Alexis Nikole Nelson, better known to her millions of fans as @blackforager, was raised by a mother who is an avid gardener and a father who loves to cook. Foraging allowed Alexis to fuse her love for wild plants and food from a very young age.

But before Alexis became the @blackforager many know today, there was a period in her life where Alexis lost that love and connection to foraging, and where food became very much the enemy.

This episode comes to us from our friends at Going Wild with Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, a podcast about the human drama behind saving animals. From a paleoanthropologist who hunts fossils in conflict zones, to someone who helped save an endangered species while in prison, show host and wildlife biologist Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant takes us inside the work of the extraordinary people who are protecting wildlife.

Featuring Alexis Nikole Nelson.

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS

You can find Alexis Nikole Nelson’s videos on Tik Tok and Instagram.

Also, be sure to check out Going Wild with Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant.

SUPPORT

To share your questions and feedback with Outside/In, call the show’s hotline and leave us a voicemail. The number is 1-844-GO-OTTER. No question is too serious or too silly.

Outside/In is made possible with listener support. Click here to become a sustaining member of Outside/In.

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GOING WILD CREDITS

Host: Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant

Written and produced by Caroline Hadilaksono

Sound design and engineering by Cariad Harmon and Jason Sheesley.

Managing editor: Priscilla Alabi.

Executive producer: Jacob Lewis

Danielle Broza is digital lead for Nature.

Fred Kaufman is executive producer for Nature.

Artwork by Ariana Bollers and Karen Brazell.

Going Wild is produced by Great Feeling Studios and the WNET Group.

Going Wild is a podcast from PBS Nature.

OUTSIDE/IN CREDITS

Host: Nate Hegyi

Produced and mixed by Felix Poon

Editing by Taylor Quimby

Our staff includes Justine Paradis and Marina Henke

Executive producer: Taylor Quimby

Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio

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Audio Transcript

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

Nate Hegyi: Hey, this is Outside/In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I’m Nate Hegyi, here with producer Felix Poon. Hey Felix.

Felix Poon: Hello Nate.

Nate Hegyi: Felix, I’ve got a question for you. Do you follow any nature influencers on like Tik Tok or Instagram?

Felix Poon: Umm, nature influencers… I follow you, does that count?

Nate Hegyi: No, most definitely not. I’m not a very good influencer.

Felix Poon: Oh yeah, there’s this guy, Creative Explained, have you– do you follow him? Do you know who he is?

Nate Hegyi: I have not heard of him.

Felix Poon: He shows you these like, hacks for taking care of your house plants and stuff. Like, one time I tried to blend a bunch of chicken bones in my blender, to make fertilizer. It actually broke my blender, so I don’t know if that was such a good one.

Nate Hegyi: No, don’t believe everything you see on the internet, Felix.

Felix Poon: There’s also, um… @blackforager, are you familiar with her videos?

Nate Hegyi: Yes, because I think we have talked about trying to get her on our show several times.

Felix Poon: She’s like, super likeable, enthusiastic, and she has a ton of foraging knowledge.

Nate Hegyi: Well, today we are very lucky because we’re finally going to hear @blackforager on the show – we’re sharing an episode from one of our favorite podcasts, Going Wild With Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant. Now, Going Wild is a PBS show.

Felix Poon: Go PBS!

Nate Hegyi: And it tells all sorts of stories about people working to protect wildlife, and the environment.

They’re in the middle of their new season, which features this episode with Alexis Nikole Nelson… aka @blackforager.

Alright, here’s the show.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

When I was foraging in Japan, I was minutes away from a run-in with a bear, and that bear had just pooped a ton of ginkgo nuts.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

Okay, you got to tell that story, Alexis. You said the magic word. You said bear. I’m Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, and this is a different kind of nature show, a podcast about the human drama of saving animals. This season we’re talking to all kinds of nature advocates.

From a paleoanthropologist who hunts fossils in conflict zones to someone who helped save an endangered species while in prison, we’re going to hear from real-life heroes with widely different expertise and life experiences about what led them to be champions for the natural world. What transformation did they go through to create change within themselves, their community, and the world? Together, we’ll find out how these ordinary people fell in love with nature and became their most extraordinary selves. This is Going Wild.

