 I was actually living a very normal average Westerner life. I was very focused on material possessions, financial wealth. I actually had a goal of being a millionaire by the time I was 30 years old. I'm 34 and I have $6,000, so obviously that isn't the case. There was a change of plans about 10 years ago. I realized through watching some documentaries that many of you have seen and reading books and hanging out with different people. I was in San Diego, California, when that Chrissy was over here and we were starting to wake up at the same time. And what happened is I realized that basically I was destroying the earth in every single action that I took. The food that I was eating, the calling I was driving, the gas that I was pumping into the car, the house that I was living in, the water that I was drinking that was being sucked across the desert where half of it evaporates into the air and the ground. Even every drop of water that I was drinking was causing destruction. My money was in IRAs that were supporting fossil fuels and cigarette companies and all of these things I didn't stand for. I was supporting the military industrial complex, the police industrial complex, the pharmaceutical industries, the prison industrial complex is what I meant to say about police. I was part of all of that. Everything that I was doing was causing suffering to humans, to other species and to this earth. And I just said, no way am I going to keep doing that. I was 25 years all the time in 34 now and I just said to myself, dude if I live to be 75 that's another 50 years on this earth. I'm not going to live another 50 years as a complete hypocrite. Like I realized that I was living a complete hypocrisy of my belief system because I didn't believe in destroying the earth but I was doing it. So I decided that I was going to just radically transform my life starting then in 2011. But what I decided I was going to do was taking one step at a time because radical transformation doesn't happen with one little thing. You got to have stepping stones. So I made a list of all the changes that I wanted to make in my life. Over 100 changes that I wanted to make and I put it up in my kitchen in San Diego on a piece of paper where I had a pen taped next to it so I could check them off one at a time. And it was in my kitchen right through the front door. So everybody saw it. So it was my way of like keeping myself accountable by having it like right there for everybody to see. So over a period of two years I just started changing my life one little bit at a time. And at the time most of my food was coming from walmarts. Plastic packaged food, factory farmed food. Then I put it in two more plastic bags. Put it in my trunk, drove it home and put this garbage inside of my body. So I started to change the food I was eating. You know first I went to Trader Joe's because I thought that was better but when Trader Joe's isn't better it looks better but it's maybe not really better. I'm not exactly sure but it's not living off the land that's for sure. So I started changing my life you know what I was putting in my body stopped getting wasted drunk and putting all my resources into that and started to ride a bike and drive the car less and started to change the ways that I was interacting with other people and from little things to bigger things eventually after about a year and a half I got rid of my car and had no car to pump fossil fuels in and continuously made these changes and at the center of so much of this was food because what I realized is there's a lot of things that we do that cause destruction but pretty much every human being eats every single day like that form of destruction is at the center of almost every human's life and I realized that I thought food was one of the greatest gateways to completely transforming our life it is our life it is the food that nourishes our body it's our medicine that keeps us alive it's our social circle it's what we do with our friends with our family we have emotional attachments to it without it we perish and it's at the center of every single human being's life and at the same time it's one of the most destructive ways that we interact with the earth so that was a big part of my wake up and what I was shifting and I had this idea at the time like wow you know could you maybe like not go to the grocery store anymore like could you actually grow and you know collect all your food from the land and at that time it was an idea I mean I was still going to Walmart and then Trader Joe's then the farmers' market you know got that over time but I wasn't ready to go there yet I grew a little bit of my own food I had a couple of raised beds and I was making these changes so fast forward to about 2016 I've been transforming my life for five years I've got a lot of activism around food and other issues and I finally said by the way is this thing working well? yeah we can hear you it's possible none of you are here unlikely but and let's see I got myself off track here five years yeah and so then it's I finally am feeling like okay maybe I can do maybe I can try this can I try to go a year with no grocery stores or restaurants nothing package or process remove myself so deeply from what is so entrenched into our lives in a destructive way so I decided that I was going to do it probably in around 2016 I don't remember how the you know where exactly it came from so I had a couple problems first though one I didn't live anywhere and I didn't own any land so you know I had to figure out where I was going to put this garden that I had in mind and didn't really have much money I had a backpack with 111 possessions at the time and that was everything that I owned maybe five thousand bucks or something like that so I didn't really have that going for me so