Could you imagine yourself living off the land for a whole year, only eating food that you have grown or foraged for yourself? My guest this week, Robin Greenfield, did just that, and it’s just one of the extreme challenges that he has undertaken in recent years to demonstrate that there are alternative ways of life that are kinder to the environment and fellow humans.
Robin is dedicated to living simply and sustainably, and describes himself as “a truth-seeker, activist, social reformer and servant to Earth, humanity and the plants and animals we share our home with.” In the media, he’s been called “the Robin Hood of modern times” and “the Forrest Gump of ecology.” His latest book is “Food Freedom: A Year of Growing and Foraging 100% of My Food.”
Robin Greenfield poses with a food mandala celebrating one year of growing and foraging 100% of his food.
Photo Credit: sierraford.com
For our conversation via video conferencing, Robin joins me from a park in Los Angeles. He has been on the West Coast for a few months though he is frequently on the move.
When Robin was last a guest on the podcast five years ago, he was just two weeks shy of completing his Food Freedom Project. He literally lived off the land, foraging and growing his own food for an entire year in Orlando, Florida.
“I go deep into my own mind to invite others to go deep into their own minds,” Robin says. “I question my own actions so that others can question their actions. I talk about what I do so that others can see that another way is possible. And so I am here to be a radical example of a different way forward.”
Before continuing with my conversation with Robin Greenfield, I want to take a second to invite you to attend the Ecological Gardening Summit on Wednesday, May 7, at noon Eastern. Learn sustainable gardening practices and connect with fellow green thumbs. I will be hosting, and joining me are Dave Goulson, Nancy Lawson and Benjamin Vogt.
A Total Transformation
Robin walks the talk in a big way, but 14 years ago, his life was much different.
In 2011, Robin was living a typical American lifestyle. “At the time I was very focused on material possessions — you know, my car, my apartment, filling it with stuff,” he recalls. “I was focused on financial wealth. My goal at the age of 25 was to be a millionaire by the time I turned 30. And that’s where a good amount of my time and energy and mind went.”
But then he realized he wanted to totally transform his life and take a different path from the one he was on.
“I simply learned that the way that I was living was causing such destruction,” he says. “The food that I was eating, the car I was driving, the stuff I was buying, the money I was spending, the trash I was creating — all of it was tied to such a level of systems of destruction and exploitation and extraction and oppression and inequity and injustice. And it was just so clear to me that I was living such a hypocrisy. My actions were not in alignment with my beliefs, because I never believed in destroying the earth and destroying the plants and animals and other people.”
He said he learned about it by reading books, watching documentaries, visiting websites and talking to people.
“I set out on a path to transform my life one step at a time, breaking free from the web of consumerism that I was so deeply wrapped in and instead building a web of harmony, of relationships with people, with the plants and animals we share this home with and with the earth itself,” he says.
He began to move toward his goal step by step.
“I didn’t even know what I was capable of,” he recalls. “It was just one step at a time.”
He realized he could cook more of his own food, get more fresh fruit and vegetables, and grow a bit of food. He also learned that he could forage for food growing wild in his neighborhood. He could ride his bike more and drive his car less and make friends he could grow and learn with.
Some changes were small, such as switching to reusable towels from paper towels. And others were large, such as selling his car and no longer using credit cards.
“I never imagined that one of the most powerful aspects of not owning a car is not having a trunk,” he says.
When he went to the store on his bicycle, he couldn’t buy as much stuff. He began shopping at a food co-op and farmers market, which helped him to build a community around food.
“I, within two years, had radically transformed my life,” he says. “So to the average person, that’s fairly rapid. However, it didn’t feel totally rapid to me because I genuinely was taking it one step at a time and seeing what I could do.”
Eventually during his year of food freedom, he whittled down his possessions to 44, which made it easier to travel.
While the lifestyle changes may seem radical and rapid, it’s a matter of perspective.
“Here it is 14 years later and I’m still making changes, and some of these are changes I thought I would’ve made a long time ago,” Robin says.
A home-grown salad.
Photo Credit: sierraford.com
COVID Changes Plans
Robin was on a world speaking tour in Europe when COVID happened. During a time when he was experimenting in being highly reliant on people, it became a time of isolation.
Then in 2021, he started a community house back in Florida with about eight people doing community projects: building gardens and providing seed packs with 20 vegetables, herbs and fruits to people with low access to healthy food.
“Over the years, we have provided that to 40,000 people across the country,” Robin says.
They also planted about 200 community fruit trees — “fruit trees that are publicly accessible to anyone to enjoy” — in Orlando.
Robin Greenfield enjoys a bite from a community fruit tree.
