Alexis Nikole Nelson | Happy Snacking, Don't Die! | Talks at Google

I'm so excited to welcome our guest, Alexis Nicole Nelson, here today. Now, I first came across Alexis's content on Instagram, and wow, her content's fantastic. If you've probably seen her on Instagram as well, her moniker is Black Forager. Which is both attention-grabbing, steals your attention, and it's just a plain lovely handle. I love Black Forager. On those various platforms, she captivates, she entertains the masses, all while educating us on the indigenous roots of foraging. And when it comes to mushrooms, which ones are pleasant snacks and which ones are not for eating. And now she's got A cookbook, so we can all level up our foraging and cooking skills. So it's an absolute pleasure to welcome Alexis here to Talks at Google.

Thank you so much. Oh my gosh. Yeah, bring it in. Thank you so much. Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for coming. Oh my goodness.

That's amazing. Welcome.

Can I just take you everywhere to introduce me before I walk into rooms?

If you do, I'll get better at it.

Oh my God. Also, I did not know that your last name was Chestnut. What a perfect name for the chat that we are having today.

That's right. That's right.

Have you ever foraged a chestnut?

Not yet.

Okay. There's always time.

That's right. But when I'm in season, right?

Yeah. Well, actually, we are in the season.

Oh, that's fantastic.

Ba-ba-ba, plot twist.

Today I learned. I think I'll be doing a lot of learning today. But just to hit us up with some lightweight questions, we'll play a little This or That. Not going to be Poison or Snack.

Sweet.

If you've seen her Instagram, Poison or Snack, fun game. Currently only 1 of 2 right now for correct. But we're going to do This or That. Give us some preferences.

Ooh.

All right?

No pressure. Well,

first one's light. Coffee or tea?

You said this one was light. It depends on the day. Like, right now I'm running on 5 hours of sleep. And I've been in a couple different time zones in the past week. It's definitely a coffee day. That being said, 9 times out of 10, I am a tea girly. I unfortunately fell in love with a very bougie form of green tea visiting a friend in Japan. If anyone can teach me how to find a cheap savory green tea, please talk to me after this. For my bank account, we gotta figure this out. Gotta figure this out. And also, one of the small silver linings of the large rain cloud that is climate change is that the one caffeinated native plant to North America, yaupon holly, is starting to do better and better in my central Ohio yard. I have moved 3 growing zones since my childhood, and I have not moved very far. So, you know, we take our wins where we can get them.

That's right. That's right. Well, speaking of wins, how about musicals or movies?

Musicals. I'm sorry. And movies— the theater, so dark, so cold. When I'm cold and dark, I want to go to bed, especially when I'm filled with like slushy And candy? That says nap time to Alexis. You're not going to nap during a musical. You might cringe a couple of times, but you're certainly not going to be falling asleep.

Do you have any go-to musicals?

Oh my gosh. I love Spring Awakening, who's— I know. And shout out to the one person who knew to be sad about that, because Duncan Schick just passed away last week. And that musical, it's so fun. It's so crazy. I definitely should not have seen it for the first time when I was 13. I don't think my mom knew what that show was about.

Good to know.

Yeah. Yeah. If you're ever looking for a crazy time in the theater, Spring Awakening, 10 out of 10, would recommend.

I think I'll stick with my Moulin Rouge for now.

That's fair. That's fair. That is a safe bet right in the middle.

Cool. Oh, how about superpowers? Flight or teleportation?

Flight. I wanna be a bird. They just look like they're having such a good time up there. Let me in on that.

I love that.

I just, you know, riding all the little wind gusts, fall migration, just seems like it would be a fun time. And if you can fly fast enough, I don't think you need transportation powers.

Well, sometimes it's about the journey, right?

Exactly, exactly. That's how foraging is too. Sometimes it's about the journey.

Well, let's talk about foraging then. Yeah, let's do it. You're the Black Forager. Amazing. Can you tell us a little bit about your story for folks who might not be as familiar with your content? What was your journey that led you to becoming the Black Forager?

