Alexis Nikole Nelson, better known as the "Black Forager," is a social media sensation.
And she just happens to call Columbus home.
She joins All Sides to talk about her eagerly awaited first book.
Happy Snacking, Don’t Die! is a one-of-a-kind collection of recipes and foraging wisdom that teaches you how to turn common plants, flowers and fungi into yummy, plant-based meals.
This unique book is basically two books in one. It is a foraging plant guide and a vegan cookbook. It's organized by season to guide you through a year of appetizing discoveries.
We will discuss the new book and Nelson's career as an internet personality. On Tik Tok, Instagram, and YouTube she shares videos about foraging, cooking, and food history.
Guests:
- Alexis Nikole Nelson a.k.a. the "Black Forager"
Transcript
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Amy Juravich: You're listening to All Sides with Amy Juravich. Do you follow Columbus' own black forager on social media? If you do, then you're certainly not alone. Millions of people learn about foraging, connecting with nature, and yummy plant-based treats from Alexis Nicole Nelson. Never heard of her? That's okay. We're about to educate you about the abundance of food that is all around you, if you just know where to look. Alexis says foraging is a meditative practice that deepens one's connection with nature. She is also careful to make sure you forage correctly. And don't die. Her brand new book is called Happy Snacking, Don't Die. And she joins us now. Alexis Nicole Nelson, welcome to All Sides.
Alexis Nikole Nelson: Oh my gosh, Amy, thank you so much for having me. It is surreal to be in the studio. I'm usually just listening.
Juravich: Oh, well, thank you. Thank you for listening. I'm happy to know you're a listener. And it's great to know that you're Columbus's own Black Forager because you are known. You have so many followers. You are known, I'm assuming, around the world. But you're here. You're ours. So I love it. Thanks for coming to the studio today.
Nelson: Oh my gosh, well, the love goes both ways. I love Columbus so much. Oh, good.
Juravich: Well, how does it feel to have this book out in the world?
Nelson: Feels really good because it took a long time to write. I mean that's one of the the joys but also one of quarks of using such seasonal wild food. You know a couple years back when we had that really bad summer drought, it was the first year I was working on the book and I just didn't get to write any of the mushroom recipes, didn't got to recipe test any of them because we
Juravich: didn't get them. We didn't have enough rain. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Best laid plans, right? Exactly.
Nelson: Exactly, exactly.
Juravich: But I bet you've had a lot of mushrooms recently. Oh my gosh.
Nelson: More than you can shake a stick at our fridge is overflowing right now too much rain in other words. Yeah
Juravich: In other words, yes, okay. Well, I wanted to give our listeners a sense of what your content is like on social media. So I have a clip to play. I wanna start with this.
Nelson: One of these is poison and one is a snack, yeah, which one are you choosing? A or B, this or that? We're gonna learn about them together and that is a fact, oh yeah, cause one is poison, and one is a snak. Welcome back to America's 12th favorite game show, Poison or Snack. And yes, I said 12th, we have now passed all of the non-Steve Harvey seasons of Family Feud. Today's contestants are two bunching berries that happen to like to grow near each other. Here's A hanging out down here, here's B hanging out up here. But who's the good neighbor and who's bad neighbor. Let's find out.
Juravich: Now I know you've promoted yourself, your favorite game show to eighth favorite game show, but I had to get the Steve Harvey joke in there because I loved it. So.
Speaker 4: I appreciate that you are.
Juravich: Hold on. Let's get your mic back on. Okay. Yeah, I had to get the Steve Harvey joke back in there But um, okay. So can you tell me about this bit? I mean, do you still love it? I mean you you do this is it poison or is it a snack bit so many times? Do you still?
Nelson: I do still love it. It arose as a game that I played with my fiancee while we were on hikes because while we both were in scouts growing up and were both very outdoorsy, I am the one who is obsessed with plants. And he just likes plants, like a regular person. And so a lot of times he would spot something and say, I think this is that. And then I would have to swoop in and say, oh no, unfortunately, that's just one of its. Poisonous look-alikes and he was like, oh my gosh, you should just start quizzing me on them, which made me think oh gosh Maybe I should just Start quizzing everybody
Juravich: And how did you come up with the little ditty?
Nelson: Um, that was improved on the spot the first time that I recorded it. No way. Yeah, used to do a little bit of improv around Columbus, uh, I'm very rusty now. And it was catchy enough that I just decided to stick with it. Just go with.
Juravich: It. Okay, okay. In the community section of your book, you have some thank yous and in it you thank your Montessori teachers for letting your five-year-old self be best friends with a tree and not making you feel weird about it. So have you had a love of nature literally your whole life.
