This piece first appeared in the summer 2025 issue of Gravy quarterly from the Southern Foodways Alliance, guest edited by Rough Draft’s Beth McKibben. You can purchase the issue of Gravy here for $12. Read this story and others from the issue online at Gravy.
My first impression of food foraging was that it’s expensive. Two tickets for a Saturday morning mushroom hike at Arabia Mountain were more than a hundred bucks. I wasn’t paying for mushrooms, I reasoned. It was for time with Ranger Darling Ngoh, a data scientist and expert mushroom hunter. This guided ramble in a 2,550-acre nature preserve thirty minutes east of Atlanta promised to teach me “how to forage like a pro” while allowing me to escape into the woods for the day. Foraging may be free, but tuition isn’t cheap.
Maybe more valuable to me was getting my thirteen-year-old son off his laptop for the morning. Guy is accustomed to my forays into agritourism, having spent Saturdays in orchards and berry patches all over the South since the pandemic. It was a useful diversion from doomscrolling for me, too.
The morning was warm for early February, a muggy sixty degrees and climbing. A noisy chorus of frogs greeted us from the woods that ringed the gravel parking lot at Davidson-Arabia Mountain Nature Center. Was this the sound of early spring or climate change?
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Ranger Ngoh met us at the front door of the nature center with a cardboard box of dry mushroom specimens and a brief lecture on the kingdom Fungi. Despite his goatee and abundant knowledge, he looked closer to my son’s age than mine. He told us that his name was pronounced like “go,” and that he was inspired by how mycelial networks—these complex, underground fungal root systems with the power to share nutrients, information, and even memory—mirrored his studies in data science.
“We’ve had some rain,” he said, “so we should be lucky today.”
What was I doing out here, attempting to forage for mushrooms?It clearly wasn’t going to provide lunch, at least not this early in the season. From the media coverage I had seen about food foraging, it struck me as either the rarefied hobby of intellectual foodies or the survival tactic of preppers, two groups of White people I tend to avoid at parties. What does this practice offer everyone else? Particularly in a time of political whiplash, when even the terms “climate change” and “environmental justice” are being scrubbed from the national discourse, what can foraging teach us about abundance, about reconnecting to place, to our communities, to our own bodies? I wanted to know, so I spent the spring foraging for foragers.
We ventured down an old quarry road into the woods. My son proved surprisingly fast at spotting the yellow, orange, and red of tiny mushrooms hiding in the gray-brown forest. Ngoh was like a kid in a candy shop, bursting with knowledge about each discovery.
He rattled off the Latin names for the mushrooms, their medicinal benefits, immune support, anti-inflammatory properties, dendritic connections. He explained the basics of foraging etiquette (take no more than 30 percent) and how to scatter the spores of the Apioperdon pyriforme or pear-shaped puffball, patting the sides of an old log as if it were a Labrador retriever.
We found a half-dozen different species of fungi in the first hour, from the nontoxic, nonedible Phyllotopsis nidulans, or orange oyster, on a pine log, to the extremely toxic Galerina marginata, or deadly galerina. As we hiked through the granite-block ruins of some outbuilding of the Davidson Granite Company, I marveled how this old industrial site, quarried for almost eighty years, had been reclaimed by nature and the public. Donated in 1972, it was now a thriving public park, well-traveled by an ethnically diverse mix of hikers, cyclists, birders, and roaming naturalists.
We finally found some turkey tail, our first edible mushroom. We took turns gathering the indigo-striped frills and carefully placing them in baggies like the medicine they are. Wash, air dry, pulverize, Ngoh instructed, then mix into tea or coffee. “I don’t go more than two weeks without getting some form of turkey tail,” he said. “The tails have increased my ability to stay healthy.”
Growing up on the western coast of Africa, Ngoh foraged guavas, passionfruit, mangos, and bananas for fun, but rarely fungi.
“I realized early on, it was usually the adults that foraged for mushrooms, because there still was that stigma, even in Cameroon. These things were deadly. So they did it responsibly. I did go a couple times with my dad to go foraging for mushrooms, and that was cool, but the majority of the time was spent with other kids and my brothers, foraging for fruits and plants.”
If mushrooms are always in season, I asked Ngoh, does climate change affect the practice of foraging?
