Foraging Ecology (EATING WILD PLANTS) Encore with @BlackForager, Alexis Nikole Nelson

Alie Ward
This episode is brought to you by Merrick Petcare, and if you've heard me talk about Grammy, you know that she means the world to me. I wanted a dog for probably ten years and I was living in an apartment. Couldn't have dogs. When I finally moved somewhere else. I adopted her within weeks and it was love at first scritch.

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Okay, it's 2024 ally here jumping in to say this is an absolute fan favorite episode of Ologies. It's also a me favorite one. It was a while in the making and it's the perfect time of year to serve it up on a doily for you. And since we recorded this three years ago, this guest, Alexis Nelson, aka Black forager, and I have gotten to meet in real life. We become pals and when she's in LA, we hang out and she's just as much of a gem as you think in person.

She's also an ologite and she texted me last week after our Columbidology episode about pigeons, to say that it's nudged her toward considering becoming a pigeon parent herself. Also, since this episode aired, Alexis has launched a tv show called Crash Course Botany, which you can find on PBS. Also, at the end of this episode, I added a new secret, which contains the reason why this is an encore this week and a special perk for patrons coming up in a few days. Okay, wow. I just love this episode and this guest.

All right. Oh, hey, it's your friend's cat who just had a $600 hairball. Allie Ward back with an outdoorsy, quite frankly, a scrumptious episode of Ologies. So this ologist, we're gonna get right to it, studied both science and performance at Ohio State University, you know, but the role most know her in is teacher of the can I eat this? It grew in my driveway.

Arts and sciences. So she has a million, a literal million TikTok watchers who just eat up her lessons on making violet simple syrup and magnolia cookies and garlic mustard pesto and more. And I have had so many of y'all begging me to have her on that. When I dmed her, honestly, I was shocked to get a response. This woman is busy.

So we recorded this right as April was turning to May, and since it's still spring and things are still blooming and shooting, crawling from the ground, it's time to grab a basket and see what's for dinner. But we also talk about year round edibles. We're going to get into it. But first, thank you to all the patrons who sent in their questions. You can become a patron for a dollar a month.

A dollar a month@patreon.com. Ologies thank you to everyone rating and subscribing to the podcast. Thanks to everyone who leaves such nice reviews. Keeping ologies in the top five science podcast globally, which is bananas. I read all the reviews and each week I pick a fresh one.

And this week it's from for the earth, who wrote. I hope I hear you read it, Allie. Thank you, Allie and team for truly some of the best content available. Thank you for the earth. Also, we got a rare two star review this week from Bee Jester who said that they do not like my voice and I am a woman.

That's a problem for some people. But thank you so much for the feedback. And there's actually a secret about my voice at the end of the episode, which you might already know. But anyway, thank you, everyone else, for all the loving and very lovely reviews. Except for be Jester who's probably not listening.

And that's a. Okay, thanks, everyone, for leaving them anyway. Okay, foraging ecology. Foraging comes from a root for hay or straw or fodder, and then it evolved to mean hunting about for edibles. And ecology comes from the same root as oikology for the place we live and our relationship to our environment.

So foraging for the things around us. Now for breakfast. Side note, I just want you to know that I ate some loquats that I stole from a friend's tree. She didn't even know she could eat them. She thought they were ornamental.

So we're doing a good job today. Anyway, pull up a stump and lean in for a bounty of information on edible versus poisonous plants. Taproots, blossoms, tinctures, brews and stews and cookies and cocktails and hikes and eating invasive species, some dog pee talk, the best guidebooks and how gathering what grows around us is a radical act for Internet hero and teacher, autodidact, wild food maker and your gathering guide. You know her on TikTok and YouTube and Instagram as blackforager. Alexisnicole Nelson.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
I'm so excited to be talking to you. Hello, my name is Alexis Nicole Nelson, and my pronouns are she, her, hers, and my cat just clawed me in the butt. What a good time we're having already. Get him on the mic. Yeah.

Hey, Ozzy, you have words to say, use your words. Oh my gosh. People have been asking me for so many months to get you on this podcast. When you wrote back, I was thrilled. I've been wanting to do this topic for a while.

Alie Ward
Which would be foraging ecology, I believe, right? Yes, foraging ecology, I think, is the theology that we settled on for this. Yes, it works. It totally works. Your TikTok's amazing and informative and you're so prolific and it's so great.

At what point were you like, okay, it's time. The world needs to know what they can eat in their backyards. I mean, I've honestly felt that way ever since I was really little. I guess I just didn't have the tools to tell anybody outside of my parents, family members, friends, anyone who I could get to listen to me in person. Do you remember what the first thing you ate out of the ground and were you safe?

Was it dangerous? The first thing I remember eating out of the ground. I must have been about five years old, and I was helping my mom in the garden in our old house in Cincinnati, and she pointed out some grass, but it looked different from other grass, and she broke it and it smelled delicious. Like, it smelled like onions and garlic. And she's like, oh, yeah, it's onion grass, and it's edible, but it's, like, not as good as the onions and the garlic that we get from the store.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
And if you tell a five year old that something is edible, then they're going to put it in their face and they're going to get really excited about it. So I did. And it just kind of ignited a gentle obsession, a lifelong love. Where did you get a lot of your information? Did you start getting, for your 6th birthday, did you get an encyclopedia of edible herbs?

Alie Ward
How did the information dumpstart? Well, my answer to that question is yes, but for my 8th birthday. Oh, got it, got it. A little late. Late bloomer.

Late bloomer. I know. Oh, my gosh, I was so late to the game. I just. I inhaled all of my mom's books on gardening.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
My mom had, like, an entire shelf in our house dedicated to just her gardening books. And, yeah, I'd say by the time I was eight or nine, I had read each of them front to back. Was like trying to memorize every single one of the trees and flowers and herbs present in them. And when I was done with those, I bought more every weekend. My parents used to let me go to this independent bookstore in Cincinnati.

Joseph, Beth. After we'd go out to dinner, and they'd be like, okay, you get one book, and it'd be really hard for me to choose between, oh, gosh, whatever fantasy novel I was obsessed with at the time or a plant book. When it came time to figuring out your life's course, did you want to stick with botany? Did you decide to go more of a business route? I know that you have been, like, a social media manager, which explains another reason why you're so good at TikTok.

Alie Ward
You're a professional. But what did you decide when it came to figuring out careers? I think I'm still deciding. Every time I have to remember that I'm a real adult, I'm just like, oh, yeah, 28 is real. I can't fudge it anymore.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
Definitely full blooded adult. Now, growing up, I. In the fourth grade, when we had to draw what we wanted to be when we grew up, I said that I wanted to be a geneticist by day and a pop star by night. I love it. I love it.

I mean, I feel like this is closer than anybody, myself included, thought I was going to get with kind of melding this aspect of performance, which I've always loved, like, right hand in hand with, like, my love of plants has been my love of entertaining people. And when it came time to choose what I was going to major in in college, I was, like, pretty gifted in math and science, but I was also, like, pretty gifted in theater. But nobody tells you to major in theater. Even when you're really good at theater, no one tells you to go and major in theater. So everyone was like, oh, my gosh, you're a woman of color.

You're good at math. You're good at science. If you don't become an engineer. What a waste. And I didn't know if I wanted to be an engineer, but I did know that I didn't want to be a waste.

So I applied to all of my schools as an engineer, got accepted to Ohio State as an environmental engineering major. On the first day of her schooling as an environmental engineer, the dean addressed the students just to tell them that most people will quit the program. About half, which is the about as opposite of a pep talk as you can possibly get, like, welcome. This is going to suck. You'll hate my program.

