Alexis Nikole Nelson: When you go back far enough, everybody has some sort of connection to foraging because none of us would be here if it wasn't for that action.

Amanda Shapiro: Hi, Healthyish friends and welcome to the _Healthyish_ podcast, where we explore food and wellness in all their delicious complexity. I'm Amanda Shapiro, the editorial director at _Bon Appétit _and the founding editor of _Healthyish,_ and I'm so excited to introduce you to our very special next guest, Alexis Nikole Nelson. You may also know her as the Black Forager. I think the best way to get to know Alexis is really by pulling out your phone and pulling up her Tik Tok or Instagram videos, but before you do that, stay with us, we want to give you a proper introduction. And what she's doing on those videos is usually traipsing through the woods or the fields or the parks of Columbus, Ohio, where she lives in search of wild produce. Take a listen. 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: This is my land, otherwise known as cowboy toilet paper. Listen to the fleece. It's so soft. You can use it to make tea, but I just think that it's cute. 

Amanda Shapiro: Oh, and she's also singing a lot of the time, which we're definitely going to get into. She is one of those people who is just so conversational, so charismatic that she already feels like a friend. I'm so excited to talk to you today. Alexis Nikole Nelson, welcome to the _Healthyish_ podcast. 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Oh my God, Amanda! Thank you so much for having me. Holy smokes. That was just like a beautiful intro and now I'm just going to be, "Hi, my name is Alexis and I am a forest troll. Let's talk about eating stuff off the ground."

Amanda Shapiro: Well, that's exactly what we want to talk about, so that's perfect. I mean, that's really exactly the first question I have, which is watching your videos, I feel like I'm outside with you, but what is it really like to be out there in the fields and forests around Columbus, walking with you? 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: I stop constantly. Occasionally to my partner and my dogs to gram, I- because to me it's just so exciting. It's not my fault that there is a noteworthy plant every three to seven feet along every single trail that we walk. So I am, I'm a frequent stopper, for sure. Very capable of like speed walking a 15 minute mile, but miles usually take me closer to a solid 30, because there's so much to behold. 

Amanda Shapiro: I feel like you see the world differently than a lot of other people. Literally, you see things that other people don't. And you've talked about this, I think you call it plant blindness and you want to, you want to, you're on a mission to eradicate, or maybe that's too strong a word. You're on a mission to reduce plant blindness. What does that really mean? 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Oh my gosh. So nine times out of 10, probably even more than nine times out of 10, but we'll say that just because I don't need to go getting a big head. Studies show that when you ask any random person that you come across to identify a tree that they're standing by, or to look at a grassy knoll and tell you what they see in front of you they'll say "plants" or "grass" or " trees." And then we do have these little pockets, these like, almost like cultural touchstones, like everyone knows what a dandelion is. Um, because for most of us growing up, they were like the scourge of our parents' lawn so... 

Amanda Shapiro: Right, or the things we would blow on and make the dandelion- 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: And make the wishes.

Amanda Shapiro: Yeah, make the wishes, right. 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Exactly. 

Amanda Shapiro: But you do seem like a very natural performer and watching you just break into song about dandelions or pesto or whatever. I just have to guess that you have some kind of musical theater performance background.

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Ding, ding, ding! 

Amanda Shapiro: Yes! I am a fellow theater, high school theater nerds so I see when I see one, I know one. 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Uh, yeah, I originally went to college as an environmental engineering major and after crying after too many labs and realizing that I hated physics. No hate, no shade to the physicists, our brains just are wired very differently. 

Amanda Shapiro: We need them, but we don't have to be them. 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Exactly. And I always felt like that was what was missing in academia period was having that kind of joyousness in relaying information and in watching people process that information. 

Amanda Shapiro: Yes, and teaching through entertainment, where, where people don't even realize that they're learning or they're changing their entire perspective on something because you're singing to them.

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Exactly. I love it when people are just like, well, I just realized I've been watching your videos for an hour and I'm like, "Yes, good. That means that I have done a good job. Thank you for this high praise." It's it's so rewarding. Teaching people, just like a handful of plants and then having them come back to me a couple of weeks later and say, "I didn't even realize that I was passing so many plants going on walks through my neighborhood," because it kind of flips on a switch. They download like inaturalists on their phone and suddenly a city block seems whimsical and like almost magical. Whereas previously you, you wouldn't have stopped to notice those kinds of things. 

