Short Wave - How foraging reconnected Alexis Nikole Nelson with food and her culture

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

Our colleagues at the TED Radio Hour introduce us to forager and TikTok influencer Alexis Nikole Nelson. She shares how the great outdoors has offered her both an endless array of food options and an outlet to reconnect with her food and her culture. Listen to the full TED Radio Hour episode, The Food Connection: https://n.pr/3DeRmEUFollow TED Radio Hour and host Manoush Zomorodi on Twitter:- TED Radio Hour: https://twitter.com/TEDRadioHour- Manoush Zamorodi: https://twitter.com/manoushzSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. With an episode that I loved so much from the TED Radio Hour, I had to share it with you. It features Alexis Nicole Nelson, who has built a huge following on TikTok. I mean, her account has over 2.5 million followers, and her posts are all about foraging, as in finding and eating all kinds of plants sourced from the great outdoors. anyone who can build hype around garden weeds is a friend of Shorewave, right? Anyway, in this episode, you'll hear Ted host Manusse Zamoroti chatting with this famous

forager about how she started identifying plants and how the current practice both reminds her of previous generations and is helping her reclaim outdoor spaces for black and brown people for the future. Alexis is so infectious, her enthusiasm for foraging so real, I think you're going to like this conversation. All right, I'm going to turn it over to Manus and Alexis right after the break. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Minnuch Zamoroti. Oh my God, my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. And today, we are starting the show outside, foraging for food. I have been searching this whole city and I finally found them. Black locust trees and they're blooming. This is Alexis Nicole Nelson.

And I am a forager. Ghost flowers. Let's go make snacks. Which is a very fun way to say, I eat plants that do not belong to me. And I teach other people how to do the same thing. Coolest job title ever. Eatin mulberries in Central Park. Alexis is best known on TikTok, where she has over 2 million followers.

We're making dandelion root coffee. And is kind of a foraging legend. Dig up some dandelions. Your neighbors will probably thank you. For those who haven't seen Alexis's work, Her videos are all about her foraging adventures, finding cool plants, teaching people all about them, and then using them to cook amazingly delicious dishes. A lot of rosewater. There's a lot of singing little ditties.

There's a lot of quippy fun facts and little jokes. A lot of yelling about plants and fungi. You say yelling, but actually, it's a lot. It's more just like hyped up enthusiasm, right? Thank you. Those are much kinder words. So sweet. Happy foraging.

Don't die. So when you forage Alexis, like you walk into your backyard or into a forest. And what do you see that I guess most of us don't? It's like a supermarket basically for you. It's like Disney World, but plants and full of much cheap. for food. You walk in and you see this very vibrant ecosystem that, like, we are a part of. And there's something so fulfilling about it, right?

You're just like, I pulled this out of the ground. And now it's sustaining me. Yeah. Food is a way to connect with other people. Food is a way to express love. Food is a way to express creativity. I think I look into natural spaces and I just see wonder. Food. It's a basic need and one of life's greatest pleasures.

But for many, accessing nutritious and affordable food isn't always easy. We have nearly 50 million people that are living food insecure, which means they never know when or where their next meal is coming from. And on top of that, the ways we produce. and consume food are harming the planet. Human population has doubled in the last 50 years, and meat consumption has tripled. How can we produce enough good food for a growing global population? I think that was the best place to start was just opening up my eyes and starting to see the world around me for what it had to offer.

We need solutions to secure our food for the future and reconnect with the land that feeds us. So today on the show, the food. connection. Ideas from people who are taking lessons from the past and others who are experimenting with new technologies to change the way we eat. For Alexis Nicole Nelson, collecting ingredients out in nature has helped her reconnect to her food. She first discovered foraging when she was just five years old. I remember gardening with my mother at the house I grew up in, and just one day, stands out in my mind with me probably not helping at all. And her pointing out some grass in our yard that looked different than all of the other

grass, which until she pointed it out to me, I had never noticed. So my mom tells me to go and break some for her. I break it and suddenly it's the air is just like perfumed with garlic. And she's like, that is onion grass. You know how we sometimes cook with like green onions. You can cook with that too. And warning, if you tell a five-year-old that they will just start breaking plants in your yard and seeing if magical smells emanate from them.

And eating them. Yes. Okay. So your mom was very into plants, clearly. Did you get your love of food and gardening and the outdoors from your parents, do you think? Oh, absolutely. So on my dad's side of the family, his mom. is also of indigenous ancestry, Iroquois ancestry.