I decided Florida because well you know it's got the ability to grow food year-round I had grown almost nothing as close to nothing in my life a few raised beds and I had experience like I would plant a lot of things at community gardens or fruit trees but I was never really around to see them actually grow to the point I could eat them and my permaculture design certificates more theoretical you don't actually really learn how to grow food so I was starting there like kind of square one so what I decided to do I arrived in Orlando after visiting there one time and what I decided to do was ask people how would you like your front yard to be turned into a garden and in exchange for returning you on into a garden you get to have a garden and you get to eat all the food you want from it and when I leave it's yours all the work is yours you just need to not like lawns enough to let me experiment down in this place basically and pretty soon I had a wait list of people that wanted me to turn their yard into a garden so I did end up turning six yards into gardens and that's where I was based in just two miles from downtown Orlando and I chose Orlando because I wanted to be in with the people it's like the project I did where I was in New York City and I wore all my trash for a month while living like the average American I was I wanted to be in front of people so that they would see consumerism in their face so I put my gardens right on the streets right along the sidewalk I foraged from people's front yards I helped people to immerse in this idea that food is growing freely and abundantly all around us and that's why I chose being in the city plus I met the Orlando permaculture group which is an ironically Orlando has a really nice group of people who grow a lot of food there's a lot of plant people there so I ended up there didn't know how to forage so I started going to foraging classes and basically what I at the beginning when I started I was going to the web you know thing they call Google and I would type in how much sun does a KLC need and how much water do you put on the carrots and like just the basics and I was googling it for every plant and trying to make a spreadsheet and after a few months I realized holy crap there's all sorts of spreadsheets that have done this for me already even in this area they exist and so what I did is I opened myself up to the local resources what I learned very quickly is that we know how to do all of it there's just not many of us who are doing all of it but we all have the skills between us to accomplish almost everything that we want to accomplish so what I started to do is just gather all the local knowledge and put it together into a way where I could step away completely from the consumeristic globalized industrialized food system and so I gave myself six months from when I arrived in Orlando to the point where I would be growing and foraging a hundred percent of my food so zero to a hundred and six months was my goal so I got to work kind of I also got distracted doing quite a few other things and so six months turned into ten months but still ten months never having grown anything in that state having done very little foraging recently just googling how to grow a carrot I launched into the year on November 11, 2018 and the first day was the well the first meal was the first meal that I ever ate in my entire life that I had completely grown and foraged so I was jumping into the deep end what happens is I started a bunch of other community projects planting community fruit trees building gardens for single moms sending out free project seeds and I just got busy doing a bunch of other things but I think it could have been started in six months anyway that's not important at all so ten months later I ate the first meal and um that's it so any questions okay what was the meal the meal is actually a smoothie it was three years ago I don't remember exactly but I'm sure there's a picture on mine if you want to go back to November 11, 2018 on your social media it'll be there with a picture I know it was a smoothie of all things from my garden if you're new to growing food remember perennials they are exquisite when you plant a perennial you know an apple tree is a perennial you plant that apple tree and you could be eating apples from that for decades by 50 50 years even or potentially longer you plant an acorn tree and you could be eating from that for 400 years so planting perennials you know pushes shrubs like raspberries, limes, raspberries, come back every year so I focused on perennial greens and then even better yet now it's easy to be here like Eric Joseph Lewis where's T.X I guess he's off playing with the plants we did a plant walk earlier and there's dozens of species of food going all around here but would you most people wouldn't expect this but food is growing freely and abundantly almost everywhere in all of the cities even you know actually New York City has some great foraging with their huge parks Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles the small towns the megatropolis is if that's a word everywhere there is food growing all around us and when you tune into that you start to see it you start to see that food is growing freely and abundantly all around us and that in itself is extremely radical because that's saying we don't need you corporations in order to have a happy healthy meaningful existence we can work with the plants and attain that freedom from the monetary system but the plants are one of the most amazing ways to do that one of my earliest lessons was the seminal pumpkin which is this beautiful de-tolerant pumpkin that grows in mostly in semi-tropical areas it's been grown in Florida for hundreds of years rather than the seminal indigenous people and and I learned