having some say, some sovereignty in our food and where it's coming from is so important.

And that's something worth taking into consideration, too, is like is a degree of human suffering going into what it is that I'm eating today.

And everyone's allowed to have different answers to it, just like, you know, how I'm vegan, but I know I know that not everybody needs to be. And for me, I would much rather go through like the sometimes annoying practice of going and canning and preserving a ton of fruit during the summertime when it's in season, then be relying on like often mistreated labor to be eating strawberries in the middle of winter time.

I just I hope that this summer and hopefully this book just makes people think about food access. I don't think it has to make any decisions for anybody. I love to say in my videos like I can't make that decision for you. I'm not your mom. Uh I'm just like your weird cousin. I just want people to be better informed so they can make the best decisions for them.

So, in in my early years, before I was a vegan, um I used to go and visit my mom's family in Massachusetts, and we would stop at this small family-owned restaurant on our drive down to Cape Cod called Lindsies, and they had these crab cakes that I was obsessed with as a kid. It used to be a running joke in my family. People would be like, "Oh, and what's Alexis going to get?" And everyone knew the answer. I don't even know why they would ask. And now, one, I I am a vegan. So, crabs, not plants, unfortunately. And two, also unfortunately, uh the Lindsay's family restaurant closed shortly after the initial shutdowns in the pandemic, which also just makes me really sad for that community.

So I tried to reconstruct from memory using chicken of the woods in place of crab meat their crab cakes for the book. And I spend a lot of time thinking about that recipe when it's not the season to be having chicken of the woods.

I've been traveling so much this year that I haven't had time to like go to my regular chicken of the woods spots and it's a little heartbreaking. I literally might do that later today. [laughter] You're like now you've made me think of of this thing that I need in my life.

But I gotta tell you, those little pears taste very good. They make a very good bubbly beverage.

I think that having that connection, especially from a young age, helps us become more like environmentally conscientious adults once we grow up. I'm really thankful for my like wonderful hippie monastery school uh that I went to for elementary school for instilling a lot of this information and knowledge and you know this want to steward the natural world instead of you know bending it to our will

cuz I think that that's a lot of what's missing society at large right now. So, I would love to see more just like regular restaurants taking advantage of things that are local and seasonal. I think that also means we might have to change our expectations sometimes when it comes to food. We live in a society where, like I've said a ton of times, when we want something, we get it. And when you are starting to rely more on local food systems, sometimes you're going to go to that restaurant and they're going to be out of the pimmen sorbet because they only got so much and it's towards the end of the season. You know, sometimes you're going to go and want to get a dish that you heard someone else talking about online and it will have already moved out of season and that's just the way that it goes. And I think that absence instead of making us angry or frustrated should just make us even more excited for it to come back into season the following year. I love that in Japan they have the cultural calendar of 72 micro seasons

with like small haikus for each micro season detailing what plant is coming into season and how and the animals and how they are behaving in your area too. And I've always dreamed of like everyone in the world getting to have something like that for their neck of the woods.

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