{"id":13946,"date":"2026-05-27T15:19:43","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T15:19:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/?p=13946"},"modified":"2026-05-27T15:19:43","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T15:19:43","slug":"foraging-in-the-rust-belt-is-cool-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/?p=13946","title":{"rendered":"Foraging in the Rust Belt Is Cool Again"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Published May 27, 2026 03:22AM<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

For someone new to foraging, deciding whether a plant is edible or deadly can be daunting, even terrifying. For the 10-million-plus social media followers of Alexis Nikole Nelson (@blackforager<\/a>), it\u2019s a rollicking good time.<\/p>\n

\u201cWelcome back to America\u2019s 12th-favorite game show: Poison or Snack!\u201d Nelson gleefully declares in a series of posts where she gamifies plant identification. Do you know your spotted smartweed (snack) from your white snakeroot (poison)? She\u2019ll talk you through it with the authority of a botany professor and the timing of a stand-up comedian\u2014all while looking like a magical forest sprite, her floral sundress trailing to her ankles.<\/p>\n

More often than not, Nelson is pursuing edible plants in her own Columbus, Ohio, neighborhood. Along with other foragers across America\u2019s postindustrial Rust Belt, she\u2019s laying claim to a landscape long inaccessible for a host of historical reasons or simply overlooked in favor of the mineral wealth beneath it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI say all the time, foraging is just a practice of noticing,\u201d Nelson says. She provides a guide to doing that safely and joyfully, season by season, in her new book Happy Snacking, Don\u2019t Die!<\/em><\/a> (Simon Element), out September 22. From Dandelion Flower Fritters to hot-pink Milkweed Nectar to Quick-Pickled Purslane, the recipes rely on ingredients quite possibly ripe for the picking in your own backyard.<\/p>\n

Nelson comes by her whimsy naturally, but she also understands it can be powerful. \u201cIt\u2019s exciting to be part of the conversation of women and femmes getting a say in how we show up in the outdoors,\u201d she says. \u201cThere are some great women-led athleticwear brands now. You have your pockets for everything. You have your shorts to make sure your thighs don\u2019t hate you. But you also get to feel cute.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her style is strategic in other crucial ways. \u201cBeing in the forest and looking like a fairy princess makes me, a nearly six-foot-tall Black woman, seem approachable to people,\u201d Nelson says. \u201cI would much prefer that they come and ask me what I\u2019m doing rather than ask the cops. Which has happened.\u201d She recalls being \u201clightly bullied\u201d by other kids in junior high school who told her, \u201cWe\u2019re Black. Black kids don\u2019t do that. We don\u2019t go camping and we don\u2019t go picking random wild plants and telling everyone what they are and putting them in food.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now she unpacks the history behind those attitudes and the loss of local plant knowledge, which she\u2019s made it her mission to restore. In one post, she provides an illustrated chart, starting with Reconstruction-era trespass laws that criminalized foraging on lands where Black and Indigenous people had previously gathered food, through \u201chands-off\u201d conservation policies that restricted foraging in parks, up to what she calls \u201cThe Big Food Forgetting.\u201d<\/p>\n

She believes the future can look different. \u201cI live in a neighborhood with a lot of school-age kids and teenagers, and we\u2019re the ones with the weird yard with all the native plants,\u201d Nelson says. \u201cWe just got native pollinator gardens protected in Columbus. We\u2019re making baby steps. But they\u2019re steps.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Photo: J.B. Douglas)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Three hours east of Nelson\u2019s foraging grounds, in Pittsburgh, it\u2019s a Wednesday afternoon at Apteka.<\/a> The restaurant specializes in modern Slavic plant-based cooking. It isn\u2019t open for dinner Wednesdays, but the kitchen staff is here anyway, prepping and receiving.<\/p>\n

