A Beginner’s Guide to Foraging
Foraging 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Foraging
The key to foraging is knowledge of your surroundings and a drive to explore new flavors and opportunities. Food rich with nutrients and healing properties are all around us! I’m forever grateful that my mother got me started early and that my curious nature kept me going throughout adulthood. I’m excited to take you with me on my journey!
Listed below are a compilation of tips and tricks that will help you get started so you, too, can supplement your diet with nutritious, natural foods that are invasive on our islands. Each invasive species in Hawaii that you pick brings the island closer to its natural state.
•Curiousity: The first step to foraging is to simply look around with a new sense of curiosity! Most of us are surrounded by edible plants, even in urban areas! Pay attention to your surroundings and start wondering what the varying types of vegetation are and how you can use each one. Once you find a plant, the next step is to identify what it is!
Step 1: Plant Identification
•Identification: The hardest part of the whole process is learning how to identify plants. Once you learn this process, foraging becomes second nature. There are multiple ways to identify plants, and it all comes down to what works for you!
Books: It’s difficult to find a comprehensive book on edible plants, most are specific to a certain location or subtype. One would need multiple books for plant identification. Books are great once you have a bit of experience, but as a beginner they can be cumbersome. However, books are great to keep at home for learning and referencing.
Plant Identification Apps: As a general rule, I wouldn’t rely on these as a beginner. They are often inaccurate, but they can be useful if you have experience identifying plants already. Often the plant doesn't look exactly the same as the app photo, but can be identified after comparing it to other subspecies. Of online resources, I have found Google Lens to be the most reliable way of identifying plants by image
Community: I’ve learned so much by talking to other people who have an interest in plants. So many people have a wealth of knowledge who don't identify as foragers: farmers, florists, botanists, and especially those that are indigenous to the place in which you live. Some of my favourite sources in Hawaii can be found on Instagram as @sunnysavage, @nattybynature, and @followsthewai, and most have links to professional and educational sources that can be found from their profiles.
Google!: my favorite means of identifying plants because it is the simplest and most reliable. Type in a series of keywords that describe what the plant looks like and any other identifiers (i.e. large yellow flower Hawai’i) and search! Once results come up, you might not find it right away, but keep combing through an image search until you find it.
When thinking of keywords, think location, color, shape, and type (i.e. tree vs. fruit vs. flower vs. fungus).
*Keywords- it is useful to know certain adjectives that describe plants, such as simple vs. compound leaves, or alternate vs. opposite vs. whorled leaves, or roots vs. rhizomes. On a smartphone, you can also tap the camera icon in Google’s search bar and take a photo of the plant you are identifying using Google Lens. I find this method to be one of the most reliable ways of identifying a plant, plus it’s very easy to research details once you identify it!
*AI: A lot has changed since I first wrote this article, and AI has changed the foraging game. Identifying plants has become a lot easier due to things like Chat GPT and Google Image Search. Once again, these can be unreliable and it’s always best to cross-reference sources.
•Research: Once you identify the plant, the next step is to research. The points of research may be specific to the individual (for example, the things I want to know about a plant tend to have more to do with edibility, while someone else may be looking for plants to recultivate in a garden. For me, the most important points of research are as follows:
Name: Common name, Latin name, Hawaiian name, and any other names that may be applicable.
Status: Native vs. Non-native and everything in between (endemic, naturalized, invasive, and culturally significant).
Environment: Elevation (low, medium, or high), Season, and Location (mesic, arid, coastal, etc).
Edible Uses: Edibility and how the plant can be used for food in various cultures or how best to translate the ingredient into an edible food or drink.
Flavor: How the plant tastes in various expressions.
Medicinal Uses: Traditional and modern uses for treating various ailments.
Characteristics: Note certain characteristics about the plant, such as how the leaves are structured or the colour of the flowers so you don’t forget for future foraging journeys!
• Experimentation: A lot of plants don’t have much information available, but as long as I can find out if it’s safe to consume, I often experiment on my own with how best to use it. Sometimes it’s easy, and other times it takes me several attempts. When there’s a will, there’s a way!
•Don’t Play into Fear: The last point I want to make is a delicate one. Colonized literature will have you believe that the only edible foods are the processed, FDA-approved ones, despite the fact that indigenous cultures have been eating some of these “toxic” plants for centuries. And while I will be the first to say to do your research and find out what something is before ingesting it, I will also say that the wonderful world of wild food isn’t nearly as scary as the commercial food chain would have you believe. So please, don’t let the modern idea that wild foods will kill you stop you from experiencing and incorporating some of these nutritious foods into your diet. After all, some of them have amazing medicinal benefits, are incredibly delicious, and, totally free!