A short explanatory segment by Wendie Trubow defining foraging as finding foods and medicinal plants in one’s environment and bringing them home to incorporate into diet or medicine. The speaker emphasizes urban foraging—identifying edible/medicinal plants near one’s home (e.g., dandelions)—and explains uses such as preparing tinctures, salves, and oils while warning about site selection hazards (dog urine, vehicle exhaust, pollution).
Chapters
What is foraging for the listeners? Yes, that's such a great question. And up until very recently, I had a rather naive assumption that when I said foraging, people went, oh, yeah, sure, I know what that is. And it turns out that that's not the case for many people. They've not even a word they've necessarily heard of before. It's essentially going out of your normal environment and finding the foods and the medicines that nature provides for us and then bringing that home and learning how to incorporate, incorporate that into your diet, into your food, or how to use it as medicine, how to prepare medicinal tinctures and salves and oils and, and things like that. And the beautiful thing about foraging is that you don't have to go to some far distant forest and tromp through watching out for bears and cougars. You can forage right in your neighborhood. And I teach people about urban foraging, which is basically stepping outside your front door and knowing that the dandelion that's growing in the crack in the sidewalk is edible and medicinal. I mean, you probably don't want to eat that one because it is right in the sidewalk crack. But watch out for dog pee and everything else. You do have to be careful of that you do. And dog pee and exhaust and those sorts of things. You do want to be mindful of where you're foraging.