Today, I’m talking to the internet’s favorite forager and my new friend, Alexis Nikole Nelson, also known as Black Forager. If you are not one of the millions of people who follow her on the internet, Alexis is a James Beard award-winning forager, vegan food concocter, environmental science enthusiast, and a soon-to-be cookbook author. As Black Forager, Alexis has over 6 million followers on TikTok and Instagram where she regularly posts videos teaching people how to identify, harvest, and cook all kinds of edible wild plants, from common backyard weeds like dandelions to interesting mushrooms.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Don’t these fungi look delicious? And people think there’s nothing to forage in the winter. Puff balls should honestly be called tofu of the woods. Here’s one that I sliced open so you can see that it is beautiful and white all the way through. Happy snacking, happy mushroom hunting, don’t die.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

Our conversation covered a lot of ground, from what it’s like to grow up as the only Black student in her nature-centric school, to the history of how Black people became systematically excluded from nature in the United States, to body image issues, and finally, my favorite subject, bears. Here’s my conversation with Alexis Nikole Nelson. Alexis, what an incredible honor to have you. Allow me 30 seconds to just appreciate, because we haven’t met.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

First time meeting. You guys are hearing this in real time.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

In real time. I just want to appreciate that.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Oh my gosh. I am like beyond flattered.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

Yay. Well, you deserve. And I want to actually start by telling you this little tidbit about me. When I was a kid, I didn’t lead a very outdoorsy life. But I used to do this thing when I was young, so maybe like 6, 7, 8 years old, where if I saw a tree that had what looked like a cut, maybe someone carved their initials into the tree or something, and I would think, “Oh my gosh, this tree is wounded and it needs healing,” and I would find aloe vera or something.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Oh my goodness.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

And I would open it up, and I would try to heal the tree. I would push the aloe vera gel into the tree’s wounds to heal it, and I would check on it every day, and I was called to it. I just remember even the feeling as a kid of real concern, and I felt like I was a tree doctor.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

That is fantastic.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

And anyway, I share this story because I don’t think we’re so different.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Yes. Oh my gosh. Well, so I like to joke that I had my human best friend when I was in pre-K, and I also had my tree best friend. My human best friend, Natanya, and I are still best friends. And Priscilla, she was just a very small little honeysuckle, an amur honeysuckle. And I, of course, was too young to understand how gently devastating non-native honeysuckles were on our environment. I just knew that, every spring, Priscilla The Tree had all of these beautifully scented flowers.

And because Priscilla The Tree was smaller, I felt a lot safer climbing up to the top of that tree and just sitting and enjoying spending time with this tree friend of mine. And yeah, I would thank her for the gift of her flowers when I would pick them in the springtime. And in the fall, when they would produce red berries, which you can’t eat, but we had a lot of fun smushing them and painting them onto pieces of paper.

I went to a very nature-centric Montessori school, and one of the earliest lessons I feel like I learned was they would encourage us to have these interactions with plants that were growing in the schoolyard. One section was just for growing herbs. And it wasn’t like, “Oh, those are special plants. Don’t touch them.” Instead, it was, “We want you to develop a relationship with these plants.”

So they’d be like, “Here’s the mint plant. How about we only enjoy one leaf a day? I know you like chewing on the peppermint leaves, but if we take all of the peppermint leaves, it won’t be able to make anymore.” So I think inadvertently, I was getting primed for, one, having relationships with our non-human neighbors. And we are part of nature as opposed to nature is a museum.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

I could not agree with you more. And it’s really amazing. I actually didn’t think that you were going to talk about such a powerful preschool experience. Not everyone gets that. And so, as a kid, it sounds like you were learning about respecting nature and sustainability. But was there also a cooking aspect with your family when you were growing up?

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. My mom’s side of the family is Cape Verdean and my dad’s side of the family is from the South, from Southern Mississippi. And both of those cultures, of course, one of the biggest ways that you express love is through food. And I was very lucky that my dad has always been a really avid cook. And so, I would have the joy of getting to be outside with my mother, who just has the greatest green thumb, and get to learn about how all of these plants grow, and who pollinates them, and what time of year they’re in season. And then I’d get to turn around and bring these plants inside and learn about developing flavors and where they would best be suited in terms of what type of meal with my dad.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

I mean, the way you speak about your two parents is that they were very connected to, let’s say nature, but connected to the land, connected to plants. But Alexis, I think you’d agree that that’s not the case for many parents, especially in the Black community, right?

