 It's the dream of millions of people, complete self-sufficiency, to grow all of their own food and never have to take a trip to the grocery store. But for most people, it's just that, a dream. The ease of our current global industrial food system is just that. Too easy, too convenient, too time-saving and too alluring. I've been exploring food for nearly a decade and since the beginning I've had the burning question. Could I step outside of the big ag system? Could I go without grocery stores and restaurants? Nothing packaged or processed, nothing shipped from a far off place. Could I grow and forage 100% of my food, everything that I ate for an entire year? That's exactly the journey and the quest that I decided to set out on. And now I'm here to share the story with you. But one big thing. I had very little experience with growing my own food. When I lived in San Diego, I did have a few raised beds where I grew some greens, tomatoes and herbs. But as a traveler for the last seven or so years, I had never really settled in one place long enough to grow my own food. So in order to do this, I would have to settle in one place. And that place that I chose is Orlando, Florida, where I'm sitting right now. Besides being really fresh to growing my own food, I was also fresh to the scene here in Orlando and Florida. And I was giving myself just two years here before hitting the road again. So I had to get planting as soon as I landed here. But I didn't have a garden, I didn't own any land, and I had almost no experience with foraging in the state of Florida. I chose Florida so that I could grow food year around. And I chose Orlando because I had passed through here a few times and met a great community of permaculturists and people who grow their own food. And specifically, I chose the community of Audubon Park because that's where Orlando permaculture and my friends at Fleet Farming were based. And there was already a movement here of turning front yards into gardens. So I would have the support I needed in order to do it here. I quickly got to work meeting people in my neighborhood and proposing the idea to them of turning their front lawns into gardens. It really wasn't hard to find takers because it was a pretty sweet deal. Their boring lawn would be turned into a garden. I'd do almost all of the work, cover the costs, and they could eat all the food they liked right from their front yard. In fact, I quickly had a list of lawns longer than I could handle. The transformation was amazingly quick and within just a few months I was growing more food than I could eat myself and sharing it with friends in the neighborhood. I ended up creating six small plots all within easy cycling distance of each other. I was just figuring out what I was doing the whole time. I went to local meetups like Orlando permaculture, volunteered in the garden with Fleet Farming, visited farms and gardens and nurseries, took foraging classes with local foragers like Green Dean, read books by local growers and watched videos online and more. For a place to live, I built a simple tiny house homestead in the backyard of a community member that I met. And in exchange for using their space, I turned their monoculture of grass into an at-home supermarket. Starting from scratch, it took me 10 months to be comfortable and ready to begin my year. November 11th, 2018 would be my first day. It was now time to eat 100% from my gardens and food that I would forage. Now, when I say 100%, I truly mean it. No grocery stores or restaurants, no drinks at a bar, nothing packaged or processed, nothing shipped long distances, no farmers markets, not even going over to my friend's pantry or even going to their gardens or their food forests. Why not share food from my friend's gardens? Because I wanted to truly immerse in my food. I wanted to have to literally figure out how to grow every single food or ingredient that I needed or how to source it from nature. Many people know me for my dumpster diving to raise awareness about food waste. And a lot of people who follow me online assume that I would still be eating from dumpsters. But nope, no food from dumpster diving at all. I had already proved to myself that I could live off of the waste of our globalized food system. Now, it was time to see if I could step away from that completely. That included everything that I put in my body, even supplements, vitamins, and medicines. Now, you'd think on day one that maybe I'd have eaten a lot of 100% homegrown and foraged meals. But to be honest, my first meal on day one was my first 100% homegrown and foraged meal of my entire life. It was day one and I was in the deep end. But I had laid the foundation that I needed. My gardens scattered across the neighborhood were full of food and I had scouted out food both in the city and the countryside to forage. My supermarket was on nearly every street I could walk down and the shelves were stocked. Over the last 365 days, I grew and harvested over 100 different foods from my gardens and foraged over 200 different foods from nature. That's a new species for almost every single day of the year. I grew a dozen different greens packed with nutrients. Moringa, katuk, chaya, perslane, collards, kale, and perennial spinach is just to name a few. I grew sweet potatoes, cassava, and yams for my main caloric needs. Pigeon peas and southern peas for protein, delicious fruits like papayas and bananas, seminal pumpkins, carrots, eggplants, just to name a few vegetables, and garlic, onion, peppers, and many herbs to add flavor and nutrition to all of my meals. And I raised bees for honey to satisfy my sweet tooth which believe me, I do have quite the sweet tooth. All of the bees that I stewarded were rescued with my friend Dennis the Bee Guy from locations where people didn't want them living, such as in the side of their homes. I harvested giant wild yams from the woods, picked coconuts to make coconut milk, butter, and coconut curries. Forged from fruit trees in the wild, growing in public parks, and in the city with the bounty of fruit falling onto the sidewalks. And of course, wild bananas too. I caught fish from the oceans, lakes, and rivers, and