Forage for food—without killing your guests

By Madeline Holcombe, CNN

(CNN) — There is a saying among people who forage in the wild for food: “There are old mushroom hunters, there are bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters.”

Edible mushrooms can look—and taste—a lot like lethal ones, a fact exploited by murderers from ancient times to 2023’s notorious triple killing by death cap mushroom in Australia. But plenty of people simply seeking to gather a delicious meal from nature have suffered the painful or deadly consequences of confusing a toxic variety of fungus or plant for one that is tasty and nutritious.

Foraging has grown in popularity since the pandemic as a way to connect more with nature, said Dr. Matthew Nelsen, senior research scientist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. That means more and more people need to learn about how to manage the risks of harvesting food from the wild.

Wild carrots and poison hemlock, for example, are often considered lookalikes. So are wild garlic and death camas, a plant that can cause vomiting, convulsions, coma and death.

Mushrooms can be particularly hard to tell apart, which is why they are the cause of so much concern (and so many hospital visits). Dr. Greg Mueller, chief scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden, said that a white mushroom growing in your yard could be the wild version of ones you would buy in the store, or a variety that can cause stomach problems, or the infamous death cap.

Yet Mueller and other proponents of foraging say that if you’re armed with the right knowledge and preparation, you can stay out of trouble while expanding your diet to take advantage of nature’s offerings.

The appeal of eating from the wild

Why bother foraging? Especially for mushrooms?

Well, Dr. Shan Yin, medical director of the drug and poison information center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, wouldn’t. With the risk of improperly identifying and suffering health consequences, he is only eating mushrooms he’s bought at a store.

But foragers say they find real benefits.

“One of the beauties of foraging is it’s really an amazing way for people to experience nature and have … a really tactile relationship with nature,” said Mueller.

A fresh mushroom also can have incredible flavor, Mueller added. It is like the difference between a tomato wrapped in cellophane from the grocery store in January and those picked straight from a garden in July, he said.

“They may be round and red, but there’s not much other things that are similar to them,” he said.

Robin Greenfield, a sustainable living activist in Wisconsin, is currently undergoing a year of foraging all his food –– no shopping, not even gardening, just gathering what he can find in the natural environment. “Food and medicine really is growing freely and abundantly all around us,” he said.

Greenfield recalled eating handfuls of berries in Olympic National Forest.

“I felt this deep level of interconnectedness, that I was just a part of this land, not separate from this land, and that I belong there,” he said.

How to get started (safely)

Making that kind of connection begins with having the proper information. “The number one rule of foraging is you only eat any plant if you’re if you’re 100% sure that you’ve identified it correctly, and you know how to eat it,” Greenfield said. “If you do that, you’re not going to die.”

Your foraging adventure can start in your own backyard — or that of a loved one who gives you permission, Greenfield said.

You can begin with easy to identify edible plants that don’t have a scary lookalike, like dandelion, beebalms and fruits, he added.

While there are books and online resources to help you identify more complex plants, there is room for error, Mueller said.

Instead, consider going out with an experienced forager who can teach you what to look for and how to properly harvest the plant, Greenfield said. He has a database of more than 500 foragers in the United States.

Most foraging illness and deaths come from a lack of knowledge, so take your time learning how to do it, Greenfield added.

“If you just learn one plant every month for a year, at the end of the year, that’s 12 plants,” he said. “If you can walk outside your door and harvest 12 different plants, that’s a lot.”

Where do you go?

Even once you have learned how to properly identify what is edible around you, there are still some concerns to keep in mind. Where to look for food, for example.

The problem isn’t availability. Greenfield has found food in Central Park in New York and Griffith Park in Los Angeles. One of his favorite plants, the serviceberry, is commonly used in North American landscaping.

There are also the legal issues you need to be thinking about, Nelsen said. “Who are the landowners or managers for that land you’re foraging on?” he said.

City parks, county nature preserves and national parks may all have their own restrictions when it comes to the right to forage or how much is acceptable, Nelsen said.

Where you forage can also be a safety consideration, he added. Gathering food near a busy roadway or a place with a history of pollution could impact the plant you are eating, he said.

Lastly, it is important to learn how to forage without having a negative impact on the ecosystem. Overharvesting or uprooting the whole plant when you don’t need to can cause problems, Nelsen said.

Looking for plants that are considered invasive can be a way to forage with a positive impact, Greenfield said. From a roadside in Connecticut, Greenfield harvested gallons of autumn olives, which he calls some of the most nutritious and delicious berries on earth—an Asian species that now spreads aggressively in the United States.

“You’re doing an ecosystem service with every bite,” he said.

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