News Reporter: Future Coach: He forages all his food, but calls your diet ‘extreme’

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By Michael J. Coren

Welcome to Future Coach.

This week I’m writing about Robin Greenfield, who foraged all his food for a year.

Robin Greenfield spent a year eating only foods he foraged himself. (Nicole Neri for The Post)

For the past year, Robin Greenfield has eaten only what he can find or catch as he travels across the country teaching others to do the same. Some will think that radical. He calls it normal.

“Compared to the status quo, I’m living a very extreme life,” concedes Greenfield, whose daily meals include wild rice, acorns, wild pecans, black walnuts, hazelnuts, plums, fish and deer. “Compared to the long-term arc of humanity, I would say I live a quite normal life.”

Greenfield doesn’t advocate that everyone should forage as he does, or like him give up their passport, birth certificate, Social Security card and driver’s license. He hasn’t entirely stepped outside all the systems that mediate contemporary life.

He owns a pressure cooker. People drive the environmental activist to events, and he borrows a phone to talk to journalists while campaigning to make us question the assumptions beneath our daily lives. One project sent him on a 4,000-mile journey back to the U.S. from Panama with only his clothes to prove “people are good.” For another, he wore every piece of trash he created for 30 days to highlight how the average American tosses out about 4.5 pounds of stuff each day. On Oct. 10, he completed one year of foraging for himself. The first food he’ll buy? Local smoked whitefish and lake trout.

Greenfield leads a foraging walk that includes shelling black walnuts during lunch at The Little Barnyard Preschool in Esko, Minnesota, on Aug. 22. (Nicole Neri for The Post)

What he wants, Greenfield says, is for people to question whether their idea of normal is nothing of the sort, perhaps disconnecting them from what makes them happy. “Basically, I have no other option but to go to an extreme,” he said over the summer, “because of the extreme times that we live in.”

Greenfield and I spoke by phone just after he arrived in San Francisco. He was gleaning food around the city before leading a foraging workshop, one of many, on a trip away from home in Ashland, Wisconsin, a small town on the shores of Lake Superior.

“The first thing that I did was harvest about 25 pounds of red plums in the park,” Greenfield said, describing the wild brassica, mustard, radish, loquats and strawberry tree fruit also filling out his suitcase pantry.

Many people will dismiss Greenfield, arguing he’s demonstrating what billions of people can’t or shouldn’t do: forage for their food instead of relying on the mechanized agriculture and fossil-fuel energy that feeds billions of people. By the numbers, they’re right.

“I could see why some people would say he’s crazy,” says Lauren Robinson, who attended Greenfield’s foraging school in Duluth, Minnesota, with her son on Aug. 22. “But I don’t see him that way.”

While she can never imagine foraging all her own food, Robinson says Greenfield’s example brings her closer to her own ideals, and reaches people who would otherwise not “look at their own lives and reassess how they’re living.”

“We, as humans, are so disconnected from so much, and a big part is food,” she says. “I walk into grocery stores and put stuff in a car … I sometimes don’t know what the plant looks like that it’s grown on.”

Rather than explain Greenfield, I’ll let him explain his “extreme” living. Foraging all your food and medicine for a year is remarkably difficult. By his own measure, it was the most ordinary thing he has done.

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