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Yeah.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

There’s been, over generations, a separation between particularly Black folks and nature. And we’re saying this as two Black people talking about our own cultural experience.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Absolutely.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

Alexis is from the Midwest. She grew up in Cincinnati before moving to Columbus, Ohio, where she still lives today. For Alexis, who was raised to be very much in touch with nature, finding out just how rare that connection to nature was for other Black people, especially in the Midwest, well, it was kind of a rude awakening. This realization hit her hard when Alexis left her Montessori preschool and elementary school to go to a public junior high.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

I transitioned from a really small nature-centric Montessori school where I had been in a class with the same 12 people for nine years of my life. By the time we graduated, I was the lone Black person in our class holding it down. So I’d get back from the summer at that school and be like, “Oh, yeah, I did my couple of weeks at overnight camp, I learned how to make rope out of stinging nettle.” And everyone would just be like, “Oh, yeah, cool. Totally normal.”

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

Thinking that represents a typical Black experience.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

A typical Black experience. Exactly. And then I went to public school and suddenly went from being the only Black person in my class to being in a school with a 33% Black population, which was fantastic. But I immediately was met with all of these new friends who looked like me and who we shared so many different cultural touchstones. And then, one day, we were talking about what we had done that summer, and I told them, “Oh, every summer I go to overnight camp and live in the woods for a couple of weeks.”

You would have thought that I told them, “Oh, yes. I spend a month every summer walking across hot coals all day.” You would think that I had said the craziest thing in the world to my friends during that gym class. And one of them came up to me, and she was the epitome of cool, she was already a cheerleader in junior high, and she just put a hand on my shoulder, and, oh, honey, and said, “Girl, we do not do that.”

And for me, I instantly felt embarrassed. I instantly reeled it back in and was like, “Oh, I need to do some market research. Because I didn’t realize how unique it was to be a Black person in the Midwest, in Ohio, with two parents who, at least some point in their life, were really outdoorsy, and with one parent who still very much was. And so, I definitely, I reeled it in, I pulled it back.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

So when you say you reeled it in and scaled it back, do you mean you spent less time in the outdoors, or you talked about it less?

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Both. Definitely both. I would still help my mom in the yard, but I would opt to go to the mall with my friends instead of go hiking. Or if the summer camp that I went to was having a fall weekend, instead of asking my parents if we could go, I would just have a slumber party at a friend’s house and we’d play The Sims and make prank phone calls instead.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

Which, to me, still sound like great ways to spend time.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Oh, absolutely. It wasn’t me sitting in a dark bedroom weeping into my nature journals. I was still having a lot of fun.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

But without doing an activity that you love to do. And so, I imagine at the time you just thought, “I must have misunderstood Black culture. I thought it was this and it’s really this.” But today, you understand a deeper reasoning about why that girl said to you, “We don’t do that.” Now you know some history.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Yeah. I started doing some deep dives into why it was that Black people and People of Color in general, especially on this side of the country, on the Eastern side, were not really a part of any of the nature storytelling. If you’re a really big dork like me and you’ve read through maybe some of the WPA papers from the ’30s, you will find actually a really great treasure trove of older Black folks talking about their relationships with nature. But unfortunately, a lot of that is because those are people who were born into slavery.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

There is this complication between the beauty, and the wonder, and the education that comes with spending time with nature, and the way that Black folks were forced into it for far too long.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Yeah. I tell everybody, you go far back enough in anyone’s ancestry, and you are going to find someone indigenous to the place that they are living in, who has a deep relationship with the nature around them and bases their life around it.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

And for Alexis, that indigenous connection to place on her mother’s side of the family is Cape Verde, which is an island country off the coast of West Africa.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

I like to tell this story in particular because it’s one of the crops that my ancestry had connection to. There are quite a few types of wild rice growing in Western Africa, and rice was a cash crop that people wanted to start growing in the southern mid-Atlantic and in the coastal southern states. And so, who was going to work in these spaces? Well, people who already know how to work with the crop. So then, suddenly it’s people from Western Africa getting taken, often with their rice crop, to a completely alien place and essentially being told, “Because you know how to do this, because you have this relationship with this plant, this is what you’re doing now.”

