Wild foods
Natural, wild, uncultivated habitats are not only critical for biodiversity, ecological health and beauty, but also for food and nutrition. Traditional and indigenous cultures around the world have always had immense knowledge and respect for wild foods, and continue to rely upon them as important sources of sustenance. Wherever you live, there are likely to be wild edibles growing nearby, including many plants commonly denigrated as "weeds". As with local food generally, learning about and utilizing wild foods helps reconnect you to your local ecosystem, and makes you more aware of the threats it faces; it improves nutrition, and reduces dependence on global markets. Get into the weeds with the actions below! In this section, we also include resources for gleaning unused food from cultivated plants, and food gardens deliberately cultivated for public foraging.
A rich diversity of wild or uncultivated foods can be found in our local environments, from urban areas to the backcountry. With sustainable harvesting practices and ethics, these foods can provide a dependable, perennial source of exceptional nutrition. Learning to identify, harvest and prepare wild foods provides not only nutritious sustenance, but opportunities for intergenerational and intercultural learning, preserving biological and cultural diversity, and deepening an ecological ethic of care and respect for the land.
Take action
- Gain knowledge about wild food in your local area by reaching out to a local herbalist, ecologist, or elder.
- Learn to gather wild foods ethically and safely with The Forager’s Toolkit.
- Find a group that harvests and prepares wild foods together; check out Meetup's 80+ foraging groups (US), or start your own group.
- Find an experienced forager in your area through Rob Greenfield's database Find a Forager (US and Canada).
- Learn to cook wild foods of temperate North America and Europe with Dina Falconi's book Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook, and wild foods of Southeast Asia with The Non Timber Forest Product Exchange Program's webinar What's Cooking? Discovering Wild Tastes in Asia.
- Identify dispersive, prolific animals and plants near you with the database Eat the Invaders, and help bring balance to their role in your local ecosystem one meal at a time.
- Learn to collect seaweed with Milkwood Permaculture's article and zine Foraging Seaweed for Home & Garden Use (Australia).
- Learn to identify, forage and prepare 13 wild weeds found all over the world with Katrina Blair's book, The Wild Wisdom of Weeds: 13 Essential Plants for Human Survival.
- Host a themed potluck dinner – where everyone brings a dish to share – to showcase the variety of wild foods in your area.
Get inspired
- The Deccan Development Society in Hyderabad, India helps introduce the public to neglected, highly nutritious and abundant wild foods through its Festival of Uncultivated Foods.
- Fox Haven Farm in Maryland, US runs 10-month foraging education programs with a focus on ecosystem stewardship, within and alongside an herbal farm, ecological retreat, learning center, and wildlife sanctuary.
- Linking Wild Foods, Biodiversity, and Forest-Based Livelihoods, an online conference held in 2021, offers stories and conference presentations from across South and Southeast Asia.
- Forgotten Greens, based in India, connects people with wild plants growing near them through 11-day virtual group programs, as well as place-based plant walks, festivals, and workshops celebrating the plants that form the often invisible backdrop of our everyday lives.
Gleaning refers to harvesting and gathering foods that would otherwise go to waste. From city fruit trees to leftover crops on farms, the amount of food that can be gleaned is huge, and many organizations and initiatives have emerged to collect this food for local consumption. In many cases, the gleaned food is donated to local anti-hunger programs. Not only does this tap into hitherto ignored local abundance, but it helps reduce dependence on the global industrial food system.
Take action
- Find a local gleaning group with the Center for Food and Agriculture Systems' Nationwide Gleaning and Food Recovery Map (US), Feedback Global's Go Gleaning map (UK), and Alive's Gleaning Fresh Food list (Canada). Elsewhere, find a local gleaning or urban harvesting group with Falling Fruit's worldwide database Grow Pick Distribute.
- See an overview of approaches to gleaning with How to Glean for Good, featuring examples from around the US.
- Start a new gleaning group with Feedback Global's Toolkit (UK) or the United States Department of Agriculture's Let's Glean! toolkit.
- Map out the trees in your city with FallingFruit.org, a worldwide database of fruit trees available for public harvest. A gleaning or urban fruit organization near you may already have its own database, too.
- Create and distribute a paper map of public fruit trees with Fallen Fruit's Public Fruit Maps.
- Organize a group city fruit harvest with Solid Ground's guide How to organize an urban fruit harvest.
- Understand the laws around gleaning in your area with the National Gleaning Project's Legal and Policy Resources page (US).
Get inspired
- Volunteers with Not Far From the Tree in Toronto, Canada, pick fruit from private trees all around the city and share the harvest with owners and local food banks.
- Food Forward in Los Angeles, US, collects fresh fruits and vegetables from backyard fruit trees, public orchards, and farmers markets, and delivers it to people in need.
- Smarta Kartan in Gothenburg, Sweden, maps out the sharing economy of the city, including public fruit trees.
- Fallen Fruit in Los Angeles, US is an urban fruit trail highlighting 150 edible trees in one neighborhood.
- Wild Food Voices and Stories, a series of short films and speeches by Wild Foods Asia, offers a plethora of insights into the role that wild foods hold in nutrition, society, forest protection, and livelihoods of indigenous people throughout Southeast Asia.
- Uncultivated Foods, part of a series on food, farming and farmers by the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture in India, features presentations by three scholars and activists working with Adivasi (indigenous) communities in India to protect, strengthen and revive their knowledge, access to and use of the huge diversity of nutritious forest foods.
- Gather, a new feature-length film, is "an intimate portrait of the growing movement amongst Native Americans to reclaim their spiritual, political and cultural identities through food sovereignty, while battling the trauma of centuries of genocide."
- The research paper Forests as Food Producing Habitats: An Exploratory study of Uncultivated Foods and Food & Nutrition Security of Adivasis in Odisha, by Living Farms in Odisha, India, shows the invaluable importance of forests for food and nutrition security and prosperity of indigenous peoples in Eastern India.
- The book Wild Tastes In Asia: Coming Home to the Forest for Food, by Madhu Ramnath and Ramon Razal, explores the immense but often marginalized knowledge that tribal communities in Asia possess about wild edible plants.
- The scholarly journal article Enacting Treaty Rights through Restoring Shoshone Ancestral Foods on the Wind River Indian Reservation, by Shoshone Ancestral Land et al, shares the story of the Restoring Shoshone Ancestral Food Gathering community's journey of decolonization through food sovereignty based on traditional foodways.
- The article Beyond Rice Supremacy and food diversity in Indonesia explores how reclamation of locally-appropriate staple foods like sago palm is key to ensuring food security, rainforest preservation, and cultural diversity in the archipelago.
- The article When Invasive Species Become the Meal, in the New York Times, US, profiles several edible plants and animals that are ecologically dispersive, along with philosophical debate on labeling species as "invasive."
- The books The Wild Wisdom of Weeds: 13 Essential Plants for Human Survival, by Katrina Blair, and Foraging and Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook, by Dina Falconi, offer foraging tips and recipes for wild edible plants common throughout the world.