Amanda Shapiro: So I want to take a big step back, and I want to ask you about your background. So I know you're not the first generation of, of Nelson or whatever surname there is on your maternal side. Uh, in this, in the Ohio area, you have talked a bit about your mom's relationship with plants and what you learned from her, but I also know it goes even further back than that. So, however far back you want to go, tell me about how that kind of relationship with the land is part of your family. 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Oh absolutely. So we're very lucky, um, because not, not every person of color and especially not every black person in the United States is lucky enough to be able to trace a lot of their familial history back. On my mom's side of the family, with her father, uh, they'd been, they've been in the United States since the 1600s. They were farmers in New England after the Revolutionary War, and with my mom's mom's side of the family, with my, my Nana, she was a second generation Cape Verdean immigrant to the Cape Cod area. And with a lot of bigger and immigrant families, a lot of them brought foraging practices with them. And, I mean, my Nana was like working in the cranberry bogs in the 1930s to help better support her family. And that's a whole lot of exposure to plant life, but you just get to learn about with each passing day while you're out there. So- 

Amanda Shapiro: Yeah. Tell me more about that. She was picking the cranberries and selling them for food? 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Yeah. Well, picking the cranberries for, uh, someone else's business, which one of many reasons why I think being a forger of color is very revolutionary is because nine times out of 10, historically, and even in the present day, if you are a person of color and you are attending the land, it is typically for someone else's gain and that person tends to be richer and unfortunately often whiter than you. And so, when you go back far enough, everybody has some sort of connection to foraging because none of us would be here if it wasn't for that action. But for the indigenous people who were already here like that, that was food, that was eating. And then a lot of those indigenous folks in turn taught black people who were enslaved those same tips and tricks, and about those same kinds of plants because as a black person, living on a plantation, you were lucky if you were getting enough to eat to sustain the kind of duress you were putting your body through every day. So it was smart to know how to forage, how to trap, how to fish, how to hunt, so you could better take care of yourself and better take care of your family and the rest of your community. 

So, when slavery ended, a lot of black folks expected to be able to continue those practices and some even hoped to make a living out of it because they were so good at it. And let me tell you, a lot of those plantation owners who were also, you know, parts of the local government and a lot of areas of the south, did not want that to happen. Uh, they just lost an extremely efficient and extremely cheap work force, and wanted to do pretty much anything within their power to try and reverse that as much as possible while still remaining within the bounds of the law. So what happened is, those public spaces that a lot of black folks and indigenous folks, and just poor folks in general, would harvest from, fences were put up around them. Some metaphorical, some actually physical. So you no longer could be going into those spaces to harvest, sad air horn sound. Um, I have to be light about this otherwise I get big, sad about this. So a lot of those folks had to return right back to the plantation as sharecroppers, and it really put a lot of black folks at a disadvantage when we're already disadvantaged enough to begin with. 

Amanda Shapiro: Yeah, the irony of calling it free when you essentially end up back where you started.

Alexis Nikole Nelson: I mean, as my Nana got older, right until she passed in her nineties, she grew tomatoes on her third floor balcony in Boston, Massachusetts, and very much passed on this connection to plants this connection to the earth, through plants to my mother. So when my mother moved from New England to Ohio, and suddenly had all of this space to work with, she crafted these beautiful gardens. And if I wanted to be spending time with her on the weekends, like her way to decompress was working in the garden. So I would also have to work in the garden. Work is a very loose term. It is very hard to corral a five-year-old into doing anything even remotely benficial, uh, for any chore, not just outside. But my strongest memories are that my mom used to quiz me on the plants in our yard from a very young age. So by the time I got to elementary school, I could be like, "Oh, basil. Look at that stem, it looks like the mint it must be in the mint family." And then being able to like go and find a book later and then have that confirmed. But out of all of the herbs, out of all of the flowers, out of all of the trees that my mom taught me about, the plants that stuck with me the most were the weeds that were also useful.

Amanda Shapiro: Wow. Why do you think it was? Why do you think you went to the weeds?

Alexis Nikole Nelson: I think as a, as a gently lazy child, like I was, who grew into a gently lazy adult, I saw all of the time and effort my mom was putting into the tomatoes. All the time and effort my mom was putting into pruning the Mulberry trees, and taking care of the lavender bushes. And then suddenly you would turn around and there would be these plants that you had no say in, that you put no blood, sweat, nor tears into, that were even more nutritious sometimes than the things that you did put all of that time and effort to. And they were just there for the taking. I thought it was so revolutionary as a child.