Alie Ward
Attrition perhaps should not be something to brag about, but what do I know? And I've always loved the pursuit of knowledge, but I've always hated when some sort of, like, very competitive aspect has been thrown into it. So, needless to say, I had a rough time my first year in engineering school. So rough that I took a semester off to kind of get my head right and decided that I did love math and science, but that I also loved writing. I also loved performing.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
So I came back and focused on both environmental science, because I didn't take all of that calculus and physics and chemistry for nothing. But then I also went and got a theater degree and took, like, master's classes in playwriting, put on a one woman show before I graduated, wrote a couple of short plays. So I feel like everything I'm doing right now makes sense. And in terms of where I see it going in the future, any opportunity that I get to talk to large groups of people about the value in the green spaces around them, that's how I would define the career that I want to see myself in at any given time during the rest of my life. And if that's.

As a TikToker, that's great. If that's. Oh, my God. On a tv show, hey, PBS, that's great, too. If it's writing field guides and books, that's great, too.

I just. This is what fills my cup. And this is the type of thing that even when I'm working really hard, it doesn't feel like work. That's the best thing. Did you ever think that you'd have a million people tuning in to watch you make pesto?

No. Never. Never in a million years. I made my foraging account on Instagram originally because I was annoying my friends with the plants I was eating. They were like, we don't want to hear about it.

Yeah. They were like, no, thank you. So I was like, okay, cool. I'll just make, like a finsta. But just for the wild things that I put on my plate, now I feel like my.

Now I feel like my personal account is my finsta, a switcheroonie that I never in a million years would have called. So, side note, a finsta, for those of us not born in the nineties, is a fake Instagram or an alternative handle that's not, like one that your boss follows or something your followers would find off brand. So perhaps it's the real you which makes me want to sit on a rock and ponder, am I living my most finsta life in the, out in the open? And why not? Anyway, Alexis had an underground passion for plants, and at the start of the pandemic, she posted something to her TikTok about foraging if you couldn't get to the store during the first few weeks of the COVID lockdown.

Alie Ward
And she posted it. She woke up to tens of thousands of views, and suddenly people were smitten, not only with her plucky delivery, but her extensive botanical knowledge. So millions of views later, she's really opened up people's eyes and no noses and mouths to edibles that we walk right past all the time, all year round. It's been really cool to see the seasons change and to see different things that you're harvesting and persimmons and then going into blossoms and stuff. When it comes to keeping yourself educated, are you looking things up before you're foraging?

Are you already familiar with them? Does it really depend on the region? Like, how are you keeping all of this knowledge? How often do you have to kind of sharpen those tools? Yeah, I think it's constantly a process of sharpening.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
And the more you interact with a certain plant, just like, the more you interact with certain people, you get to know them better, you know their nuances better, you know when to expect them. So there's definitely a swath of plants that I've worked with for a really long time. I know when to expect, like, apples and all of the other, like, rose family trees to start blooming. I know when dandelions are coming up, I know when violets are coming up, plants that I'm a bit newer to, that I have to go and do a little bit of digging, a little bit of reading, or my favorite, I see that someone else in one of the regional foraging Facebook groups that I'm in is posting about them, and I'll be like, oh, I did not know that we were already in cow parsnip season. I did know we were already in cow parsnip season.

That's just the first plant that came to my head. Of course, she knew. Also more on those densely hairy perennials later. And that's been wonderful, is being able to have that community to always come back to. But I'm always rereading all of my foraging books, all of these poor books.

Their covers are just bent as all get out. Because whenever I have some free time, or if it's before bed, I'll just flip one open, do a little bit of reading. I feel like I notice something new every single time I read one of my foraging books. So it makes sense to go back over them again. And it's just like when you're in school, like you have to keep practicing or, or you lose it.

Use it or lose it. That is the TLDR answer. Maybe you don't know what TLDR means, and that's fine. It stands for too long. Didn't read.

Alie Ward
I see. Why am I, in case you missed it. So Alexis is schooling us on Internet culture at large, as well as precious, overlooked botany. Okay, question that's on my mind a lot when I watch your TikToks. How do you know if something's peed on it?

Alexis Nicole Nelson
I do sniff. Because if it smells like fresh pee, that's just like not appetizing at all. The answer to this question, and I know, Allie, that it is not the answer that anybody wants, is if it's out in a green space, odds are at some point in time in that green space is past, probably in the last year, something has peed there. That's a very good point. Even, even tiny little invertebrates, they're making pee all the time, and they're doing it on our romaine lettuce that we're buying from the store.

Alie Ward
Everything's peeing on everything. There are things in us right now peeing on each other. Exactly. It's the circle of pee. And that's my thing that I always love reminding people, is that the farms that we get our groceries from do not exist in a microcosm.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
Either. You don't know how many field mice peed on your kale. You should wash everything you take home, whether you pulled it out of the ground yourself or if someone else did. Very good point. I just try and I try to help people kind of put that out of their mind.

Now, of course, there are some areas that I avoid because they get peed on more often than others. And that is what I call the dog pee zone, which I would say is like a solid foot, foot and a half into anyone's lawn that is on a sidewalk. Probably best to just leave that be. I bet there's someone out there, a forging ecologist getting their PhD, and, like, the concentration of urea within certain feet of a sidewalk. There's gotta be.

There has to be. And if there's not, that's a good reason to go back to school, as I personally need. I know my tiny dog. She's got, like, the perimeter of lawns absolutely covered. That's a huge weight off my mind.

Alie Ward
I love foraging. I've always thought it's so fascinating. And one thing I'm so curious about, like, what is something that you tasted that you weren't sure if you were going to dig it at all, and it was just delightful. Oh, that's a fun one, I would say. Cal parsnips.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
They are in the carrot family, which is famous for having some of, like, the best wild edibles, but also famous for having some very deadly lookalikes to those same wild edibles. I've been eating Queen Anne's lace for a really long time. I think I figured out that Queen Anne's lace was wild carrots, dacus carota, when I was in high school. And it, like, blew my mind, because where my family stays in Massachusetts, there's Queen Anne's lace everywhere. And I'm like, you mean, I could have been just digging this up this entire time?

So Cal Parsnip is also in the apaca family. It's also called pushki. Okay, so quick aside, these plants are not another Internet acronym. APACA is a full word. It's just a long latin one for a family of flowering plants.

Alie Ward
What are some other apaca plants? Celery, carrot, parsley, dill, cumin, anise. So many apaca plants have already made it into your mouth area. But some of them are in the not to be messed with category because they are straight up poison, like hemlock, or are highly phytophototoxic, which means plant in light makes bad so think skin blisters that require medical attention and a lot of well justified moaning and pouting. But cow parsnip is safe.

However, it doesn't always look like it. A lot of indigenous peoples ate it, still eat it for a millennia. But its dangerous look like is giant hogweed, which has been in the news off and on in certain areas of the country because it's super invasive and it's super dangerous. Third degree burns if you interact with the SAP while the sun is out. Dangerous.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
We love a phytotoxin. I mean, you gotta give it to the plants. They figured it out. You do. And everyone gets really mad at them.

And I'm just like, well, if it makes you feel any better, don't take it personally, because we're not who they did that for. The insects are. It's not for you. They're not out to get us, they're out to get the small, crunchy boys. Don't take it personally if you get burned.

Cow parsnips, giant hogweed leaf shapes are super similar. The difference is cow parsnips get to be like, eh, 6ft, maybe even like seven or 8ft tall max. Whereas giant hogweed could end up being like, just a 16 foot tower of doom. Oh, my God. They don't call it giant for nothing.

I believe the species name is like, mega gigantium. It's, I believe, a derivative of the latin word for humongous. And it makes sense. Cow parsnip was one of those that I'd heard so many good things about it, but it's really hard, even when you are so confident in your ability to id plants, to get over, like, the hump of the zero zero, 1% chance of mortal danger? Yeah.

Alie Ward
Is there an identification trick for some of the more dangerous plants, like between giant hogweed and wild carrots? Is there something you can look for, like a purplish ring at the top or something discerning like that? I'm glad you called out purple, because I love how often purple is the color of danger in nature. Yeah. When it comes to differentiating Queen Anne's lace and poison hemlock, purple is actually one of the identifiers, the purple splotches that you will see on poison hemlock but you will not see on Queen Anne's lace.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
Wild carrots for cow parsnips versus giant hogweed. Cow parsnips have this, like, very fine kind of fuzz all over them and these really cute papery sheets over their leaves. Before the leaves go ahead and shoot out. Also, their leaves are very even in their serration, whereas giant hogweeds leaves similar shape, irregular serration, which I feel like makes sense. Chaos means bad, organized means good.

