‘Nature Feeds Us More Than It Floods Us’: Asheville After-School Program Teaches Kids to Forage

Juniper Stewart just turned 12. She wears a cropped orange sweater and her ginger curls in a bob. She used to like Taylor Swift, but now she’s more into the Cranberries and other indie rock.

Juniper also knows how to identify a Pilobolus mushroom, which grows on “cow poop”, according to Juniper. She can confidently harvest plantain leaf, a ubiquitous wild plant that’s tasty in salads and sautées, and useful as a poultice on stings and poison ivy. She has paper bags full of sourwood leaves drying at home to make tea, and she’s delighted by the fact that when you touch jewelweed seed pods, they explode.

Juniper’s deep knowledge of the wild plants around her home in western North Carolina stems from her involvement in an after-school program that taught kids in Asheville and surrounding towns how to forage. For three days a week this fall, foraging guides brought groups of students ages five to 12 from City Mountain Public Montessori out to forests and fields to learn about the plentiful berries, mushrooms, leafy greens and even flavorful sticks in their own backyard.

The program is the brainchild of Alan Muskat, a “philosoforager” who runs No Taste Like Home, an educational company that for the past 30 years has taught locals and tourists alike how to plumb the bounty of the southern Appalachians, one of the most biodiverse areas in the world. There are many different reasons to forage: self-reliance, connection with nature, sustainability, remembering where our food comes from.