It occurred to me recently that in our modern world, not only are a lot of people detached from nature in a general sense, but as a side effect, they are also unfamiliar with the cadence of agrarian lifestyles.
What I mean by this is that while it may be intuitive for some of us to identify a plant, prepare it and eat it, most people think in a completely different way in industrial society.
I want to make things as clear and easy for new people and explain what “forager’s eye” means, as well as understanding how to even learn foraging.
What is “Forager’s Eye”?
Forager’s Eye is a rapid, sometimes unconscious environmental reading built from accumulated experience and interaction with the land.
Examples include:
- Looking at a plant and instantly recognizing the plant family even if you haven’t seen it before
- Glancing at an area and knowing immediately if you might find a fruit there or not
- The gut instinct that you shouldn’t eat a particular plant or mushroom
Take this photo below for example.
Most people look at this patch of land and think “weeds, scrub, trees” and go no further with the thought.
Forager’s eye is looking at this plot of land and instantly seeing food and medicine.
In this small area I found the following:
Mullein (below picture)
Lamb’s quarters
Sassafras
St. John’s Wort
Cleavers
Clover
Dewberries (a species of blackberry)
Black raspberries
Red raspberries
Elderberry
Black Cherry
Yarrow
Curly Dock
Bittercress
Autumn Olive
Stinging nettles
Dame’s Rocket
Milkweed
There was certainly more, and not all of these were in season yet, but that should give you a good idea of the sheer abundance that exists in most parts of the Midwest and what you can find if you develop forager’s eye.
What skills need to be developed?
It takes time to develop this eye for the land. There are a few skills that need to be developed to get to this level over time:
Plant identification - You have to first learn the plants you want to forage for.
Seasonal rhythms - Learn what plants are ready at what times of year in your local area. This will come from practice and just being outside more.
Biome - While you can learn all the technical information in the world, that is no substitute for being outside and actually interacting with the wildlife. Notice what plants grow in the area and pay attention to the nuances of the place you’re in. Eventually you will start to get a feel for what kinds of plants to associate with what local biomes.
The structures (and microstructures) of specific plants. This is more than basic identification, it’s getting familiar with the way the veins tend to run, the variations in the leaf shapes between different individuals, and knowing what a healthy vs diseased plant looks like.
An example of this is whenever I see mixed hardwood forests with hills and slopes down to seasonal streams, I know I will almost certainly see ramps there in the spring.
Sassafras seedlings
How It Works:
There are a few psychological things going on with this skill:
Perceptual learning
Explicit vs Tactit knowledge
Chunking
Essentially after countless hours of interacting with the environment around you, the brain starts to recognize patterns. When this happens, you start to notice details and nuances that were previously invisible to you. Often I find that these kinds of nuances are impossible to fully explain to someone, it is just something you start to intuit.
It is important to note that this perceptual learning is not something you can gain via book smarts. This is something you have to experience and practice in order to obtain.
As you gain more experience, the brain does what is called “chunking” similar to how chess masters function. This is what separates the novice from the expert.
Chunking is taking many bits of individual facts and reading them as a whole piece at once rather than noting each individual piece of information. An example of this would be recognizing “this plant is in the mint family” rather than actively thinking “it has opposite leaves, the scent is pungent, it has a square stem, it has a two-lipped flower” etc.
This is where tactit knowledge comes in: while explicit knowledge (field guides) are very helpful and useful, they are not a substitute for tactit knowledge.
Foraging relies very heavily on procedural and not-easy-to-explain, hands-on knowledge. This is why the skill is notoriously hard to learn via books alone.
Habitat reading is very much a classic example of these concepts; there are a lot of factors being taken into account such as time of year, tree canopy, plant species present, recent weather, soil moisture, etc but the expert forager isn’t thinking through all of those individual factors. They just know.
Lamb’s Quarters
Expertise researchers refer to this effect as “fluency”; or being so streamlined at processing certain types of information that it appears effortless and instant.
This is why the absolute best way to get into foraging is to work with a local guide or expert.
If anyone wants a local guide to come and teach them hands-on, I do bookings!
Split the cost between a handful of your friends and make an event of it!
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