I experience a ridiculous amount of joy when I encounter a loaded blackberry bush, an uncontrollable giddiness like a kid who just got a really good birthday present. The berries are plump and perfectly ripe, and there are more of them than I can possibly harvest and use. I pick bucketloads with my family, and we fill our biggest pots, cooking them down into thick, inky purple magic. This summer sunshine, the slightly salty seaside sweetness filling jars and filling my suitcase, can be cracked open for a taste of the west coast when I’m in the middle of a Montreal winter. When I close my eyes, I have blackberry vision from staring at them all day. The search image burned into my mind. With that suitcase full of jars and a carry-on bag of carefully vacuum-sealed salmon wrapped in newspaper, I feel like a rich man. Like a smuggler who should probably have a bodyguard.
These experiences of overwhelming abundance—the loaded tree, the cooler full of fish—are part of why I love harvesting wild food. If I were to calculate my ‘efficiency’ though, using concrete measures like time spent, calories burned, and the costs of gear and gas to get to ‘the spot’, I might not be breaking even. And I could care less. I don’t think the majority of foragers, fishermen, or hunters are bothered by that either. It can obviously be done (we only exist because our ancestors consistently “broke even” on calories); it’s just that someone working at Costco could spend their day’s pay on a lot more calories than I can harvest and process in a day.
So why is it worth it? Why are people so passionate about wild foods that they’ll spend their precious time and resources to eat them when it’s more convenient and often cheaper to just buy food at a store?
Because the glorious inefficiency of foraging is a good thing.
Here are some of my reasons why:
Process and not just product: I absolutely love the process of learning to identify, harvest, process, and eat wild foods. It’s beautiful, and I feel like I’m picking up treasure. I experience the world as a generous place full of gifts, instead of the scarcity mindset I feel when the price of raspberries goes up $2 and I don’t buy them.
Flavour (and nutrition): Wild food tastes really good, is more varied, and is usually more nutritious. A wild strawberry is about 2% the size of those huge California ones and tastes about 200 times more delicious. Nutritionally, wild foods almost universally have more vitamins, antioxidants, etc. than their cultivated counterparts. Sure, many wild greens are more bitter, but some people love that. Foraging is a great way to try new flavours and see what you like. Sometimes it’s so good you no longer really enjoy the farmed version—this has happened to me with salmon, blackberries, duck, and walnuts.
Relationship: Foraging builds relationships between you and the land, and because it takes so much time and care, you tend to share it with others in special moments. Wild food compels most people to feel grateful and connected to the species and places they harvest from. People rarely buy a huge load of groceries to then give half away, but with wild foods, this is common. From what I know of actual hunter-gatherer cultures, the standard practice is to store extra food in your neighbor’s belly and pass the gift along. This may be the most significant part of wild food gathering for many people today, when cheap calories are incredibly abundant but belonging is so scarce. Wild food weaves us back into the fabric of the world. It is soul food.
There are many more reasons why wild food is “worth it,” and here I’ve focused on contexts where hunger is more about meaning than calories. Wild food also has huge relevance to food security, traditional foodways, and survival. Calories do matter, especially when far from the grocery store. Northern and coastal communities in particular tend to eat a ton of wild food, and a moose, goose, salmon/seal etc. is not just a meaningful treat; it fills bellies and freezers. It’s absolutely possible to live entirely off wild foods, getting more than enough calories to thrive from the land and water. Societies would have to significantly realign priorities to rewild and restore the land for that to be sustainable on a large scale.
For now, harvesting wild food will continue to be a beautiful act, inefficient by the standards of a worldview that needs new standards yet highly effective at reconnecting us with the world as it is—a generous place full of gifts just waiting to be gathered and shared, as well as tended and protected with grateful reciprocity.
If you want more wild food and foraging in your life, you might enjoy our Forest Feast course. The inefficiency of foraging may be a good thing, but it can take a long time to learn. If you’re a total beginner and don’t know how to start, the course can probably bump you forward a couple years in your learning journey.