Now, if you fast-forward about a 100, 150 more years towards the tail end of American slavery, what ended up inadvertently happening was a lot of enslaved people became really skilled at foraging, at hunting, at trapping, at fishing. There was a lot of information exchange with indigenous along the coast and further inland. And that kind of arose out of how poorly treated people who were enslaved were at that time. You were being given things like fat back, which is like if you took bacon and reversed the ratio of protein to fat in it, and you were given cornmeal, and essentially told to fend for yourself for the rest of your calories. And what that does is it makes people very scrappy, very inventive, and very resourceful.

A lot of enslaved people made their own money by foraging, harvesting, hunting, and then selling their wares to other people in the towns in which they lived. So an interesting thing happens when the Emancipation Proclamation happens, and it is that a bunch of those states suddenly recognize that these recently freed people have no reason to come back and work for them because so many of them have learned the skills to start their own businesses and be able to take care of themselves and their own community as a whole.

And this made a lot of wealthy white landowners very irate, so a couple lawmakers in South Carolina deciding, “You know what would be really interesting? These Black folks that are now free, they’re free, but they’re not landowners. When they are foraging, when they are fishing, when they are hunting, a lot of times that is on our land.” So what they did is they took trespass, which at the time it was a civil offense, and then what they decided to do was to take trespass and make it a criminal offense. Criminal offenses, the fines are higher, the bail is higher, they can have you in prison for longer. When you are in prison, you are often then loaned out to other places to work for free.

And suddenly, all of these folks with their foraging skills had a decision to make. Would being locked up for weeks, is that risk worth one or two things that you would be able to sell in town the next day? And for a lot of people, and I think very sensibly, the answer was no. It worked so well that neighboring towns and cities adopted the same law, and it just concentric circled out further and further, kind of like a disease, until you had new states having that in their constitution and not even knowing where it originally came from.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

And so it just became normalized. I mean, I can see where you’re going with this, that there was this very quick, very deliberate separation of Black people from the land. Right?

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Exactly. It takes a generation, maybe two, for something that had been culturally ingrained in a person’s family to completely disappear. It’s crazy how fast knowledge dissipates, especially when there is societal pressure to do so.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

I know that we’re talking about the past, we’re talking about a post-slavery era. But girl, I mean, today, when it comes to even things like plants, there are still racist, classist policies that are in practice. And you even had a video about botanical sexism.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Oh my goodness. Well, at the beginning-ish of the 20th century, once botanists got a lot better at being able to sex a tree early on, if it was a tree where say a female tree would be fruiting and then dropping fruit on the ground, and a male tree would not. So a lot of cities started deciding, “Well, if I’m going to have this particular tree… Ginkgo is one that always comes to mind pretty readily, because people love having them as street trees. They’re very resilient, they’re gorgeous in the fall. But female ones do drop those fruits. And if you’ve ever smelled one, you will not forget it.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

Oh, it smells horrible.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Oh, so bad. Like a baby poop and throw up at the same time, with a little bit of cheese.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

It is, yeah. It kind of makes you gag a little when you get a whiff. And it’s in the air. It’s not like you have to walk up to the ginkgo tree.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Exactly. If anyone has tried to harvest ginkgo nuts for eating, you’ve probably experienced the struggle of actually trying to find a female ginkgo tree in your city. But what happens when you start being preferential to male trees versus female trees is male trees may not make fruit, but they do make pollen. And you are increasing the number of male trees, so more pollen. And by decreasing the number of female trees, there are fewer receptors for said pollen.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

And so, we are getting a pollen overload. And if you’re someone who has allergies like me, all these extra pollen in the air is making our seasonal allergies that much worse. But another consequence of this botanical sexism of preferring male trees over female ones is that because most male trees bear no fruit, it’s also depriving animals, humans or otherwise, from foraging those tasty fruits.

And this might not seem like a huge deal to a lot of people, but in some cases, being able to gather food on public land could be really useful, maybe even essential to some members of our society. And really, a lot of people could benefit from being able to supplement their diet with plants growing in public spaces. For Alexis, foraging was more than just about gathering food. Even before it made her internet famous, foraging was something that truly saved her life.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

There is something that I find to be almost meditative about foraging, about turning on a soft focus for the world around you, and instead of being really in your head, just letting everything around you reach your eyes. So I started realizing that it was doing really good things for my mental health.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

We’ll hear more after the break. Today I’m talking to vegan forager Alexis Nikole Nelson, better known to her millions of fans as Black Forager. Raised by a mother who is an avid gardener and a father who loved to cook, foraging became a way for Alexis to fuse her love for wild plants and food from a very young age. But before Alexis became the Black Forager we all know today, there was a period in her life where Alexis lost that love and connection to foraging and where food became very much the enemy.