Oh my gosh, it really started when I was a lot younger. My mom is an avid gardener, has always had these beautiful, meticulous gardens my whole life. So when I wanted to spend time with her, when she wasn't kicking butt and taking names in Procter& Gamble boardrooms, I would have to be outside. And so I just started learning all of these plants kind of at my mother's hip, including a lot of wild edible plants, which to a 5-year-old— telling a 5-year-old that there's something delicious growing in the yard by accident is life-changing. I literally was like, this— why isn't this on the news? Call them now. I don't think people understand how cool the world is. And funny enough, I still feel that way. And I am occasionally on the news because of it. Wow. Yeah, and so I just kept kind of accumulating plant knowledge during the course of my childhood. I read all of the plant books that my mom had in the house, then all the plant books at my local library, then all the plant books at my high school. When I got to college, I kept studying edible native plants just on my downtime. And then when I graduated from college, like many college graduates— maybe not relatable for everyone in this room, but for college graduates who don't get degrees for good jobs— You usually spend a couple years broke right when you emerge into the real world. And I learned very fast that 69-cent ramen alone does not a good meal make. And what a perfect time to start actually applying all of the foraging knowledge that I had been aggregating during the course of my childhood and my adolescence. And just for me, I started documenting those recipes on my Instagram. My mother and my sister were like, Listen, we follow your Instagram to know that you're alive. Can you put all of this somewhere else? So I was talking to a friend of mine who, funny enough, is now also like a pretty popular and prolific content creator. If any of you follow Schoolhouse Homestead, those crazy kids in Indiana, yeah, who turned a spooky, spooky 120-year-old schoolhouse into the coolest house ever. Can vouch, have been. We were walking and talking one day, and I was trying to decide what to name my new foraging Instagram. And she said, well, what do you think is missing in the space? And I laughed and said, Black people. Like, I go through all of these other Instagrams of foragers, and I am not seeing anybody that looks like me, which is crazy because I literally learned how to forage from a Black woman. And so I called it Black People Foraging. I called my page Black Forager. I wanted people to know regardless of whether they could see my hands in a food picture or anything, that they knew that that content and that knowledge was coming from someone Black, and that we also had a seat at the wild food table just like everyone else. 'Cause if you go far back enough in anybody's ancestry, you're gonna find a forager. That's just the history of the human race. Yeah. So I wanted to remind people That everyone in the foraging world is not Bear Grylls. Which also, that can't be his real name, right? Right? His government name cannot be Bear Grylls with a Y. That's crazy. Can you imagine him going to the DMV?

Excuse me, Bear?

Bear? Yeah, number 1, 2, 3, Bear. Mr. Grills, absolutely insane. I just wanted to remind people that foragers look all sorts of different ways, and most of us aren't crazy preppers and survivalists. We're just people who enjoy food and the cultural history of the wild foods that we get to partake in. Yeah. And

you're doing a great job spreading that content. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And foraging has such a rich history. It really does. You were saying everyone's ancestors has foraging in their history. And yet, you know, we have more grocery stores than we have foraging guides, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, here in the United States especially, it's funny because the founding of our country, one of the big goals and ideals for a lot of the founding fathers was actually to have more common space for the everyman to get to use, whether that's for grazing their livestock or gathering free food, because in England, a lot of the land was owned by the monarchy, and thus was not available for usage by people who were not landowners. We lost the plot pretty badly, I would say. Because we had about a century of foraging pretty openly throughout what was then, you know, the states of the United States. But in the South, foraging kind of took on a different meaning and connotation, especially for people who were enslaved. It became a necessity to learn, and they often learned from their indigenous neighbors because the food you were being given on plantations was often rotten or just meager, something you couldn't live off of. So you had to learn what was in season, how to prepare it, how to identify it. But when slaves were emancipated, plantation owners were suddenly faced with a problem of their own creation, which was, we taught this entire population how to take care of themselves because we didn't take care of them. Now, who's gonna come and work on this plantation because I don't wanna do it? And they don't have to. Because they know how to be self-sufficient. Mm-hmm. So you will see documented in a ton of Southern cities immediately after the Civil War, them having these crazy debates about how to solve this problem. And the solution that they landed on was prohibiting people who didn't own a piece of land from doing any type of recreational activity on it. So suddenly, if you weren't a landowner, you could not fish, hunt, trap, forage on any— on someone's private property, or else you could be jailed. Mm-hmm. And so suddenly, you have to be asking yourself this question as a Black person, is it worth it? Because I really can't help support my family from behind jail bars. And just like that, immediately, not only do Black folks in the South stop foraging, but so do Indigenous folks and poor white people who were not wealthy enough to own land of their own. And those criminal trespass laws kind of spread in a concentric circle throughout the rest of the United States, even up here to the northern states. And when you add into that the advent of sundown towns, so suddenly, even if a piece of land out in the country was public, if you were a person of color, you didn't want to be out there, because you didn't know if you'd be safe or not. Mm-hmm. And in the 20th century, you start wanting to keep up with the Joneses. You don't want to be doing an activity that could come across as poor to your neighbors. And so even some of the people who were still foraging coming into the 20th century stopped because they thought that it would make their neighbors in the newly rising American suburbs judgmental of them. Hmm. You saw it sneak back in for a second during World War II. George Washington Carver's last piece of writing was a pamphlet that the USDA commissioned from him to give to housewives to say, oh, we know y'all are just getting your victory garden started. We know gardening takes a long time. We're the USDA. Here are a bunch of wild foods when they're in season and recipes using them that Carver had aggregated during the course of his life as an ethnobotanist. And so for a little bit, people were foraging again. But then the war ended. Everyone came back, moved to the suburbs, and It's not cute in your picket fence-lined house with your 2.5 kids to be digging in the muck for cattail hearts. So it just kind of became part of counterculture ever since. And I'm hoping not necessarily to turn everybody into someone who forages as much as me, but to let people be a little more connected to our food systems than they are now. Yeah.

