The joy of foraging your own food | Alexis Nikole Nelson

0:02You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. There's a whole world of food growing just outside, in our backyards, around our sidewalks, the parks we walk through every day, and most of us pass by it without a second glance. Alexis Nikole Nelson wants to change that. Known to millions on social media as the Black Forager, the self-described ethnobotany nerd has spent years teaching people how to spot, harvest, and cook the wild plants hiding in plain sight. And it all started when she was five years old in her mother's garden.

0:39You tell a five-year-old, actually, you could just be going and getting some food out of your lawn and nobody even put it there. And as a child, I thought it was crazy that everyone wasn't talking about it and that everyone didn't think that was the coolest thing they had ever heard. In this conversation with TED curator Whitney Pennington Rogers, Alexis makes the case that foraging isn't just about free food. It's about the wonder of wild food and how paying closer attention to what's already around us can reconnect us to the land, our communities, and each other. 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.

1:19And I think your world feels fuller and your world feels brighter when you can do those things. They also get into how to start without getting overwhelmed, how to forage responsibly, and the surprising and troubling history of why foraging became so restricted in this country in the first place. That's coming up right after a short break.

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4:23And now our TED conversation of the day. Thank you for being with us, Alexis. It's so exciting to have you here. And what exactly is foraging? It's just, it's finding things in the wild to eat. Is that right? Is that all it is? Yeah. So I would describe foraging as the act of properly identifying and then gathering and then utilizing wild plants, nuts, seeds, fruits, fungi, any of the not animal neighbors of ours. It's being able to identify them properly and know their uses. Some people forage just strictly for food. Some people forage for medicinals. there's a lot of different ways to forage.

5:10And you gave a whole TED Talk about this, which I mentioned, and I'd encourage everyone to watch if you haven't. But how did you get into foraging? So my introduction to foraging comes to me by way of my mother. When I was growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, she has always been such an avid gardener. So the way that you spend time with her during her time off was outside in the garden. And I've always been just a really curious mind. So I, of course, would ask her questions about all of the different plants that she planted. And before long, she was teaching me about all of the different uses of them and not just of the plants she put there on purpose, but also of some of the weeds that had just come up, which for me, as like a five-year-old was absolutely mind-blowing.

6:02You tell a five-year-old, actually, you could just be going and getting some food out of your lawn and nobody even put it there. And as a child, I thought it was crazy that everyone wasn't talking about it and that everyone didn't think that was the coolest thing they had ever heard. So I just kind of started storing away all of that knowledge. And every time my mom or a teacher at school or a summer camp counselor taught me a new plant, I'd just kind of squirrel it away into my Rolodex of plants in my brain. Well, your book, Happy Snacking, Don't Die, comes out in a few days. So first, congratulations on that.

6:37Thank you. And it's really a, it's a beautiful book with gorgeous pictures and artwork, and it's part cookbook, it's part foraging guide, it's part encyclopedia and so many other things. Could you tell us a little bit about what the book is and why you wrote it? Yeah, when I was growing up, you know, going through all of my mom's books on plants and then later going and checking out tons of books from the library, 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.

7:22Now, of course, we have classics like Yul Gibbon, 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 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.

8:06I 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 the next time that this plant is in season. I love this. So it sounds like it's for people who have never done this and people who have an interest in this, wherever you fall on that spectrum, there's something. Yeah, I tried to make sure there was something for everybody. And I also tried to make sure that there were extraordinarily easy recipes and also recipes for when you're feeling a little bit more gutsy.

8:48Sometimes it's just a quick pickled purslane. You're just massaging salt and spices into purslane stems. And sometimes it's rosewater baklava. You know, sometimes you want to be spending a lot of time in the kitchen and have something showy to show for it. So I also wanted to make sure that it was attainable on the cooking side as well, because by the time I got out of college and there were a couple more foraging cookbooks on the market, they were absolutely beautiful. But a lot of the recipes I would look at and be like, I don't have what I need to make this in my kitchen, even if I do go out and forage the foraged ingredient.