And just a heads-up to our listeners, in this next segment, we’re going to be discussing disordered eating. If you’d like to skip this part, you can tune back in around the 28 minute mark. I read that part of your story is battling an eating disorder. And one of my philosophies is that we can’t have a healthy environment if the people who protect those ecosystems’ environments aren’t well. And so, luckily we don’t live in a world without you teaching us about foraging. But would you like to explain to us what was going on and the role that foraging played in pulling you through?

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Yeah, and thank you. I was like, “Oh, I don’t need to put on waterproof eyeliner. Surely not. I’m not going to cry today.” Yeah. I have always existed in a bigger body, despite being really active. I played soccer in elementary school. I was on the varsity tennis team in high school. I was moving around a lot.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

And yet we’re socialized to believe that if you’re active, you are super thin. And if you’re not super thin, it must mean you’re not active somehow.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Yeah. And I do think sometimes younger people do not understand how bad it was in the aughts.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

I mean, that was the era of Bridget Jones. I think in the movie, she weighs herself on a scale, and the scale says 135 pounds. And that is shown to us in the movie as like, “Oh, boy. She is fat.”

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Yeah. I remember seeing that movie as a 13-year-old who weighed more than that, and being like, “Uh oh.” So I had always had these underlying insecurities gnawing at me. And I never want to fault my mom for anything. I think she knew what it was like being a Woman of Color in a predominantly white, very academic institution, because her high school and college experience was the same way. But I did get a lot of commentary from my mom about my body growing up.

There would be a lot of days where I would’ve finished my homework and I’d be like, “Okay, time to put my feet up and read a book,” and my mom would be like, “Hey, maybe you’d feel better if you did some bicycle kicks for the next 30 minutes.” And coming from a place of trying to preemptively get ahead of bullying that she thought I would receive, which I absolutely did. And just, that stuff stays with you for a lot longer than you think it’s going to.

And so, in my adulthood, after getting out of college and feeling really bad about myself because I got older and gained weight, it’s weird how you reach a threshold and a switch just flips. And so, one day, I was just like, “Oh, well, this is something that I can have complete control over.” And as anybody in the throes of an ED knows, you start getting very afraid of lots of very normal things, and lots of wonderful things. I didn’t eat pasta for over a year of my life. Even if a friend baked me a fresh loaf of sourdough bread, I’d thank them for it, and then I’d throw it away after. I also started obsessively walking everywhere to make up for the little amount I felt like I had to eat every day so I wouldn’t pass out.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

Luckily, during this dark period in her life, Alexis had a chance encounter that helped her find her way back to plants and to foraging.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

While I was on of my quite literally five mile walks, I came across this house. Their fence was sunflowers. And I was like, “Oh, well, that’s delightful.” And then I peered into the sunflowers and it was two people who didn’t look much older than me putting edible native plants into their garden. So of course, I start having a conversation with them, and we talk about being little feral outdoor children, and our favorite edible wild plants, and where we like foraging. And it blew a little bit of air onto the really dim spark that foraging and wild food still had in my heart, but that I had very much not tended to for a couple of years.

And I don’t know, just that little bit of kindness and connection, it felt like it shook me awake. And it didn’t happen that quickly. I think it took years for me to unlearn some of those unhealthy habits. And getting into a good relationship, being with someone who made me feel secure and made me feel safe and that I knew loved me for me, I feel like I could start having fun with food again. Which for a while, I was like, “Okay, cool. I guess I’m just saying goodbye to one of the things I’ve defined my life with up until this point.” And it was not worth it.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

And fortunately, Alexis was able to fan that dim little spark she had for foraging and continue to nurture it. So right before you became TikTok famous, right before that was a hit, what was your job?