There are a couple other tells too, like the hollowness of the stem on cow parsnips. But the moral of the story is I babysat a stand of cow parsnips for a full calendar year to watch it go through its entire life cycle before I finally ate some last year. Oh, my gosh. That is an investment of time. Did it pay off?

It did. Oh, my gosh. Absolutely delicious. The fried flower buds right before the flowers open especially are just a taste to behold. Behold this for sight.

Still a taste to behold. And the leaves are this. They're beautiful and aromatic this time of year. A little bit reminiscent of celery, which makes sense. Another apaca family member, also a little reminiscent of almost like coriander.

And a little bit of burnt orangeiness, which becomes much more prominent in their seeds later on in the season. So absolutely worth it. I just made a flatbread with some cow parsnip leaves diced into the dough just yesterday. A plus. Oh, a plus.

Alie Ward
Nice. A plus. Ten out of ten would recommend to a friend. My caveat is, if you are going to harvest it, I don't know, maybe babysit it for a year to make sure that you're not going to get a burnout and be very sad. And also only harvest from healthy stands of it.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
The stand that I harvest from has doubled in size year over year, two years in a row. It's the only reason why I feel comfy harvesting from it. Ah. Do you ever take people with you and give up your spots? Or how protective of certain plants are foragers.

Oh, my gosh. It really does depend on the plant. There's a handful of people who I've taken to some of my, like, my secret spots, some of my, you know, this time of year, there's ramps and cut leaf toothwort as far as the eye can see kind of spots. Side note, what are ramps? Despite sounding like a disease you get from a dirty hot tub, ramps are just an oniony, leaky type of scallion, oniony type of plant, only they're free if you find them.

Alie Ward
And also trendy. And cut leaf toothwort, which sounds like another affliction. It's a wasabi horseradishy tasting plant that has ganja looking leaves and little pink flowers. Also, did you know that wart means root? So toothwort plants have roots that look like discarded teeth.

So never let anyone tell you that science isn't goth. I'm not crazy possessive over any of the spaces because none of them belong to me. Yeah. And it's just, it's not worth getting all riled up about because someday someone's gonna find out about it. The only experience I've had with something that I tried to keep secret, and then the beans got spilled, but not by me, is the persimmon tree near my house.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
A sweet, curious soul using inaturalist last summer probably looked up and said, oh, my God, this tree is full of these adorable, cute little green fruits. I'm going to figure out what it is. Inaturalist, being the great app that it is, immediately was like, oh, diospheros virginiana. Congratulations, friend. You found the persimmon tree.

And so they tagged it, and now I am not the only person who visits that tree during the fall and winter. And that's okay. Do you ever see anyone else rolling up with a basket and are you like, oh, hello. Oh, hello, hello. Oh, I've just missed people before.

I have seen people, like, taking their plastic bag and, like, hopping into their car and driving away right as I'm walking up with my bag. Uh huh. And I was like, oh, no, friend, come back. So foragers make friends. Just respect the supply, and no one will have to grapple sweat soaked on a lawn for a handful of persimmons.

Alie Ward
So the first rule of forager club is not don't talk about forager club. Let's say that you're a baby forager and you're just starting. You're inspired by someone with amazing energy and knowledge on TikTok, and you decide, I'm going to start eating my neighborhood. Where do you think is a good place to start? Or, like, dandelions and entry level, what do we got?

Alexis Nicole Nelson
Oh, I would say dandelions are an excellent entry level edible, not just because they are almost universally recognizable, but because every single part of the plant is useful. You can eat the flowers. You can pick all the flower stems. You can eat the greens. Oh, you can ferment the greens, making, like, a sauerkraut with dandelion.

Yum, yum, yum. Very tasty, the taproot. You can go ahead and, like, dig it up and either eat it like a root veggie, though it's a little, it's a little bit bitter. So a lot of people will roast it and grind it into a coffee substitute or dice it, roast it, and then throw it into some alcohol to macerate, to make bitters, alcohol plant is useful. So I feel like that's a great gateway plant because if you have fun with that, odds are you will have fun with more of them in terms of other really easily recognizable ones.

And I think this accidentally ended up being a gateway foraging plant for a lot of folks are magnolias. So many of us have magnolias planted as ornamentals in our neighborhoods. They're one of those plants that, for whatever reason, a lot of us know the names of. And those white and pink flowers, if we're talking about, like, sauce for magnolias, are so recognizable, so hard to confuse with anything else. Because, I mean, magnolias as a genus are very unique flowers.

That's what happens when you decide to push pause on evolution a couple million years ago. That's fine. And so that one's been a really great one, too. And to see so many people going out and gathering them and making magnolia syrups and making the magnolia snap cookies was so exciting. We all know that magnolias smell amazing, but did you know that their petals kind of taste like ginger?

So we're gonna do a play on a ginger snap cookie. It's a magnolia snap cookie. Flower, cookie, flower, cookie. Also, side note, if you're not on TikTok, don't freak out. Don't worry about it.

Alie Ward
Check out black forager on YouTube, where Alexis has posted a ton of her recipes, including one for magnolia cookies uploaded about a month or two ago. And I was just over on this video's page to grab that sound bite, and then I read the description and I had to include this. So in the description, Alexis writes, I'm super proud of these cookies. And not just because they passed the taste test with my partner's family, but because a year ago, I don't think I would have felt confident creating a cookie recipe on my own. And as I found myself sitting on the couch this afternoon smelling like nothing but magnolia flowers and warm sugar, I realized I am quite happy with who I am right now.

But yes, her TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, all have great recipes and the same handle at black forager. And she has recipes, including ones for dandelions and magnolias. Easy gateway foraging plants. So those would be my two recommendations off the top of my head. If you are in the midwest or along the east coast like I am, pawpaws are another great one, asamina triloba.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
But it is not pawpaw season yet. What is a pawpaw? Ooh. So pawpaws are the largest native fruit to North America, if you're not counting squash, squash are really cool, too. Okay.

Alie Ward
But back to pawpaws, which look like if green potatoes grew on trees. But what do they taste like? They taste as if a mango and a banana had a baby. If you get a good one. I'm going to give that caveat because last week a friend of mine pulled me aside and said, I don't know if I did something wrong, but I tried a pawpaw last year and I didn't like it.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
And pawpaws are a great adventure. They don't breed. True. It's very hard to assume how a pawpaw from a certain tree is going to taste until you're tasting it. But when you find good ones, oh, buddy, they are fantastic.

And they do look like little mangoes hanging out in the trees. The trees have these humongous, glossy, dark green leaves that make them very easy to recognize from a distance. Once you've seen one, you start seeing them everywhere. If you live in a region that they're native to, and they are a fruit that did not develop for us. They developed for megafauna, they developed for giant sloths to eat the fruits whole and poop out the seeds.

But now we get to enjoy them, which is cool. That actually brings up the point of native and invasive species. Are we doing the earth of mitzvah by eating invasive species? And how do you find out in your region what's got to go and what's got to flourish? Oh, I absolutely think we're doing mother nature a solid by eating invasives, because eating them is much better for the environment than spraying them, which is what I see a lot of cities, towns, municipalities turning to when it comes to eradication of certain species.

Two that come to mind for all of us kicking it on the eastern half of the United States. Our garlic mustard, which is very much in season in, oh, gosh, pretty much early through late spring here in Ohio. Right now, while we are recording this, it is flowering. So I'm just going through and picking the flower heads off of all of them that I see and bringing them home to have them for dinner. But mostly just because I don't want them to set seed because they are very prolific spreaders.

They are a non native brassica, and brassicas are just so good at their job, and their job is being spicy and spreading seeds. And what is abrasica, you ask? That's why I'm here. Abrasica are things such as broccoli and cabbage and kale and rutabaga. And kohlrabi and Brussels sprouts and mustards.

