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Leonore Enfield tried for the first time last fall to shoot a deer. She spent a full day sitting in an elevated stand near Lawrence, Kansas, with an experienced hunter as mentor.
“We did not get a single thing,” Enfield said, laughing. “It was totally worth it.”
The two of them watched the sun rise and set. They drank hot chocolate and ate snacks. They sat quietly with their crossbows for long periods, eyes and ears trained on their surroundings, whispering about movements in the distance. Enfield never got bored.
“The birds started chirping,” she recalled. “You got to see just the movement of life around you — undisturbed — and so it was amazing.”
Enfield says the experience of hunting can give a meal a deeper meaning.
“It’s, like, primal,” she said. “It’s like those basic things that everybody can relate to, but very few people nowadays understand.”
Humans have fished, foraged and hunted for millennia, but those activities have been sidelined in the modern U.S., where much of the population no longer eats any wild foods. Now the knowledge of how to track down your own sustenance is being sought-after by people who want to strengthen their connection to plants, animals and landscapes.
Ethnobotanist Linda Black Elk has seen a surge in people seeking foraging skills. She studies and teaches about relationships between plants and humans, and she works for the Minnesota-based, Native-led North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, or NATIFS.
“It is absolutely wild how many requests for plant walks and educational materials we get,” said Black Elk, the nonprofit’s director of education. “It is literally every day.”
People reach out in search of workshops and information about harvesting specific plants. The group publishes illustrated cards and posts detailed videos on foraging and cooking for each region of the country. Its goal is to improve access to Indigenous foods — especially for Native people — and to support tribal food sovereignty.
Wild plants and proteins can lower a family’s grocery bill, provide medicines, promote fairness in food systems and offer a sense of place, Black Elk said.
“My grandmother used to say that you know you’re not home when you don’t know the plants outside your door,” Black Elk said. “So if you want to feel at home somewhere — learn those plants, build those relationships.”
Black Elk, who is not a tribal member, was raised with wild food traditions on both sides of her family. Her mother grew up in South Korea, where she foraged to put food on the table, and her father’s mother was a Southerner who loved pokeweed and wild onions.
“ One of my very first memories is harvesting wild onions with my grandmother,” she said.
Enfield graduated this summer from a pilot program that teaches Kansans to harvest, process and eat wild foods legally, sustainably and safely. Much like a master gardener program, those who complete the Wild Foods Academy commit to volunteering in their communities to show others how to eat “field to fork.”
“It helps people to be connected to each other, to the land,” said Enfield, who works at the Kansas Association for Conservation and Environmental Education. “When you can do that, then you’re more filled, more well-rounded, more connected.”
A short-staffed state agency gets a wild idea
When the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks started holding workshops on easily accessible wild sources of protein, the events drew plenty of interest. Just a few generations ago, wild rabbit and squirrel were common fare, but over the decades, they’ve vanished from many dinner tables.
One training session on how to trap, kill, process and cook squirrels attracted more than 60 people in Lawrence. Just as many people came to a similar workshop at Hillsdale State Park on raccoons, where attendees gobbled up homemade “racquitos” — raccoon taquitos.
Amy Bousman, who works at the department, taught those workshops (and made those racquitos). She says small animals are some of the most accessible sources of wild protein. A squirrel trap is cheaper than hunting equipment. It also works well for people with mobility issues who may not be able to lug hunting gear through woods.
She’s also seen lots of interest in learning how to gig — or spear — frogs.
This raises the question of how to make it easy for more people to learn. The wildlife department is a relatively small agency and can’t meet all the requests for events on gathering mushrooms and wild greens, for example.
“There’s just not staff capacity,” Bousman said. “There’s no shortage of interest, but there is a shortage of qualified and available people to lead those kinds of classes.”
Separately, Bousman was working with Indigenous experts on a program to teach other members of the Native community their methods for deer hunting, butchering and cooking.
The experience drove home to Bousman the role of mentors in boosting access to traditional sources of nutrition for their communities. She began sketching out ideas for a Wild Foods Academy that would engage leaders from more backgrounds, offering extra training as needed and helping them earn certifications to teach angling, archery and hunter’s education, for example.
The state wildlife department approved a pilot run. This past year, 10 students from across Kansas met monthly to learn from each other and from experienced hunters, anglers and foragers.
They hunted waterfowl and bowfished silver carp. They discussed ethics and sustainability. They learned about chronic wasting disease in deer and watched a wildlife disease expert dissect the head of a roadkill button buck to learn what part of the brain gets tested for the illness.
Patrice Gonzalez, the branch manager of an environmental learning library in Kansas City, Kansas, gigged her first bullfrog.
“ I learned how to dispatch it and then prep it. I took it home and showed my mom, who was super proud,” she said. “We fried it with coconut oil and it tastes pretty good.”
Gonzalez said it surprises people to know that although raised in an urban area, she grew up playing outside barefoot, splashing around in the county lake, making up games with hedge apples and caring for a wide variety of pets, like ducks and turtles.
Now, as an adult, harvesting wild foods offers another way to interact with nature. She looks forward to mentoring others in her city, especially people of color.
“I’m excited to show people who look like me in my community that we can do things like this,” Gonzalez said. “I know there’s a need, and I also know there’s a want for it.”
She and other graduates will hold at least two workshops a year to teach outdoor skills in their communities.
Learning to read landscapes, plant by plant
The Wild Foods Academy is just one model for increasing access to wild foods.
