What is Foraging?

Foraging is a verb that means “to search widely for food or provisions.”  Popular use of the word today generally adds an additional distinction – foraging means to search for edible plants and animals inhabiting wild, uncultivated landscapes. This narrow definition of foraging stems from the common misconception that early humans survived only by hunting and gathering wild foods. Like most other animals, this line of reasoning goes, humans were a foraging species until agriculture was “invented” about six thousand years ago.

Recent anthropological and archeological research tell a different story.  It turns out that early humans evolved a variety of strategies for assuring a stable supply of food, medicine, and useful materials. Hunting and gathering wild foods were important, but early humans also carefully managed the natural environments that they inhabited to enhance production of the foods that they favored by using practices such as plant selection, transplanting, burning, weeding, tilling and mulching. As agriculture evolved across the planet – slowly and at different times – nearly all human cultures continued to depend on a mix of foraging and farming, with farmed foods eventually dominating the food supply of most cultures.

Foragable Communities employs this broad view of foraging, which can take place in a diversity of environments ranging from unmanaged and managed wildlands, restored native ecosystems and urban food forests, to commercial farms and ranches, community gardens and suburban parks, walkways, and backyards. The kinds of plants and animals that form the basis of a foragable food supply are diverse.  They can be native, naturalized, or exotic, wild, wild-cultivated or cultivated.

The food species and the amount of human care involved are not important to the concept of foragable community.  What is important is for us to engage in our regional food system in ways that promote the healthy ecosystems we all need to sustain community well-being over the long term.

What is a Foragable Community?

A collective of community members, led by local businesses, working together to enhance community resilience by increasing public participation in local foodways. Foragable Community engages a diversity of settings ranging from wildlands and restored natural lands, to commercial farms and ranches, to urban and suburban forests, gardens, parks, and yards.

Activism

Foragable community members are vocal and engaged activists for community-based action to cultivate a sustainable and resilient regional food system.  Community members invest their own resources in the collaborative development of a regional food system that is aligned with the values of Foragable Community, advocate for the development of food system policies and programs that enhance community resilience and serve as models of sustianable and resilient businesses committed to taking action to promote the well-being of the communities they serve.