Nelson: I really have. It's been the through line through all of my life experiences as far back as I can remember, all the way back to Priscilla, the tree, who unfortunately was a mildly invasive honeysuckle tree. I did not know that at age five. I do know it now. Life is for learning.
Juravich: You're still you're still allowed to love Priscilla. Okay, she didn't mean it
Nelson: She didn't mean it, exactly, it wasn't her fault. Yeah.
Juravich: So you write in the beginning of the book that your mom and your dad are your cornerstones, your mom in her garden, your dad in the kitchen. So tell me what your mom taught you about plants growing up.
Nelson: So my mom's way of decompressing after a long week at the office was always going and working in the yard, getting her hands dirty. And one of my favorite things to do was to tag along beside her and ask her maybe too many questions about all of the plants in the yards.
Juravich: No such thing as too many questions, that's what I do for a living, go ahead.
Nelson: I don't know. I think when people have five-year-olds, they might discover the limit of too many questions.
Juravich: So what did she teach you was your mom kind of a gardening expert? Oh, absolutely. So she
Nelson: is mostly self-taught, learned a little bit from her mother as well, and I guess we've just been generationally building on that information. And one fateful day, my mom had pointed out a patch of onion grass in our lawn that I had never noticed before, and i asked her why she put it there. It seemed like a weird place to put a tasty plant, to which she told me, oh, I didn't put It just lives there and to a five-year-old That is mind blowing. I was like, accidental food, alert the presses. Like, why is nobody talking about this? And it really ignited this lifelong love of both myself connecting to my surroundings through food and teaching other people to do it too.
Juravich: You also write in the book that you did not have the word foraging in your vocabulary for a long time. Like you collected plants, you love nature, but you didn't know you were actually foraging. Is that right?
Nelson: No, it wasn't until probably my mid-20s when I came across a cookbook that I checked out at the Columbus Library called Forage Harvest Feast and I, you know, was like, oh, okay, there is a specific verb to describe this, because previously for my friends it was just that weird thing that Alexis does sometimes. She just picks up where...
Juravich: Plants and stares at them and smells them. So, you learned the actual word foraging, and then did you start calling yourself a forager at that point? Maybe not the title you have, Black Forager, but did you start being like, I'm going to go foraging this weekend?
Nelson: Yeah, it was also in the era of people using hashtags to organize their posts on Instagram. And so it was amazing to learn the word foraging because it allowed me to start searching through the internet for other people doing the same things. And so I started forming my online community with other foragers pretty early on before I even had a specific page for my foraging. You found your people? For my foraging, yeah.
Juravich: You found you people with a hashtag. With a hashtag! Oh, see you guys, social media's not all bad. So I read that in college, you studied theater and environmental science. So what did college Alexis want to do with her degrees?
Nelson: Oh my gosh, she had no idea. She just knew that she loved nature and knew that he loved storytelling. And when I first started at OSU, I started as an environmental engineer and it became readily apparent to me that I was going to be spending much more time in front of a computer or in a lab than I was actually going to spending outdoors. And I felt very ripped off and very upset.
Juravich: So more emphasis on the word engineer than on the environmental part exactly exactly
Nelson: And coming out of high school, I was simply told, oh, you're good at math and science, you absolutely should go into engineering. And so I guess I didn't really think twice about it. When I was a littler kid, all I wanted to be was a plant geneticist by day and a pop star by night. And I was told that that was off the table. So I was like, well, I don't have any dogs in this race. I'll do your engineering. But You know, instead, I took a semester off, came back and decided I'm just gonna focus on the things I know I love and the things that I think I'm pretty good at. And hopefully, things will fall into place later. My mom was very worried. She would ask me questions like, so what are you gonna do, write plays about the whales? Which, first of all,
Juravich: Why not? I would love that. Sure.
Nelson: I want to see a play about the whales. That's a freebie idea for anybody listening who wants to take it on. I would love to come and see that. But instead, it has turned into this social media presence, which is one part storytelling, one part food science, one couldn't have dreamed up a better role.
Juravich: This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We are talking with Alexis Nicole Nelson, better known as Black Forager. We're talking about her career and her new book, Happy Snacking Don't Die. So why is it important to know what you're doing when you're foraging, besides the obvious? Not dying, right? But in Happy Snackng Don't die, it's not just the name of your book and you say it in your videos as a funny tagline, But it's part public service announcement, right?