Photo Credit: livewonderful.com
A Month of Foraging
In 2022, in his homeland of northern Wisconsin, Robin embarked on a month where he foraged 100% of his food — nothing from a store or even a garden. “This was just food from the wild, just foraging down to the salt and down to the oil and the spices, the fat, the calories, et cetera.”
He visited about a dozen different cities during this time to host foraging walks, teaching others how they could forage their food.
“That was a whole new level of connection to the earth,” he says.
“After my year of growing and foraging 100% of my food, to move to the point of foraging 100% of my food was relatively easy because I had built a lot of skill set already,” he says. “The most challenging part was that I started in Wisconsin where there is no salt. And so I went the first 17 days without salt, before I got to the ocean. And wow, was that challenging. I found a lot of my food to be so bland.”
On day 27, he finally made oil — hickory nut oil.
“And once I had oil and salt and I put that all together, it was like, Oh my! It was so incredible. I did well, very well, but lacking those couple of things makes such a huge difference in the mind,” he says.
During that time he also learned how to roast chestnuts. He learned the hard way that chestnuts will explode when put in the oven if a cut is not made across them first. He also learned to love highbush cranberry, juneberries, wild grapes and choke cherries — foods that are abundant and nutritious.
He also enjoyed applesauce made with foraged apples, and he harvested, cooked and ate a deer that had been hit by a car.
“It took me into some places I never thought I would really be,” he said of the monthlong project. “… I never imagined I would be the one who’s teaching people how to harvest a deer that’s been hit by a car.”
That one deer gave him his protein for a month. He preserved it by pressure canning the meat.
Black walnuts and wild rice were also on his foraging menu.
“In one day, if you know what you’re doing, you can get a month’s supply of calories from one day of harvesting out there on the water, or even a couple months if you’re really doing well,” he says. “But it’s also just the most sacred place on earth for me to be, to be in the wild rice beds. Just endless, endless wild rice with the blackbirds above and the bluegills and the muskie and the northern pike below, and the otters and the geese.”
He learned how to knock rice grains out of seed heads while on a canoe, filling the canoe with grains of rice.
Good that Robin Greenfield found while foraging.
Photo Courtesy of Robin Greenfield
Nonviolent Communication
In the last five years, Robin also adopted the practice of “nonviolent communication,” or “compassionate communication.”
“The practice of compassionate communication is to learn that whenever anybody does anything, they’re doing the best that they know how to meet one of their basic human needs,” Robin explains. “… Compassionate communication is a language of feelings and needs. So at every moment we’re doing one of two things: We’re either listening for the other person’s feelings and needs, or listening for our own feelings and needs.”
Robin admits he struggles to have harmonious relationships with others.
“I’m a very sort of short and sharp communicator,” he says. “I’m very literal, and so often I have a hard time with people feeling really supported and nurtured in my communication.”
Silent Meditation
Robin has practiced vipassanā meditation — a 10-day silent meditation — at a retreat center each year for the last three years.
He also went deep into the Olympic National Forest solo to a mountain lake and went one week without seeing, hearing or being in communication with another human being while living in a tent.
“And I brought in just six and a half pounds of wild rice, a little bit of hand- harvested sea salt, about a pound of my dried venison that I mentioned earlier, and then some dried maitake mushroom.”
He didn’t bring a phone, a computer, a light — not a single electronic.
“At night, I didn’t look up in the sky, so I wouldn’t even see a satellite,” he says. “So I was really, really, really alone, and it was almost a psychedelic experience at times for me.”
He harvested huckleberries, feeling like a bear — or a human of that land.
“Robin Wall Kimmerer says that we can all become indigenous to the land,” Robin says. “Like we can all reconnect to the land in that way. And that’s one that I feel timid about speaking about, but I felt like I was a person of that land.”
He also broke free from synthetic clothing, and he hand-made all of his own clothes from natural fibers and naturally dyed them.
In 2016, Robin Greenfield spent 30 days in New York City wearing all of the trash that he had created throughout the month.
Photo Courtesy of Robin Greenfield
Simplifying a Simpler Life
Around 2021-2022, Robin decided he needed to simplify his life. Though he was living simply, he was also working on a computer 40 to 60 hours a week on all the programs he ran.
“I realized I’m just doing way more than I can,” he says. “So I was working to decrease the number of programs I was running, decrease the number of working parts in my life. And the culmination of that was I decided to walk from the Canada-U.S. border to Los Angeles, 1,600 miles.”
He walked on the Pacific Coast Highway with a pushcart full of his few possessions.
“My ultimate goal is to be of service. And I really believe that shedding the extraneous and letting go of a lot of the attachments is what will allow me to dedicate more of my ability to do that,” he says. “So that’s a large part about what the walk was.”