“Foragers are individuals who are aware of their native ecosystems,” he explained. They notice when things change. “Mushrooms serve as great bioindicators. They are the underlying infrastructure, you could say, or connectors that facilitate ecosystem health, rehabilitation, and general sustainability.”
“Foraging is just a quick feedback loop that allows me to test certain concepts, understandings, and knowledge.”
Toward the end of our hike, as we trooped across the pitted moonscape of the monadnock, I spotted a cluster of flat cactus petals growing in one of the mossy depressions. I stopped; the hike continued. Nopales. I carelessly plucked one of the fleshy pads and was holding it out for a photo before I noticed the fine needles stinging my palm.
The clouds broke and we stripped off our hoodies. It was nearly seventy-five degrees. My son asked to go to McDonalds. I was tired, hot, and happy, so I said okay. As we left Ranger Ngoh, I realized that for the entire morning, I had been thinking about mushrooms. Not politics; not what was for lunch. I was entirely tuned into studying the logs, branches, rocky surfaces of this wild place, hands in the soil, sniffing the branches, observing and curious. For a half day, it didn’t feel like the world was falling apart.
What I bought wasn’t tuition; it was therapy. At home, I washed my turkey tail bits and arranged them with the lone nopal on a blue plate on my windowsill: a little offering to keep that pleasant feeling going through the week.
Serviceberries
Two weeks later, when I planned to go back to Arabia Mountain for a sunset hike with Ranger Robby Astrove, an arctic blast chilled the South. The forecasted high temperature was below freezing, and I wimped out. Instead, we met at his house in Grant Park.
A well-known environmental educator and arborist, Astrove has earned a reputation as a forager and supplier to chefs and bartenders in Atlanta’s restaurant scene. His spring offerings include local delicacies like Japanese knotweed, smilax shoots, Nanking cherries, green plums, and serviceberries.
In 2021, Astrove and his friend (now wife) Jess Pfeffer organized their first Serviceberry Fest, a one-day celebration of the native Georgia fruit. Often planted as ornamental street trees, the white flowers of serviceberries bloom all over Atlanta in the spring, on roadsides from Freedom Park to the Georgia Tech campus. The berries ripen from red to deep purple by mid-May. It’s hard to think of anyone in Atlanta who has done more to introduce Atlanta food enthusiasts to serviceberries and other, as he put it, “ingredients that grow in our zip code.”
I left my boots by the front door and settled on a bean bag while Astrove squeezed lemon over mugs of hot herbal tea. He showed me a well-worn notebook that contained his log of more than ten years of foraging expeditions. “This is climate change data,” he said, tapping the cover.
“There’s trees that I used to hit that were like jackpots that have died—or they’re gone.”
I can see the handwritten columns: date, plant, location, customer, pounds harvested.
“Even in my span of years, there’s these waves, and I’m convinced I was on a wave when I started. Now I look and I can see the ebb and flow of poundage with climate change and freezes and frost. I mean, sometimes I might not go as hard, but there’s certain crops that I know for a fact—I could say with great accuracy the trends, because I’m there. I’m watching them.”
I told him about my introduction to foraging with Ranger Darling Ngoh. “He’s like a living mycorrhizal network,” said Astrove. “His brain is beautiful.”
What about the other hungers, I asked. Was foraging an intellectual pursuit or a way to eat? “I found some turkey tail, which eventually I will drink,” I said. “It’s not like I found something I can sauté with butter.”
He smiled. “This is completely a leisure activity. But it’s also the most basic survival activity.”
“There’s lessons for everybody when it comes to foraging, and it doesn’t have to be just about feeding themselves,” he said. “Just the art of paying attention and being based in a place. It really makes you think about home as Earth. And then, the benefit is like, yeah, you get a nice snack out of it, too.”
I pulled a copy of British architect and writer Carolyn Steel’s book Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World out of my backpack so I could read him this highlighted passage:
While supermarkets are all about blurring time and place—the year-round availability of kumquats—foraging is all about the here and now. Convenience has nothing to do with it, but rather the patient gathering of food and knowledge.
It turns out, Astrove had an emotional connection to year-round citrus, too. When I asked about his earliest foraging memories, he spoke fondly of the ruby red grapefruit and Key lime trees growing in his childhood yard in south Florida.