9:26And I didn't want anybody to feel that way with this book. And I know it's been some time in the making. So I guess why this moment? Why do you feel like this is the time for this book to come out into the world? I think something that a lot of people realized during the early days of the pandemic and a lot of the world being shut down was this lack of connection to nature that has kind of found its way into Western society. 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 tiktoks 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 and you know and people will laugh and people will ask them how you don't know it makes sense that they don't know We live in a society where we are extremely disconnected from our food systems.

10:35It's not just passing through one set of hands before getting to us. It's passing through like tens, sometimes hundreds of hands before it even makes its way to us. And I don't think it feels good to be that far removed from every single aspect of your food. So now, especially with a lot of the issues that we're having in the United States with food recalls, we've realized how fragile this food system that we all rely so much on is. 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.

11:29And 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.

12:17And I think your world feels fuller and your world feels brighter when you can do those things. So I hope my book inspires people to do that. that's so beautifully said um well let's let's get into some of the things that you will discover in this book and maybe the first is just if you are one of these people like i will count myself among them who wouldn't know a wild onion if i stepped on it what is a thing that you would say to get someone feeling comfortable about beginning this journey i would say don't be afraid to start small it's really easy to you know see content like mine or any of the other foragers that are online and feel like you have to be where we are tomorrow or you're not a forager I think even if you just have one plant that you know how to identify and that you look forward to coming into season every year you're a forager I have friends who just get really excited about lilac season every year because they gather the lilacs growing in their neighborhood and make lilac sugar with it with their kids.

13:27That makes them a forager. You know, I would tell people, you don't have to know everything. You just have to be curious about knowing some things and stay curious. To the point of curiosity, you've said that one of the hardest parts of foraging is not the finding the food part, but it's sort of learning to see. Can you explain what that means and how do you train your eyes? So when I feel like anyone who has a very outdoorsy hobby knows that feeling when you're kind of transitioning from maybe after work, being on the computer all day, to needing to almost be in a completely different mindset for, say, going out for a jog around the neighborhood or going rock climbing.

14:18Like you're using different parts of your brain. And I think foraging is much the same. You're going from just kind of being this like input sponge of all of this light and information. And instead you are needing to tune out a little bit and let things find you. You know, you're pausing for a second, you're noticing the bird song around you, or maybe the laughter of children in the background, just like really helping to ground yourself in the place where you are currently standing. and I even talk about it in the book, something called the noticing game that I play when I lead plant walks in person 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.

15:15I will show everybody one plant, sometimes it's as big 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. 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.

16:16It could even just be a grassy field like near 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.

17:06I love this. I love this as an alternative way to find your peace and your zen and all of that. Yeah. Well, we've been getting questions in from the members and I want to start to share those with you. We have one from Antoinette who sort of along the lines of what you're sharing here. Antoinette 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? Oh, Antoinette, that's such a beautiful question. I absolutely think that foraging changes the way that you feel about where you live, how you move through the places that you live.

17:48Just like walking around a neighborhood and knowing all of your neighbors feels good. Walking around the neighborhood and knowing all of your plant neighbors and your animal neighbors feels really good, too. And when people feel good about where they live, they take better care of where they live too, which is really, you know, the big goal above all goals with getting people out and foraging or even just noticing is helping people realize even if you live in the middle of a city like I do, there's still nature everywhere. We're still part of an ecosystem even here. And that's beautiful. Well, to the point of taking care of the places where we live or where we are, what do you say about foraging responsibly?

18:39What should people know about respecting the land and, you know, not stripping up a patch of land that they're using bare? I would say the times when I see issues of overconsumption coming into foraging is almost always when capitalism is also being brought into foraging. 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.

19:26So 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, Allium tricocum. 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.

20:14A 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 overconsumption 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. If you're going and over-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.

21:01And 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.

21:54Well, that means ramps aren't in that area anymore. And you accidentally put the final nail in the coffin. Yeah. And I just, for me personally, I don't want any foraging that I do to be even a little bit noticeable. 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 been here and messing around? Because if so, that to me already means that I've done too much. And 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 going and when you are harvesting.

