COMIC: How foraging restored my relationship with food

Mike Letterman

Oct 7, 2022, 1:15 PM
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LA Johnson illustrated the comic based on an interview from The Food Connection.

There's something soul-nourishing about connecting with your food and that's what foragers like to do. Her videos are about her adventures in finding cool plants and teaching people how to cook them.

Page 1: Hi! I'm Alexis and I'm a forager. Which is a very fun way of saying I eat plants that do not belong to me. And I teach other people how to do the same thing.

Page 2: When I walk into natural spaces, I see wonder. It's like Disney World, but plants, and way cheaper food.

Page 3: I remember gardening with my mother at our house ... well, I probably wasn't helping at all ... but she pointed to a patch of grass that looked different than all the other grass.

Page 4: I break it, and suddenly the air is perfumed with garlic. Mom: You know how we cook with onions? You can cook with this, too. (Warning! If you tell a 5 year old this, they will go around breaking plants in your yard and smelling them!!to smell them!)

Page 5: My dad is excellent in the kitchen, and my mom in the garden, so I grew up with this. I'm very lucky to grow up as a black kid with black parents who are outdoorsy, because there has been this cultural separation between black folks and the outdoors.

Page 6: If you look back at history, at the diets of people who were enslaved, the way they beefed up their food rations was with hunting, trapping, fishing and foraging. But after slavery ended, new laws said you couldn't reap the benefits of the land unless you owned it.

Page 7: In the 20th century, foraging became taboo because the way to show off your wealth was by going to the grocery store. So a lot of this knowledge has been lost. I am just one of a myriad of people working to get that knowledge back.

Page 8: Many of us have a fraught relationship with food. A lot of that is societal pressure and how processed food is. I grew up overweight, pressured to eat less. I had an eating disorder. Food was the enemy.

Page 9: Foraging was the way that I fell back in love with food. It brought me joy and a connection to place.

Page 10: I believe caring about what you're nourishing your body with is soul-nourishing. Happy foraging, don't die!*

It can pose serious risks if it is done wrong. Conducting thorough research, consulting experts, and exercising caution are some of the things that those who choose to pursue foraged should do.

Sanaz Meshkinpour edited this segment of the radio show. The research and production of this piece was done byFiona Geiran. You can follow us on social media and send us a message.