 All right, Rob, what do you want to share with the world? Well, for the last decade, I have been on a mission to break free from Big Ag, to never have to go to the grocery store or a restaurant again. That's where this next big journey began. For one month, I decided that I was going to forage 100% of my food, just food that I harvested from the fruits of the earth in a way where I was able to reconnect with the plants while living in harmony with the earth. This is the story of the last month, and I'm elated for you to be here to share it with you. A lot of people have said to me, Rob, all the food we need is already in the grocery store. Why would you even go to these extreme measures to do this? And my answer is very simple. The global industrial food system that we depend on for our food, it is a destructive food system. It is one where every single bite that we take, we are taking a bite out of the planet. I have a desire to live deeply connected with this earth. And for me, I find that connection through foraging. But this isn't just about me. I want to help others reconnect with the earth. And by embarking on this honestly, sort of extreme project, the idea is to take you along on this adventure and ask these questions, go deeper into our food. And when I say food, I'm also talking about my medicine. Our food is our medicine. So that means no pharmaceuticals, no pharmacies, breaking free from that as well and finding all of my medicine growing on the earth as well. Believe it or not, the preparation for this journey only began nine days before the month. I arrived in my homeland of the state of Wisconsin and I started there with no food. And as much as I was excited about the fun, I had a lot of work to do. I had to harvest my calories, my fat, my protein, my nutrients, salt, herbs, spices. And I had just nine days before I was about to have to eat 100% from the land. My work was cut out for me. Over those first nine days and over the entire month, I harvested about 100 different foods from the land. So my diet was diverse and diversity is absolutely, in my opinion, the key to meeting our basic needs, to having a truly healthy and vibrant diet. My focus was to choose the plants that are abundantly growing, that are growing in large quantities and that can meet really my basic needs. So number one for me was wild rice. This was my absolute go-to. It's called manomen, the food that grows on water, the good berry, and in one day I was able to harvest 30 pounds of it. Manomen is an important traditional food of the Anishinaabe people who are the original stewards of the Great Lakes region where I am from. It's one of the most calorically dense foods that exists. It's also one of the most special foods that exists. I harvested apples and pears and plums and with them I made really filling and nourishing applesauce and fruit sauces. I harvested a lot of high vitamin fruits like aronia berry, cherries, autumn berries and grapes. I turned a lot of them into fruit juices. At the heart of my diet was greens packed full of nutrients like watercress from the springs where I got my water. Weeds like dandelion, plantago, and lamb's quarter from parks and front yards and stinging nettle from farm fields just to name a few. I harvested medicinal herbs for teas like bee balm, catnip, mint, goldenrod, mugwort and so much more. I harvested plants that would add a lot of flavor to my meal like wild onion, wild leeks and mustard. I harvested both edible and medicinal mushrooms like puffballs and mitaki and chicken of the woods and medicinal like turkey tail and reishi. I harvested deer that were hit by cars. This was one of my main sources of protein in a way that I could harvest meat that I felt truly good about. I harvested nuts like hickory nuts for making nut milk and black walnuts and butternut for eating straight from the shell. And I harvested new things and some things you've probably never heard of eating like stinky ginkgo fruits and roasting up their nuts. And I pressure canned the fish that I caught which actually softened up the cartilage and the bones to be able to eat the entire body. And I even harvested all of my own water. No tap water, no chlorine or fluoride or other chemicals. All of my water came from beautiful springs. And I found most of these using a website, findaspring.com. There was a very common misperception of me just being out every day and nibbling off the trees and eating off the ground and having to forage everything that I would need for that day. But that's not how it works. If you want to be able to live off the land, the key is storing your food. So my main means of storage were dehydration. This was done both by dehydrating with the sun, the free energy of the earth I'm talking about. I also carried an electric dehydrator with me. Things like wild rice and nuts and seeds, a lot of these can be stored just at room temperature. And then of course there's your cold storage, your freezer or your refrigerator. And I carried a cooler with me and as I traveled to different places I often used the fridge or the freezer of where I was staying. Next equally importantly was pressure canning. This is how I stored my venison and my fish so that I had this readily available for me every day. If I had to summarize the whole experience in just one sentence, it is food is growing everywhere. The most challenging part wasn't finding the food. The most challenging part was just having the time to harvest all of the food and then even more so to process it. People often ask me how many hours per week does it take to forage all of our food? And I don't have a clear answer to that because again, the key is storing that bounty. And some days it was zero. Some days I was just able to sit back and eat what I had harvested. And some days it was morning until night, foraging, processing, preserving and at the end of the day I was completely exhausted. Now when I say food is growing everywhere, I really mean it. It is growing in what we consider to be the wild or nature but it's growing in our front yards. It's growing in our backyards. It's growing in our city parks. It's growing along the sidewalks. It's growing out of the sidewalks. It is growing in very large populated cities. It's growing in the rural areas, the small towns. It really is growing everywhere and I harvested it from all of these places except the interstate. I do not harvest my food from the interstate except