even harvested deer that had been hit by cars during my visit to Wisconsin. I harvested over 20 species of mushrooms in the woods, picked nutritious plants that people call weeds, that they walk by unknowingly or even constantly battle with in their yards and gardens. My caffeine came from the native yapan-holly tree that I made a tea from, and I even harvested my own sea salt from the ocean by collecting the water, boiling it down in a pot until I was left with just the sea salt for my meals. I grew and foraged all of my own medicine and vitamins too. I grew fresh turmeric and ginger in my gardens, foraged elderberries from the wild. I harvested reishi mushrooms and herbal teas and grew Moringa, also known as the vitamin tree, to make an easy to travel with multivitamin powder. But most importantly, my food was my medicine. It's a different way of thinking for most people, but even the weeds that grow just outside of our doorstep are some of the most nutritionally and medicinally dense plants on earth. For the last year, nature has been my garden, my pantry and my pharmacy. With the seasons, my foods varied greatly. I cooked up dozens of different healthy meals, fermented foods like sauerkraut with my homegrown cabbage and herbs and fermented delicious beverages like honey wine and ginger beer and whipped up delicious desserts and ate the healthiest food of my entire life. This was food that I could feel truly good about eating. It was all local, all natural and all organic. I made it through the entire year without using a single pesticide. Now sure, I had my problems with pests like when the cucumber worms decided to attack my seminal pumpkins. But when I was growing over a hundred different foods, if the pests were attacking four or five of them, I still had 95 other foods that I could eat. Just as importantly though, I chose to grow the plants that thrive in this environment. When I started, I didn't walk down the aisles of the grocery store and ask which foods that I liked the most. Instead, I talked to local farmers and gardeners and my permaculturist friends and asked them what foods grow so ridiculously well and so ridiculously abundantly that I could hardly screw it up. And those are the plants that I chose to focus on and that's one of the main things that got me through this year. This was without a doubt one of the most challenging things that I've ever done. A year is a really long time and I had my highs and my lows. There were times when I felt my absolute best and there were times when I just didn't know if I could go on. Generally, I did get enough food. My weight stayed the same about the entire time so I did have enough calories. But there were times when I felt like I was really deficient, mostly in fat and protein. Those were the times when I found it really hard to want to keep going. And there was the social aspect. I was on my own a lot of the times, not able to join other people for their meals and sort of isolated, not being able to go to restaurants or eat with friends and family. Overall, with all the ups and downs, the year went about as well as I could have possibly hoped. I maintained my body weight throughout the year and I never got sick once. And I really attribute that to my food being my medicine. I think that nature is able to provide for our basic needs and I trusted earth, I trusted nature. Now, I want to say though that this project, it wasn't really about my health. It wasn't about a diet. And I don't believe that this is the diet for seven billion people. I don't actually think there is one diet for the seven billion people. I think we live on a diverse world where we have diverse cultures and people need to do things in a very different way. So I'm not trying to represent a diet for everyone or anything like that. This was just my own personal quest to see if I could step away from Big Ag, step away from what I see as a broken food system and instead grow and forage 100% of my own food for an entire year. This project wasn't just about growing and foraging all of my own food though. It was about empowering others to grow their own food, to take back power from Big Ag and ultimately to take back their health and grow their communities. So during this time, I started a few community initiatives. We built 15 gardens for the people, planted over 200 community fruit trees and sent out over 5,000 free seed packs to help others grow their own organic, healthy food. And I taught dozens of free gardening classes in my gardens to the people in my community. I'll be honest though, I do have an agenda. I want you to question your food. Where did it come from? How has it grown? How did it get to you? And what was the impact that it had on the earth, other species and the humans that grow that food? And if you don't like the answers that you find, I want to empower you to change them. The good news though, is that you don't have to grow and forage all of your food. The solutions are there in your community. You can grow a little bit of your own food, maybe an herb garden on your window sill or some pots of tomatoes and basil on your balcony or a raised bed in your front yard. And if you don't have any space at all, you can join a community garden. You can source your food locally and purchase from local farmers and gardeners. The farmers market is a great place to start. You can buy whole foods and cook more rather than packaged processed foods that leave trash behind. And you can work with your community to make healthy foods for people in need. Grow a garden for your elderly neighbor or start a grassroots organization to harvest the fruit trees in your community to distribute it to others. And this doesn't need to be a lonely journey. For most of us, food is at the center of our lives and we can do this together in our communities. My year is over, but my journey of food has just begun. A book is in the works and 100% of my proceeds will be donated to organizations working on the food solutions. And I'll be here online, sharing inspiration and education and how you can get involved in gaining food freedom. My mouth is cold now. My own medicine and vitamins too. All right, make note of that.