Forager and TikTok influencer Alexis Nikole Nelson 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.

Transcript

MANOUSH ZOMORODI, HOST:

It's the TED RADIO HOUR from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi.

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ALEXIS NIKOLE NELSON: Oh, my God, oh my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God.

ZOMORODI: And today, we are starting the show outside, foraging for food.

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NELSON: I have been searching this whole city, and I finally found them - black locust trees. And they're blooming.

ZOMORODI: This is Alexis Nikole Nelson.

NELSON: And I am a forager...

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NELSON: (Singing) Ghost flowers. Let's go make snacks.

...Which is a very fun way to say I eat plants that do not belong to me.

ZOMORODI: (Laughter).

NELSON: And I teach other people how to do the same thing.

ZOMORODI: Coolest job title ever.

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NELSON: (Singing) Eating mulberries in Central Park.

ZOMORODI: Alexis is best known on TikTok, where she has over 2 million followers...

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NELSON: We're making dandelion root coffee.

ZOMORODI: ...And is kind of a foraging legend.

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NELSON: Dig up some dandelions. Your neighbors will probably thank you.

ZOMORODI: 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.

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NELSON: The kitchen smells so good.

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NELSON: That liquid in there? Rosewater.

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NELSON: (Singing) Filthy forager.

There's a lot of singing little ditties.

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NELSON: (Singing) I love you, sweet land coral.

There's a lot of quippy fun facts and little jokes.

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NELSON: This tree is very good.

A lot of yelling about plants and fungi.

ZOMORODI: You say yelling, but actually it's more just, like, hyped-up enthusiasm, right?

NELSON: Thank you. Those are much kinder words.

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NELSON: So sweet. Happy foraging. Don't die.

ZOMORODI: 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.

NELSON: It's like Disney World, but plants and full of much cheaper 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.

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ZOMORODI: 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.

JASMINE CROWE: 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.

ZOMORODI: And on top of that, the ways we produce and consume food are harming the planet.

AMANDA LITTLE: Human population has doubled in the last 50 years, and meat consumption has tripled.

ZOMORODI: How can we produce enough good food for a growing global population?

SEAN SHERMAN: 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.

ZOMORODI: 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 Nikole Nelson, collecting ingredients out in nature has helped her reconnect to her food. She first discovered foraging when she was just 5 years old.

NELSON: 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 5-year-old that, they will just start breaking pants in your yard and seeing if magical smells emanate from them.

ZOMORODI: And eating them. Yes. OK, 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?

NELSON: 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 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.

ZOMORODI: But historically, there was no separation, right? And you have been studying just what happened. Can you explain?

NELSON: 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.

ZOMORODI: No.

NELSON: 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.

ZOMORODI: 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, and anyway, only poor people would do that?

NELSON: Yeah. Then, yeah, you have this really weird thing happen 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 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.

ZOMORODI: And do you feel like it's working? Like, what kind of feedback do you get from your followers?

NELSON: 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, like, give her and her mom, like, a cut leaf to four leaves so they could taste, like, the spicy brassica-iness (ph) 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...

ZOMORODI: Aww (ph).

NELSON: ...Because that's...

ZOMORODI: Aww.

NELSON: 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.

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ZOMORODI: In some ways, through forging, 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.

NELSON: 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 and which I had to like 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.

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NELSON: Meet the serviceberry, also known as the juneberry, also known as the...

It was not on purpose. I was super-poor after college (laughter), 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, like, weird knowledge that I had just been amassing for no reason as a kid.

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NELSON: It's crown tipped coral fungus, clavicorona pyxidata.

And it just brought me this joy...

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NELSON: Summer mushroom season is starting.

...And this, like, 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-nourishing about caring about what you're nourishing your body with.

ZOMORODI: That's forager Alexis Nikole Nelson. You can find her on TikTok at @alexisnikole and on Instagram and Twitter at @blackforager. On the show today, The Food Connection. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.