about this plant and started to grow it and what I realized the beautiful lesson that I got is I was at a friend's house and he had the seminal pumpkin and he took the seeds out and what most people do with the seeds well some people eat them the cool people eat them a lot of people throw them in the garbage can some people compost them but most people throw the seeds in the garbage can in the pumpkin and I said hey can I have those seeds? and he was like yeah of course yes so I took those the seeds from those two pumpkins home and that turned into 169 pumpkins each of those pumpkins has a hundred seeds in it so that's like a lot somebody 17,000 pumpkin seeds you know what I could do with that I could give one seed to 17,000 people and the next generation every human being in the city of Orlando could have been pumpkin self-sufficient that's the power of the seed you know you might have heard of Ron Finley one of the things he says is throw in your own food he's like printing your own money he's one of my heroes and it is the power of the seed one little seed can hold but can turn into the health and abundance of an entire community it's truly powerful what is in those seeds so they also taste good the pumpkin seeds are also good for eating you don't have to give them all the way you can also just eat them that's a lot so this the year started off pretty well and I continued on eating lots of fruits foraging for lots of fruits I harvested myself from the ocean I did make my own coconut oil but only a little bit because it turned out to be a lot harder than I thought so I went nine months without oil that was one of the big struggles also ironically the greatest skill set that I had going into this as far as being a forager a gatherer was fishing I've been fishing since I was eight years old pretty much for my happy place and weirdly enough I couldn't catch any fish I was just like flabbergasted I was like what is going on I went out with all my friends who are the best best fisher people all of them got scumped when I was on their boat it was like I was cursed for fish man but so about halfway through the year I started to become I thought that fishing is fat and protein that's what I was having the hardest time living in Orlando I didn't have a car I didn't have a gun I couldn't easily get to like the coast it was an hour and a half drive so that was part of it I didn't it was you know not easy to access so much because a lot of people have said like dude fishing in Florida I mean come on that's like some of the easiest fishing in the world but I had my reasons that I didn't do good fishing there also was cursed so about halfway through the year I started to become kind of deficient in fat and protein I thought I can't say for certain that that's what it was but that's what it felt like a little bit of foggy brain a little bit of just like you know achiness and so I ended up going up to northern Wisconsin for three months and a lot of people said oh you know you quit like you went up there and ate pizza with your family no I brought 120,000 calories with me because 2000 calories a day at 60 days it means that I could survive at least for 60 days up there off the calories I brought I did sit at the table and watch my family eat pizza but I wasn't not eating that pizza well I went up there and I started to catch some lake trout and then one of the biggest places to go through is is this thing still on? not not me not me but you can still hear me right? not me yeah all right I might just don't want to switch things up too much right in the middle oh I don't know about that though that's like a little intense go hold it further away wear out though like hey man I don't like that I don't like that I don't like that guys treat it like an ice cream coin do you need a little ice cream by the way how's this? it's good it's good all right I gotta be honest about one thing this is the first time I have ever given a talk after having a little meeting with my plant friend marijuana I wanted to see how it would go and I thought it was the truth or not you're a natural all right I'm saying I'm sure I'm sure all right I'm sure and I'm going to say it is a great friend it's all about all these friends it's about how you work with them you can choose to turn them into something negative or they can be a wonderful friend in medicine and they all are in one way shape or form for another whatever something like that you got it okay so okay the big savior was it started to cool off up there I gotta be honest Florida summers were brutal and I did flee I did flee from them and then what happened was up there the deer were flexible not because I had a gun but because a lot of people hit deer with cars and so some people call them roadkill deer but what I call them is deer that are hit by cars because roadkill comes first and then you're you're moving the identity of that deer and saying it is something it's still a deer it was deer before it was a hit it was a deer after it but it was hit by a car so it's still a deer and depending on how it's hit it can be a really good deer still for example if it's hit in the head and none of its body is the whole body is still edible so I started to eat a lot of deer while I was up there especially because I still was pretty cursed for the fishing thing so the end was I ended in the fall and I actually ended up at UW La Crosse where I went to University and they actually they actually about a month after I had the fat and efficiency I stopped there and I happened to be staying with like the physical duty who does like dunk tanks where you learn your body fat percentage and stuff so he put me in that thing and my body fat percentage was up to 50% 15, 15% so I managed to work it back with the deer and some of the fish that I was catching