Nelson: Oh, absolutely. I want to remind people that while foraging is fun and anybody can learn how to do it, you do still have to be careful. You do still need to think through your actions. I always tell people, you know, take it slow. Some people think if they're becoming a forager, they have to be at a level like me or Yule Gibbons or Sam Thayer immediately. And you forget that a lot of us have literal decades, now for me nearly three decades, of slowly aggregating this information and these experiences. Also, I think if you dig up the dandelions in your front yard and eat them, you're a forager. I also, I don't think you need to be doing crazy things or climbing trees to knock mushrooms down or making insanely fancy meals to be considered a forage. So, my biggest piece of advice is... To go slow, enjoy the learning journey. Let your curiosity take over. And also, you're allowed to take something home to investigate it further without eating it. You're allowed to take Something home and compare it to one of your books on your bookshelf, or just just to be safe.
Juravich: Let's lean into this don't die, avoid the poisonous stuff thing for a moment. Here is a clip where you pay a little homage to your hometown a little bit.
Nelson: A is a buckeye. No bucks. If we don't say that, they take our degrees away. Buckeyes, or horse chestnuts as they are also known, not be eaten because of the high level of saponins in them. Here you can make a mean soap with them. Their seed pods can be pokey or smooth, it depends on what species you have.
Juravich: So everyone knows a buckeye is poisonous, right? Or have you had to teach people that over the years?
Nelson: Oh, I've absolutely had to teach people that, especially because here in the wonderful land of the Buckeyes, sometimes people's first experience with them is the candy, which is delicious. I'm not saying don't go and eat a Buckey candy before the next football game, but I have definitely had to inform some of my fellow Ohioans that the mythological nut that they are named for is not to be eaten.
Juravich: The real Buckeye looks dangerously close to the candy sometimes, depending on how the candy's made, right? Yeah, so I could see accidental confusion. So you paired that, though, with your is it poison or is it a snack, with something that looks surprisingly like a Buckey. Let's listen.
Nelson: This specific chestnut is a Chinese chestnut, but all chestnuts will come to that signature point. The little pokey butt and with its tail is where it got pollinated back when this spiky thing was just a female flower. American chestnuts have way fuzzier butts than this one does, but they're also getting very rare to see because of a blight that almost killed all of them about 100 years ago. Don't get me started on my American chestnut rant. I will cry.
Juravich: So you share a little history in that clip, too. I mean, why is it important for people to learn a little history while enjoying your videos?
Nelson: I think we've become really separated from our food systems in this day and age. And I mean, for starters, I think this summer has shown us how precariously balanced our food systems are and how easily some things can fall through the cracks when a system gets to be this big and sometimes loses a little bit of regulation. And I think having the knowledge of where your food comes from, what it looks like during all of its stages of life is really important. And not only that, it's something that we as humans all had to have in order to survive up until relatively recently, historically speaking. I think it empowers you to make smarter food choices. It makes you feel good also to have some of this food knowledge and really good about yourself when you get to serve something in which you were the hand that gathered it. You know the stories behind it to inform the cooking decisions that you make with it. I think having a stronger connection to food makes us happier people. And I hope that that's something that people are inspired to be both with my content and now with my book. Yeah, I.
Juravich: The chestnut, I'm leaning back to the chestnut for a second because it looks dangerously like a buckeye. Oh, they look so alike, it's crazy. I had no idea, yeah. Can I find a chestnut around or is it really, it's hard, like you said, there's not as many trees as there once was.
Nelson: I will say here in Columbus, you will usually find Chinese chestnuts or hybrid Chinese American chestnuts. American chestnuts are really hard to find. Ohio does have its own section of the American Chestnut Foundation. If you want to look them up and get your own American chestnuts to try to grow in your own yard. But knowing- that the odds are they will succumb to the blight within the first two decades of their life. You can see some of the massive remains of some of our American chestnuts just outside of the city. If you go to the great Hexagon Earthworks around Newark, there are some humongous leftover stumps from American chest nuts that used to grow there. And a couple hybrid chest nuts that produce a of nuts this time of year also growing in that area. Also, not to out one of my favorite chestnut trees, but there is a very prolific Chinese chestnut in Goodale Park that I am not sure the squirrels would love me telling you about, but I'm sure the tree would love it if you paid her a visit. So it hasn't succumbed to the blight? Is it just lucky? So Chinese chestnuts are actually the ones that accidentally brought the blight over when we were bringing them over as ornamentals. They co-evolved with the fungus blight. So they have had millennia, millions of years even to develop a resistance that our American chestnuts never did. So scientists are working on finding a solution to this problem in a bunch of different ways. Some of them are trying to. Breed in those resistant genes out of the Chinese chestnut. Some are trying to insert genes of wheat to help the trees heal themselves when they get injuries from the blight. So I'm really hoping by the end of my lifetime, we see a return of the American chestnut here in Ohio because it used to dominate the Southeastern portion of our state.
Juravich: Oh, wow. Yeah. And, and Buckeyes, on the other hand, you can find them everywhere. Oh, they're everywhere. There's one on my street. Yeah. Just, I know not to eat them, but we like to pick them up.