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Right before that happened, I was a social media marketing manager.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

So you’re familiar with social. And I don’t want to say you got a big break. You were-

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

No, I did. That is how it feels. Because a lot of really talented people in any field don’t necessarily get that one, often accidental, opportunity to show what they can do on their own in front of a large audience.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

Yeah, I wouldn’t say accidental. I would say unpredictable. You couldn’t predict that it happened, but you had a thing. You had a thing. What Alexis had was her extensive foraging knowledge that she’d inadvertently accumulated over the course of her life. And she had this deep love for sharing that knowledge with her community. And the big break that put Alexis on the map was a video series she posted on her TikTok during the COVID lockdown.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

A little afraid of going to the grocery store right now? That’s okay. I’m going to show you some things are growing in your neighborhood that you can eat. Let’s go. Dandelion flowers, I think they’re pretty tasty by themselves, but you can also dip them in batter and fry them. And I hear they’re amazing. Violets, the whole plant is-

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

And as you can imagine, during a time when a lot of people couldn’t go to the grocery stores or there just wasn’t enough food on the shelves, learning to find tasty and nutritious foods that were growing freely around us was super useful knowledge. Once her pandemic TikTok videos went viral and Alexis continued to gain avid followers, foraging became more than just a hobby. It became a joy that she was able to share with the world.

Today, Alexis is touching so many people’s lives through her work, inspiring them to get out of their comfort zones and look at the world around them differently. Because if you look closely enough and with a little bit of effort, there’s abundance all around us. Remember those super smelly ginkgo fruits Alexis was talking about earlier? Well, even they could be a source of food.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

I’m going to show you how to deal with these stinky guys. And by deal with, I mean enjoy.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

Alexis has made different tutorials to show her followers that if you take the right precautions and process them properly, it’s worth braving the smelly ginkgo flesh to get to the nuts.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

You need a plastic bag or gloves and a female ginkgo tree. You’ll know that she’s female this time of year because look at all the fallen fruit.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

And after collecting the nuts, Alexis roasts them in a pot, just like you would if you were making popcorn.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Look how lovely they are now that they are destankified. Thanks for hanging out. Happy stinky nut snacking. Don’t die.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

Apparently these tasty roasted ginkgo nuts are a popular bar snack in some parts of Japan and Korea. But on a trip to Japan, Alexis learned that humans aren’t the only ones who enjoy snacking on the stinky ginkgo. She discovered firsthand that bears eat ginkgo fruits too. You got to tell that story, Alexis. You said the magic word. You said bear.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

I was in the Ishikawa Prefecture, and one of my friends, Hannah, lives in this small town, Yamanaka Onsen, and it is beautiful. It is nestled into the mountains. And so, we get there and we’re prepping to go on a hike. We were actually going to see if there was any late in the season horseradish coming up, because Hannah was going to be hosting a nabe or hot pot night later that evening, and we wanted to see if we could bring back some fresh horseradish. And when we were getting ready, I see Hannah put a little metal object that looked like a little bear head onto her jacket. And then she pulls the nose out and then it falls down, and it’s a bell. It’s a bear bell that looks like a little bear.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

It’s a bell in the shape of a bear that is used to deter bears?

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

As a bear bell.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

Got to get me one of those.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

And I was just like, “Ah ha ha. But we won’t see one, right?” And she’s like, “I don’t know. One of my neighbors who’s on the boar hunting committee had just caught a bear in one of her traps by accident earlier that week.”

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

If you’re wondering what a boar hunting committee is, well, in recent years, wild boar attacks and encounters have become a huge problem across Japan as the boar population has exploded. And towns like the one Alexis was visiting have to organize their own boar hunting parties to deal with the issue. And apparently, a bear got caught in one of the traps that was meant for the boars. And we all know what that means.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Oh, so we might see bears. It’s just like, anything can happen. And then, quite literally, it felt like the second we left town, the second that we got onto the muddy path going out into the woods and up into the mountains, the first notable thing we saw was a literally still steaming bear poop that was just 95% ginkgo nuts.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

Oh, the bears were there.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

There was no doubt in anybody’s mind. We were like, “Oh, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Bear here, recently. Great. This is his house. So what if we just ring this bell for a few minutes before we continue forward?” And that is exactly what we did.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

Well, and that’s the thing. Most species of bears we believe can smell from over a mile away. So they knew you were coming before you were there. You also had a little bell, right? That was chiming a little bit, making noise. So that bear pooped either heard the bell, or smelled you all, or both, and decided, “You know what? I don’t really need one of these pesky people in my life this afternoon. I’m going to walk away.” That bear could have been up a tree, which is what I’m guessing. Usually when you’re foraging, you’re not looking up, I bet.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

As you started saying that sentence, I was like, “Oh my God, he could have been above us and we didn’t even know, because I didn’t even look.”