22:47But 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. 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 good rules to live by in lots of areas of our lives, but definitely in foraging, that seems like that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Well, so I want to talk also about safety. The title of your book is Happy Snacking, Don't Die, which of course is in many ways your catchphrase and is a joke, but of course the don't die part, there's a very real part to this.

23:36And we have a lot of questions. Yeah. I mean, yes. And we have so many questions from members about this. Like Steve M, for instance, is interested to know how he can know if there are chemicals in his food. So, yeah, just what is your rule of thumb on how confident someone should be before they eat something that they found? So I tell people that and the rule that I live by is I don't put anything into my mouth unless I'm 100 percent sure of what it is. If there's even a little bit of worry in my mind, I don't need to eat it. I might take home a piece so I can go and cross-reference it with a book, so I can go and do additional research.

24:18another thing 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 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.

25:01While we're talking about ramps, 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 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.

25:51That 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. To which 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 half-life 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 err too much on the side of caution and then never participate at all.

26:37And 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. Superfund sites, because a way that we remediate a lot of superfund sites around the country is putting parks on them, which is great for the community, maybe not as great for your digestive tract. And for the deeper into foraging, the more you will learn about what you need to know about what you're harvesting.

27:28When 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'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.

28:15Don't go away. We'll be right back with more of this conversation after a short break.

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30:24well so you mentioned the epa's reported spills website and sybil s is curious if there's an app you recommend for recognizing edibles growing in the wild and things that are actually safe to consume beyond just thinking about chemicals and that chemicals and whatnot yeah there are a couple apps that i enjoy recommending to people even though i tell people not to let apps kind of be the be all end all of whether or not you're choosing to eat something. So the first one that I like recommending to people is called iNaturalist, like lowercase i. Remember when we used to just put a lowercase i in front of things to show that we were tech savvy back when iPods were a new thing?

31:06And so iNaturalist, it's an excellent app. You can use it to identify by plants, fungi, animals. And the thing that I love the most about it is, one, a lot of your sightings can go on to contribute to citizen science that's going on in your area. A lot of universities and research institutions will go and ask for permission to be able to include your sightings into pools of their own data for monitoring the area where you live. And that's just always fun to get to participate in. And two, experts can go and either back up your sighting. So if you are like, oh, I think this is a black cherry. It's coming up in the suggestions.

31:54I'm going to mark it down as black cherry. another more experienced forager or botanist can follow up and confirm and then it becomes a research grade sighting or they can say hey actually I don't think we have the full story here let's just downgrade it to the prunus genus because I can't see x y and z and they can leave you that feedback while they're doing so. And I think that is like such an invaluable research, especially for people who are kind of trying to like rekindle their curiosity about the natural world. And you can also open the explore map and see all of the other sightings that people in your area have found and logged.

32:43And that's a quick way to feel way cooler about your neighborhood. um also my friend jesse who 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. 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.

33:30I love this. And it seems like to the point of being able to connect with nature and your community that this also enables you to do that with technology too. Technology, nature, all of the things coming together, which is very cool. Exactly. You know, back when I was a little kid, someone would tell me a new plant and I'd have to try to keep it in my head until I could go home and write it down and then go to the library and then look through the encyclopedias and then try and find it and then write everything down and then take it back home. And it is kind of cool that a lot of that footwork is now living in these chaos rectangles that we carry around with us.

34:08chaos rectangles. I'm definitely stealing that. I love that. Well, I, so I want to zoom out to talk a little bit more about the art 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. 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, that is?

34:46Well, I think just in the way that we've structured, especially, you know, speaking to like us in the United States, the way that we have structured our food systems is because we've created this world in which you can have strawberries in the dead of winter and you can have, you know, tomatoes any time of year. Food is having to travel progressively further and further and further just to end up on our plates. So you're adding a pretty large carbon footprint to a lot of foods that previously did not have them. It used to be your grocery store was stocking from farms that are generally within your area.

35:33And now you can be in New York City enjoying an avocado toast with an avocado that was grown 4 ,000 miles away. 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 cyclospora or myriad E.