Nelson: Exactly. They're fun to pick up, they are fun to hold, they are fun to make necklaces with. I will say sometimes this time of year, they're hard to find because people will come and scoop them up to make necklases for game day. That's true.
Juravich: That is 100% true and happens in my neighborhood on the daily. This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. I'm Amy Juravich. We're talking about foraging with Black forager herself, Columbus's own Alexis Nicole Nelson. Coming up, we are going to talk about where you should forage and perhaps more importantly, where not to forage. That is when All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
You're listening to All Sides. I'm your host, Amy Juravich. Alexis Nicole Nelson, better known as the Black Forager.
Juravich: Wants everyone to know that foraging is not just for survivalists, it's for anyone who wants to be in nature. It's also a great way to add exciting new flavors to your table. And that is the premise of her brand new book, Happy Snacking Don't Die. The book is part foraging adventure, part yummy snack cookbook. And she's with us today to talk about connecting with nature. Alexis, Thanks again for joining us. Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me, Amy. So your book includes a list of essential foraging tools, like a Swiss Army knife, a gardening knife, wear boots, that kind of thing, but it also has bug spray on there. You don't really need much though. I mean, that's the list. That's the least. Exactly.
Nelson: A lot of times people will think that there's all of this gear that you need, but foraging can be as easy as taking a walk around your neighborhood this time of year and picking up the black walnuts that are trying to roll everybody's ankles and taking them home, giving them a little dry, and then cracking them open as you want to eat them throughout the winter. It doesn't have to be complicated.
Juravich: So it's kind of a minimalist activity, you would say?
Nelson: No, definitely not a hobby that you need to be running to the store constantly for. In fact, if anything, I think it kind of exists an antithesis to that.
Juravich: Mm, yeah. And you put an emphasis in your book on the bug spray though. Yes. Yes. Please. Tell me why, yeah? Please.
Nelson: Please don't get Lyme disease. Please don't get Alpha Gal. And also mosquito bites are very annoying. But, you know, Lyme Disease and Alpha Gal are the two that I hear people talking to me a whole lot about now. And as our winters are getting a little bit warmer, tick populations have just been exploding here in the Buckeye State. So you got to make sure that you're being safe, especially if you're going out into the woods to do your foraging, which with all of this rain and all of the mushrooms, I know a lot of people are. Yeah. And the mosquitoes are coming in.
Juravich: Coming with you. Oh my gosh, yes they are. Okay, so then you also say you have the kitchen side of the tools you need and one thing you need is a lot of jars. So your book says to make your kitchen look like an old time apothecary. So how many jars do you have in your kitchen home right now. Oh my god.
Nelson: If I had to make an approximate guess, I would say easily a thousand. Oh wow. It might even be closer to two. But also, so much of what we eat comes from things that we've foraged. You don't have to go that crazy. You can just have one jar with the one spice that you like going and gathering in the wild if you only like getting spice bush berries this time of year, that's totally fine. And you only need one jar for that.
Juravich: You do have a section in the book where you list places where you should not forage. The first place that you warn people about is to stay away from golf courses and then you say stay away railroad tracks. Tell me why.
Nelson: So both golf courses and railroad tracks are areas where there's heavy pesticide and herbicide usage. For railroads, you know, you gotta keep tracks clear. It helps the trains run as efficiently as possible. And so there are a lot of treatments going on frequently and within about a 30-foot radius of a railroad track at all times of the year. So unfortunately Uh, if you are like me and you have done a lot of scampering around the confluence of the Olin Tangi and the Scioto, there are some beautiful staghorn sumacs growing right along the railroad tracks. Don't take them. Don't be tempted. It's a trap.
Juravich: Man. Okay. What about city dwellers though? Do we need to get in a car and drive to the forest? I mean can you forage in a city?
Nelson: Oh, absolutely. During the springtime, the trees that line the swinging benches near Kosai, all the trees behind them are service berries, which there's an entire chapter for in the book and one of my absolute favorite fruits. In fact, Columbus is kind of a service berry city. We love having them as street trees. They line one of the sides of North Market. We have a couple in Goodale. There are a bunch around Ohio State's campus. I know, because I used to frequent them as a student. So you just, you don't need to go anywhere. You just have to pay a little bit closer attention.
Juravich: Okay, well why don't you tell me one of the recipes with service berries that's one of your favorites in the book
Nelson: My favorite serviceberry recipe in the book are the hand pies. You make this really tasty, thick jam with the serviceberries. You can leave the seeds in for an almondy crunch or take them out if, you know, seeds in it aren't your jam. Put them into a little hand-rolled pastry, crimp the edges, and then you have a delicious portable treat. That is a little reminiscent of like the little hand pies you can get at the gas station, but way more exciting because you made it yourself.