Alie Ward
And the oil of the brassica seeds is where canola oil comes from. There is no such thing as a canola. The word just means canadian oil, low acid, because it was invented in Canada. Jared, did you like when I told you all about that earlier? I loved it.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
I loved learning about canadian oil. Low acid. There's no such thing as a granola. Okay, but back to yellow mustard flowers, which bloom in early springtime in California. And everyone gets so hyped up about nature not knowing that it's wildly invasive and may have been introduced by spanish missionaries, tossing it out like confetti on their path up the California coast.

Alie Ward
Mustard. It's so good for Instagram pictures, but native plant enthusiasts are. Hate it. Hate it. Yup.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
Oh, my gosh. If you are in California, go find all of the mustard. Pull it up, eat it. Blanch it, put it into pesto. Put it in the stew.

Pickle the stems, eat all of it. Get rid of it. Eat it, please. And I know here we also have japanese knotweed, which is a prologue horrific spreader. And it is kind of becoming a scourge in a lot of areas in the northeast.

You'll just see towns just spray the worst kind of chemicals onto them because it's a very hardy species, it's very good at the game of survival. So you kind of got to drown it in a lot of things that are not good for the rest of the environment if you want to get rid of them. But what a joy it would be if instead, you know, in the spring when they start putting all of their chunky little shoots up, people were just going through cutting them off or pulling them up and collecting them for people to eat. Eat that knotweed. Northeast United States, and actually every state except North Dakota, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Florida, and Hawaii, who aren't yet overrun with it if you're like, what is the knotweed?

Alie Ward
Okay, so it's been in the US since the 1860s, when it was given to a nursery owner in New York. And now it's everywhere. Japanese knotweed. Its root systems can span 70ft. It grows up to one and a half stories tall, eight inches a day, and it has these large green leaves and a bunch of little white flowers.

And the stems look a little like bamboo, which is why it's called american bamboo. It's not bamboo. And in spring, sprouts look like reddish asparagus, and it has a sour flavor or kind of lemony like rhubarb. Which is where it got the nickname donkey rhubarb. Now, if you want to name your EDM EP donkey rhubarb, think again, people.

British electronica outfit affix twin already beat you to it. Why? Why does a fix twin care about donkey rhubarb? Because in England, if you have this invasive knotweed on your property, banks might refuse to give you a mortgage because it's so robust and so hard to eradicate and it ruins foundations of buildings. And in prepping for the 2012 Olympics, London spent the equivalent of $100 million to get rid of japanese knotweed on ten acres.

$100 million. $10 million an acre. Connecticut weed scientist Jatinder Auloch has said ominously, there is no insect, pest or disease in the United States. They can keep it in check. So what do you do?

One, make sure it hasn't been doused in herbicides, and two, eat it. It grows through the cracks in Alexis's. Deck because for a species that is very quickly changing the landscape on the outskirts of a lot of cities, it is delicious. It's very rhubarb esque, but slightly more vegetable than rhubarb. That being said, it does lend itself both sweet and savory.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
So. Well, I made sorbet with it last year that I was obsessed with. I need to make it again this year. For a class over the weekend. I did like a fun little sauteed greens and threw a couple of the shoots in.

And they just add a lot of lemony brightness to any dish. And when the shoots are young and you cook them just right, they get kind of like melt in your mouth when you cook them. For my friends who do eat the eggs, I hear that they're a wonderful addition to an omelet. They're delicious. And what a joy it would be if we just suddenly had cities with armfuls, truck fulls of free, lemony japanese knotweed shoots this time of year instead of just going and, like, dousing them in herbicides.

Alie Ward
On the topic of herbicides, that's something I didn't even think of. But when you're foraging, is that something that you have to be more careful of than pee? And how do you. Oh, yeah, I'm way more worried about herbicides than I'm worried about. Yeah.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
There are a couple things that I tell people to look out for when they're foraging in urban spaces. I think some people don't realize how visually apparent it is when an area has been treated recently with herbicides. You will see, like, rings of discoloration around the very obviously sprayed weeds. So if you're looking at someone's lawn and it is otherwise, like, it's 98, 99% beautiful grass throughout the rest of the lawn, and you look around the fringes and you see some weeds doing their thing because they're, they're hardy af and stubborn af. You should probably stay away from those because the way that people get perfectly manicured monoculture lawns is help from herbicides.

So those guys I typically leave alone. If you see any odd discoloration, either on the plant or in a, like, little perimeter ring around the plant, leave it alone. Absolutely. Any irregular wilting that you wouldn't expect to see this time of year. Absolutely.

Leave it alone. And just for the sake of things like runoff and whatnot, too, and exhaust, I give a pretty wide margin to streets that are wider than two lanes and an even wider margin to railroad. Oh, really? Because of diesel engines? Yeah.

Oh. I wasn't sure if it was that or just the, you know, getting lost in a playlist, headphones on and just choo choo, you know, yikes. And that's. And that's how we lost the forager. Wow.

Alie Ward
So sad. When it comes to where you forage, how do you do it differently in the city versus if you're out on a hike? And what kinds of stuff do you find in each place? Yeah. So in the city, it's going to be a lot more of the kind of classic, quintessential weeds, the plants that like taking advantage of disturbed ground where they don't have to, you know, out compete any of our other native species.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
So right now in the cities, I'm seeing a lot of Queen Anne's lace already putting up their new sets of leaves for the year. Ton of dandelions, a lot of clover, white clover, red clover, and now sweet clover is starting to show up to hang out. A ton ton of mugwort. I passed a couple very healthy stands of mugwort while I was on a walk around the neighborhood today that I will be visiting this weekend because I'm in the mood for mugwort roasted potatoes. So what does mugwort look like?

Alie Ward
Okay. I had to look it up. It's a member of the daisy family, so its leaves look like daisy leaves, and it has clusters of these drooped bell buds at the tip of a stalk. And mugwort can grow meters and meters high. And while scientists call it artemisia lucia vulgaris, close friends call it Riverside Wormwood, felon Herb, old uncle Henry and naughty man and I feel like I have to buy mugwort a beer to hear how it got those nicknames.

But mugwort just means marsh root, and it's best to pick the leaves and buds between July to September. And you can season some meat with it. You can make a mochi dessert or look into its medicinal purposes. And indigenous people in North America used mugwort for a wide variety of ills like pit stank to colds and flus, rousing folks from comas, and even inducing labor. So ethnopharmacology episode, anyone?

Yes. But yes. When this was recorded a few weeks ago, Alexis was planning to gather some mugwort and roast potatoes with it. So just a lot of the friends who you see enjoying spaces that maybe have been modified for something else. We have a couple empty lots in our neighborhood in which the ground was turned over before the winter, and now that ground is just covered in weeds.

Oh, wow. Whereas if I'm in the forests right now or out in the woods, oh, gosh, it's almost a completely different biome. We're still in the middle of spring ephemeral season, so I'm seeing trout lilies, trilliums, ramps, cut leaf toothwort, Virginia bluebells. I'm starting to see pheasant back mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, morels, of course. Course.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
And then you have a lot of the trees whose early leaves are edible starting to leave out, like your maples. You have pines, spruces, and firs putting out their new growth. And their needles are very soft right now and great to incorporate into meals too. So it's a fun game, kind of having to change the mindset of what you're looking for, depending on where you are. And I'm lucky that where I live here in Ohio, while I very much live in the city, Columbus proper, I do not have to go very far to not feel like I'm in the city anymore.

Alie Ward
By the way, congratulations on your mushroom find. Thank you. Pretty big deal. Oh, my gosh. I know.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
I feel like morels are just like a badge of honor in the foraging community. I feel like I haven't been an official forager until now. I know. I saw that. There are so many questions from patrons, and so many of them start off, congratulations on the morale, like so many.