“Sometime in the 1980s, and we might have to go back and research it, there was a citrus canker,” he recalled. His mother tried to explain why the state Department of Agriculture required them to destroy their trees as part of a years-long canker eradication program, but he couldn’t understand it. It seemed that their healthy trees were sacrificed to protect the citrus industry. He was upset then—and still sounded a bit heartbroken as he recounted the story.
“Maybe that’s buried somewhere,” he mused. “Maybe all my fruit planting is like revenge from that time. I’ll call my mom tonight.”
The room grew dim as the late-winter light faded. Astrove switched on some twinkly lights.
I wanted to hear how it feels to forage, how putting yourself in the right place at the right time adds to the flavor, the experience, and the value of food. I remembered the thrill of discovering pawpaws for the first time one October.
Astrove described the act of foraging as somewhat mystical, “like this very weird superpower.”
“When I’m in the tree gorging on serviceberries, it’s pure joy and bliss. I always feel such appreciation for the plant that’s nourishing my body. I have this moment of extreme reverence that I’m the recipient of these nutrients.”
In 2023, Astrove and Pfeffer cancelled Serviceberry Fest because he couldn’t harvest enough berries. That March, a late frost destroyed the serviceberries—along with most of the state’s iconic peach crop. “A festival that depends on abundant foraging was a bust,” he told me. “It was like witnessing our world fall out of equilibrium.”
Why had I never tasted Georgia’s super fruit? After tea with Astrove, I felt like I was missing out. I also wanted to test my own idea that part of what makes wild foods so special is that money can’t buy them at Whole Foods.
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A week or so later, I received six pounds of frozen Saskatoon berries, also known as Juneberries or serviceberries. It cost fifty-five dollars to have them packed in dry ice and shipped from Washington. Unlike the transcendent experience of eating from a tree, I felt silly about the expense and the carbon footprint of buying something that will be falling off Atlanta trees by June.
I made Guy a purple smoothie with frozen serviceberries, bananas, Nutella, and milk, and he sucked it down without noticing the fruit. The serviceberries’ slippery, amaretto-flavored seeds survived the blender, and the feeling of drinking while chewing them reminded me of Boba tea.
The next afternoon, I baked a simple serviceberry dessert using the apple crisp recipe from my old faithful Betty Crocker cookbook. I went for nutmeg instead of cinnamon in the topping, and as the scent of toasted butter and spice filled the kitchen, I deemed this a wholesome breakfast for the next day, too.
Despite being frozen, then baked, the berries stayed firm and chewy, reminding me of cherries. This is a close description but not quite right, in the way that gooey pawpaw flesh resembles banana but tastes like nothing else. Both fruits have a unique texture and flavor, and it’s worth watching the trees and the weather for the day they grow ripe and fall.
Nopales
M. Soto told me about nopales a couple of years ago. We met leading a hike for Trees Atlanta, where I talked about the history of the nature preserve, and Soto, a Mexican American ethnobotanist and the one of the founders of Atlanta Planting Cooperative, talked about the plants. Afterwards, Soto pointed out a spiky ornamental cactus in the front yard of a house across from the park.
“They’re really good for your skin and your hair,” they said. I had no idea that this Dr. Seuss–looking plant was edible, even delicious.
I forgot about that until I had my own prickly specimen in the kitchen. I tracked down Soto, who uses they/them pronouns, in Lilburn, where they helped organize a tree giveaway for Día del Arbol at a huge shopping mall called Plaza las Americas. Soto explained why Georgia’s Arbor Day was in late February: When the trees are still dormant, “they experience less transplant shock and have more time to acclimate to their environment.” Inspired by my visit with Astrove, I picked up two little elderberry saplings to plant along the city-owned strip of grass by my mailbox.
While I waited for the event to wind down, I wandered into the food court for a cheesy arepa and a café con leche. Soto and their colleague Vicki Mendez, a forest restoration expert, joined me at a table outside of the food court. There’s no specific term for foraging in Spanish, Soto told me. So, I asked, how do they talk about it?
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“I don’t say forage, I just say go outside,”said Soto. “My mom is the one who taught us first, getting mint, flowers, berries, things that were growing along Buford Highway—especially things that our neighbors planted. Foraging is just picking from people’s gardens or yards.”
