It's hard to know what to expect when meeting a "professional" forager. I find Robin Greenfield in a Thousand Oaks park. People normally come here with their children or to walk their dog. But Greenfield isn’t here for recreation—he’s here showing me how he’s spending a year foraging for his food. The first surprise is when he opens the trunk of his car and reveals a large white bucket, clearly labelled with its contents: "My Poop".
"I was not planning that, you're the first journalist to be exposed to my poop bucket," he laughed.
But why is it there, I wonder.
"So the reason why is that the idea of this year of foraging all my food and medicine is about deep connection with Earth," Greenfield said.
"It's about really critically thinking, questioning our societal norms and structures. And every single plant that I harvest, I have a relationship with and generally I consider them my friends. So I'm not willing to flush my friends down the toilet at the end of my relationship with them. I want them to return to the Earth and give them the highest level of respect. And sending them off to be a problem in a wastewater treatment plant is just not something I'm willing to do," he said, in a way that makes it sound perfectly logical to have a large bucket of poop in the back on your car.
Aside from the bucket, his car is packed full of mason jars of food that he’s found and stored, like a human squirrel, hiding it away to dig out later.
"This lower crate, that's all fish down there and there's a whole other crate of fish below that. And here's my bag of dehydrated chanterelles," he shared.
"A lot of people imagine me just eating like a goat from the side of the road. The only way to forage all of your food and medicine is when you find the abundance, you harvest it and you preserve it so you have it long term," he explained.
This isn’t going to be an ordinary interview. But then, Greenfield doesn’t want to live an ordinary life.
He had a corporate life with a successful career in marketing. But a few years ago, he said he became disappointed with the industrial food system. Instead of making small changes, he’s made drastic ones — like living a year without grocery stores, nothing packaged, nothing processed or shipped, not even multi-vitamins or spices.
"It's been 224 days without grocery stores or restaurants or even a farmer's market or growing food in a garden. Just the food that's growing freely and abundantly all around," he said.
A few steps into our walk and he heads over to some small yellow flowers, the ones that seem to grow likes weeds this time of year.
"Sometimes you'll literally see this along the highway, just mile after mile of yellow," he said of the wild mustard.
"And you can just nibble on these flowers. They're a little bit spicy. They're like mini broccolis. You can see the unopened buds there. So all of these are edible. And I would say wild mustard will probably make the largest supply of my vegetables while I'm in Southern California."
Foraging isn’t illegal but finding a location where it’s legal to forage is a little harder.
"As I'm professing that I'm foraging 100% of my food, I have to define what that is. If it's not being grown as food by humans, I'll forage it. If a human-being is intentionally growing it as food, then it's not foraging, that's eating from a garden," he said.
And while he is unlikely to persuade many to follow the extremes of living entirely off the land, maybe there are baby-steps toward a better connection with our food sources? I'm at least persuaded to try a taste of the wild mustard before we part ways. It's tasty but I will draw the line at driving around my own bucket.
Greenfield has written a book called Food Freedom and is leading a foraging walk in Santa Barbara on June 1 and an ecology talk in San Luis Obispo on June 2.