36:25coli, so many different things. So, and the 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, cooked pokeweed greens were extremely important culturally in the American South. 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 cannery that has to rely on people going out and gathering it and bringing it in for a little bit of money in return?

37:18How 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.

38:12You know, the common man, of course, at that time, 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. but unfortunately after the emancipation of enslaved people in the mid 1860s you know for black culture and the american south specifically a lot of black folks had to get really good at foraging and hunting and fishing and trapping because if you didn't you'd only get the scraps that you were being fed if you were living and working on a plantation and what they found was those newly freed people did not want to come back and work as sharecroppers on the same plantations they were just freed from because they knew how to be self-sustaining because they had to learn how to be and that's when you see laws specifically around foraging starting to shift kind of in this concentric circle moving out of South Carolina where we see it first and then rippling through the rest of the country.

39:25You know, trespass used to be a civil offense until rich plantation owners were worried that their newly freed workforce was going to be able to get free food on their land. And they said, absolutely not if you're not working here for free anymore. You know, there are specific quotes from town hall meetings about why these laws change. 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 like things that started as a race thing almost always end up affecting everybody because racism and classism are like this. You know, because then it wasn't just black folks who were newly freed and thus obviously didn't have any land of their name who couldn't forage.

40:13Suddenly poor white workers also couldn't forage on land that didn't belong to them. Indigenous people also couldn't forage on land that didn't belong to them. And it just started 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. because even now today, it's way easier to be a forager if you're a rich landowner. Well, thank you for sharing a lot of that history.

40:57I think it's really important to sort of know the journey that we as people have been on with foraging and how that's evolving. And you're kind of getting to this, to this point of foraging, how the accessibility of it in a lot of ways is still limited. And the wellness world, of course, has really embraced this idea of clean eating and whole foods. But of course, that comes with a hefty price tag if you're doing that in stores or subscription boxes or what have you. Do you feel like in some ways foraging does offer sort of a quiet challenge to the commercialization of food? Yeah, the clean food movement.

41:36Oh, absolutely. I, you know, it tickles me a little bit, but I guess a sad way to go to a fancy grocery store and see them selling tied bunches of dandelion leaves for like$7 a bundle. Because 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 in their neighborhood. I'm sure a lot of their neighbors would be happy to donate their dandelions to the cause that is your plate. And I mean, that is a thing that I do worry about with foraging now kind of entering the zeitgeist again. I do worry about the commodification of it, mostly because, you know, with what we talked about earlier, the second that you're foraging, not just to sustain yourself and your loved ones, but you're foraging to try to make a profit off of it, is the second, I think it goes from foraging to poaching.

42:42And in a lot of areas, you know, where I live currently is a food desert. I was on the phone 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, no pharmacies. You know, I live in an area that is historically poor and historically Black. And 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, you know, which I guess is like another word for processed foods.

43:40but we don't even have time to get into what are we considering processing? Is grinding wheat processing? 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 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.

44:31So you've mentioned the food recalls. And of course, like I think a lot of us when we think about food recalls this year, it's, you know, Taylor Farm cyclospora lettuce outbreak. And that feels like the biggest one that's probably made headlines. And so, I mean, as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about where food comes from, what goes through your mind when you see headlines like this? And how do you think it changes the way all of us think about foraging nationwide and globally? For me, it has been a really sobering reminder of how fragile our food system is. But because most of the time, it's so out of sight, out of mind for everybody.

45:10That's not an awareness I think a lot of people were living with until things like this started happening. And, you know, do I think this is going to turn everybody into an avid forager overnight? No. And also, I hope it doesn't because I don't want to see too many people speeding into this hobby because once again, safety first. But if it means that someone pauses for a second and maybe instead of getting all of their veggies at the large chain supermarket, maybe saying I'm going to hold off until I can go get these things at the farmer's market over the weekend. Just something that maybe I'm paying a little bit more for, though a lot of times you really aren't.

45:57But I'm also better supporting my community. There's a smaller footprint on what it is that I'm eating. And the safety odds might be a little bit higher. And I think when you start foraging, you start not taking for granted all of the people who work really hard to get your food onto the table. Because I mean, we haven't even, and we don't even have time to get into a lot of the labor practices on some of these giant industrial sized farms. 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 that not everybody needs to be.

