AILSA CHANG, HOST:
For most of history, humans got by just fine without grocery stores. But how many of us in 2026 could make it one week, one month or one year without one? Well, Zachary Turner from member station WFAE took a walk with a man who is doing just that.
ZACHARY TURNER, BYLINE: Blackberry vines cling to Robin Greenfield as he uproots a green, leafy weed. He's come to Davidson, North Carolina, to forge with over 30 people in tow. They look at a curly dock, a plant with edible leaves.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: So the ones with the red, it's not that they're toxic. It's that...
ROBIN GREENFIELD: No, not toxic.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: ...They're just bitter.
GREENFIELD: Yep, just bitter. Not toxic. But if you did try to eat a whole bunch of this, you would puke.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENFIELD: Yeah, I'm almost certain.
TURNER: Greenfield is an environmental activist. He not only educates about foraging, the practice of finding, identifying and eating wild things. He says he's also walking the walk.
GREENFIELD: For one year, I'm living without grocery stores or restaurants and not even a garden. Just harvesting what I can forage from the land and the water.
TURNER: He says it's been over 150 days since he visited a grocery store or restaurant. He cooks much of what he finds in his traveling InstaPot.
GREENFIELD: My go-to meal is wild rice from my homeland in northern Wisconsin with either venison or fish, different dried, wild mushrooms, green stinging nettle powder that I make.
TURNER: Have you been doing any hunting along your trip?
GREENFIELD: I haven't hunted yet, and the reason why is because where I live, 20,000 deer are killed by cars per year. So I harvest deer that are killed by cars.
TURNER: The 39-year-old has been an environmental activist more than a decade. And this year-long challenge isn't his first. He's gone a year without possessions. He's also grown his own toilet paper. These extreme campaigns, he says, are the best way to raise awareness for nature and how people relate to it. He makes some money from his foraging school and has a nonprofit to support his activism.
GREENFIELD: I've made a lifetime commitment to earning less than the federal poverty threshold since 2015.
TURNER: Folks are keeping up with Greenfield on social media, where he's amassed over a million followers. In Davidson, some folks drove over two hours to forge with him. Eliana Frahm came to the walk with her mother, Darci.
ELIANA FRAHM: I just wanted to join people in learning a little bit more. I also wanted to bring my mom because she thinks I'm a little strange for getting excited about plants and then running over and eating them.
TURNER: (Laughter) After witnessing this, I guess, this meet-up, do you find it a little bit less strange? Or how are you feeling about foraging now?
DARCI FRAHM: I definitely feel more confident when she just goes and picks things off the grass and starts to eat them.
TURNER: The Frahms proceed to share a piece of henbit together. It's an edible weed. Greenfield says he's not trying to get folks to swear off grocery stores or anything so drastic.
GREENFIELD: Can the average person forage a hundred percent of their food? And the answer would be resoundingly no. It's very challenging. It's something that has taken me a decade or more of skills in order to be able to do this.
TURNER: But he hopes a small piece of what he's doing will fit into people's lives. Greenfield said, as long as folks walk away knowing one plant they can eat, it's a win. For NPR, I'm Zachary Turner in Davidson.
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