About Full Belly Foraging

I'm Matt Kip. I've been eating wild things for thirty years. I grew up exploring the sandhill country of central South Carolina. There was a vast tract of forest across the road from my house where me and a tribe of little boys dug kaolin clay from creek banks, followed deer tracks in the sand and played war games hiding in the bracken. Years later I watched bulldozers turn the woods I knew into housing developments and shopping centers. It hit me like a slap in the face, the collision course between consumer culture and wild nature. I began searching for some way to live that didn't require the destruction of nature. I was fascinated by the old ways of generations who lived without the manufactured products and industrial food systems of our modern world.

When I was 16, a neighbor took me foraging one afternoon. I was instantly hooked. I'd never known I was surrounded by food and medicine, hidden in plain sight. In those days before the internet, I began reading every book I could find in the library about wild edibles. I also was lucky enough to find and learn from two accomplished foragers in the region. I imagined a life of radical self-reliance, carving out a living in a remote wilderness somewhere. I never got there. Instead, I walked away from the skills I was building, for years. It wasn't until my kids were born, and I studied permaculture, another great love of mine, that the relevance of foraging returned to me. Being able to pull up weeds in my garden and add them to dinner is a great skill to have, but beyond the dinner plate lies something much deeper. Foraging showed me something I can never forget. Nature is a give away. If you want an apple from an apple tree, do you have to leave a pile of cash at the base of the tree? Or can you just pick an apple? It's not that there is no exchange- afterall, from a plant or mushroom's point of view, we're simply fancy seed and spore dispersers. It's that the exchange is native to us, intrinsic in the way we interact with the natural world, and doesn't require us to engage in centrally controlled currencies our cultures have invented. Most of us find we must work within the system of money exchange.

But it never seems quite as real once we remember the much older order beyond money. We knew it as tiny children. But we forget.

I'm no exception. I have bills like everyone else. Though I choose to participate in modern society, and deal with money everyday, it's freeing to continually be reminded of the unfathomable abundance and generosity of wild nature all around us. Wild foods and medicines pop through even the sidewalk cracks of our cities, beckoning us to remember our birthrights as parts of a living ecosystem. Every time I fill a bag with wild nettles, or come home with a pile of oyster mushrooms, I experience the most radical feeling of freedom I know. I want to share that feeling.

I began leading plant walks 18 years ago along the rivers in Columbia, SC. Since then I've had the opportunity to introduce thousands of people around SC and beyond to this way of seeing and connecting with the natural world. When I'm not munching on wild edibles, I experiment with urban permaculture gardens, raise three wildly creative children, and learn new steps in the wild dance of relationship. I'm excited you found Full Belly Foraging, and hope to see you in the woods soon!