Juravich: Okay, and then there is a more funny tip about where not to forage and you say you say near sidewalks.
Nelson: Yeah, basically because dogs pee.
Juravich: Dogs pee there.
Nelson: Yeah, I call it the dog pee corridor. Yeah, like the one foot on either side of any given sidewalk Just just to be safe
Juravich: So even if you see a good-looking mushroom there, leave it alone. Leave it alone, I'm sorry. I never really thought about it, but yeah, you're so right. There are a lot of dogs. This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. I am talking with Alexis Nicole Nelson, better known as Black Forager, about her career and about her brand new book, Happy Snacking, Don't Die. How did you create a book like this when the United States has so many different climates? I mean, is it mainly for us Midwesterners or is it for everywhere? Tell me about that.
Nelson: I'd say of course us Midwesterners will have a leg up just because I know that everything in the book is here in our region, but I tried really hard to make sure that I was choosing species that are very widespread, not even just here in the United States, but in the global north generally. And when someone maybe doesn't have the same species, but has one that can be used Similarly, I make sure to note that in the chapter, so. Garlic mustard, a scourge for so many of us on the springtime here, they may not have it in Southern California, but they do have black mustard, equally as invasive, equally as tasty, can be used in all of the same recipes deliciously and have them come out different, but still great. So we can embrace some invasives when they're tasty, right? I mean.
Juravich: When you can't beat them, eat them. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, I like it. Now, you do forage when you travel. And I have some audio here from a video you made when you were visiting California recently.
Nelson: Is this plant poison? Let's find out. Scientific name is Nicotiana glauca. It is one of the most populous roadside weeds in Southern California where I'm visiting. Gina's name is nicotiana because it produces nicotine. That probably gave it away for you. This is tree tobacco and it is super hazardous. That being said, it has been used medicinally for outside of the body thing in its native South America since time immemorial. Produces a lot more nicotine than its cousins who are, you know, used recreationally. Do you guess correctly? Also, smoking is bad. Happy snacking. Don't eat that. Don't die.
Juravich: Alright, so that was one nod to eat, but do you travel to make content or do you make content when you happen to be traveling?
Nelson: Um, I make content when I happen to be traveling for work already. And, you know, just like my mom used to garden to decompress, I find that going out and walking and paying close attention to all of the plants and fungi, and, oh, now I've tripped and fallen into bird watching. So now the birds that I see, it's really grounding. It helps me feel better. It's good for my mental health. And if I happen to notice something interesting enough, yeah, I love to pull out my phone and also make a video about it so other people can learn as well. And in that.
Juravich: Video, you said the Latin name of the plant, and you do that often. Why do you think it's important for people to know the Latin name? Are you just trying to give them the origin or just teach them something?
Nelson: A lot of plants have very common names, and then on top of that, a lot of common names are shared by multiple plants. So, as- gently annoying and sometimes hoity-toity as giving the Latin name can seem, I think it's really important to give it just to make sure there's no confusion. Sometimes you'll have something like albizia julebrissan, which is known as mimosa tree, those beautiful pink pom-poms that you'll see on some trees around the city during the middle of high summer. But mimosa is a name that's given to a lot of different plants. In the Fabaceae family, some of which are not edible and medicinal. So it's important to know the difference. So plants can be confusing with the naming. Plants are often confusing.
Juravich: With the naming. Yeah, I mean, who decides that? Is it just like the Latin name exists and then someone one day was like, let's streamline all this, it won't be bad.
Nelson: Unfortunately, it was the reverse, and some of the people who named these plants, I don't know what was going on in their brains. I take jabs at whoever named a lot of plants frequently.
Juravich: You thinking? Do people hire you to take them on foraging excursions?
Nelson: Yeah, I have done quite a few here around like the greater Columbus area, which is always fun just because I know it so extremely well. Jokingly, I will tell people, though, if you do hire me for a plant walk, we will be lucky if we travel more than a quarter mile, because I will stop and talk about everything. And I think some people don't notice just how much biodiversity. Is hidden sometimes in just a very small portion of a trail in the woods.
Juravich: Well, a few years ago, you went on an excursion with Jimmy Kimmel and Guillermo. And listeners, if you haven't seen it, it's worth a search, worth watching the video. How did that come about?
Nelson: I found out that Jimmy Kimmel's wife is a fan of my content. And so she had the team reach out. And thankfully I have a lot of friends in Southern California who are also foragers who could point us in the right direction of a place where we were allowed to go and forage. And film. And film, yes. Also importantly that. Yeah. And it was a blast. It was a whole lot of fun. Guillermo brought pocket hot sauce, which I think I might need to add to the gear list for the next book. I know that.
