How Black Foragers Find Freedom in the Natural World

Foraging has opened their eyes not just to the possibilities of new food sources, but to the legacy of land separation.

When Alexis Nikole Nelson was a kindergartner, she counted a honeysuckle tree among her most cherished friends. She named the tree Priscilla, after her great-aunt. “I wasn’t especially adept at climbing trees,” she told me as we walked through the woods near her home in Columbus, Ohio. “But this tree grew in this curved way that it was perfectly manageable for me to just scamper up, sit in the branches and snack on some honeysuckle flowers.” One might expect such an endearing origin story from Ms. Nelson, known to her 1.7 million TikTok followers as the Black Forager. An urban adventurer who roams everywhere from Central Park to areas closer to home, the 29-year-old makes short, exuberant videos about edible finds in the woods. She gathers unripe black walnuts for her version of the spiced Italian liqueur nocino and extols the virtues of milkweed, a favorite of monarch butterflies and the base of Ms. Nelson’s recipe for air-fried fritters. And it all started in those early years with her inclination to view trees as kinfolk.