went back to Florida my garden was just a jungle because that's how food forestry works not that it was a food forest it was too young but the idea of permaculture one of the sayings is maximizing hammock time you design the garden in the way where it's less work where you can spend more time in the hammock I actually don't like hammocks but a lot of people do so if you like hammocks that's a good thing for you but it's not for me it's not that I don't like them I just don't enjoy spending time with them no problem with them themselves so anyway I get back to Florida and I'm in great health I finish off the year in I end feeling honestly the best that I've felt in my adult life I've felt great the best physical condition I've been in my adult life and this for me the biggest lesson was you know I don't know who said it maybe hypocrisies let that food be that medicine you're allowed to let those things slide you don't have to laugh if that person says hypocrisies? hypocrisies hypocrisies if you get it you don't need all the words to get the start so um so where was I going the first time? let that food be that medicine I absolutely that's the thing all foods are medicine and everything that you put in your body that's toxic to you is the opposite of that and the more things that you put into your body that harm you the more medicine that you actually need what we do is we pump ourselves with pharmaceuticals but simply by not putting the bad stuff in our body in the first place and filling our body with good stuff we don't need those pharmaceutical medicines the plants are our medicine every single one Chrissy over here got stung by a wasp and she she learned to put a little plantago on the eyebrow there when you're stung by a wasp it reduces swelling it's one of my favorite plant medicines and they're all around us these are a lot of these are weaves you know things that people despise they hate them they're stabbing them they're poisoning them and they are medicines they're such wonderful plants the family lion all of these so I finish off the year feeling really good and uh I was the end though I honestly I was pretty anxious at the end and I was pretty stressed because for the last month or two everybody asked the same question what's the first thing you're going to eat when you're done and I'm like man that's so that creates so much anxiety if you haven't tried to figure out what the first thing was going to be but uh first thing ended up being a friend of mine uh Pete Canaris maybe some of you have seen his youtube channel he brought me a coconut that he had forged I hadn't forged it so it was a good way to like work anything but uh and through that I've it's been what two years now and I've held on to uh everywhere I go I find food and I and I eat it and I don't even remember that I'm eating a lot of times it's just food is everywhere and but with that being said I also do that at Ben and Jerry's in Asheville as well I eat a lot and I you know most of my diet right now is not grown and forged I'm amazed how quickly I reverted back to being okay with putting things in my body that I didn't want to but sugar's a real thing man and it's hard to avoid it a lot of the times so um it was a wonderful year and two things I want to say one the only reason I could do this was because of community first the community has existed for thousands of years prior to us who have gotten so disconnected from our community only reason that any permaculturists are able to share anything with me or the current gardeners or the foreigners is because people have been doing this for thousands of years prior to that so in the greatest sense possible the only reason that I was able to do this at all of us community like technically I was the only person that I was growing and foraging all my food but even beyond that when you come to the local people I was only able to do it because of the gardeners and the foragers and the books and the books and the internet information the only reason I was able to do it was because of community and even building my gardens people came together and they volunteered not altruistically they got to learn how to you know start gardening by helping me build my garden it was all about bringing community together as much as possible and the other big part about it is it wasn't just about growing and foraging all of my own food it was about empowering others to do it as well the reason I do these things so publicly like I could totally do this like quiet in the woods by myself but I do it because I'm trying to penetrate the minds of mainstream society and I go to extremes to do that because our media is extreme and sometimes we need a message that really can get in there and get to people and get them to question things so but the community like came together and the only reason I was able to do was because of community that's the beauty of life so yeah thank you all so much for being here and for spending this time together and I'd love to answer any questions that you have they could be wacky or they could be pretty normal either one is totally fine Eric what's your favorite wild food of all of the like I guess favorite in calories and favorite in flavor so this is Eric Joseph Lewis right here he's a well we call him master forager definitely if you get a chance to do a plant walk with him if you get plant opportunities do plant walks in general there's a lot of plant walkers around here people who walk and show you plants take that opportunity it's amazing my favorite food is whatever is growing me growing abundantly around me I have such an affinity for whatever there's so much of that it's just there and I know that it's nutritious I don't know the nutritional factoids of almost any foods I just eat lots of foods from the land and I