Juravich: That was hilarious, he put hot sauce on a leaf that you told him to eat.
Nelson: Yeah, Mallow Leaves with Tapatio is an excellent snack and I still eat it now!
Juravich: So now you think of gear about every time yeah every time, okay?
Nelson: And I did have to keep Jimmy from trying to take home tree tobacco. He was like, no, I'm strong enough for it. And I was like. No, you absolutely are not, Jimmy. Please put that down.
Juravich: Oh, like the non-processed stuff is too strong. Yeah, yeah. Got it. Good to know. Good thing you were there. I can't believe we've gotten this far into the conversation and we've barely talked about mushrooms. We mentioned them at the beginning a little bit. But do most people think foraging is just mushrooms? Yeah.
Nelson: Because they're, you know, the poster child, they're enigmatic, they're a little mysterious, one day they're there, the next day they've gone, and they, people are often afraid of them, and so it makes them seem more exciting. Well, you don't wanna die, yeah. Exactly, which, you now, I think that, you know not that I think, they're like way more poisonous plants than poisonous mushrooms that you're gonna see frequently. That being said, some of the poisonous mushrooms don't take a lot to inflict a lot of damage. But the same thing is true for plants. I wouldn't have anybody eat any amount of poison hemlock, just like I wouldn't have anybody eat any of a destroying angel.
Juravich: Well, your book has morel mushrooms in it, obviously. And I know we can only find them in Ohio in the spring, so not right now, but one thing I did not know is that they are the only kind that humans can't grow on demand. That's fascinating. I mean, tell me more.
Nelson: People are trying. There are a lot of folks primarily coming out of China and Japan who are really trying to have on-demand morels. But at least for our species here in Ohio, we have not figured out the magic combination of the trees that they need to be living around, all of the other little critters that need to present in the soil. They just get to be. Beautiful and seasonal and I kind of hope they stay that way. Oh, yeah, keep some special though I am very envious of our friends in the Pacific Northwest who can just get morels all year That's crazy
Juravich: Well, I mean, we had a guy who is an expert in mushrooms on the show one time, and it was kind of interesting because it's like, did he want to give away all of his spots, you know?
Nelson: You know, right? I know that is that is definitely tough. I've definitely told some people about my morale spots and ended up with fewer morels because of it. Life is all about balance. I don't regret telling them about it.
Juravich: But you're not going to tell my giant radio audience. But I am not going.
Nelson: But I am not going to tell your giant radio audience. I'm sorry
Juravich: I mean it's not that giant. I'm kidding. Maybe you'll just tell me
Nelson: Exactly once we once we go off-air. All right
Juravich: All right. This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. I'm Amy Juravich. We're talking about foraging with Black forager herself, Columbus' own Alexis Nicole Nelson. And coming up, we're going to talk about cooking with dandelions, mulberries, goldenrod, and more. That's when All Sighs continues on 89 7 NPR News.
You're listening to All Sides. I'm your host, Amy Juravich.
Juravich: Alexis Nicole Nelson, better known as Black Forager, is a social media sensation, and she just happens to call Columbus home. She joins us today to talk about her eagerly awaited first book, Happy Snacking, Don't Die. It's a collection of recipes and foraging wisdom that teaches you how to turn common plants, flowers, and fungi into plant-based meals. It's A Foraging Plant Guide and a vegan cookbook in one. Alexis, thanks for joining us today.
Nelson: Aw, thanks for having me, Amy.
Juravich: We're gonna dive into a few of the recipes that you share in your book. And I wanted to start with what you call the true taste of summer. Perslane, am I saying it right? Perslane yeah. Perslane okay. Here is a clip from a video that you made recently.
Nelson: Perslane, or for Spanish speakers, verdolagas. Mm, they're crispy and tasty and a good plant source of omega-3 fatty acids. Perslane is everywhere around the world this time of year, so let me show you a quick recipe with them. Hee hee hee. Wah! Let's make some quick pickled Perslane from my cookbook. Happy snacking, don't die!
Juravich: So, will you forgive me if I had never heard of purslane?
Nelson: Oh no, I absolutely forgive you, but I am so sure you've seen it before and just not known its name. Yeah. Because it is everywhere. I was walking and getting coffee at Little Cat a couple weeks ago and it's coming out of all of the sidewalk cracks right smack dab in the middle of downtown.
Juravich: Can you eat the ones coming out of the sidewalk?
Nelson: Okay, so those ones I would maybe stay away from though. Sometimes they come up in some of the planters and those are kind of high off the ground. So I don't know, it depends on how gutsy you're feeling.
