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My neighbor had a black walnut tree and told me what it was. You could eat black walnuts. Lots of people know that. I just never forgot that and I started eating black walnuts.” He’d add perhaps half a dozen items each year, just by asking people. “There’s a lot of knowledge floating around, but people just aren’t picking it up and using it.” When he was 10, he discovered books on edible wild plants, which rapidly sped up the learning process. By middle school, he was presenting his learning to classmates in science class. He learned survival camping in his teens, guided to foraging walks, and, after high-school graduation, built and lived in a log cabin on an abandoned farmstead near Lake Superior. But far from living a quiet life o the grid, he traveled the nation to give workshops, learning more regional wild foods as he went. He published his award-winning first book, “The Forager’s Harvest,” in 2006; his latest, “Sam Thayer’s Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants,” will be out in May 2023.

Teaching the Trade

In a typical year, Thayer hosts 10 to 15 workshops. “If I have 100 people and I say, ‘Who here gathers wild food?’ 30 hands will go up. And if I say, ‘Who here gathers wild blackberries?’ 90 hands go up. As soon as people eat something, they don’t think of it as wild anymore. It really helps them accept that [foraging] really is a normal activity.”