46:55And 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, than 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. I'm just like your weird cousin. I just want people to be better informed so they can make the best decisions for them.

47:43I love this. Well, we have a couple of questions that I want to try and throw in our last couple of minutes from the audience that are, more specifically about the kinds of things you're into as you're thinking about this work and foraging. So Kristen asks, what is your favorite wild recipe? Oh, my favorite wild recipe. Oh my goodness. So in my early years, before I was a vegan, I used to go and visit my mom's family in Massachusetts. And we would stop at the small family owned restaurant on our drive down to Cape Cod called Lindsay's. And they had these crab cakes that I was obsessed with as a kid.

48:23It 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 am a vegan. So crabs, not plants, unfortunately. And two, also unfortunately, the Lindsay's family restaurant closed shortly after the initial shutdowns and 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.

49:16I'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. You're like, now you've made me think of this thing that I need in my life.

49:35Well, also, I guess, thinking about things that people talk about and plants that are top of mind. Paul W. is curious, what is a yard weed or invasive plant that tastes incredible, but has terrible public relations problems? Oh, man. You know, the best pear cider, I guess, perry for all of the cider heads. I don't want anyone coming in and correcting me because it's a cider made from pears. The best perry I've ever made was made with the pears from the Bradford pear. And I don't think that that is its redemption story. I think that it is just a way to deal with a very active invasive in my area.

50:17I'm not saying that that's a good reason for anybody to go and plant a Bradford pear. You shouldn't do it. It's literally illegal to do it here now in Ohio and in quite a few of our surrounding states. And I mean, those trees smell so bad in the spring. They are weak as all get out. I saw so much damage in the windstorms we had a couple of weeks ago solely because of Bradford pears. But I gotta tell you, those little pears taste very good. They make a very good bubbly beverage. It's like, this is something just for yourself. Keep that to yourself. Exactly. It's a real turning lemons into lemonade kind of moment.

51:02I love it. That's what we're here to do. Exactly. Do you feel like there's a future where foraging becomes more mainstream, where kids are learning how to do this in school or you're seeing that it's showing up on, you know, menus that aren't just in high end restaurants? How do you think this looks in the future? Yeah, I really, I hope so. I hope that we see foraging being more important kind of from the start of our lives all the way through. I'm often very envious of friends who have grown up elsewhere around the world where there is still a strong culture around foraging. You know, going and visiting friends in Helsinki and Finland and seeing that there's still a really strong culture around chanterelle foraging as a family in the summer and the fall.

51:56Going to Korea and seeing that there's still a strong culture of acorn harvesting, whether it's to bring to factories that process it down to starch for people to make dotory muck or acorn jelly. or if it's just making it from scratch in your own home. I think that having that connection, especially from a young age, helps us become more environmentally conscientious adults once we grow up. I'm really thankful for my wonderful hippie Montessori school 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.

52:50Because I think that that's a lot of what's missing societally 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 persimmon 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.

54:18And I've always dreamed of like everyone in the world getting to have something like that for their neck of the woods. Well, let's hope that your dreams become a reality for all of us because that sounds beautiful. And this has been so beautiful. Alexis, thank you for sharing your time, your wisdom, all of this with us. I seriously cannot wait to make some of these things that you've shared in your book, I'm sure all of you are excited to dive into all of these recipes and start doing this ourselves. So thank you for taking the time to be with us today. Thank you guys all so much for joining me.

54:54Whitney, you're going to have to let me know what the first recipe is that you make from the book. You're going to have to keep me posted. I definitely, I will. I will. Bye, everyone.

55:06That was Alexis Nicole Nelson in conversation with Whitney Pennington Rogers for a TED membership event in 2026. If you're curious about Ted's curation, visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is a podcast from Ted. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner, and Tansika Sungmarnival. Additional support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Christopher Fazey Bogan, Valentina Bohanini Banban Chang Brian Green and Lainey Lott Learn more at podcasts.ted.com I am Elise Hu I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed Thanks for listening

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