If you haven’t made Alexis Nikole Nelson’s acquaintance, you are in for a real treat.
Literally.
It might not be the kind of treat you’re expecting, though. It could be bread made out of acorns, fermented pine needle soda or cattail fritters. Sound a little crazy? That’s part of the fun.
Nelson is the force of nature behind the Black Forager accounts on Instagram and YouTube. Dressed like a woodland fairy in her Stevie Nicks phase — long skirts, poofy sleeves, glitter, butterflies in her hair — she sings songs, sprinkles in outtakes and talks to squirrels, all in the service of teaching you about her profession and favorite pastime, foraging.
She calls one of her most beloved series “America’s favorite outdoor game show: Poison or Snack.” Gathering samples of two or three common plants that are lookalikes to the casual eye, she points out the botanical details that distinguish a delightful nibble from a serious problem.
And yes, there is a jingle.
As hilarious as she is, she also knows her stuff. She is the botany host for John and Hank Green’s popular educational series, “Crash Course,” and has a wealth of deep scientific knowledge about nutritional and medicinal compounds in the plants growing all around us.
In this tour of a single urban vacant lot, she points out remedies for sore throat, pain relievers, edible roots, egg substitutes, seeds that can be ground into flour, and the first thing her mother showed her to forage at age five: onion grass. No matter where you are in the country, you’ve probably got at least a couple of these growing right around the corner, or even in your own backyard.
She’s now adding author to her list of hats, with a cookbook named for one of her catchphrases: “Happy Snacking, Don’t Die!”
The book is “part foraging guide, part plant-based cookbook” and includes recipes using foraged ingredients, like color-changing Pine Shortbread Cookies, Rosewater Baklava and Juneberry Hand Pies. Widely available foods like mushrooms and acorns are heavily represented.
As a dietitian, I most appreciate Nelson’s ability to model curiosity and joy about food, without falling into the traps of restriction and fear that do so much damage. She doesn’t just replace harmful food rules with better food rules; she’s using a different paradigm altogether, one of connection and community. I caught up with her to talk about that, and about what she wishes we all knew about foraging.
It turned out that her wisdom didn’t come to her easily.
“I was in the throes of an eating disorder when I started that Instagram,” she told me, recalling her former focus on things like lightly dressed salads and salted ramps instead of potato chips, more with the intent to interact with other foragers than to start an educational empire. “It’s interesting watching the progression of what my food on the page looked like from 2018 to now.”
As she incorporated foraging into her daily life more and more, it naturally changed her relationship with food.
You can’t really think of a food that you’re gathering and then preparing with your own two hands as inherently bad. It just is.
Alexis Nikole nelson, the black forager
“As I started taking more and more responsibility for the food that was ending up on my plate,” she says, “I started deconstructing this idea of good food versus bad food without even really realizing it. When you’re responsible for so much of your food, it’s so much harder for all of the accidental and purposeful moralizing of food and body to reach you.
“You can’t really think of a food that you’re gathering and then preparing with your own two hands as inherently bad. It just is.”
We can extend that understanding to our physical selves as well, she explains.
“This body still carries me up and down mountains. This body still takes me hiking out into the woods for mushrooms and greens multiple times a week, and does everything that I require of it — dances, climbs, runs, etc,” she says. “And so if my body is still doing all of those things, then why am I feeling bad about it?
“Just like food just is, our bodies just are.”
From her formerly restrictive mindset, she moved to wanting to make things with what she could forage, then loosened into an overall more balanced relationship with her meals, foraged or not.
“When you’re the person gathering, you do want to try a little bit of what you just spent four hours in the woods gathering,” says Nelson.
Eventually, she made a pasta that’s featured in the book — Scissor-Cut Garlic Mustard Noodles — and thought to herself, “You know what? Store-bought is also fine. Thank you, Ina Garten!”
It’s a good way to help encourage more adventurous eating, too, and Nelson’s advice to parents is to let kids in on foraging and cooking — with proper supervision, of course.
“When I would pick dandelion flowers in our front yard and our neighbors’ kids would pick them with me, then they’re way more excited about dandelion flower fritters than they necessarily would have been,” says Nelson. “Let them participate!”
She feels lucky to have had a family that encouraged her to participate herself, and although a lot of her training comes from books and an environmental science degree, her parents’ encouragement in her childhood years was formative.
“Both of my parents were in scouting, which I understand, as a Black woman in America with parents who were born in the ’50s, is very, very rare,” she says, remembering gardening and foraging with her mother, and learning the constellations through a telescope with her father. “I feel very privileged in that way, from both sides.”
She doesn’t expect everyone to easily follow suit, though.
I just hope (my content) teaches people to slow down and notice more things in their surroundings.
“I would love it if everyone who watched my content did go out and try foraging. Even just one thing, finding one wild plant that you can align yourself with the cycles of every year … but I know that not everyone is going to immediately thrift a wicker basket and go traipsing through the woods,” she laughs. “I just hope it teaches people to slow down and notice more things in their surroundings.”
If you do want to add foraged foods to your repertoire, she wants to remind you of the very important second part of her cookbook title: Don’t die! Not all plants are friendly, and it’s important to have reliable information before you transfer something from the meadow to your mouth.
“Starting with a book as specific to your region as possible is a plus,” Nelson explains, but she also cautions that, these days, some books you might come across are less expert and more AI. Checking a purported author’s bona fides is critical. “Us foragers and field botanists, we want to tell you everything, so if you’re having trouble finding out information, there’s not a real person there.”
She also encourages finding local groups for hands-on learning, like mycology clubs that go mushroom-picking to help newbies tell a morel from a menace.
Still, Nelson doesn’t think actually foraging is the only way to rekindle joy in everyday life.
“Something I think that we are missing out on in a very deep-set human level in our ancient little brains, is noticing the cycles of nature around us,” she says. “Even if we live in cities, just noticing what weeds are coming up in the sidewalk cracks, how the trees in your neighborhood are behaving during different times of the year, makes so much of a difference in this very screen-driven hustle and bustle world.
“Those touch points, those reminders that we were a part of something bigger than ourselves, I think are really important for humans in general. We have to exist in community, and I think that realizing that your community extends not just to the humans who live around you, but to all of the living things that live around you, makes you feel happier where you live. It makes you feel more connected to where you live; it makes you want to take better care of where you live.”
Nelson left me with a favorite quote of hers to ponder, from Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of “Braiding Sweetgrass” and “The Serviceberry”: “How are you going to fall in love with the world if you don’t pick berries?”
That’s a sentiment so good, I kind of wish I could eat it.