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources created a mobile kitchen and drove it to events around the state so people could taste wild fish and game. The nonprofit wildHERness teaches women in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and other states outdoor skills such as field dressing, skinning and butchering deer.
At North Dakota State University, the Indigenous Food Sovereignty Emerging Leaders Program works to support food sovereignty. It also works to address health disparities in Native communities related to decades of discrimination and marginalization after the U.S. government forcibly removed tribes from their territories and traditional food sources.
The program includes, in part, teaching participants to harvest wild food and medicine. It also gives students a chance to explore Indigenous-led initiatives like NATIFS, the Minnesota-based nonprofit founded by James Beard Award-winning chef Sean Sherman to teach Native ways of harvesting, preparing and cooking food.
Black Elk, the education director at NATIFS, talks about the need to address “plant blindness.”
“I’ve talked to people who take a walk in the park, but at the end of that walk, they cannot tell me — or identify — a single plant that they saw,” she said.
Learning to recognize each species and to harvest sustainably for food and medicine helps people truly see the plants. NATIFS teaches people to view plants as relatives.
“You start to think of them differently,” Black Elk said. “You start to take care of the land on which they grow.”
A former neighbor, for example, stopped spraying the backyard with weedkillers after Black Elk explained the dandelions could make the same kind of tea that a doctor had suggested the neighbor drink for liver health.
Many other species often dismissed as weeds, such as purslane and lamb’s quarters, are also edible or medicinal, as Black Elk teaches in NATIFS videos.
Sometimes people ask whether she worries that as more people start foraging, it could lead to overharvesting from the wild.
“Yes, that is a fear,” she said, “but we can see that the alternative is not working. Not having a relationship with the natural world and with these plants and with these animals and insects is not working.”
Passing along knowledge and improving access
Marlisha Kearney calls the Wild Foods Academy “life changing.”
She relished the new foods and experiences and came away with a keen sense of how humans are part of — and not separate from — the landscapes that surround them.
“It’s been very special,” she said, “realizing I am part of that ecosystem and how I can help it or I could hurt it.”
But her top reason for joining the program was to remove barriers for others to hunt, too. Kearney is the president and founder of Brass Jacket Gun Club, the Wichita chapter of the National African American Gun Association.
“When my son went to hunter’s education, he went at a place where people did not look like him,” she said. “How impactful it would be if there were other people that looked like him that he could identify with.”
She plans to become a hunter’s education instructor and wants more Black people to feel welcome taking such classes.
“Representation matters,” she said. “If you see them, you can be them.”
Similarly, Justin Vann went through the Indigenous hunting program that helped inspire the Wild Foods Academy and then got certified to teach others. To him, hunting and fishing aren’t just sources of food, they bring a sense of wellbeing.
“It clears your head,” he said. “If you have stress from a hard day, that’s what I do. I go fishing, hunting, just get out of the house and just get stress free and then come back home, cook.”
Experienced hunter and angler Bobby Cole helps run a mentoring nonprofit that passes on such skills to children. Many kids don’t have a way to get started, he said.
“They don’t have a place to hunt,” said Cole, regional program manager for Outdoor Mentors. “They don’t know the regulations and they don’t have anyone to go with.”
At a recent event in Clinton, Oklahoma, he helped teach eight girls, ages 10 to 17, hunting safety and how to shoot from a duck blind. They used a clay target for practice. Over the next six months, they’ll take trips to hunt doves, duck, turkey, geese and deer.
Kids can attend as many events as they want, and they take home their catches.
“We’ve had kids that come from very poor backgrounds who will tell you, ‘Hey, I’m feeding my family with this,’ and they’re very proud of that,” said Cole, who coordinates programming for Oklahoma and Kansas and is testing the waters for expanding into Texas.
The group is also active in Iowa, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and New Jersey and trying to build a presence in Tennessee, Minnesota and Michigan.
Inspiring people to hold onto vanishing landscapes
One fall morning, the Wild Foods Academy students met up with University of Kansas ecologist and accomplished forager Kelly Kindscher for a stroll on land managed by the state wildlife department north of Lawrence.
They started at the parking lot and quickly realized that weedkillers had been sprayed along its edges, raising the risk of contamination.
“See all the dead vegetation here?” Kindscher said. “Parking lots are not great places to forage adjacent to.”
That was the day’s first lesson: A reminder to keep safety and health top of mind when picking wild plants. The group also talked about how to harvest food without hurting the local plant populations.
They also saw firsthand the sheer variety of nutrition that even a small patch of Midwest woods can offer.
As they strolled the Buck Creek Wildlife Area, Kindscher found one example after another in quick succession. Dead nettle can make a good broth. Jerusalem artichoke tubers work well raw or sauteed.
There were black walnut and red mulberry trees, too, and robust grapevines.
“Wild grapes are more flavorful than our commercial grapes and wild grape jelly is wonderful,” he said. “A few mulberries, too, in a cherry pie or another pie is really good.”
Kindscher, the author of two books on edible and medicinal prairie plants, wants more people to fall in love with these wild flavors and to find places that they’ll visit year after year to get them.
He believes that finding a favorite wild recipe or foraging spot can translate to greater support for conserving the undeveloped places that make this possible.
“If we look at our wild spaces, we don’t have a lot,” Kindscher said, “but those we have, if you get people engaged, we will probably more likely keep them wild.”
Celia Llopis-Jepsen is an environment reporter for Harvest Public Media and host of the environmental podcast Up From Dust. You can follow her on Bluesky or email her at celia (at) kcur (dot) org.
Harvest Public Media is a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
