It's the dream of millions of people.
Complete self sufficiency.
To grow all of their own food and never
have to take a trip to the grocery store.
But for most people, it's just that, a dream.
The ease of our current global, industrial
food system is just that, too easy.
Too convenient. Too time saving and too alluring.
I've been exploring food for nearly a decade,
and since the beginning, I've had the burning question-
Could I step outside of the Big Ag system?
Could I go without grocery stores and restaurants?
Nothing packaged or processed,
nothing shipped from a far off place.
Could I grow and forage 100% of my food,
everything that I ate, for an entire year?
That's exactly the journey and the quest
that I decided to set out on
and now I am here to share the story with you.
(music)
(music abruptly stops) But one big thing-
I had very little experience with growing my own food.
When I lived in San Diego I did have a
few raised beds where I grew some greens,
tomatoes and herbs but as a traveller for
the last seven or so years, I had never
really settled in one place long enough to
grow my own food.
So, in order to do this I would have to
settle in one place.
And that place that I chose is Orlando, Florida,
where I am sitting right now.
Besides being really fresh to growing my own food,
I was also fresh to the scene here in Orlando, in Florida.
And I was giving myself just two years
here before hitting the road again.
So I had to get planting as soon as I landed here.
But I didn't have a garden, I didn't own
any land, and I had almost no experience
with foraging in the state of Florida.
I chose Florida so that I could grow food year round.
And I chose Orlando because I had passed
through here a few times and met a great
community of permaculturists and people who grow their own food.
Specifically, I chose the community of Audubon Park
because that's where Orlando permaculture
and my friends at Fleet Farming were based
and there was already a movement here of
turning front yards into gardens.
So I would have the support I needed in order to do it here.
I quickly got to work meeting people in my
neighborhood and proposing the idea to
them of turning their front lawns into gardens.
It really wasn't hard to find takers
because it was a pretty sweet deal.
Their boring lawn would be turned into a
garden, I'd do almost all of the work,
cover the costs and they could eat all the
food they liked right from their front yard.
In fact, I quickly had a list of lawns
longer than I could handle.
The transformation was amazingly quick
and within just a few months, I was
growing more food than I could eat, myself,
and sharing it with friends in the neighborhood.
I ended up creating six small plots
all within easy cycling distance of each other.
I was just figuring out what I was doing the whole time.
I went to local meet ups like Orlando Permaculture,
volunteered in the garden with Fleet Farming,
visited farms, and gardens and nurseries,
took foraging classes with local foragers,
like Green Deane, read books by local
growers, and watched videos online, and more.
For a place to live, I built a simple,
tiny house homestead in the backyard of a
community member that I met.
And in exchange for using their space,
I turned their monoculture of grass into an at home supermarket.
Starting from scratch, it took me ten
months to be comfortable and ready to begin my year.
November 11th, 2018 would be my first day.
It was now time to eat 100% from my
gardens and food that I would forage.
Now, when I say 100% I truly mean it.
No grocery stores or restaurants.
No drinks at a bar.
Nothing packaged or processed.
Nothing shipped long distances.
No farmer's markets.
Not even going over to my friend's pantry
or even going to their gardens or their food forests.
Why not share food from my friends' gardens?
Because I wanted to truly immerse in my food.
I wanted to have to have to literally
figure out how to grow every single food
or ingredient that I needed or how to source it from nature.
Many people know me for my dumpster diving
to raise awareness about food waste.
And a lot of people who follow me online
assumed that I would still be eating from dumpsters.
But, nope! No food from dumpster diving at all!
I had already proved to myself that
I could live off of the waste of our globalized food system.
Now it was time to see if I could step
away from that completely.
That included everything that I put in my body.
Even supplements, vitamins and medicines.
Now, you'd think on day one, that maybe
I'd have eaten a lot of 100% homegrown and foraged meals,
but to be honest, my first meal on day one,
was my first 100% homegrown and foraged meal of my entire life.
It was day one and I was in the deep end.
But I had laid the foundation that I needed.
My gardens, scattered across the
neighborhood, were full of food
and I had scouted out food, both in the
city and the countryside, to forage.
My supermarket was on nearly every street
I could walk down and the shelves were stocked.
Over the last 365 days I grew and
harvested over 100 different foods from my gardens
and foraged over 200 different foods from nature.
That's a new species for almost every
single day of the year.
I grew a dozen different greens packed with nutrients.
Moringa,
katuk,
chaya, purslane,
collards, kale,
and perennial spinaches, just to name a few.
I grew sweet potatoes, cassava and yams
for my main caloric needs.
Pigeon peas and southern peas for protein.
Delicious fruits like papayas and bananas.
Seminole pumpkins, carrots, eggplants,
just to name a few vegetables.
And garlic, onion, peppers and many herbs
to add flavour and nutrition to all of my meals.
And I raised bees for honey to satisfy my sweet tooth.
Which, believe me, I do have quite the sweet tooth.
All of the bees that I stewarded were
rescued with my friend, Dennis the bee guy,
from locations where people didn't want them living
such as in the side of their homes.
I harvested giant wild yams from the woods.
Picked coconuts to make coconut milk,
butter and coconut curries.
Foraged from fruit trees in the wild,
growing in public parks and in the city,
with the bounty of fruit falling onto the sidewalks.
And, of course, wild bananas, too.