Chef Tomasz Skowronski has just gotten a call from his father, a materials science professor at nearby Carnegie Mellon University who brought his foraging habit with him from his native Poland. \u201cHe was asking me what to do about all this spruce he cut, and should he just get started on something?\u201d Skowronski sounds mildly exasperated. \u201cMy dad\u2019s like a bear! He\u2019s out there, picking those berries.\u201d Sometimes, it\u2019s all Skowronski and his co-chef and co-owner, Kate Lasky, can do to keep up.<\/p>\n

\u201cA restaurant doing foraging well is about creating systems for how to handle that logistically,\u201d Skowronski says. \u201cNot just the aspiration of being seasonal or having foraged stuff, but how to actually pick it, how to make time to pick it when the moment\u2019s right, how to store it, and how to make use of it in a way that really shows off the ingredient.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those systems are visible from the moment you walk into Apteka. Jars of different ferments and cordials line shelves by the door. Bundles of dried tansy bristling with tight yellow blossoms hang from the ceiling. Want to sip some of that? Order the Zeptucha cocktail, made with tinctures of tansy, sage, mistletoe, and marigold. It\u2019s shaken until frothy, light, bright, herbal, delicious, and totally unique.<\/p>\n

The restaurant recently earned a semi-finalist nod from the James Beard Foundation for Outstanding Wine and Other Beverages Program. Here, \u201cother beverages\u201d include an entire section of the menu dedicated to Western PA Wild Teas made from plants picked by Apteka staffer Zach Rihn. \u201cZach has really invested a lot of time in learning plants. He\u2019s pretty Western Pennsylvania\u2013obsessed, canoeing and hiking around this area,\u201d Lasky says. \u201cI think it\u2019s encouraged a lot of people here to spend more time learning their environment and understanding it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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(Photo: Ross Mantle)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rihn adds, \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of history of plant use in this part of the world, of flavors that don\u2019t really exist in food we eat today.\u201d Right now he\u2019s interested in local alternatives to the bay leaves you can buy at any supermarket; in the absence of those Mediterranean imports, Indigenous people and early European settlers in some parts of what\u2019s now Pennsylvania relied on, for instance, incredibly fragrant sweet bay magnolia. A discovery like this snaps the world around him into sharper focus: \u201cA lot of nuance gets lost when you have hyper access to anything, anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

But is it possible, maybe, to get a little too interested in a native plant? \u201cEverybody wants to talk about ramps,\u201d says West Virginia farmer Mike Costello, and he admits he gets tired of it. \u201cAt the same time, it\u2019s really important to talk about ramps.\u201d<\/p>\n

Costello and his wife, Amy Dawson, live and produce food at Lost Creek Farm<\/a> in northern West Virginia. The property has been in Dawson\u2019s family for generations. Her maternal grandparents were the last to occupy the farmhouse before the couple returned to restore it in 2013, though Dawson\u2019s parents continued to run cattle on the property in the meantime.<\/p>\n

At the Farm and Forage Supper Club that Costello and Dawson run May through October, occasionally you\u2019ll see a cow hanging out surprisingly close to the long dining table set up on the grass, under lights strung from tree to tree. There\u2019s something slightly surreal about it and also absolutely right. The cows are part of the story Costello and Dawson are sharing. Foraged ingredients are, too. \u201cA central theme of Appalachian food is making the most of what you can get your hands on,\u201d Costello says. \u201cPeople who lived rurally, in times defined by scarcity, could go to the forest and find something that would sustain them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Depending on what month you visit Lost Creek Farm, you might get a slice of carrot-butter cake made with the edible leaves and flowers of wild carrot (aka Queen Anne\u2019s lace), served with elderflower whipped cream. You might get house-cured bologna flavored with smoked Dryad\u2019s saddle mushrooms, served as an opening snack on a rustic communion wafer\u2014the same recipe Costello\u2019s grandmother baked for her church\u2014with wild-onion mayonnaise and wildflowers. And you might just get a soup that\u2019s a vehicle for ramps Costello and Dawson harvested, along with their complicated thoughts about them.<\/p>\n