Amanda Shapiro: It's magical in a way that, I mean, there's something about these plants that seem to have super powers, the way that they spread and crop up without any human interaction, really. My, my great-grandmother and my grandmother on my mom's side were both heavy gardeners and they would always call them volunteers, which I think is just a hilarious, I mean, I know that's like a common gardening term, but I just always thought that that was so hilarious.

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Yeah, they're like "Hm but I volunteered, can't I stay, please?" And a lot of people say no. 

Amanda Shapiro: Yeah, oh my God, that's so sad, but it's so beautiful that you took those volunteers and you were like, "I see you. I appreciate you. You are wanted here." 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Yeah. I think people get really down on plants that we consider weeds. Especially when those weeds are considered invasive. The plants don't have that kind of agency. It's not their fault that they're good at their job. And if there's a chance to develop a symbiotic relationship with that plant, instead of just trying to, you know, nuclear out of the system, why not do it?

Amanda Shapiro: After the break, Alexis Nikole and I will talk about one place that rarely develops a symbiotic relationship with the land, and that's the restaurant industry.

Okay, let's get back to our conversation with Alexis Nikole Nelson. We're talking about the places that don't develop a symbiotic relationship with the land, like the restaurant industry, which obviously we cover a lot on _Bon Appétit_. I know among restaurants, foraged foods are considered super gourmet. I remember when I started working here and I had never even really heard about ramps and suddenly it was like the spring and everyone was like, "oh, it's ramp, season, it's ramp season." and then I go to a restaurant. These ramps are on this menu and this thing is like $30. Like what is going on? Um, you actually made a rap about ramps, I think, on your, on Tik Tok, which I thought again, so entertaining. And so educational. Tell me you had some, you have some very strong feelings about the subject, what's your take?

Alexis Nikole Nelson: I do. Ooh. This is the part of the episode where I get to make enemies, yay! So for those of you who are, I guess, lucky enough to have escaped the fervor around ramps, every single spring, uh, ramps are allium tricoccum. They are a native allium to North America. They really kind of straddle the sweet spot, perfectly in between onions and garlic, which I feel like are kind of the two ends of that allium spectrum that we like to compare everything to. And they're, at least in some parts of the Eastern half of the United States, they are very prolific, but there are now some parts on the Eastern side of the United States where they are not. And a large reason why that is the case is because a lot of folks, for the sake of selling to the luxury food industry, were going into wooded spaces and just completely clearing them out. I did not do a lot of ramp harvesting this season, even though I have ample opportunity to, um, there are kind of two camps. There is the camp of only gathering leaves. Uh, ramps put up these beautiful, uh, like wide, almost lance shaped leaves in the spring time. So some people will only harvest the leaves. I'm going to be real real with everyone right now. The leaves are like the only part of the ramp that has any flavor that I feel like you cannot replicate with another allium. So people will gather one leaf from a single plant that has two or more leaves and only do that for a handful of plants in the area that they're gathering from. And if they're sparse in that area, then you just don't gather from them at all. 

And then there's the campus folks who will dig them up bald and all. And of course, if you're taking up the entire root system, then that plant and that spot's done. You know, that's, that's the end of its life cycle. If, if ramps were very quick growing, this would be a little less of an issue. My big issue is the people who see dollar signs in their eyes and see the chefs putting the call-outs up on Facebook, offering X amount of dollars per pound, and then going in and just filling up gallon buckets with whole ramps. Um, that is why one of the two ramp variations is now on the endangered list in the state of New York when it wasn't previously. And it's now on the special concern list in New Jersey and Tennessee, both of which are pretty recent developments. 

Amanda Shapiro: Right. There seems to be this vicious cycle where they're in demand because they're considered rare, but they're rare because we've over foraged them and created this demand for them that is self perpetuating and good for, you know, a restaurant owner, if you can charge that much and get that much and make them feel like this rarefied thing, but not good for the species in the short or long run. 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Exactly. I think forged food is of course, very exciting. If I didn't think it was exciting, I would be very bad at what it is that I do. So I get a lot of the cache, but boy golly, I would love to see more big restauranteurs putting like a garlic mustard, you know, puree onto their plates. Putting more dandelions into their meals, taking a lot of non-native species, and especially invasive species and kind of hamming it up for them just as much as we do for, for things like ramps.