maybe an occasional deer. When I set out on this journey, I did not set out to prove that this is a diet that's best for the world or even best for me. And so that is a reasonable question. Was I able to meet all of my needs? And the answer is yes but maybe not yes. So calories, no problem. I was absolutely able to get enough calories. The vitamins and the minerals absolutely feel like that was there. The protein absolutely was there but where I lacked was fat. I was not able to get enough fat and this fat, it created the caloric density to have really filling meals. And so because I had enough food, it was just hard to eat enough. I did lose some weight. So over the month I lost about five pounds and if you think about it, that's about what you would expect. No ice cream, no junk food, no alcoholic beverages. I myself am a fan of eating relatively the same meals day after day after day. I will say that I struggled with flavor and that really changed on day 19 when I harvested my salt. And all of a sudden I tasted all these flavors inside of the pot that were there the whole time but I just couldn't taste them and the salt just absolutely brought it out. And then day 27 is when I made some hickory nut oil and you add that oil and that salt, the herbs and the spices to the wild rice and the venison and the fish broth. And then it was hard not to say oh my gosh with every single bite. So by day 27, I really had that truly complete meal and I have to say that's exciting because with just nine days of preparation and then just a few weeks into it, I was able to meet all of my needs in a truly nourishing, delicious, joyous way. I know some people see me and they say, oh, look at this white guy running around foraging all of his food. Not very important. And I completely understand that in the world that we live in today and all of the challenges that we're dealing with. I really want to share again that I do have a lot of privilege and that includes the amount of time, resources, energy that I have to be able to do something like this. The reality is that I wouldn't be doing this unless there was a much bigger picture behind this whole immersion. And what it's really about is it's about reconnecting with earth. So as I was traveling across the country, immersing in this project, I was also leading plant walks and helping others to learn the foods that are growing freely and abundantly all around them. People from all walks of life coming out to learn the basics, whether it was Central Park or the capital in DC or in Chicago, Philadelphia, across this region, I brought people out to help them reconnect, reconnect with the earth because if we can find our food growing around us and we can reconnect with our community, we don't need capitalism and consumerism. And I believe this is part of overcoming colonialism. Colonialism is all about removing us from the land, removing us from our community, removing us from sovereignty over our bodies and our health. And part of foraging is it's about reconnecting to this and it's about taking the power back. So in these plant walks, I introduced people to a dozen or so different, easy to identify foods and medicines that are growing all around us in our cities and in the countryside. And I shared with them basics of foraging, how to identify plants, how to know which ones are safe to eat, how to forage in a way that is ethical and sustainable and also how to reconnect with the people that have been the stewards of this land for thousands of years and where this knowledge that we have today exists from them. Today we're foraging on stolen land. Land that is here, it is what it is today because of genocide that happened but still continues to happen here in what we call the United States, also called Turtle Island. And so I think it's a really important thing to acknowledge that and acknowledge the land that we're on because if we're out foraging and we're connecting these plants but we're not connecting to the history of this land, that's a pretty big important part of equality and justice and regeneration of our earth and community. Now, with that being said, one of the most common things that I hear is, well, Rob, if everybody wanted to forage their food, nature would be destroyed overnight. The truth is that is not what would happen because think about it. If the whole world decided that they wanted to start connecting with the land and harvesting their food and creating relationship with these plants, what we would have is a revolution of the mind, a revolution of the way society wants to interact with this earth and that to me is what a forager does. When I look back at this chapter, this month of foraging all of my food, I feel the power and the connection to the earth that we can all experience to know that I can go out and I can meet all of my basic needs as a human without money, without corporations and to be able to do it in a way where I'm giving back to the earth, that's the power that I want to experience. Not power over anything but power with these plant and animal relatives. And when I look back at the last decade of breaking free from Big Ag from this global industrial food system, I feel excitement because although I just finished this month of foraging all my food, I think it's more or less still the beginning stages. It was just a month. I'm ready for a year. I'm ready to see if I can meet all of my needs, harvesting the food that is growing freely and abundantly from the land and doing it for an entire year. I think that's what's next. Thank you for still being here with me, dear friends. It means a lot to be sharing this journey with you and sharing this thing that I am so incredibly inspired and excited about. And so if you want to break free from the global industrial food system and you want to create food sovereignty in your communities and you want to live a life of deep joy and health and happiness, then I really encourage you to keep coming back here. And also my website is a great resource of information. So subscribe to this channel if you haven't already and you'd like to if you want to see this video get out into the world, comment. That helps the algorithm, like it. And of course, share it with the friends, the family, the people in your life who you want to help break free from the global industrial food system and find freedom in connecting to the plants that are growing freely and abundantly all around us.