The Black Forager
Reclaiming Foraging with Infectious Exuberance
by Dawn Emery Ballantine
She frolics, she dances, she gambols through meadow and forest; she rhymes, she sings, she shouts joyously at the top of her lungs. She is Alexis Nikole, aka The Black Forager. It’s impossible to watch her short videos without smiling or even laughing out loud. Engaging and delightful, Alexis takes you out into nature and brings you home with good things to eat that you likely walk past, unnoticed, every day.
Alexis is returning foraging—even in cities—to the forefront, and her natural vivacity and evident passion for the topic has clearly hit a chord. She has been chosen as a Forbes 30 under 30 and a Fortune Magazine Creator 25, as well as the recipient of the James Beard Award for “Best Social Media” in 2022, and a TikTok Tastemaker with 5 million followers. As a recent promotion said, “. . . she reframes the world of food, asking us to consider tastefully satiating and environmentally sustainable food choices. She also peels back historical layers on African American and Indigenous food traditions that has [sic] traditionally been repressed.”
This 34-year-old, who hails from Ohio, credits both her parents for getting her out into nature when she was growing up and giving her a good foraging foundation. She had her first remembered foraging experience at the age of five, out in the garden and yard with her mother. But foraging didn’t really play a large role in her life until after college, when she was “super poor,” as she puts it, “and wanting to eat things other than ramen and canned vegetables.” Getting back into foraging helped her fall in love with food, but also spurred her into more research, which led her to some hard truths about the schism between Black folks and nature.
During her research, Alexis learned that Indigenous peoples had long shared knowledge with enslaved African Americans, teaching them how to fish, trap, and forage so they could supplement their meager meals. After emancipation, new laws were enacted which made it a crime to forage on land one did not own—and newly-freed folks did not, of course, own property. This effectively took both private and public property off the foraging map. Given the times, according to Alexis, “… being black in nature was a very scary thing to do, for the sake of your safety.” Foraging also became synonymous with poverty—people with means could purchase what they wanted at the grocery store and looked down on those who could not.
Under these conditions foraging became both disparaged and impossible in practice. Studies show that once folks lose access to a knowledge-base, that knowledge is often lost forever. Reclaiming that cultural and ecological wisdom is the heart of Alexis’ work. She reflects in one of her Facebook posts that, “There truly is something revolutionary about being black, and meeting the earth where she is, and making a trade. For too long this knowledge has been forgotten, and for too long, first out of fear of violence, and then out of cultural routing, black faces have shied away from the great wide outdoors. A space that truly belongs to us all, just as we belong to it.”
Grounded in this awareness, it’s clear why Alexis calls herself “The Black Forager,” even though she has received a fair bit of push-back in her online communities for doing so. In her words, she does it “for the culture.” In her 2021 Ted Radio Hour, Alexis explained, “... it makes my heart and my head heavy to see people who honestly believe that one’s race doesn’t affect the way we move through this world.” In an LA-based foraging spot on Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show, Alexis emphasized that “Foraging as a black person is an act of rebellion … I will keep talking about race and I will keep talking about socio-economic status as it relates to food.”
Alexis is conscious of how her race impacts the way in which people respond to her when they encounter her out in the wild. In a HuffPost interview she shared, “I went through a phase where I was urban foraging exclusively wearing dresses with full makeup, because I thought, ‘If I look the most palatable version of myself—even if someone doesn’t know what I’m doing and the fact that they can’t identify it makes them a little bit nervous—hopefully I look so inviting, so pleasant, that they’ll come and talk to me about it before they call the cops about it,’ which is not an experience that I feel I see a lot of my white counterparts even being a little bit familiar with … I feel like I have to have a speech ready to go at all times, regardless of where I am.”
In her posts, Alexis illustrates how to locate plants, how to differentiate them from their less healthy doppelgangers, and what to do with them once you’ve found them. She offers plenty of pointers for finding safe foraging sources and loads of recipes for turning foraged treasures into delectable—or at least interesting—edibles, such as: pickled magnolia leaves, pinecone syrup, magnolia syrup for use in making her Magnolia Snap Cookies, nocino, dotorimuk (acorn flour noodles), prickly pear syrup, dandelion fritters, and pine sprite, to name a few. On social media she notes that, in the recipe creation process, “This is one of those parts of foraging that is very ‘choose your own adventure.’” And Alexis is nothing if not adventurous, looking deeply into our natural spaces with so much wonder. During her Ted Radio Hour she reflects, “It’s like Disneyworld, but plants. And full of much cheaper food!”
To further her educational reach, Alexis launched “Crash Course: Botany” with PBS Nature and Complexly in 2023. This 15-episode series (found on PBS and YouTube) illustrates Alexis’ basic tenets: “Our lives and the lives of every other creature on earth depend on plants . . . This is a plant’s world. You’re just livin’ in it.” And her most recent foray is into the herbal soap world with Blueland, an environmentally friendly soap tablet company, launching “The Foraged Collection,” a limited edition soap line made from three of Alexis’ favorite combinations: Beach Rose, Juneberry Basil, and Lilac Clove—all plant-based and planet-friendly.
For a written source to supplement her videos, Alexis recommends Sam Thayer’s Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants in helping to decide what is safe to eat in the wild. She notes, “There’s something soul-nourishing about caring about how you’re nourishing your body.” And if we can channel even a smidge of Alexis’ joy in doing so, what better way to connect with nature and explore wild edibles. Just always remember to abide by her tagline: “Happy Snacking. Don’t Die!”
The Black Forager
FaceBook/Instagram/TikTok @blackforager
Photos courtesy of The Black Forager
Dawn Emery Ballantine lives in Anderson Valley where she procures special order books at Hedgehog Books, edits this magazine, and delights in discovering good things to eat.