Alie Ward
A lot of people are so thrilled for you. I was wondering, what percent of your diet do you think is foraged versus market? Ooh, I love this question because it varies a lot throughout the year. And we just finished the time of year where it's like maybe ten or like 15% in the winter through early spring. And now I think we're kicking it up probably to closer around 25% just because there's not a whole lot of the high caloric value, high nutrition value plants out to play.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
But, oh, my gosh, once we get to late summer and into the fall, where it's like acorn season, paw paw season, hazelnut season, persimmon season, that's the time of year where I can have entire days where everything that I am cooking, with the exception of maybe a little bit of flour being thrown in or, you know, an olive oil being added into a pan, is something that I foraged. So it very much fluctuates as we progress through the year. I have so many questions from listeners. I have 35 pages of questions from listeners. What?

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. 35 pages of questions. Single spaced. So a lot of questions.

Alie Ward
So many people who just love you. I mean, I can't. I should just forward you all these questions. So if you're ever having any kind of bad day. Oh, wow, people love you so much.

Can I ask you some of their questions? Oh, my. Oh, my gosh, yes. Do we have time to go through all of them? Ah, I wish we did.

35 pages of questions. Okay. But before we start answering them, first, we're going to take a pit stop to donate some money to a charity of the ologist choosing. And this week, Alexis chose backyard base camp, which aims to inspire black, indigenous, and all people of color across Baltimore City to find nature where they are and empowers them to explore further. And backyard Basecamp also offers garden consultations, educator training, habitat discovery programs, and more.

And they're awesome. We've donated to them a few times in the past, so check them out and consider donating to. That is backyardbasecamp.org dot. And that was made possible by sponsors of the show, who you may hear about. Now, this podcast, and my life is brought to you by Squarespace.

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Okay, two great questions. I really loved one from Lyd Hodnett, who says, it seems to me that it's important to keep in mind that there are respectful ways to forage. At least there should be. Are there guidelines for this? And do these guidelines draw knowledge or inspiration from the indigenous people of the region you're foraging?

Lynn also says, I feel like native people are routinely harassed for performing traditional actions like foraging, while white people get away with taking more than they need. And Seguani Dana says that she learned about plants and their medicinal values, among other things, from my parents. She and her dad are penobscot, and that knowledge has been passed down. But she is wondering kind of how you gain the knowledge to know you're not going to poison yourself. Because she trusts learning from elders more than books, because she would rather learn in the field.

Hands on. So, yeah, any thoughts on kind of what you've learned from indigenous cultures and foraging? Oh, my gosh. I mean, that's the indigenous peoples of the Americas. That's like the crux of everything that foraging is here right now.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
Their knowledge is the foundation of the knowledge that everyone else has had the opportunity to interact with and build upon. I know Michael Twitty talks about this a little bit in his book the Cooking Gene, because a lot of enslaved black folks in the south foraged. But obviously the people who they got that information and that knowledge from were the indigenous people. So coming from my dad's side of the family, my dad's mom hails from the seneca up in like the. The New York area, but she passed away when my dad was in high school.

So he got like bits and pieces and little like inklings about certain plants and certain foods, but not in the way that he wished he had. And honestly, he also knew a whole lot about plants. I'm very lucky that as a person of color, both of my parents are very outdoorsy. Also got a lot from his dad's side of the family down in Mississippi from bits of information that they had been passing through the generations since they had been enslaved there. So, yeah, of course I feel like in some way or another, every single one of us who is talking about foraging in North America is only doing so because of the generosity with knowledge of the indigenous people who now, yeah, do not get to continue some of those practices and some of that land stewardship.

That is the whole reason why this nation looked the way that it did, period. I honestly feel like we need more indigenous voices front and center when it comes to foraging here in the United States, because while I like to think that I know a whole lot about foraging in a way that preserves for not just me next year, but me in ten years and children in 20 years and their children in 50 years, 60 years, I know that I don't know everything. Alexis notes that we could do an entire series of episodes on the role of indigenous land stewardship before colonization. And this field does have an ology, environmental anthropology, further proof that I will make this podcast until I die because there are so many good ologies. So please just get used to me, friends.

Alie Ward
Oh, and 2024 me again. So we actually have done some really great episodes since we recorded this. We have an indigenous wildfire ecology episode with Doctor Amy Christensen about land stewardship, and an indigenous colonology episode with Mariah Gladstone, who's awesome of Indigikitchen, and a really great indigenous phytology episode about ethnobotany with Doctor Lee Joseph of Squalan Botanicals. We also have an indigenous pedology episode about soil science with Doctor Lydia Jennings, and of course the biology episode about moss with the legend Doctor Robin Wal Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass. And yeah, we will link all of those in the show notes, my friends.

Speaking of friends, first Time question Asker Alexandra Holland wrote in to say, quote, I love Alexis so much I'm going to die of excitement and Alexander wants to know, how do you use foraging to connect to other people and to yourself? And Konstantin Gutnichenko asks, are there any clubs that I can join? So, yes. Do foragers hang out together? How does one get invited to those gathering gatherings?

Alexis Nicole Nelson
Oh, absolutely. We have a whole little community. I love it. I love it so much. We have Facebook groups divided by regional and divided by country and divided by continent and just like global foraging groups, too, that really let us bond with one another past all of our borders.

So it's great. You get to know the people very closely who are near to you. I'm in like a Midwest foraging group. I'm in an Ohio foraging group. I'm in a central Ohio foraging group.

So we definitely have a community and we exchange recipes and we exchange ideas and we build each other up and we buy each other's books. It's really, it's really nice. I'm so thankful that the Internet makes it possible to digitally, you know, get to know all of these people and spend time with them, especially in the age of COVID because it's not like any of us were able to go out and actually see each other in person. Such an interesting thing about the last year for you is, you know, when so many people felt so isolated, they gained a new appreciation for being outside and then also had like a really cool new friend to show them, you know, which is so great. We have so many questions that use the word newbie.

Alie Ward
By the, by so many people, literally almost 50 folks asked this question. So I'm just going to shout out for this one the first time. Question askers, including Caitlin James, Alex Nelson, Curtis, Roderick, Dane Schuchman, Katie Kyle, and Bennett Gerber, wants to know what are some go to foraging tips? The mushy what are your favorite tools for different kinds of foraging? So just one huge question.

How do you start? My, the black Forager guide to getting started foraging is three fold. Number one is get a foraging guide that is as specific as you can find for your area. For some places, that's just going to be a regional foraging guide, like the book Midwest Foraging. For some places, like where some of my family lives in Massachusetts on Martha's Vineyard, there is literally a Martha's Vineyard guide to wild edibles that their conservation society puts together each year.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
So find a guide as hyper specific as you can find is number one. Number two is to join a regional foraging group on Reddit or on Facebook, wherever you find groups of people hanging out digitally, because one, it will introduce you to people who are like minded, but maybe have a bit more experience than you. And two, what a perfect way to see what is in season because, you know, 1015 times a day, other people are posting what they're seeing and they don't live too far away from you. So get a book, join a group, and then what's the last step? And then three, make friends with one of the folks in that group and go out with them, because you can't replicate seeing the plants in real time in all three dimensions.

For me, that's where the real learning comes and that's where the real memorization comes from. Just for me personally, I can see a plant or a mushroom in a book until the cows come home. And the way that it'll stick in my mind and the way that I will be able to, like, point from across a field and be like, look, it's yellow. Rocket is being able to see it in person for the first time and get a good gander at it. So hit the trails with someone who's been at it for a bit longer than you.

There is no replacement for it. Well, also, I guess you can't smell a book, can you? But smell must come into it, right? You can't. And so when people are like pheasant back mushrooms, they smell like cucumbers.

Well, yeah, there's no scratch and sniff that I know of, at least in the foraging books yet. I don't know. That could be a million dollar idea for somebody out there. Scratch and sniff, foraging book. I'd buy it.

Alie Ward
Okay. So I looked it up, and I found one title, the scratch and sniff book of weeds. But alas, on second glance, it just said weed, not weeds. So the scratch and sniff book of weed, the blurb on the front boasts this book is dope. Also, I looked up, when is a plant a weed?