So he was just being exposed to food ways that some of his peers weren't necessarily while he was a kid, while he was a teenager. And my dad's excellent in the kitchen. And it was really this kind of coming together of the two things that I enjoyed doing with my parents most as a kid. And I'm very lucky to be a black kid

who grew up with two people. Black parents who were also very outdoorsy because not all of us get it. There really is kind of like a, there's been this cultural separation between a lot of black folks and the outdoors. But historically, there was no separation, right? And you have been studying just what happened. Can you explain? Yeah, absolutely.

100%. So back, especially in the South, while a lot of black folks, were still enslaved. There was a whole lot of kind of knowledge trading between black folks and indigenous folks in a lot of the southern states and a lot of like the Midwestern and northern states too. And for a lot of people who were enslaved,

the way that you beefed up like the meager meals or the scraps that you were given was often by supplementing with foraging, with trapping, with fishing, So that was knowledge that was a huge part of like early black culture here in the Americas. After they were emancipated, suddenly laws were getting put in place very rapidly about only being able to kind of reap the benefits of land that you owned. And if you are newly freed, odds are you do not own land. No.

So if you can't hunt and forage on public property and you don't yet have private property to your name, boom, that is a part of your life that you are not partaking in anymore. And it doesn't take a whole lot of generations passing for that knowledge to just kind of fall away completely. Huh. And is this true then that like when there was an opportunity to go foraging, it was kind of like, well, I don't have the handed down knowledge in any way only poor people would do that? Yeah. Then you, yeah, you have this really weird thing happened in the 20th century where everyone is like wanting to show off wealth. So then foraging kind of became taboo, even if you did have the knowledge. And that was regardless of race. Foraging very much got looked down upon because why we were. would you be, you know, heading down to the creek to gather pawpaws when you can go to the grocery store and get a banana? And in the 1950s and 1960s, being a black person out in nature, out in the woods, out in predominantly white spaces, was like a very scary thing to do. For the sake of your safety, that, like, that's not a space that you would want to necessarily be in. and it was kind of like a three-combo punch to us culturally moving away from getting to know our natural spaces.

And I am one of a myriad of people who is actively trying to combat that. And do you feel like it's working? Like, what kind of feedback do you get from your followers? Yeah. One of the best days I think I've ever had in my life, I was, out foraging and a girl who also happens to be black, probably a teenager, she runs up to me and she's like, you are that girl from TikTok. And I was like, oh my God, yes. And she was so excited. And so I got to like take her and show her what I was there harvesting. I got to

give her and her mom like a cut leaf toothwart leaves so they could taste like the the icy brassica-iness from it. And the way that her and, like, her friends and her mom's, like, face lit up, I went home and I cried. I cried for, like, a solid 20 minutes because that's, oh, my gosh, it's, like, almost overwhelming. And the thing that stuck with me was she was just like, you're doing this for the culture. Man, I'm starting to tear up just thinking about it now.

In some ways, through foraging, you are helping people reconnect with their own history and the ways that people used to eat off the land, like in a seasonal, sustainable way. Yeah. So many of us have such a fraught relationship with food. And a lot of that is due in part to, like, societal pressures. a lot of that is due to how processed food is. And I personally, I have had a historically very fraught relationship with food. I grew up very overweight, and so I was always being pressured to eat less, cook less. I, full disclosure, like, dealt with an eating disorder in my early and my mid-20s,

in which food was like very much the enemy in which I had to train myself to stop thinking about this subject that I had loved thinking about and dreaming about my entire childhood. And in a way, diving back into foraging was the way that I fell back in love with food. It was not on purpose. I was super poor after college, living in a house with five of my friends

and wanting to eat things other than ramen and canned vegetables. And so I was like, oh, well, you know, let me turn to some of that weird knowledge that I had just been amassing for no reason as a kid. And it just brought me this joy and this connection to place that I didn't have at that point in time. So much so that I went out and I sought out more information.

And I got more bold with my cooking and, you know, started being willing to put like flour and bread into my food again. And, you know, was willing to make sweet things again. I just, there's something soul-nourished. about caring about what you're nourishing your body with. That's Forger Alexis Nicole Nelson. You can find her on TikTok at Alexis Nicole and on Instagram and Twitter at Black Forager.

On the show today, The Food Connection. I'm Manus Shumeroody, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.