foraging as an act of resistance

Some of the best herbs exist in the ditches alongside county roads.

Written by. Sunny, aka the witch

The forest doesn’t ask you to be productive. In fact, she invites you to slow down.

The prairie doesn’t care ask for you credentials. She teaches you to notice the things you could never learn in a classroom.

The whole plant gives medicine to us freely, but only if you’re willing to unlearn your fears and programming.

When I go out to forage I am not simply gathering ingredients for herbal tea blends to sell at the farmers market. I am participating in a long lineage of resistance. To forage responsibly is to remember a slower way of living that doesn’t depend on extraction, ownership, or relentless growth. Slow living depends on stewardship, deep listening, and remembering who you really are. All things that our current culture seems hell-bent on erasing from our collective consciousness

Foraging is a gentle and quiet rebellion. But it still ruffles the feathers of even the most well-intentioned people.

Let’s start with one facet of human history that illustrates the deeper impact of foraging.

a legacy of liberation

Many cultures around the world have used foraging as an act of survival, resistance, spiritual practice, and cultural preservation.

I recently attended a talk by environmental educator and lovely forager, Alexis Nikole Nelson aka Black Forager, and she explained exactly how foraging was a powerful tool for her enslaved ancestors seeking liberation in the American South.

At first, slave owners permitted enslaved people to forage on the plantation as a means of supplementing their meager rations.

But what these slave owners failed to recognize, at first, was that the woods and the weeds offered not just food to the oppressed, but it also offered them a much greater sense of autonomy. And that autonomy broke the imposed dependence on the plantation — mentally, physically, and spiritually.

Enslaved people foraged greens, fruits, berries, and roots which also led them to explore to a new ways of cooking. And by practicing a radical form of creativity, the enslaved people began to locate and remember their own inherent power, too.

Creativity and self-trust are the skills that oppressors *do not* want their subordinates to remember nor possess. Because self-trust is what leads to self-empowerment. And self-empowered individuals (rightly) pose a serious threat to the powers that be.

So in realizing the power that foraging had to upset the status quo, slave and land owners eventually started to prohibit the sacred practice. But by that point, much of the knowledge had been shared, preserved, and passed on through generations. Foraging played a role in not only leaving the slave life behind, but for many, it also played a role in staying out of its web and never returning.

By engaging in foraging Alexis is honoring and remembering her ancestors’ resistance to a violent system, and she’s doing so in our contemporary and disconnected world. She explained how even today’s trespassing laws are actually rooted in white supremacy echoing back to our shameful slave history. And everytime she goes out to forage, she feels like she’s doing it for her predecessors.

Foraging remains a radical act today, and it’s a way to subtly empower yourself in the face of corrupt and damaging systems that aim to keep you dependent, disoriented, and obedient.

wildness > domestication

The number one concern I receive from people is “Why do you keep eating weird mushrooms from the woods? You could die!”

Modern life tells us that safety lies in systems like grocery stores and pre-packaged meals. But domestication — i.e. the belief that products purchased at the grocery store are 100% safe to consume and the mushrooms from the forest are not — always comes with a cost.

Foraging is a refusal of convenience. It’s a way to subvert reliance on abusive systems interested in profit over people. And you get really good, cosmic, and delicious meals and medicine to sustain your body and spirit.

Learning how to identify plants (which is actually accessible these days with plant identification mobile apps and the ID books aplenty) reminds me that I am not separate from nature. That real food does not come from a factory. That healing doesn’t require a license or a $700 medical bill.

When I kneel to gather nettles or mica cap mushrooms, I am reminded that my body knows how to listen and direct my own healing. My ancestors, some of whom lived as serfs in Poland on oppressive estates, knew how to listen to the land.

I want my descendants and friends to remember, too.

This is not the woo woo. This is your birth right.

the slow work of passing it on

Through our apothecary, we aim to preserve and share this sacred knowledge with people in our community — specifically those who live with us on Kickapoo lands (aka central Illinois).

We practice foraging not in the name of ownership, but stewardship for our planet and for this land. Plants and humans have long evolved alongside one another. To me, ethical foraging means taking only what’s needed (no more than half), replacing the plants with more of its wild seeds, cleaning up garbage that plagues the area, offering water when necessary, and reducing harm toward all of our ecosystems.

We offer herbal teas at the farmers market not to tell people how to live, but to show them what’s possible. Our teas are an introduction to the power of the plants that grow in one’s own yard or apartment complex parking lot. They grow in the cracks in the sidewalk, in the alley behind the bar, and along the creek beds of the park.

Foraging reconnects us to land without the need to control anything. It’s an evolving relationship rooted in reciprocity, not profit. It’s a conversation, not a conquest.

This matters because we live in a time where even the herbal world has become industrialized and co-opted by wellness marketing. But wild plants don’t play by those rules. And foragers aren’t seeking to exploit. The wild plants grow where exactly where they are needed. The weeds (which annoy so many Americans) defy borders.

When we harvest with care and give thanks, we participate in a story much older than capitalism.

resistance can be soft

Foraging teaches me that resistance doesn’t just have to come from anger (though anger is definitely helpful in activism).

Resistance can be tender.

Resistance can also be found in the seemingly-silly act of carrying a used wicker basket through a red clover ditch. It can sound like a bullfrog’s croak as one kneels to collect raspberry leaves. It can feel like the sting of the nettles I collect with with my bare hands.

Each time we step off the established trail, each wild leaf, root, and berry we collect becomes a gesture of refusal of oppressive programming and a promise for our future.

We never have to be tamed.

Red clover, red clover, send Sunny right over.