And essentially a weed is just any plant that is unwanted in a human controlled setting. And so weed as a name for marijuana, perhaps as ironic as they come, because for the most part, it seems pretty wanted. PS is weed and reefer and trees and laughing grass, cabbage that smoochie woochie poochie. Is that even native to North America? Nope.

It originated in Central Asia before making its way to Africa and then the Caribbean and South America. And then after prohibition ended, the agency that became the DEA was like, quick, what should we ban next? And they turned their attention to this smokeable plant that humans have used for eons, that sticky, icky skunk weed. Which brings us back to smells. The devil's lettuce but that must be.

Good to know when you're out foraging, that you're using a lot of your senses at once, too. Yeah, and that's one thing I think. So many people get very worried about. Lookalikes, which you should. That little, like, layer of anxiety is something that keeps you safe.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
But I can't even fully communicate how you are truly using all of your senses for id ing. Yes, I made a video on how to tell the difference between Queen Anne's lace and poison hemlock when they are still wee babies, just we little rosettes, when honestly, the best way to tell the difference is that poison hemlock smells like rat pee and Queen Anne's lace doesn't. Poison hemlock does not smell like something you want to put in your face, and for good reason. If you don't like rat pee, if. You don't like rat peas, if you do like rat pee, I don't know what to tell you.

Alie Ward
But what if something smells like fungus genitals and you like it and want to put it in your mouth? Well, all mushrooms share that characteristic. Maybe not if you wanted to put it in your mouth, but they're all fungus genitals. And so many patrons, including Ned Lansing, Dory Brenna Anderson, Eden Sunshine Morell Hunters, Madeline Duke and Curtis Roderick, Rebecca Weinstettle, Hailey Everson, Rachel Stearns, Kate Bell, Madeleine Winter, new listener, Nicholas Maritime, archaeologist Chanel Zapp, Kristi Kazakhov, Sebastian Papanu, Anya Marion, RJ Deutsch, Katherine Jamison, Annie C. Zoe Hull.

All asked about this. In Thimblewim's words, I love foraging for garlic, grass, fiddleheads and dandelions. I never forage for mushrooms because I don't know enough and I'm way too addicted to not dying. And Rachel Casher wrote in all mushrooms are edible. Some mushrooms are only edible once.

Where do you even start learning proper identification? I have a lot of questions about mushrooms because, okay, set me straight here. I feel like mushrooms is like you level up to mushrooms. Is that correct? So I feel like you level up to mushrooms because I grew up being very plant specific in my study of what's growing around me.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
So I think it kind of depends on what you feel more comfortable learning. First, for me, I guess I've just. I've been learning about plants for long enough and interacting with them for long enough that I can go into a new space in a region that I'm somewhat familiar with and be like, I have a good idea of what I'm going to find here. Flora wise, do not ask me what I think I'm going to find fungi wise, because I will not have a good answer for you. Every time I find a mushroom.

It is a pleasant surprise. Yeah. Someone about your morales asked. Zoe Hole says, oh my goodness, I love Alexa so much. Yay.

Alie Ward
She just found her first morale. So I got to know what is the secret to this elusive cerebral delight? So unfortunately, the only secret that I know that seems to be worth its salt is the one that I did have in that video. And it is if you are in an area that is known for having growl mushrooms. And the ground temperature has been consistently between like 40 and 60 degrees and it has rained within the last week.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
Look for trees that are dead and have bark starting to peel off of them. The cool thing about morels is they begin their life in between the cells of those trees. And then when those trees die, that is when morels then kind of convert to breaking down that dead matter and put up those fruiting bodies. So you're. You're going to be finding them near dead trees, but not trees that have been dead for a very long time just because they would then be devoid of the nutrients that the morels need to grow and to fruit.

And honestly, I've like, had that knowledge up in my noggin for a while. And I still only found my first morel last week. So exciting. How did you cook it? I brought four homes and everyone was just.

Because I've only had them dried before, which are still, you know, delightful, but there's something about, like, not having to reconstitute them that everybody says is just miraculous. So I went super simple. I melted a little bit of a vegan butter, I added in a splash of white wine, and I added in a little bit of diced field garlic, some allium banali, just to like, get some aromatics going. And then I halved the morels and tossed them in the sauce, cooked them until the. The wine had cooked off and had caramelized them just a wee bit and then just ate them that way.

And allie, they were, they were so good. I cried a little. Oh my gosh, that's so exciting. Is this the season for it or is that. Are they a seasonal mushy?

So they are a seasonal mushy. Here on the eastern side of the United States, we are like right in the middle of morel season right now. In the midwest specifically, things are a little up in the air right now. We've had some very chaotic weather. It has been both 80 degrees and we have had an inch of snow all within the last seven days.

Alie Ward
Oh, wow. So we have no idea if that means good things for the rest of Morrell season or if it means bad things for the rest of Morrell season. Season. But on the west coast, where you also have things like burn morels, those are going to be dependent on wildfires, whether or not you're going to be able to find them. And morel season is much more like late winter.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
Morel mushrooms look kind of creepy, but at least they taste good. Kendra Sinclair wants to know if you write your songs ahead of time or if they are musical improv. Oh, my gosh. What a great question. It is a little bit of both.

If I'm just riffing in a video that is almost always just musical improv. I was in an improv group called Affirmative Distraction here in Columbus for a couple of years, and I'm a improv group here in the city, and I love, I love musical improv. It used to scare the crap out of me, and now it's one of my favorites. Fun little side hobbies. That's a really something that I really enjoy doing.

But things that involve instruments. Oh, absolutely. Written ahead of time. I am not one of those people who can just pick up an instrument and be like, and now here's a song fresh out of my brain hole. I mean, I can do that.

It just won't be good. Understood. Great question from Katherine Jamison wants to know, why are so many foraged plants so mucilaginous?

I think the answer is a lot of plants are mucilaginous and we just don't cultivate a lot of them. So then when it's time to go out and forage things, you just get constantly surprised by the plants and the fungi that do that. Do a slimy when you cook with. Them, do a slimy. Well, you know, you compared it to okra as a kind of a thickening agent, right?

Yeah. And that's exactly what I was going to mention. I was going to say for folks who grew up eating okra, that is not a crazy, surprising thing. But for people who didn't like giving them something made with Mallow for the first time might be a bit of a squicky experience if they're not prepared. Just a little slippery, just a little bit.

Just a little slippy. And from slime to something more serious, a lot of patrons had cultural questions about foraging, like Riley McInnes, Emily Richardson and Claudia Dana, and first time question Asker Vicki Preston, who wrote in to say so. I'm an indigenous person living in my rural homelands, and for us, foraging or gathering is still a common and necessary practice, much as it's always been. But Vicki wanted to know, alongside listeners Alexis Jarvis and Amani al Kidwa, how and why can it be empowering as a black, indigenous or person of color forager? My Instagram handle is black forager, and that was 100% on purpose, because, one, I didn't see a lot of people who looked like me in the space, and I still don't see a lot of people who look like me in the space.

I honestly think of it kind of like an act of restorative justice to be a person of color who is foraging, because historically, culturally, and legally, a lot of barriers were put in place to prohibit us, historically, from being able to do so. I talk about it a little bit in a video that I had made for black History Month. But in the south, immediately after the civil war, a lot of laws were put in place to purposefully curb recently freed black folks from being able to forage and trap to provide for themselves, essentially kind of holding them in economic bondage to the plantations. So they, you know, they weren't enslaved anymore, but now they pretty much have to be sharecroppers because there's not much else you can do. Because trespass went from being a civil offense to being a criminal offense, which suddenly makes it a way more expensive problem for you if you are on somebody else's land and they don't want you to be there.

