This post was written by GUEST AUTHOR Chelsey Reis.
From childhood fascination to adult passion
It's a chilly 6 degrees as I leave my house early on a winter morning. Equipped with two sturdy bags and dressed in op-shop woolens and gifted gumboots, I shut the door quietly and step out into the expectant dawn.
I'm off on an urban foraging expedition, an activity that has grown from a childhood fascination with finding treasures from the natural world into a growing passion for sourcing sustenance from nature in my adult life.
What is urban foraging?
The Collins Online Dictionary defines foraging as "...the acquisition of food by hunting, fishing or the gathering of plant matter."
Across all cultures, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was held in common around the globe up until the advent of large-scale agriculture around 12,000 years ago, with variations in activity depending on what food sources were supported in a range of environments.
In recent times, foraging is making a come back. It's gaining popularity with folk who are consciously seeking ways to reduce their reliance on money, increase well-being, step more lightly on the planet and deepen their connection to nature and place.
Living in a regional city, the scope of my urban foraging extends to what lives, grows or is freely available in my local environment. There tends to be more emphasis on the 'gathering' aspect of foraging; in addition to edible plants and fungi, I harvest other natural resources (such as fallen timber), with due diligence and respect to the ecosystems I'm engaging with and ensuring what we will use in our house or garden is non-toxic.
I also source food that is growing over fences (more info on the legals and etiquette later), and access fruit, veggies, herbs, recycled jars, seeds and more from the Food is Free stalls in my home-town.
According to researcher Annika C. Dahlberg and her colleagues:
Urban foraging can encompass a range of situations, from occasional recreational or cultural use, to subsistence use to fulfill basic needs with important health and nutritional dimensions, to harvesting for processing and sale for livelihood supplementation. In all cases, urban foraging contributes important and even essential aspects of urban well-being.”
A typical foraging session
My route today takes me past a lone apple tree, perhaps the last remnant of a farmer's orchard. It droops with the weight of its glossy red fruit which is, according to my kids, the sweetest they've ever eaten. I take a couple to add to the fruit bowl at home, leaving the over-ripe windfalls to nourish the birds, insects, worms, soil, and ultimately, the tree itself.
Surrounding the apple tree are 'weeds', including chickweed, oxalis and plantain which I pick for our table, as opposed to the expensive selection of limp greens from the supermarket.
I then harvest sorrel, borage and nasturtium flowers and a handful of herbs that have been planted for public use along the fence of the local Community Garden. This yields fresh greens my 8 year old loves to eat, edible flowers to decorate our salads, and herbs to add flavour to our meals.
On the last leg of my journey, I gather a spray of jasmine flowers that the kids can sip the nectar from, lavender flowers to scent the house, and a lemon or two for honey-and-lemon drinks to ease a sore throat.
As little as a handful of leaves - "One Small Serve" - of something wild or homegrown per day can make a difference to your nutrition and your connection to place
In One Small Serve, I show you a small and, simple home grown food approach. Learn about 7 easy, nutritious food plants that you can harvest from for years without replanting.
Many of them are already growing wild in your neighborhood.
6 Unexpected benefits of urban foraging.
1. Wellness through movement and nature
During the recent Covid 19 lockdowns, being able to combine my exercise time with urban foraging became a vital part of my daily routine that helped strengthen my mental and physical health.
One of the many reasons I am drawn to foraging is the way it seamlessly meets so many of my needs. Rather than spending time "...lifting weights that don't need to be lifted1", my body is engaged in movement that has a deep resonance within my psyche and that energizes and holistically engages my muscles, bones, senses and synapses.
Being outdoors brings multiple benefits, particularly accessing essential stores of Vitamin D from sunlight, which has been found to support circadian rhythms for better sleep, reduce depression through increased production of serotonin, lower blood pressure, decrease risk of contracting bowel and breast cancer, and reduce the risk of melanoma.
2. Finding flow
My practice of foraging began as a child immersed in nature. Hours spent beachcombing for precious shells, coral and driftwood on a pristine back beach on the Mornington Peninsula transported me into what Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, co-founder of positive psychology, calls "Flow."
Headspace, a global provider of mental health support, describes the state of Flow as "...giving your fullest attention to an activity or task that you are incredibly passionate about, singularly focused on, and totally immersed in… The mind's usual chatter begins to fade away, placing us in a non-distracted zone. The feelings that would consume you under normal circumstances (inhibition, hunger, fatigue, or aches and pains) melt away, and all that matters is your dedication to your craft."
As a kid, I would happily spend hours searching for a special shell, unaware of time passing, hunger and thirst, or being hot or tired.
As an adult, my experience is similar: despite the increased levels of anxiety that living through the covid pandemic generated, my daily practice of foraging embedded me in the present moment, allowing me to forget my worries through paying attention to what was in abundance in my local environment.
3. Mindfulness and present-moment awareness
The practice of mindfulness - focusing on the here and now through engagement of our senses - allows the mind to slow down and take a break from over-thinking, particularly about things outside our sphere of control.