Yeah, the connection. I love that. Yeah. Right now we live in a world where you can press a couple buttons.

And then food, hot food shows up on your doorstep 20 minutes later. Right. Which, listen, I did that when I got here last night. No hate, no shade. We all love a Grubhub, a DoorDash, an Uber Eats in a trying time. But because we're so removed from our food systems and because so much of our food comes from far away, We forget how much time, energy, effort, literal blood, sweat, and tears goes into something as simple as a fruit salad at breakfast. And I think getting to participate more in the food ending up on your plate makes you think more deeply about the choices that you're making with your other foods too.

Yeah, that makes sense. It gives us a more connection to the earth.

Exactly.

I love that. Yeah. Yeah. So thank you for what you're doing.

Oh, sure.

And what you're helping us do now with your new cookbook. Look at this. This is amazing. I know.

I can't believe it's real, guys. That was, that was a Google Doc on my computer for so long, and now it's a whole book. Yeah, it's crazy.

Yeah, and let's start with the title because we should be talking about that first, right? Happy Snacking.

Yes.

Don't Die.

Also yes. You can't snack happy if you're dead.

That's right.

It's that easy.

Well, can you tell us a little bit about how you came up with that catchphrase? Because that's in your social media content, it's the title of your cookbook. Tell us a little bit.

A couple of years ago— well, wow, I guess now about 5 or 6 years ago, I was out hiking with my now fiancé. And I was showing him the difference between Queen Anne's lace— beautiful, delightful, edible wild carrot— and poison hemlock— beautiful, not edible, not a wild carrot, killed Socrates. They both have very different backstories. And he was like, oh, you should turn this into a video, because I'm sure I'm not the only person who needs that breakdown. So I filmed it, and then at the end, just as like a funny quip, I was like, oh, well, happy snacking. Oh, don't die. And we both paused for a second after I quit recording. And he is an attorney. And so he was like, I like that you told people to not die. I would go as far as to say, I love that you told people explicitly, clearly, Do not die. He was like, as an attorney, that checks a lot of boxes for me. And I love to remind people that while foraging is so much fun, and, you know, there are plants so easy that literally kids go out and forage them, you do still have to be careful. You can't be completely like footloose and fancy-free putting whatever you want to into your mouth hole. You gotta have a little bit of discernment. We were just in the green room talking about how there is literal news breaking in the foraging world right now, because at a farmer's market in British Columbia, someone was selling chanterelles that were not chanterelles. They were a poisonous lookalike. Poisonous. Yeah. And that's the don't die in happy snacking. Don't die, because what if someone who didn't recognize them in their raw form went and bought them. You know, you really do have to be willing to pause for a moment and think as a forager. And I know that with our hustle and bustle lives led by our pocket chaos rectangles, we are encouraged to not stop and think. Like ever now. And I think that's bad for our brains. And I think foraging, or even just going out and learning the names of the different plants and fungi around you, even if you have no intention of eating them, is a really great way to counteract some of the— you know, sometimes I will have been on my phone so long and been looking at screens for so long that I'm just like, I don't feel right upstairs. I'm not exactly sure what's going on, but I'm gonna go walk around some plants about it. Just to recenter yourself, just to kind of recalibrate your nervous system, and then we can go back to our chaos rectangles, because a girl's still gotta work in this town.

Yeah, but I love that, that kind of that act of noticing, right, that you're encouraging us to do. I feel like one of the things I love in this book is Just the vivid pictures of the various foliage and fauna.

Nature accoutrements.

Yes, there we go. That are so wonderfully illustrated here. Like, I think I know what magnolias look like, but now I definitely know.