But also, if you're recently freed, you don't have land of your own to be foraging on, to be growing things on, to be trapping on, to be hunting on. And both physically in some places, but mostly metaphorically, fences were put up around public property, and in a lot of spaces, it became illegal to forage and trap there, too. A lot of that also has some history. In the very beginnings of the national park movement in the late 18 hundreds, you know, the 1880s and the 1890s, when a lot of white men wanted to preserve the pristine conditions of the green spaces they saw around them, while completely ignoring the fact that the way that those green spaces became the way that they were were because of a lot of these symbiotic relationships between the people who were living off of them and the land itself. So when a lot of laws are put in place to purposefully disenfranchise people from being able to do something, it has usually a lot of generational and cultural spillover.

There's a pretty big cultural barrier to hop over, to be a person of color, even just existing in the outdoors, when a lot of us have grandparents, or even in my case, parents who grew up in a time where there was like a very real fear of being a black person, in the case of my family, by yourself out in the middle of the woods like that wasn't a situation that you would ever want to find yourself in for fear of like extreme acts of violence.

So for me to be a black woman foraging, yeah, it feels like, it feels like justice to me. It's an act that I feel like we should begin reclaiming. We have just as much a right to do it as anybody else. But because we have all of these historical and external factors working against us, there's just not a lot of us out here. Thankfully, I do see that beginning to change, and I hope to see it change even more rapidly as we move forward.

Alie Ward
Alexis notes that if your great grandparents aren't foraging, well, they're not going to teach your grandparents how to forage, and they aren't going to teach your parents who aren't going to teach you. And not to mention so, so much oral tradition and teaching has been lost over the years. And I think one of the things so powerful about Alexis's lessons are that she has been captivated by foraging since she was five and has been studying it for years and years. And part of her work feels like carrying on a certain kind of oral tradition of her own and telling stories and showing us exactly what to look for, how to prepare it in a manner that has been missing through generations of trauma. And her work is igniting a new interest in folks who have been kept from this knowledge and resources.

Gathered around the glow of our phones, folks listen intently to her lessons. I think it's so great that you're bringing so many people together who feel similarly. We actually, we have one question. Jessica Duncan says, first time question Asker and fellow black girl who loves plants here and is from the Pacific Northwest. I'm interested in getting into foraging for mushis.

However, I'm also concerned about trail erosion and the negative effects of trampling through forests. Do you have any tips for Jessica on how to ethically and sustainably forage? Yes. Well, since she said that she is specifically interested in mushroom collecting, I would say if you have like a little pocket knife and you go ahead and just cut off the fruiting bodies instead of, you know, maybe disrupting the mycelium that are doing their thing, a lot of foraging is honestly evaluating space by space where you are at any given time. If you are in a place that is having issues with erosion of soil, and you look around and you see signs of erosion of soil, you see a top layer with poor soil quality, the wind blows and you see a whole lot of the kind of nutritionally depleted topsoil blowing around.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
That's probably not an area that you want to be taking any biodiversity out of. You want to give it as much of a chance to thrive as it could possibly have. So a lot of it is just reading the space that you're in, visually reading up on a space that you're going to be in ahead of time. And that doesn't even just go for things like erosion. I know when I'm on the east coast, if I'm foraging seaweed, I'm checking the water quality.

Those are levels that are usually posted for commercial fishermen. But anybody who is out there, you know, fishing, clamming, in my case, dragging seaweed directly out of the ocean to put into their gullet. You also want to be knowing about the water temperature, algal blooms, any spills that have happened in the area. So a little bit of it is just doing the research that you can, if you are able, for a space that you hope to be foraging from. Are those the dead man's fingers?

Yes. Oh, my God, I love dead man's fingers so much. Healthy. They're so creepy. Dead man's finger is a healthy bouquet of them.

Alie Ward
Okay, so we're not talking about the mushroom called dead man's fingers, which truly are a ghastly, grayish, fingery looking sight on the forest floor. Rather, these dead man's fingers are also called green sea fingers, stag seaweed, green fleece, and oyster thief, also known as codium fragile, if you're feeling specific. Now, Alexis says that she tries to use the binomial nomenclature, or genus and species format because so many forageable foods have tons of local names. And she says that if a thing is important enough to have different names in a bunch of different places, it's because it's really tasty or it's really, really gross or lethal. Now, how do you make sure that you keep eating dead man's fingers without having dead man's fingers?

You know, Hope says, and maybe this is of some flim flam you could bust. Hope says, I'd been told that you can test for berries being poisonous by rubbing them on your hand and seeing if it tingles or numbs, and then if it doesn't, doing the same with your cheek, and if nothing there either, you might be able to eat it. Is that true at all? Is it flim flam? Is it reliable?

Alexis Nicole Nelson
For a lot of us, especially who grew up being very outdoorsy, that was kind of the way that we were told to deal with the situation. If we, like, found ourselves stranded in the middle of the woods, the way that I always heard it was, you know, you'd rub it on the inside of your ankle, you'd pretty much just travel to more sensitive pieces of skin and wait a few hours to see if it reacts. Because I am a cautious being and because not every hazardous plant behaves the same way or possesses the same toxins, I'm just going to go ahead and say that unless you are dying, probably not the best rule of thumb to go by. And even if you are dying, probably not the best rule of thumb to go by. Also, if you are looking for berries, I can say with confidence, if you are in North America, we don't have any poisonous compound berries.

So if it looks like a raspberry, you're good to go. Okay, so compound or aggregate berries include the dewberry, the BlackBerry, the raspberry. So that should help. Rebecca Rachel Sorter, Mandy Smith, Donnell O'Neill, and Megan Burnett Taraskawis. Oh, on that topic, this is a very, very good question.

Alie Ward
Emek Kiley is a first time question asker, and their greatest love is for serviceberries. Is a serviceberry like a raspberry? Oh, my God, serviceberries. I'm so glad someone brought serviceberries up because I always want to shoehorn them into the conversation, but I never know if people are going to know what I'm talking about. So serviceberries, which are the amalanchier genus, there are a couple different species that fall under it, but we call them all serviceberries or juneberries or saskatoon berries.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
In southern Ohio, sometimes they just call them sarvice or sarvice berries. They actually look a lot more like blueberries. They are crowned berries. So, you know, they have the little points sticking out of them, the little last signs of their flowers. They, they might.

They might be my favorite. I love pawpaws, just from, like, a purely ethnobotanical history standpoint, but surface berries might be my favorite thing to forage. They taste like apples and blueberries mixed together. Oh, man. Can you make a cobbler?

Alie Ward
Can you get enough to make, like, a cobbler out of them? Or is it like, if you get three of them, you've had the best day of your life? Oh, no. So last year, just from the soul tree closest to my house, I gathered enough berries while still leaving all the ones that I couldn't reach, which was most of them for the birds. I gathered enough to make, like, ten hand pies.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
Last year, for whatever reason, I gathered, like, one big jar of serviceberries and was like, you know what? I'm tired. And by the time I wasn't tired anymore, serviceberry season was over. So this year, I'm gonna stock up all of my energy and my strength, and we're gonna go ham on service berries. My neighborhood loves planting them as ornamentals, so they are everywhere.

Alie Ward
Oh, man, that's gotta be in, like, apartment listings. What is around you that you could eat? Yeah, I honestly think that people need to start listing it because if someone told me that a house that I was maybe gonna move into has a serviceberry tree out front, I'd be like, oh, I'm done. Sold. You know, you don't have a washer or a dryer, but you have a serviceberry tree.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
Who cares? I'll wash my clothes in the sink. That's fine. It's better for the environment anyway. Now, a certain film came up a few times, and Lena Zikas and Julia McDonald wanted to know how to avoid the same fate.

Alie Ward
Julia asked, please tell us how to not Chris McCandless ourselves. Does Alexis get this question a lot? Are there any movies about foraging or survivalism that are inspiring to you or that you fucking hate at all? Oh, my gosh. I mean, people do bring up into the wild all the time.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
Yeah, that's like everyone's literary experience with foraging. And I feel like for a lot of people, their literary experience with foraging is like people being in mortal peril. It's always either into the wild or it's that, like, frickin scene in the hunger games where she's like, that's Nightlock, PETA. It'll kill you. That's the way that everybody thinks about it.

