Samantha Keene – In a world increasingly governed by our desire to eat more nutritiously, live more healthfully, and consume more responsibly, deciding what’s for dinner can be a tricky endeavor indeed. Health food trends, like fashion trends, rise and fall at increasing speeds, so that yesterday’s humble leaf becomes today’s kingly kale, seemingly overnight.

We wait for the media to tell us what the next “it” ingredient shall be, and grudgingly accept that, whatever ‘it’ is, it will likely be costly. And we neglect to look to the ultimate source of nutritional wisdom — nature itself — in our search. More importantly, we associate edible food with grocery store shelves and plastic packaging. We have forgotten, collectively, that real food grows in the ground, requiring no nutritional labels or USDA approvals.

There are, of course, dangers associated with consuming straight from the earth. Some plants are toxic, others hallucinogenic (this particular trait being obviously desirable to some, though likely not when searching for one’s breakfast), and we must approach foraging, as with farming or any other life skill, armed with at least some basic knowledge — knowledge which mothers and fathers used to pass on to sons and daughters, that duty now long-forgotten.

Fortunately, many health food warriors and sustainability advocates are doing some of the work for us, searching their own fields and backyards for solutions to the many crises plaguing the food system today — GMOs, factory farming, and too-long supply chains, to name a few — and empowering us, in the process, to do the same. Kale and spinach are delightful, to be sure, but the human body, just like the human appetite, thrives best when offered a variety of foods, each working together to fill in the nutritional gaps of the other.

Continue reading →