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

A lot of people will go on hikes and be disappointed that they didn’t see a bear. And my question always is, “Did you look up?” And they didn’t. And I’m like, “Yeah, I miss a lot of bears too because I’m not looking up.” They’re very still. They can be very, very high, so you don’t see them. They could be taking a little nap. But that is so often where they are. And what did you do? Did you find the horseradish?

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

No.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

Oh my gosh. That’s how the story ends?

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

We didn’t find the horseradish, but we did find sansho leaves, which are the leaves of Szechuan peppercorn. And so we brought those back and made a really tasty, salty condiment to add to the soup bowls instead, which was really nice.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

Delicious.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

And then we went to her yard and picked fresh yuzu. And I was like, “I don’t know. Maybe I need to live where the bears are.”

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

I’m so moved by Alexis’s foraging adventures and all the experiences that have opened up for her because she was able to continue to nurture her love for wild plants and fall back in love with food. And we are so lucky that Alexis did the hard work of unlearning those toxic messages about body image and beauty, because today, her love of foraging and creating delicious foods with wild plants has allowed so many of us to rethink our own relationship to food.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

I think that there is something about being directly involved with your food that makes you appreciative, not just of what you gathered, or grew, or in the case of some of my friends, hunted. It makes you think more deeply about everything. If you are putting a ton of time, and blood, and sweat, and tears into digging up ground nut tubers, then suddenly, you’re asking yourself, “Whose hands were digging up these potatoes? Where were they grown? I wonder how far they traveled to get here.” You start wanting to know a fuller story of what it is that you’re eating, and you get to also experience a lot of flavors that you never would otherwise. Like a roasted ginkgo nut is like creamy popcorn, which I know sounds weird.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

No, it sounds delicious.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Oh, it’s so good. Oh my God. The first time that I made them, I was like, “Oh, so this is happening every year for the rest of my life, because that’s how good these are.” And I would’ve never experienced that flavor if I was just going to Kroger every day.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

You’re touching people in so many different situations, and I think there’s so much beauty that your gateway to that is something that just exists. And you offer it so joyfully in your content.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

I honestly just think that when I am outside remembering how interconnected everything is, remembering how connected to everything I am, is when I am at my most serene, and it is when I am the happiest. This world around us, it’s fantastic, and there’s always something more to learn, and there’s always something more to be enchanted by. And so, to be able to transmute that joy into this little video package to get to share with the world, honestly, it’s such a privilege and one that I do not take lightly. And I just hope that it inspires other people to find what makes them feel that way, even if it isn’t hanging out outside in a tent for a couple of days, and gathering a ton of wild foods around it, and making videos about them.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

Alexis, I cannot thank you enough for being a guest on this podcast. And I want to keep you forever, but I won’t.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

This was such a joy. It just felt like friend time.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

I was thinking to myself like, “Oh, I get to brag to everybody that I’m friends with Alexis Nikole Nelson now.”

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Oh, I get to brag that I’m friends with Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant now.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

We’ll be real life friends. We’ll be real life friends.

Alexis Nikole Nelson:

Real life friends. Real life friends.

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:

We’ll break the internet.

Thanks for listening to Going Wild. If you enjoyed the show and want to support us, please follow Going Wild on your favorite podcast app and leave a review. It really helps. This episode was hosted by me, Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, written and produced by Caroline Hadilaksono. Sound design and engineering by Cariad Harmon and Jason Sheesley. Our managing editor is Priscilla Alabi. Going Wild is produced by Great Feeling Studios and the WNET Group. Jacob Lewis is our executive producer. Danielle Broza is digital lead for nature. And Fred Kaufman is executive producer for nature. Artwork by Ariana Bullers and Karen Brazell.

Special thanks to Amanda Schmidt, Blanche Robertson, Jayne Lisi, Chelsey Saatkamp, and Karen Ho. Going Wild is a podcast from PBS Nature, made possible by viewers like you. Watch new episodes of Nature Wednesdays at 8:00/7:00 Central on PBS, at pbs.org/nature, and on the PBS Video App. Funding is provided by Anne and Russell Fernald. Stay connected with PBS Nature on social media and sign up for their newsletter. Link in the show notes. You can also follow me, Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, and PBS Nature on social media. Find guest details in each episode’s show notes.