Tim Clemens, AKA @MNForager on Instagram, is the founder of Ironwood Foraging Co, a Minnesota-based wild food and foraging education company, and someone Daniel's been writing back and forth with on social media for some time now.
He was formerly the president of the Minnesota Mycological Society, which gives him deep expertise on edible fungi, and he also has a degree in anthropology and archeology, so his perspectives on foraging are firmly grounded in an understanding of big human history.
Daniel and Tim finally got a chance to meet up for a podcast and discuss their foraging philosophies. Over the years, his page is one of the places we've visited to keep our finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the wild food world and to get new ideas about species we might also want to chase down, harvest, and ultimately eat ourselves.
Like Daniel, he’s not afraid to get experimental, even playing with entomophagy, eating species like invasive Japanese beetles, or making unusual recipes for his blog, like black ant ice cream.
But bigger picture, he thinks we need more, not less, people out there foraging, and for very similar reasons as us. People only care about what they know. Like Tim says in this interview, food is a trojan horse for knowledge. And while both he and Daniel are passionate about teaching people to feed themselves on foods they harvest from the landscape, ultimately, they are both really reacquainting people with nature itself. And that, beyond food, has the power to create real, positive change.
People who aren’t acquainted with nature are never going to be able to live harmoniously with it. In other words, foraging is a practice with very real and important ecological implications — both in the short term, but also on the longer timeline too.
When Tim says that — despite the challenges we face with potential over harvest or pushback we receive for harvesting from wild lands and species — more people should be out there foraging, we… couldn’t agree more.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/131