Mindfulness can be described as "...paying full attention to what is going on in you and outside you, moment by moment, without judgement. It means you observe your thoughts, feelings, and the sensations of taste, touch, smell, sight and sound. You are also fully aware of your surroundings."
4. Connection to place
Becoming more aware of what grows in our local environment means spending regular time fully engaging with the spaces around us, which engenders a deeper connection to the places we inhabit.
In his paper entitled "The Rediscovery of Place and our role within it, "Nicolas Stephen Mang proposes that it is through connections to and within place, that care for place evolves. Mang quotes Zen Buddhist Kazuo Matsubayashi:
Caring evolves through attachment to a place. As one puts down roots in a certain location and becomes familiar with the surroundings, one begins to distinguish subtle differences in even the most ordinary landscapes.”
~ Kazu Matsubayashi, The Rediscovery of Place and our role within it
Over the last 18 months of foraging in my local green spaces, I've formed a network of connecting territories in my mind. Each morning, depending on the season, my energy levels and what resources we're in need of, I select my route and stopping points. These change from day to day, week to week, season to season.
As I become more familiar with each area, I notice small changes over time - such as how a bud becomes a flower and then a fruit, the appearance and disappearance of a winter pond, and which birds sing first from their tree-top perches in the early morning.
5. Breaking free of consumerism
By choosing to use what's available locally, in season and in abundance, we break with habitual patterns shaped by consumerism that take away both the joys and responsibilities of providing for ourselves.
Foraging stretches us to be open to new possibilities, tastes and ways of being, and reinstates us as active participants in sourcing our food and directly connects us to nature as provider.
As author and forager Samuel Haynes, an internationally recognized authority on edible wild plants, explains,
Harvesting wild food is the oldest and most basic subsistence activity of humankind, but today we live in a world where these skills are almost lost. Foraging is the missing link in modern civilized cultures - it is this direct physical connection, in the form of sustenance, that brings us to our deepest appreciation and understanding of the natural world.”
6. Family enjoyment and empowerment
When I return home laden with my foraged gifts, the looks of delight on my family's faces fills me with joy and pride.
The ability to provide unexpected treasures (such as an unidentified, woody pod revealed as a cocoon of an Emperor Gum Moth, which we later had the privilege of watching emerge, unfurl and flap away) and an array of fresh, varied, locally-sourced food, is empowering for me personally, and it connects my family to the abundance of the natural world around us.
Like any other worthwhile endeavor, foraging in urban spaces has a learning curve. Here are some of the challenges I've encountered, along with some tips about staying safe and legal...
Challenges and learning curve
Occasionally, as I'm collecting dried twigs from under the eucalypt trees, passers-by look at me strangely and I feel a bit awkward, like I'm stealing or so impoverished I'm forced to scrounge for fire wood.
More challenging is gaining skill and confidence to identify, prepare and consume plants and fungi for my family as the sheer magnitude of edible weeds and wild foods is daunting. I currently only harvest a fraction of our food intake.
Through a combination of online research, books, face to face discussions and walking with experienced foragers, I'm slowly building my plant knowledge and extending our range of trying new wild-grown plants, some of which I now harvest regularly when in season.
It's heartening to know that by choosing to use what is already freely available in my community, I am taking direct action that reduces my impact on the climate and allows me to live in care of our planet.
As Fergus the Forager says, "By collecting just enough, just at the right time, just in the right place and with just the right company, foraging becomes an intentional act to embrace change and the eternal transition, with resilience, hope and growing wisdom."
Safety guidelines and legal considerations
Please ensure you are skilled in identifying wild plants/ weeds before eating, and understand what you are legally and safely allowed to harvest. If you are new to foraging, here are a few handy guidelines to keep you healthy, safe and out of trouble:
- Checking in with your local council to make sure that plants growing in public spaces have not been sprayed with pesticides is a very good idea, as is learning from experts to identify which plants are edible.
- Plants that overhang residential fences are considered to be on public space and you are therefore legally allowed to pick fruits etc, ensuring you don't damage the plant and take more than you need.
- Knocking on a neighbor's door and asking if it's ok to pick fruit - as we did recently after spotting a couple of crab-apple trees laden with fruit - is a great way to source food, make new friends, and build a foraging/sharing culture in your neighbourhood.
Useful Resources
Science Behind Foraging: why gathering plants is good for your body and soul
Why Foraging and Gathering Are Food For the Soul
How to go urban foraging safely, respectfully and cleverly
Eat That Weed - Edible and Medicinal Plants Of Australia
"One Small Serve"
Learn how to grow and use 7 food plants that are
- easy and very low-maintenance (including some that grow wild in urban environments for you to forage without having to do any gardening at all)
- productive for two or more years without replanting
- deeply nutritious
Establish a "one-serve-at-a-time" home-grown or foraged food habit that's easy to maintain
Includes a series of free extra tips + free email support
Please comment 🙂 Are you a forager? What "weeds" and other treasures do you gather? Please scroll down to share your comments.
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