Yeah, now you definitely know.

And in this, the book is divided into different seasons, right? Which I think is very clever.

Thank you. It was insane to me that other foraging cookbooks don't do that. It drives me crazy because you'll get so hype about a plant and be like, cool, it'll be in season in 9 months. That's such a letdown. I want you to know from the jump, we are front-loading information in this house.

Yes. Right, because then you— right, we have the various items in the various seasons, But we're in this interesting time, like, especially around New England, right? Between summer and fall. Don't know if I should leave in the window units or take them out. Yeah,

because the second you take them out, we will get one more 90-degree day.

That's right.

And it'll be your fault.

Yeah. So they are still in my window. Thank you. So don't blame me. But what kind of items are you looking for in this kind of transitionary period?

Right now, we do still have a little bit of, like, the last dregs of fall. I have some friends out on the Cape that are gathering gathering the last of their beach plums today. You are starting to get things like acorns, which feel very quintessentially autumnal, black walnuts, crabapples. There are a lot of crabapple trees around this campus that I may or may not be seen around later. If you're trying— if you're trying to hang out later, meet me at one of the crabapple trees. Oh my God. I'll be the tall person in a cape You will not miss me. And I love this time of year, this transition, because early fall, from just like a food science standpoint, is kind of the most calorically dense food season of the year when it comes to wild food. So many of these foods that the plants have been pumping energy into for an entire growing season are just now becoming ripe and available. And so So I spend, when I'm not touring and kindly, lovingly begging people to buy my book, I'm usually at home this time of year processing just pounds and pounds of acorns for acorn flour, and walnuts, and hickory nuts, because that's kind of like the meat and potatoes of a wild food diet for the rest of the year. I'm not lucky enough to live far north enough in the Midwest to be in wild rice abundance, but I know my friends who are in like Minnesota and Wisconsin are all ricing right now if they haven't already. Just going and getting all of these like, yeah, it takes a lot of energy, but you get a lot of bang for your buck foods, which like is kind of an antithesis to spring where it's all of these light, fresh spring greens that are coming up, which— I love spring greens. You know, if you ask me what my favorite foraging season is in like March, I might mess around and say that it's spring just 'cause I'm looking forward to it. And just 'cause I haven't eaten like new fresh greens in a minute. But I love this specific period of time. I love the month of September. Not too hot, not too cold. I mean, it was a little hot at the beginning. At the beginning, I was like, okay gang, like, We gotta get some cars off the road. Some people are gonna have to take some trains instead of planes, 'cause this is getting outrageous. This is getting insane. But now it's finally cooled down. I got to wear my velvet cape today. Very excited about it.

The cape is really fantastic.

Thank you. Thank you. I will send your compliments to my friend who made it.

Indeed. And your dress. I mean, I can't stop complimenting it.

Oh, thank you. Another one of my friends made this too. If you just aggregate a bunch of friends who make cool, weird things, you will also get to be cool and weird for the rest of your life.

But back to your recipes and the items that you're foraging, I lovingly know many a picky eater.

Yes, as do I. I'm about to marry one.

Congratulations! Oh,

thank you. Oh, thank you.

Well, in what ways have you found Yeah, work best to convince someone to eat something they've never tried before or even heard of?

That's such a good question. I would let them participate in the process of gathering. I think if you get to be a part of like going and identifying, having the fun of doing a little task outdoors with your friends, you will feel so much more amenable to trying the fruits of your labor than you would if you just like showed up at family Thanksgiving and were like, I made acorn bread, stuffing, enjoy. I have done that before. It does not go the way you hoped. And, you know, I— one of my friends who lovingly lives next door to us in Columbus, they have a 3-year-old, and 3-year-olds are famously hard to get to eat the vegetables sometimes. I was one of those 3-year-olds. But, you know, when the 3-year-old gets to help you pick the dandelion flowers, and like you let them mix the batter for dandelion flower fritters and get their hands messy dipping them in, and then watching you fry them— don't let 3-year-olds fry things— and watching you fry them, then they will be so excited to at least try it, because a little bit of them went into the process. I also think, you know, kids are always Kids are always so much smarter than I think we necessarily give them credit for. And letting them get some of their questions answered by the process as you go, I think leads to a lot fewer arguments at the dinner table. Not that I would know. I don't know. If I have kids and that doesn't work, I will come back and tell you I'm sorry and I was wrong.

I love that. So you've mentioned bringing these recipes to parties and dinner gatherings before. Yeah. Have you ever had, like, a favorite reaction to someone trying something from your book?