Juravich: So in the book, you make a salad with it, you pickle it, as you just said in that clip. So both of those recipes seem pretty simple. I mean, not all the recipes are simple, but do you like simple?
Nelson: I do like simple. I want to get the most bang for my buck when I'm in the kitchen in terms of flavor. So there will be times when I am willing to put like hours and hours and hours into something. But I really wanted, especially the recipes in this book, to show people that you can take advantage of these wild flavors without having to have gone to culinary school, without ever having to work in a restaurant. It's not hard to make good food, especially when the ingredients are so fresh because you just plucked them out of the ground.
Juravich: I wanted to jump back to spring for a minute and talk about dandelions because love them or hate them. We have plenty of them. Yes, we do. So we might as well eat them, right? Tell me about the dandelion flower fritters.
Nelson: Oh my goodness, those were one of the recipes that I sent in as like proof of concept for the book itself before it was fully written. Because if you have picky children, but you want to get them involved in foraging and make them actually happy with what you gathered, make dandelion flower fritters. And I know what some of you are thinking. Isn't everything delicious once it's been breaded and fried? Yes. But that doesn't mean you're not still getting the nutrients that are in those Stand-A-Lion flowers, too.
Juravich: That's amazing. You write in your book that you call yourself a filthy vegan to divert away from the trope of the annoying vegan. Now, maybe five to ten years ago, being vegan was more uncommon, but do you feel like it's becoming more common recently? Like maybe everyone's not an annoying vegan?
Nelson: I think we've been going through ebbs and flows. When I was at Ohio State, oh my gosh, like a decade and change ago, I felt like there were a lot of vegans and then for a hot second, I felt there weren't a whole lot of us anymore once I left the little insulated bubble of academia. And then for awhile I felt that there were. And now, I think a lot people are, oh gosh, what are the kids saying, protein maxing? Which you can still do as a vegan, it's a lot of beans, a lot a lentils, you will be fiber maxing at the same time if you are protein maxing as a Vegan. But it's we certainly have a lot more wonderful food options now. And I think everybody at this point knows someone who is vegan, which makes us seem less terrifying, hopefully.
Juravich: Fingers crossed. I think you should start talking about plant maxing instead of protein max.
Nelson: There we go. Yeah. Yeah, we gotta get plant maxing. Yeah, mushroom. Mushroom maxing, exactly, fungi maxing
Juravich: and flavor maxing. You're going to have to go TM some of those words right now. This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. I'm talking with Alexis Nicole Nelson, better known as Black Forager, about her career and her new book, Happy Snacking, Don't Die. I want to, before we run out of time, I want talk about the beautiful pictures in this book. I mean, the photos are stunning.
Nelson: Who took them? So my friend JB, who is another Ohio forager, but who lives up in Cleveland, I have always loved his food photography. And so I admittedly attempted my own food photography, and I think that was the first time that my editor at Simon& Schuster very lovingly told me, you know, you can't be good at everything, Alexis. Yes. And in his defense, they were very bad. So I very kindly asked JB, I was like, I know this is kind of a huge undertaking. You know, I'll do whatever I can to make this as easy as possible. And thankfully, in true friendship fashion, he was so excited to get started, went and pulled all of these amazing vintage fabrics that you'll see as like the tablecloths in a lot of the settings, in a lotta the food scenes. And the picnic photos that we took, which were real picnics because JB and I would spend eight hours with me in the kitchen cranking out recipes and then him taking the pictures of them. And then we'd end up with a ton of food at the end.
Juravich: Might as well eat it. Yeah.
Nelson: Yeah, we just invited a ton of friends over and shared the bounty with all of them and also got a couple other great photos in the process. Yeah, there's some group party photos, yeah.
Juravich: You I did you take most of them around Columbus or maybe Evelyn where he was or?
Nelson: So the photo on the cover, I will admittedly say, was taken in the Greater Cleveland area, but all of those other great photos inside, ones where you see me out hiking with my friends out in Schaeffer, now the Hundred Acre Wood belonging to the Metro Parks, you'll see, I think some Columbus folks will see some familiar spots as they flip through and look That's
Juravich: That's yeah, that's what I wanted to know if a local person was looking at the book would they be like wait? I know that part
Nelson: And I did a lot of the plant and fungi photography because I can't take good pictures of food, but I can take a mean picture of a plant. And those are all taken either in my own yard and neighborhood in Franklinton or at Columbus Parks. With the exception of a couple pictures that my friend Jesse, who is also a forager, feral forager online, lovingly gave us for the book because I just didn't have any good enough pictures of some of the things. Hmm. Well, they're beautiful.
Juravich: And the book is beautiful and it came together. I mean, I hope.