Amanda Shapiro: Yeah. Take those volunteers. 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Yeah. Take those volunteers. They are volunteering. 

Amanda Shapiro: What are you super excited to be picking right now? 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: June berries, happy air horn this time. Oh my gosh. So June berries are one of those plants that I go on about all year, and then it'll be just about time to start harvesting them, and I'll get in my own head and be like, "have I made too big of a deal out of this? I've literally been talking them up since the second that the season ended last year. What if I bite into this June Berry and it isn't everything that I remembered and my life is a sham?" And then I bite into one and then it's just blueberry meets apple bliss and then I'm like, "Nope, just kidding. These are still my favorite fruits." and I'm excited that they are back for a few short, beautiful weeks. 

Amanda Shapiro: My jaw dropped when you said blueberry meets apple. Like tell me more, what, what are these magical berries? 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Oh, they're so good. They are in the Amalanchier genus. There are a couple of different species. They are native to North America and they grow in these just hefty clusters all over the tree. Um, you will not have to worry about like sharing with the birds because there will be berries you cannot reach. And those berries don't belong to you. That's like the mindset that I take every time that I'm picking like, "oh, I can't reach that. It's not my berry." 

Amanda Shapiro: That is like a perfect motto.

Alexis Nikole Nelson: And they are, they are delightful. They are just pectin laden enough that they set a jelly by themselves. Oh my gosh. I, I make June Berry hand pies. Just little flaky dough half moons filled with June Berry jam. And they are my favorite thing to make and my favorite thing to eat. And my dad, who's very weird about food, it's like the one forged thing of mine that he will eat. I will like, I will bring you Jim Berry jam. I'm driving- 

Amanda Shapiro: Don't say things like that Alexis Nikole, I will not forget. I will put that in my calendar and send you an invite. 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: I will do it too, right into the right into the G Cal the second, this recording is over. 

Amanda Shapiro: I just need to say it, even though it's, it's sort of intuitive, but if you're into foraging, it seems like by default you're into cooking.

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Exactly.

Amanda Shapiro: Do you think of yourself as, as a chef? How do you think about cooking with what you forage? 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Oh, my gosh. I mean, it's one of my favorite parts of the entire process. Like yesterday I made Japanese knotweed scones and I was basing it off of a lemon scone recipe. And I'm like, well, they're both acidic. Japanese knotweed tastes very rhubarb-y when you add a little bit of sugar to it, it makes it skew super sweet. And I was just like, "oh, okay, well, Japanese knotweed gets like weirdly stringy. So I'm going to make it into a puree. And if I'm putting the puree into a scone dough, then I need to pull back on the soy milk I'm putting into it otherwise they're just going to be big, a little pillow cookies." And I- it's weird because I don't think of myself as a chef. I'm definitely just like a very passionate home cook. 

Amanda Shapiro: Well, I should also mention that you're vegan. 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Yes. Oh gosh. As if I needed to make things harder for myself. I have to go find my food and then it can't have dairy or eggs in it. Challenge accepted. 

Amanda Shapiro: Well, so I think there is this stereotype probably that if you're vegan and you're a forager that you're like just sitting there munching on leaves all, all day, like, what else do you like to cook? Like even foraged ingredients aside? 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Like I had mentioned earlier, my mom's family is Cape Verdean. Uh, we have even recently confirmed that the port, the part of the family that came here in the 1600s also Cape Verdean. And there is a lot of really delicious hardy food that comes with that tradition that is like made its way into the United States. My favorite of which is our kind of take on the traditional rice and beans and it's called jagacida, and it is so tasty. Much more spice laden than I feel like a lot of traditional rice and beans dishes tend to be, but the broth is all formed around these beautifully slow simmered browned unions that you would typically uh brown and a little bit of butter, or like, lard if you wanted to, or just like a neutral oil, if you wanted to. And that's the other thing is like every Cape Verdean family has their own take on jag. Like you could go down the street to, you know, your, your mom's friend's house and they make it with peas instead of with kidney beans, like my Nana did. And there's so much room for variation, but it all really centers around the way that the onions are cooked before adding the water to make the broth and the amount of paprika, which gives it this beautiful reddish golden color when it's finished. And I- my mom is going to call me about this and in this in particular, because I hated jag as a kid, I hated it. We would get on the plane to go see my Nana and it would take us forever in the car to get from Boston, Logan to her house because of the big dig. I just got to age myself and that's really fun. And then we get there-

Amanda Shapiro: I'm right there with you.