believe that will pretty much work so far so good could be a horrible experiment who knows but I'm pretty sure we existed before nutritionists existed not exactly sure but pretty sure so that's my favorite food and then favorite as far as taste goes whoo can't do it can't do it next question but those of us who aren't great fisher people are you going to add more animals to like your farming like circles and yes and I also just realized that I will answer the question with the question in case you don't hear it the question was for those of us that aren't fisher people are you going to add animals when you do it here if I do it here hopefully but we'll see and the answer is if I have animals for that year I also had to grow over 400% of their food so if I had chickens I couldn't be buying feed to feed to them so that's why I didn't have any animals because that would just be still getting food from the system and just converting into something else so probably for me the most likely scenario is for me personally I like my interaction with the animal to do one where they spend their whole life wild and then we meet for a short period of time that's what calls to me so that's probably more likely what I'll be doing so I'll take the same question but you've been here for a month so it's July in Asheville what's your favorite food? okay so I've been here for a month it's July in Asheville I was here for June what's my favorite right now okay well service berries or june berries those are just mustard all over in the city like fruit trees everywhere love that I thought I was eating chicory but according to Eric it's mostly wild lettuce which I believe this guy he knows what he's talking about lots of greens lots of pokeweed plantago, dandelion some chicory wild lettuces lots of stinging metal I love stinging metal I've been stinging it from the tree down there lots of meat I love it and hopefully tomorrow we're going to go out for some mushrooms some melky caps maybe maybe some chanterelles maybe some lobster mushrooms so yeah those are some of my favorites at the moment so like that's what I really want in life is truth and consumerism is the opposite of truth that's all that I feel like a lot of the times that I'm resisting is sort of the lies that are put out for our society and I find truth in this I find a lot of truth in this and so as much as I'd love to do that for me like we all have our place in life we all have our ability to find our purpose and our passion and our mission and you know when I was in fifth grade I like basically started to make people laugh and I became sort of a class clown and when I was about 10 years old I realized I'm an entertainer like that's actually what I do it's what I love it's one of my passions so I gotta be around people for that I mean I like talking to myself but not nearly as much as being around people and so and society is what needs society is what I'm hoping will change so that we stop destroying this earth that we live on so what I have to do is look at each situation not as a black and white scenario but as a as a shade of gray and say what is the best thing for me to do in this scenario in order to walk lightly but at the same time be able to shift society and I found that the best way that I can do that is to be a part of it I remove myself to large you know large degrees as I can but what I don't do is remove myself in ways that actually wouldn't create the change that I feel is needed so there's you know the idea of transitional ethics you know we have to be in a time where we have our ideals but we can't necessarily have them right now and so we have to work towards that and that means critical thinking that means problem solving it's not having labels and saying okay this is vegan therefore it's safe it's good for animals no some vegan food is the worst thing for animals and some of it's great but some you know working with animals is regenerating our earth and some of it's destroying our earth so it's all about critical thinking and problem solving and looking you know deeply at the scenario so for me I actually have very little trouble it's like walking in society because I'm like comfortable with that that's the reality that I'm in and I truly believe that that's the best way of going about it so yeah what kind of amendments did I use to build the soil and then who paid for it I paid for it because I used almost all waste products that cost next to nothing so first I layered the ground with cardboard free from the dumpsters then you layer it with mulch which is the byproduct of tree cutting down companies they don't make money off mulch they'll dump it for free you layer your whole yard with mulch as much as like a foot of it and then that starts to retain moisture that starts to break down and turn into soil that starts to bring in microorganisms and actually create life that is beneficial to plants it creates the soil itself if you do that and you walk away for a year and you come back you have soil basically so if you have land and you want to do that and you want to be growing food in the future but not aren't ready do that throw the cardboard down throw a foot of mulch down and then come back in a year and you can start growing food there now with that being said I got another waste product because mushroom compost which is the the the material the medium they grow mushrooms factory farmed mushrooms if you're buying mushrooms you should be grocery store there you know probably factory farmed so I would get the waste product from that which was super nutrient dense and in a way actually almost cheating because this was a byproduct of the globalized industrialized food system but for me it was I just couldn't eat from it and you could use utilize wasted resources but not dumpster diet