I'm trying to think if I know of any movies in which their portrayal of foraging doesn't make me big, sad. Oh, no. Oh, no. None are coming to mind. Quick, someone write a heartfelt children's film with foraging in it.

You can consult me. I'll do it for free. Yes. First PBS show and then consulting also, please. Yes, please.

Alie Ward
Last questions. I always ask, what sucks the most about either foraging or having a million people watching your foraging? What is one thing that you would change about it? Oh, man. I don't think there's anything that I would change about foraging.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
Processing what you bring home is sometimes tough. I feel like that's. That's what I don't get as many questions about. But I feel like I need to warn people about is if you're getting into foraging, like 80% of the fun is going out and finding the thing, but you do have to bring it home and do things with it. Or like either cook it immediately or do something usually a little labor intensive to it so you can preserve it for cooking with it in the future.

I don't get to just bring the acorn some and crack them open and have a snack? Yeah, unfortunately. Oh God. Acorns especially. That's like a weeks long process every fall.

But that being said, I also find processing my finds to be very like meditative. It's like a great thing to do after a busy week. I'm a freak. I will process plants for 2 hours in complete silence in my kitchen and be just the happiest version of myself after. I bet.

Alie Ward
Especially after you've had each thing that you're processing has a narrative too, of when you found it, how you decided to pick that one over the one next to it. I mean, there's so much context for every single leaf, you know? Exactly. There's so much to consider. And I find that taking the time to really pause and to really think about how thankful I am for everything that I brought home for each one of those plants and for all of the people, places and books where I've gotten my knowledge about that plant from, it just.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
It fills my heart up, makes my heart feel all warm and fuzzy. And then at the end you get a snack. Who doesn't like that? So since I would change nothing about foraging, because foraging is amazing and. And wonderful, I will say being a person who a lot of people are watching on the Internet, nine times out of ten, super cool, very surreal experience.

But a lot of people talk to you or at least leave comments on your things as if you are like, not a real human person who then has to process what it is that they have said. And that stinks. Additionally, being a woman and a woman of color in the space comes with a lot of added pressure to be so incredibly perfect. And I mean, yes, this is a line of study, a line of work in which you want to be perfect and you want to be accurate because you care about all of the people who follow you and you want them to be safe and you want them to feel like they are prepared, knowledge wise, to go out and find something, or at least prepared to ask the right questions when they go and find more information about it. But being a person of color, I do find that I tend to incur skepticism a lot more than some of my delightful white peers.

Alie Ward
God, that sucks. Yeah, it sucks. Thank you. It sucks. Yeah.

Alexis recounted that online. Her knowledge gets doubted more than others, even though she's been studying this for years. And it's impossible to ignore that sexism and racism. But it's also partly why she knows the work and being in this space is important. And also, she's just entertaining as hell.

I think what's so compelling about it is it's outdoorsy and it's funny and it's personable and it's science and it's food and it's history. It's like a septuple whammy, just a. One stop shop for all different kinds of content. It really is. And I just love the way that it gets people to notice their surroundings more and not take for granted all of the things that are growing around us.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
Yeah, I think a lot of people have found solace in nature and a lot of folks who maybe wouldn't have otherwise. And for me, my. My mo has always been, when you see more value in a space, you take better care of it. And foraging is absolutely a way to see more value in the space around you. And that being said, I always end on your favorite thing about it.

Alie Ward
But I don't even. How do you even pick a favorite thing about it? I also feel like your microbiome must be so good. You must have such a healthy microbiome. I don't know.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
I eat normal things. Like right now, I do have a glass of a red bud and dandelion fermented beverage that I just bottled earlier this week. And I'm like, yay, good gut bacteria. We love to see an active fermenting drink. But I also ate two oreos for breakfast this morning, so journey's out on that one.

I guess I don't get sick a lot. What about your favorite, favorite thing about it? What just gives you butterflies? Getting to see either in real time or to have people, like, relay to me, like, a breakthrough that they have had or like, a special moment that they have now had in their surroundings. Because of my content, one of my best, best friends has never been super outdoorsy.

But she. She loves food, an amazing chef. And so her kind of foray into the outdoors has been through foraging and watching kind of like the light bulb go off for her. Now, when we go out on hikes together, and, you know, watching her being able to, like, recognize things so confidently on her own, I'm just like, yeah, that's why I do the thing I do. Those moments supersede the negatives by so many degrees and make me, make me feel like I'm doing something beneficial, I guess.

I hope so. Ask smart people simple questions, because chances are they do what they do because they really love what they do. And you never know. You might, I don't know, get hit by a bus. So you might as well ask questions.

Alie Ward
Also, follow Alexis. It turns out she's a fellow ologite and she'd listened to the show before I ever reached out, which was so cool to learn. And she islackforager on TikTok, on Twitter, and on instagram. So do follow her. We are ologies on Twitter and Instagram.

I'm alley Ward. Just one l on both. Thank you to all the patrons@patreon.com. Ologies, where you can join for just one tiny dollar a month and submit questions. Thank you Erin Talbert for adminning the ologies podcast Facebook page.

Thank you Emily White of the wardery who makes our transcripts. Thank you to Caleb Patton, who bleeps them. Bleeped episodes and transcripts are available for free at the link in the show notes. Ologiesmerch is available@ologiesmerch.com. Dot thank you Shannon Feltus and Bonnie Dutch of the comedy podcast.

You are that for managing that. Thank you to Susan Hale and Noelle Dilworth, who help with social media and scheduling. Thank you to Maine Squeeze and huge editing hero Jarrett Sleeper of Mindjam Media and longtime editor, newly unmustached Steven Ray Morris of the podcasts the purrrrcast. And see jurassic, right. Oh, my stash.

They both shaved this week. Steven and Jarrett people are vaxxed. Stashes are waxed. Wow. Springtime in America.

Oh, Nick Thorburn of the band Islands did the music. Okay, here's a new secret for 2024, and it's that I just returned from Mexico City a few days ago, where I went to talk to some axolotl experts. But on day two, I completely lost my voice. Like to a rasp. Like, I couldn't make sounds with my throat or mouth.

So we're going to be working on a workaround for that. Also. That's one of the reasons this is an encore episode this week, because I couldn't talk for a bit. We're also working on a real chunk of an episode for next week, and I wanted to keep doing some tweaks on it. I wanted it to be as good as possible.

And here's the thing, patrons, if you're a patron, I'm releasing next week's episode early. I've never done this before, probably on Thursday or Friday. So in a few days to get some ideas and some feedback on it before it comes out to the public. Next Tuesday. So if you're not already a patron and you want to know what next week's episode is and you want to give me some feedback on it, that'll be happening a little bit later this week.

And, yeah, my voice still hurts and it sucks, so I'll rest that right now. Okay? Go eat your backyard. Do it safely. All right.

Bye bye. Pachydermatology, cryptozoology, litology, nanotechnology, meteorology, known factology, nephrology, serology, selenology.

Alexis Nicole Nelson
That's nightlock, Peter. You'll be dead in a minute. Every day, our world gets a little more connected, but a little further apart. But then there are moments that remind us to be more human. Thank you for calling Amica insurance.

Hey, uh, I was just in an accident. Don't worry. We'll get you taken care of. At Amica, we understand that looking out for each other isn't new or groundbreaking. It's human.

Amika. Empathy is our best policy. Whether you're a morning person or a bedtime procrastinator, everyone deserves a mattress that works for their style. And you'll find the best mattress for you at Ashley. The new Tempur adapt collection at Ashley brings you one of a kind, body conforming technology, making every sleep tailored to be your best.

Alie Ward
The collection also features cool to the touch covers and motion absorption to help minimize sleep disruptions from partners, pets, or kids. Shop the all new Tempura Dap collection at Ashley in store or online@ashley.com. Dot Ashley for the love of home.

Foraging Ecology (EATING WILD PLANTS) Encore with @BlackForager, Alexis Nikole Nelson

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1: Introduction to Foraging Ecology

2: Alexis's Foraging Journey

3: Practical Foraging Tips

4: Cultural and Social Aspects

5: Q&A with Listeners

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