During that walk, he released his secrets. “By the time I arrived in Los Angeles, I would arrive with literally an empty mind — a mind that there’s literally nothing in here that you can’t ask, that I won’t answer.”
He did a nine-part series of videos on his YouTube channel sharing everything he had been hiding or guarding.
How Robin Greenfield Is Spending His Time Today
“When I arrived in Los Angeles after 1600 miles of walking, I arrived in the park that I’m sitting in right now on January 26th, which was almost three months ago,” he says. “And I got to this park and there were people waiting for me because I had said that I’d be here. And when I arrived, I gave away every single possession that I owned down to my computer, down to the clothes on my back, down to the last $221 that I had. And I sat here naked, just covered by a palm leaf for a little while before someone loaned me a blanket. And for the last almost three months, I have been in this what I call ‘experiment of nonownership,’ where I literally do not own a physical possession and I have no money.”
He has been sleeping outside in Griffith Park on a bed of pine needles in a little canyon. He has about 15 borrowed items: a sleeping bag and a blanket, some clothing, a book, a notebook, a hat, a bowl and a hand towel.
“I’m just here really deeply in this experiment of owning nothing in embracing my dependence on others and saying, ‘Hey, I need you. I need your support. Why? Because I believe that the truth is that we all need each other,’” he says.
His goal is to show that “it’s an illusion that we think that we’re independent. We’re all interdependent.”
‘Food Freedom’ – The Book
Robin’s new book is available for free — or for a donation of your choosing.
“This book is about my year of growing and foraging 100% of my food, and it’s an empowerment manual for those that want to break free from the grocery store and grow and forage a lot more of their food,” Robin says.
For his “Non-Ownership Experiment,” Robin is sleeping in a park with a borrowed sleeping bag.
Photo Courtesy of Robin Greenfield
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Robin Greenfield on living off the land and interdependently If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
Do you practice foraging? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. See full disclosure below.
The Ecological Gardening Summit – Wednesday, May 7, at noon ET – Join us at the Ecological Gardening Summit to learn sustainable gardening practices and connect with fellow green thumbs!
joegardener Online Gardening Academy™: Popular courses on gardening fundamentals; managing pests, diseases & weeds; seed starting and more.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Organic Vegetable Gardening: My new premium online course. The course is designed to be a comprehensive guide to starting, growing, nurturing and harvesting your favorite vegetables, no matter what you love to eat, no matter where you live, no matter your level of gardening experience.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Seed Starting: Everything you need to know to start your own plants from seed — indoors and out.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Growing Epic Tomatoes: Learn how to grow epic tomatoes with Joe Lamp’l and Craig LeHoullier.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Pests, Diseases & Weeds: Learn the proactive steps to take to manage pests, diseases and weeds for a more successful garden with a lot less frustration. Just $47 for lifetime access!
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Perfect Soil Recipe Master Class: Learn how to create the perfect soil environment for thriving plants.
RobinGreenfield.org/robinsbooks Robin Greenfield’s Books
RobinGreenfield.org/nvc – Robin Greenfield on Nonviolent Communication
RobinGreenfield.org/vipassana Robin Greenfield on silent meditation
Robin Greenfield YouTube Channel
“Food Freedom: A Year of Growing and Foraging 100% of My Food” by Robin Greenfield – Paperback on Amazon
“Food Freedom: A Year of Growing and Foraging 100% of My Food” by Robin Greenfield — Free download
“Zero Waste Kids: Hands-On Projects and Activities to Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle” by Robin Greenfield
“Be the Change: Robin Greenfield’s Call to Kids—Making a Difference in a Messed-Up World” by Robin Greenfield
“Dude Making a Difference: Bamboo Bikes, Dumpster Dives and Other Extreme Adventures Across America” by Robin Greenfield
“Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer
“Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships” by Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D.
Soil3 – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Proven Winners ColorChoice – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Milorganite® – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Disclosure: Some product links in this guide are affiliate links, which means we get a commission if you make a purchase. However, none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and compensation is not an influencing factor on their inclusion here. The selection of all items featured in this post and podcast was based solely on merit and in no way influenced by any affiliate or financial incentive, or contractual relationship. At the time of this writing, Joe Lamp’l has professional relationships with the following companies who may have products included in this post and podcast: Corona Tools, Milorganite, Soil3, Territorial Seed Company, Earth’s Ally, Proven Winners ColorChoice, Farmer’s Defense, Heirloom Roses and Dramm. These companies are either Brand Partners of joegardener.com and/or advertise on our website. However, we receive no additional compensation from the sales or promotion of their product through this guide. The inclusion of any products mentioned within this post is entirely independent and exclusive of any relationship.