Oh, man. This past spring, some of my friends have a wine club in Columbus, and so they'll pick a specific region of the world, they'll get 10 different wines from it, and we'll all pretend that we're going to have a very classy time and that we all won't be extremely drunk by the end of the evening and no longer able to be very classy and distinguished about our tasting notes. By the end of the night, it becomes, this one's good, that one's bad. And I brought a cow parsnip flatbread pizza with stinging nettle pesto. I made some vegan chorizo with some black walnuts that I had gathered in the fall, and groundnuts, another great native edible that's also native here in Massachusetts. I gave it to people, and honestly, sometimes as a forager, the best reaction you can get is people just treating it like a normal tasty thing. People just treating it as if you just brought like a Pizza Hut pizza for everyone to enjoy and being like, mm, yeah, good tasty food, good tasty greasy food with our wine, thank you. Though one person did pull me aside at the end and was like, that pizza was crazy good. like, what was in that? And then I had to send him on like a quest to go get the ingredients with me like dropping pins on his Google Maps and being like, I cannot give you driving directions to this place. You're gonna take a right at the giant dead sycamore tree that looks like a ghost in the And when you get to the place where all of the baby deer are grazing, you'll know you're in the right spot. And he— but the thing is, he did go and harvest some of those ingredients to cook with. Like, he cared enough about the flavors and enjoyed them enough. He's another, you know, cook, but working in like the fine dining industry in Columbus. And he was like, oh man, I gotta go and start messing with these ingredients. So I think that was probably one of my favorite reactions. Part of me, my gut reaction originally was to be upset, because sometimes you put a lot of energy and time into something, and someone just eats it. And you're like, but you didn't ponder it. How dare you not ponder my food? How dare you not take a moment to think? about the thousands of years of knowledge that went into that weird-looking pizza. But it is kind of the highest praise for people to just eat it like it's the regular delicious food that they're used to.

Nice. But I also love the idea of like getting a quest once I try a food to go—

To be like, and if I ever wish to eat this again, I must follow the river to where it forks in the wood, A tall cloaked wizard will greet me there. He will blindfold me, for the morel spot must stay hidden to the masses. And he will put the morels in my hand and lead me back to my car parked near the river. Yes, I love a little scavenger hunt. When I was a senior at the Ohio State University— if I don't say the the, they take my degrees away.

It's a fact.

They're keeping tabs on all of us. Just like if we don't watch the football games, they take our degrees away. I know too much about football. I wish I knew less. Oh my gosh. But I wanted my job because it was the era of millennial optimism. I was like, oh, I'm going to be a professional scavenger hunt designer. People for big events will hire me to come to their city and mosey around for a couple of days and design an elaborate scavenger hunt for their bachelorette party or their 30th birthday party. Because once again, it was the era of millennial optimism. And we really were out here thinking that we could just make jobs out of anything. And that if you wore a bow tie and rode your unicycle to work, everything was going to be OK. The world has changed a lot since then. But I guess in a weird way, I do get to send people on scavenger hunts as my job now. So there you go.

It worked out.

Dream big. You'll get there in the weirdest way possible.

Well, I have to ask you another question based off one of the recipes I tried in here, the candied violets, which I mentioned earlier. And I had to make a substitution.

Yes.

The Asiatic dayflowers. I didn't get to do this one, unfortunately. Oh my gosh. But hopefully next spring, right?

Hopefully next spring, yeah, when the violets are back. You— now that the weather is getting cooler, you might find some violets again. Now that the days are getting shorter, weather's getting cooler, I usually find a small second harvest of flowers in like late September to early October until you get to first frost. Oh, I'm gonna be on the lookout. So don't give up. Also, Asiatic dayflower tea is blue, so you could still make a really sick color-changing lemonade.

I will try that. Thank you. But my question about the candy was, is there any kind of like smell that I should be like looking out for? Because like it was an awesome recipe. It was very sweet, a little herby. Yeah. But I also love to like, you know, try to use as many senses as possible, right? Like is there an aroma I should be looking out for?

It depends on the flavor of violet that you're So we have some that are more fragrant than others. If you're going with our nice common blue violet, Viola sororia, that one does have a pleasant, almost artificial grape flavor when it's being candied. That's really fun to work with, and I love using it in the lemonade recipe too. So that's— your nose will know when you find them. So I can't wait for you to go on that olfactory journey.

Another quest.

Yes, always. Always another quest.

Thank you for being such a wonderful audience, and of course—

Thank you so much, and thank you for having me. This was a joy.