Soto told a story about unearthing potatoes as a small child from under the stairs at the Tempo Cabana apartments on Buford Highway. At first, their mother was angry about the mess, then delighted by the unexpected harvest. She made French fries.
“And mind you, we’re immigrants. We don’t have a lot of money, so the only time that we eat American food like French fries is if we get a special treat to go to McDonald’s. So to have found potatoes that became French fries, that was a treat. It just made me realize, like, there are so many wonders, and that feeling never went away.”
I could see how that kind of discovery would change a kid forever, just like Astrove’s lost ruby red grapefruit tree or Ngoh’s father’s careful mushroom hunting. All of them mentioned their parents as guides. Will Guy remember me dragging him out to pick peaches in 2024 and celebrating the abundance because 90 percent of the crop was killed by frost the year before?
Mendez talked about her mom’s childhood in Mexico. “She lived in a mountain region. They were poor, so they could not afford food all the time, so they ha[d] to constantly rely on the environment around them.”
I suddenly ached for my grandparents, who grew up in the mountains of western North Carolina during the Great Depression. They could name every tree, sprout, and blossom in the Nantahala Valley. They knew how to cook poke sallet and process sorghum. The concentration and time required was labor, not meditation.
“When you say foraging,” Mendez continued, “You kind of think about it as an activity, you know? To some people, it’s not that it’s a way of life, exactly—it’s a way to survive.”
Soto described foraging as reciprocal relationship, of listening to the Earth. “For me, it really is like being at the right place at the right time and being open to receiving.”
“That is how I treat foraging is when I’m out there, like the little things that call my attention. That’s Mother Nature’s gift to me for being there with them.”
As night fell and the plaza grew colder, we talked about how crazy the weather had been, from summery hot to freezing, with tornado watches in between. How did they see climate change affecting foraging?
Mendez was very careful. “You’re going to forage from a lot of native species, and the native species cannot keep up with climate change.”
“You can’t just extract; you have to also protect—you have to give back, you have to be a steward,” argued Soto. “So, if you know that these plants are limited in number, they’re facing a lot of, like, climate-change stressors, maybe now it’s not the time [to forage]. It’s time to adapt and to change.”
Foraging is different from other outdoorsy pursuits like camping, hiking, hunting, fishing, birding, or wildlife photography, because there’s no gear required. In fact, foraging is more like a spontaneous magic trick you can perform while you’re doing all those other activities. All you need are your nose, eyes, hands, and the knowledge that you’ve foraged from your friends and ancestors. That knowledge grows over the years, with the experience of your senses, with the changing weather and seasons.
I asked about the Arabia Mountain prickly pear on my windowsill. Mendez confirmed that they are native to Georgia, that she’s foraged them all her life. She showed me how her mom removes the spines and slices them into strips.
Soto told me that nopales could be slimy like okra, but to just keep cooking them. They recommended simmering them with fresh chicharrón in tomato or tomatillo sauce.
Soto and Mendez learned about foraging from their mothers, both of whom were newcomers to Georgia. No wonder this sprawling highway, lined with international grocery stores and restaurants from around the world, has a reputation as the epicurean capital of the South.
Their Buford Highway foraging menu—yerba buena (spearmint), tunas (prickly pear fruit), surprise papas fritas, and blackberries—made me realize I was wrong to think of foraging as some bougie, inaccessible hobby. Maybe I assumed one had to have privileged access to wilderness or specialized knowledge to make it work. Mendez foraged blackberries with her cousins on the side of a concrete barrier. Soto showed me nopales in a yard in southeast Atlanta.
How did I forget that I foraged for blackberries as a child on the side of the road with only the instruction of my dad and my granny? I don’t know all the berries of Georgia, but I can identify our sweet native dewberries every time. I recognize the briars, the pointy little leaves, the hard green berries that turn rusty red then black with sweetness. I was trained to beware of the snakes that wait for the birds that wait for the berries. They are as unmistakable as a pecan or a muscadine or a honeysuckle blossom.
I have routinely stopped on the side of a soccer field or under a bridge to fill a Chick-fil-A cup or an upturned Frisbee with free fruit. They always grow in the margins, in disturbed areas along creeks and roads. My kids will think about me when they see the tiny white flowers, and they’ll decide how to use this tether to their family, to the land, and to their hungry bodies.