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Thank you. I'm glad that someone understands. And then we'd get there and I'd be starving and my Nan would be like, cool, here's tuna salad and jag. And I'd be like, "I came all this way for rice and beans?!" And then my mom would like get mad at me in front of her mom and then pull me aside and be like, "we're going to go get you fried clams, but just this one time." And it was never just that one time. But as I got older, and especially after I lost my Nana in my early twenties, it suddenly became this very emotional way to connect with her and to feel more connected with my family and our history in general. It's my biggest comfort food now, especially in winter, we, you know, just had going from 2020 into 2021 and how isolating it was. Oh my God. I had just my giant cast iron pot going filled with jag like at the top of every single week. That's just all we were living off of all winter. 

And sometimes I get to have fun with it, you know, I'll add in some dice field, garlic bulbs and with the onions at the beginning. Lately, I've been having a lot of fun using Sweet Bay Magnolia leaves and place of the bay leaf that you traditionally put in, uh, alongside the onions and the other aromatics. So I still get to put like my own little spin on it while still feeling really connected to my heritage.

Amanda Shapiro: I love that. And it's like a pot of family right there. 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: It is. And that's what it feels like. I love it every single time. My mom would always just be like, "nothing makes me happier than calling and hearing that you are making jag right now. Like hearing me onions sizzling in the pot." 

Amanda Shapiro: How many times has she said, like "I told you so," that you actually now like that, that dish.

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Now I just beat her to it. It started getting very bad I'd say like five years ago. And she was like, "oh, so I, I come over and I snoop through your fridge because I'm your mother and you have jag in the fridge? Very interesting." 

Amanda Shapiro: Yeah. That, that mom, you, you really nailed it the, "hm" that like, mom "hm." 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Exactly the, "we know exactly what's going through my mind right now. So I'm not even going to say it. I'm just going to let you stew on it for a second." 

Amanda Shapiro: Yeah. Yeah. Um, all right. Well, I know we just have a few minutes. Can we get the ukulele back? 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Oh my gosh. Ah, let's see. I just hope that I remember where chords are this time. Okay. Okay. We can- that sounds like a song sounds, sure. 

Amanda Shapiro: Yeah, sounds like a June Berry song maybe? 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: A June berry song, oh my gosh. 

Amanda Shapiro: No pressure. No pressure.

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Oh gosh. Okay. Now I'm just going through like, Ooh, rhyming words, rhyming words, rhyming words. Okay.

Thanks for listening. I have to go soon. So if you need me, you'll catch me gathering berries in June. Yeah. 

Amanda Shapiro: That was so beautiful and a perfect way to sign off what was really an amazing and enlightening and inspiring conversation about foraging with Alexis Nikole Nelson. Thank you so much for being with us. I had such a blast talking to you. 

Alexis Nikole Nelson: Thank you so much for having me. This has just been a highlight of my day, highlight of my week. I love _Healthyish_, so it was an honor to get to be here.

Amanda Shapiro: Thanks for listening in on the second episode of the _Healthyish_ podcast. I hope you feel inspired to do a little research step outside, snoop around for some magnolia buds, or just be a little more thoughtful about where your meal comes from. I highly recommend following Alexis Nikole on her Tik Tok at @alexisnikole and on Instagram @blackforager. Her videos are a delight, I promise. And if you love the show, be sure to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts, it helps us keep putting out the good vibes. For the recipes and stories mentioned in the episode, you can follow _Healthyish_ on all the social platforms at @healthy_ish, or just visit our website for more.

The _Healthyish_ podcast is produced by _Bon Appétit_ in partnership with Pod People. Vishnu Vallabhaneni is our senior producer and Morgane Fouse is our associate producer. This episode was engineered by Trae Budde and our theme song is by Particle House. A huge thank you to the Pod People production team of Matt Sav and Madison Lusby. From _Bon Appétit_, June Kim and myself provided editorial direction for the episode. Special thanks to Julie Shen, Ginny Bloom and Nico Steele. I'm your host, Amanda Shapiro. I'll see you next week.