Nelson: It was a big group project with a lot of people who are I'm just so lucky to call friends and get to work with
Juravich: Alright, I want to pivot to a couple more recipes before we run out of time, and so let's talk about mulberries. You point out that they are one of the most recognizable tree fruits in the global north, but we don't have an industry for them in North America.
Nelson: Why are they so underrated? I honest to goodness do not understand because you will go to some places, especially in the Middle East and they're a farmed crop, they're farmed commodity. You go to parts of Asia, you will see them in grocery stores. We have a native mulberry species, the red mulberry, and we also have other species of mulberry all over, remnants of when colonists thought they were going to try to have a silk industry in the United States. Funny enough. You use mulberries for silk? You feed the leaves to silkworms. That is all silkworm eat are mulberry leaves. Well, a little educational tidbit there, but they're honestly, they're so prolific that I don't even think you need to be able to get them from the grocery store or the farmers market. Now you just got to be willing to walk around Columbus with a basket and shake a tree. Yeah. All right.
Juravich: Well, your recipes include jam and tea, and I would expect that from mulberries, but you throw a curve ball with the barbecue sauce.
Nelson: Yes, I think they have this savory umami and muskiness that people do not take advantage of in savory dishes enough. And I love a, you know, fruit leaning barbecue sauce and a fruit leaning hot sauce. So I had to make sure there was some representation of those in the book. All right, well, it sounds delicious. It's so good. And it's purple.
Juravich: Well, yes. Amazing. I do want to talk about fall for a couple of minutes. Do you have any fall foraging tips, like your favorite fall forging tip you can give to our listeners?
Nelson: My favorite fall foraging tip would be make it a friend activity. Last year, while walking around my friend Laura's neighborhood up in Clintonville, we decided to make it an hickory nut foraging outing one evening when we were just hanging out and going for a walk. We came across a shagbark hickery tree and we just all hung out underneath it for an hour and a half. Throwing sticks at the tree to get some of the nuts to fall down so we could gather them and then we all split them when we got back to her house and then went our separate ways. The fall is amazing because there's so many high volume things to forage, black walnuts, hickory nuts, acorns, American persimmons, and while it's absolutely fine to go and those things alone. I definitely do. All the time because I have a weird schedule. So if you see me in the parking lot of Franklin Park Conservatory picking up squished fruit, say hi. And, but foraging is always better in community and processing your foraging is always in community. It's the way that it was done historically. And I don't know, there's something really beautiful about getting to share that activity with the people you care about. Well, you have millions of followers.
Juravich: On social media. Don't remind me. I know, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, you're everywhere. What does it feel like to be a social media star for a living?
Nelson: Nerve-wracking? Oh, I should probably have a more positive answer to that question. That's okay. I mean, it's absolutely fantastic. I may or may not have received some, you know, light bullying about my love of the outdoors and nature when I was in middle school. So it really became something that I kept close to the chest and didn't really always talk to a lot of folks about. So when I started, making videos about what I was foraging back in 2020, I just, I didn't expect it to resonate with so many people and for so many folks to find it interesting and for people to put up with my goofy sense of humor and the songs that I'm making up all the time. I mean, it's, it is absolutely amazing, but it is weird because you record all the things by yourself, you edit them by yourself. Sometimes it's hard to remember that so many other people see it once you push post, until you go out in the world and then people are, you know, waving at you from across the trail saying, oh, Black Forager, I finally I'm so glad to see you!
Juravich: What would you tell the little girl who wanted to be best friends with a tree about the path that your life has taken?
Nelson: Stay weird. Stay weird, stay excitable, stay curious. Stay genuinely excited about the things that interest you. It's gonna look like it's easier to play it cool and it's not, just be yourself.
Juravich: And hug Priscilla again.
Nelson: And hug Priscilla again. I miss her. That was the tree name. Yeah.
Juravich: Um, just to end on, you won a James Beard award for social media influence. You were named in Time magazine's top 100 creators list. I, what does that feel like?
Nelson: Insane. I, when I was growing up, I used to joke that I had never won anything. I was first place at getting second place all throughout high school and like everything I ever competed in. First runner up. First runner always, like I was always pretty good at the things that I competed in, but I was never the best. So, especially the James Beard Award, I think there's a video somewhere floating out there on the internet of just the utter look of shock on my face, both because I wasn't expecting it and because I did wear a humongous and very heavy vinyl dress that I had to figure out how to like get back out of my seat in the theater and like waddle up on to the stage.
Juravich: I think you found your first place winning thing. So, congratulations on the book. We've been talking with Alexis Nicole Nelson, better known as the Black Forager, about her career, and her new book, Happy Snacking Don't Die. Thank you for your time today. Thank you so much for yours. And this has been All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. I'm Amy Juravich. Thanks for listening.