I caught fish from the oceans, lakes and rivers.
And even harvested deer that had been hit
by cars during my visit to Wisconsin.
I harvested over 20 species of mushrooms in the woods.
Picked nutritious plants that people call weeds,
that they walk by, unknowingly, or even
constantly battle with in their yards and gardens.
My caffeine came from the native Yaupon holly tree
that I made a tea from.
And I even harvested my own sea salt from
the ocean by collecting the water, boiling
it down in a pot, until I was left with
just the sea salt for my meals.
I grew and foraged all of my own medicine
and vitamins, too.
I grew fresh turmeric and ginger in my gardens.
Foraged elderberries from the wild.
I harvested reishi mushrooms and herbal teas.
And grew moringa, also known as the
vitamin tree, to make an easy to travel
with multi vitamin powder.
But most importantly, my food was my medicine.
It's a different way of thinking for most
people, but even the weeds that grow just
outside of our doorstep, are some of the
most nutritionally and medicinally dense plants on earth.
For the last year, nature has been my
garden, my pantry and my pharmacy.
With the seasons my foods varied greatly.
I cooked up dozens of different healthy meals.
Fermented foods, like sauerkraut, with my
homegrown cabbage and herbs, and fermented
delicious beverages like honey wine and ginger beer.
And whipped up delicious desserts,
and ate the healthiest food of my entire life.
This was food that I could feel truly good about eating.
It was all local, all natural and all organic.
I made it through the entire year without
using a single pesticide.
Now sure, I had my problems with pests,
like when the cucumber worms decided to
attack my seminole pumpkins.
But when I was growing over 100 different
foods, if the pests were attacking 4 or 5
of them, I still had 95 other foods that I could eat.
Just as importantly, though, I chose to
grow the plants that thrived in this environment.
When I started, I didn't walk down the
aisles of the grocery store and ask which
foods that I liked the most.
Instead, I talked to local farmers and
gardeners and my permaculturist friends
and asked them what foods grow so
ridiculously well and so ridiculously
abundantly that I could hardly screw it up.
And those are the plants that I chose to
focus on, and that's one of the main
things that got me through this year.
This was, without a doubt, one of the most
challenging things that I've ever done.
A year is a really long time and I had my
highs and my lows.
There were times when I felt my absolute best,
and there were times when I just didn't
know if I could go on.
Generally, I did get enough food.
My weight stayed the same about the entire
time, so I did have enough calories.
But there were times when I felt like
I was really deficient, mostly in fat and protein.
Those were the times when I found it
really hard to want to keep going.
And there was the social aspect.
I was on my own a lot of the times, not
able to join other people for their meals
and sort of isolated. Not being able to go
to restaurants or eat with friends and family.
Overall, with all the ups and downs, the
year went about as well as I could have possibly hoped.
I maintained my body weight throughout
the year and I never got sick once!
And I really attribute that to my food
being my medicine. I think that nature is
able to provide for our basic needs and
I trusted earth. I trusted nature.
Now, I want to say, though, that this
project, it wasn't really about my health.
It wasn't about a diet.
And I don't believe that this is the diet
for 7 billion people, I don't actually
think there is one diet for the 7 billion people.
I think we live on a diverse world where
we have diverse cultures and people need
to do things in a very different way.
So I'm not trying to represent a diet for
everyone or anything like that.
This was just my own personal quest.
To see if I could step away from Big Ag.
Step away from what I see as a broken food system.
And, instead, grow and forage 100% of my
own food for an entire year.
This project wasn't just about growing and
foraging all of my own food, though.
It was about empowering others
to grow their own food, to take back power
from Big Ag and, ultimately, to take back
their health and grow their communities.
So during this time I started a few
community initiatives.
We built 15 gardens for the people,
planted over 200 community fruit trees,
and sent out over 5,000 free seed packs
to help others grow their own organic, healthy food.
And I taught dozens of free gardening
classes, in my gardens, to the people in my community.
I'll be honest, though, I do have an agenda.
I want you to question your food.
Where did it come from? How was it grown?
How did it get to you? And what was
the impact that it had on the earth,
other species and the humans that grow that food?
And if you don't like the answers that you find,
I want to empower you to change them.
The good news, though, is that you don't
have to grow and forage all of your food.
The solutions are there in your community.
You can grow a little bit of your own food.
Maybe an herb garden on your window sill.
Or some pots of tomatoes and basil on your balcony.
Or a raised bed in your front yard.
And if you don't have any space, at all,
you can join a community garden.
You can source your food locally.
And purchase from local farmers and gardeners.
The farmer's market is a great place to start.
You can buy whole foods and cook more,
rather than packaged, processed foods that
leave trash behind.
And you can work with your community to
make healthy foods for people in need.
Grow a garden for your elderly neighbor,
or start a grass roots organization to
harvest the fruit trees in your community
to distribute it to others.
And this doesn't need to be a lonely journey.
For most of us, food is at the center of our lives.
And we can do this, together, in our communities.
My year is over but my journey of food has just begun.
A book is in the works and 100% of my
proceeds will be donated to organizations
working on the food solutions.
And I'll be here, online, sharing
inspiration and education on how you can
get involved in gaining food freedom.
(music)
My mouth is cold now.
(Muffled)...my own (laughs) medicine and vitamins to...
(Laughing)
Alright make note of that (laughing)