some people call that urban foraging but for the year it was no eating food from dumpsters but I was using waste products from the industrial system in order to be able to establish fertility in a short period of time to grow food so and within a few months of that first garden the first garden that I created cost $550 ish and within a few months it was producing that amount of food every month so it pays for itself very quickly once you start to invest in your food and think you know forward well so there's the people that I worked with directly which is a very small number of people in comparison to the number of people that just like watch my videos and see that it's possible I mean walking downtown Asheville the other day a guy looks up to me and he's like I turned my whole front yard into a garden from watching your youtube video man I get that hundreds of times a month you know so people see it and they're like I didn't know you could do that and then they do it because now they know it's as simple as putting other options out there that's the idea of showing people another way it's possible and then as far as the people we built gardens for you know for many for some of them it was you know a nice benefit it was you know adding a little beauty to their lives but you know one person actually told me that the garden saved their life that looking out the window at the garden was the reason that they were still alive because they were dealing with depression issues and this garden brought this life to them and kept them going through so some of the gardens were you know pretty powerful and plants are powerful and some of them were some of them were more neglected and people didn't really get into it as well all right I think we have time for about two questions and I will say afterwards I am totally here to hang out that's totally why I'm here so definitely don't be shy come up I've got the food risk band on and I'm open for hugs and just you know I'm elated to be here with you all and yeah so let's go with one more question yes so any work with gray water black water rain catchment so I don't do black water because I do compost toilets I try not to poop in our water because it's not an efficient usage of our water and it causes you would be surprised I'll give you one little tidbit I was in Bureau Beach Florida and there was a headline that said I think it was three million gallons of raw sewage spilled into the river and like dang three million gallons and it says one of that fourth largest in two years and I was like this is happening all the time our poop is going to that water a lot so what I do is you know compost toilet a dry toilet it's one of the simplest things for me it was kind of the holy grail it took me five years to get to it because you know that's a big part about this is social stigmas if you think about it what am I doing oh I poop in a bucket and deal with my own poop like really the coolest thing for most people in society and ultimately that's the most important lesson that I've got probably through all of this so I'm saying most important there's a lot of good ones but one of the most important lessons I've gotten through all of this is just to stop worrying about other people think about you because if you think about it if you spend one hour a day basing your life off what other people think you know you know just doing ourselves up and one hour a day of just like what would they think about that so should I do it or should I not that adds up to three years of your life now if you take into account sleeping it's five years of your waking life imagine you just got five years of life because you decided that you're going to spend time thinking about things way more important so what I decided to do is I would start thinking about like not through the lens of what other people will think but the lens of is this beneficial to the earth is this beneficial to my community and is this beneficial to myself basically that's absolutely what set myself free to be able to do any of this was removing that unnecessary lens so that I could actually just you know immerse as a human being that is able to freely think for the betterment of the bigger picture rather than you know our own little gag sauce so yeah this was fun this is the one that I wrote and uh this is one of my favorites from that chapter it's called golden victory I hope that you enjoyed that talk and that you enjoyed the music of Leah from rising Appalachia this was kind of a spur of the moment as far as putting this video together we had planned this event and our friend Charlie ended up filming it and so we got to take you along for part of my talk and just one of the many beautiful songs that Leah sang so I'm so glad that we captured it and we're able to to share part of the evening with you it was just for me just a complete pleasure and honor to be able to host this night with Leah from rising Appalachia she's been one of my favorite musicians for about five years now she has brought me so much joy and contentment so much motivation to to be the change that I wish to see you know to be an activist she's not just an incredible musician but she is an incredible activist and all around human being so highly recommend checking out her and Rising Appalachia's music on their website they have a YouTube channel as well and social media and if you can catch them at a concert in person it's a really great crowd of people to spend time with and just I mean all very very good vibes around Rising Appalachia so I hope that you enjoyed it I hope that you will take some of this inspiration away to gain food freedom and gain food sovereignty in your community and enjoy the beautiful music and the beautiful life while you're doing it so love you all very much and see you again soon