Foraging for the Future

In a time of upheaval and rising food prices, foraging offers a way to restore a family economy—and an American tradition

Foraging is possible every month of the year, and there are plenty of resources to help beginners get started. (Biba Kayewich)

Living in a major American metropolis almost guarantees you’ll see some notable sights—police chases, rowdy gangs—you know, the usual. But in the past few years, I’ve seen a more unexpected sight: people foraging along the city parkway where I live.

Admittedly, I’ve met such a sight with internally raised eyebrows, chalking the unusual nature of such urban foraging up to the fact that the people doing it appeared to be from some of the many immigrant enclaves located in my city. Perhaps foraging was a cultural thing unfamiliar to the American way of life, ran my subconscious reasoning.

Perhaps it’s an unfamiliar cultural thing, but in the past few months, I’ve started to think that it’s one I should consider adopting.

I began viewing foraging more favorably while pondering and listening to others discuss the decline of our society. Most of us will agree that nothing is quite the same since the pandemic of 2020—shortages are continually popping up in grocery stores, and the items that are available seem to come with increasingly extravagant prices, not to mention the unrest in many other areas of life. All of these uncertainties seem to signal the very real possibility that society as we know it could eventually come crashing down around our ears.

Such a crash wouldn’t necessarily be devastating to those living in the country—country folk naturally seem to be more independent, and they dwell in surroundings more conducive to living off the land.

But what about those of us in the city, many of whom are lucky just to have a square patch of grass in the front yard? Are there ways we can prepare ourselves to be more self-sufficient and knowledgeable about our surroundings were we ever forced to begin scratching out an existence in less-than-ideal circumstances?

To answer these questions, I checked out my local library to see if there were any books on the subject. Surprisingly, there were several, one of which was called “Urban Foraging,” by Lisa Rose.

Treating foraging as the most natural thing in the world, Rose makes the process seem less daunting and mysterious than I originally thought with her descriptions of needed tools (a sack, a shovel, and a few other basics), a guide on various leaf arrangements so as to better help identify edible plants, and cautions of general places to avoid foraging (railroads, places that are prone to using herbicides) because of the toxins they can infuse plants with.

“Gathering wild foods is possible 12 months of the year,” she writes, “even in climates where there is snow!” However, Rose urges urban foragers to use wintertime largely to brush up on their plant identification skills and then head out in the spring, summer, and fall to gather bark, roots, flowers, berries, and leaves. She then provides recipes for salves, teas, jelly, and even pickles made from ingredients gleaned from the highways and byways.

Paging through the photos of edible plants Rose includes, I recognized a number I have long considered weeds—burdock, dandelions, creeping Charlie, plantain—some of which even offer cures for common ailments. (Goldenrod makes a tea that remedies the effects of hay fever—who would have guessed?)

Perhaps not surprisingly, Rose views foraging from a progressive mindset, an environmentally friendly way of life that seeks to return to our natural roots. But according to American author Wendell Berry, foraging is actually a part of the traditional way of American life, one that hits at the very core of our current consumerist culture.

Recounting his childhood in the 1930s in “The Gift of Good Land,” Berry writes that during the hard times of the Great Depression, “farm people on the way somewhere characteristically had buckets or kettles or baskets in their hands, sometimes sacks on their shoulders.” These were used for the “fetching and carrying [that] had to do with foraging,” Berry writes, “searching the fields and woods for nature’s free provisions: greens in the springtime, fruits and berries in the summer, nuts in the fall.”

Such activity was “not for ‘sport,’” Berry explains. “People took these seasonal opportunities seriously” because “the economies of many households were small and thorough.” That economy was a family one that even small children could participate in, helping with chores, gathering food, or raising livestock to sell and earn extra money.

We have drifted from such an economy, however, moving instead into a “consumer economy” that tells us “that it is better to buy whatever one needs than to find it or make it or grow it.” As such, foraging—learning which plants are edible and doing the work to collect and process them ourselves—is frowned upon as a waste of time and effort.

“What do we do to our people, our communities, our economy, and our political system when we allow our necessities to be produced by a centralized system of large operators, dependent on expensive technology, and regulated by expensive bureaucracy?” Berry asks.

“The modern food industry is said to be a ‘miracle of technology,’” he notes. “But it is well to remember that this technology, in addition to so-called miracles, produces economic and political consequences that are not favorable to democracy.”

In other words, if we want to see a revival of the good life—free from government interference and elitist control—that our grandparents and great-grandparents enjoyed in this country, then we must begin learning how to replace our consumer economy with a family-based one. And one small part of that is acquainting ourselves with what we can glean and put to good use in our natural surroundings.

So if you drive down my city street this spring, you may just happen to see a young lady with a sack in one hand and small shovel in another, poking around in the bushes and trees that line the boulevard. If you do, don’t judge. After all, foraging and the accompanying self-sufficiency are part of traditional American culture.