This week for my prototype I gathered responses to questions on the subject of wild food/foraging and it was a bit of a rude awakening. I realized that the vast majority of people have never heard of the terms “wild food” nor “foraging” in a modern context. I very quickly realized that my multiple choice response answers leaned to far in favor of people having already heard of foraging — I mean, even the biology majors I talked to had never considered it an option. So I approached gathering responses differently by initially asking whether or not they’ve heard of foraging in a modern context. Out of the 20 people (15 TCNJ students in the AIMM building and the other 5 being friends who aren’t involved in plants) I asked whether or not they’ve heard of it, only 4 said that they’d heard of people doing it but had never considered doing it themselves. The positive part of this is that despite having never heard of it, once introduced to the subject and shown the website intro 14 out of 20 people said that they would consider doing it themselves and all 20 said that they would consider eating something made with foraged ingredients if it seemed appetizing. What I largely learned from this process was that while people aren’t familiar with the concept of foraging for your own greens, fruits, nuts, mushrooms, and spices, they’re interested in learning more about it. Showing people the mockup of my intro page and having them give me feedback on the wording was helpful.

What do you know about these terms? How do they make you feel?

• Wild food
  • “Free range or organic” **
  • “Game (hunting)” ***
• Foraging
  • “Historical context; hunter-gatherers” ***
  • “Animals foraging for food”
  • “Modern day indigenous folk who forage” 
• Wildcrafting
  • Never heard of it**** (no one heard of it, apparently a very niche term)
• Ecological restoration
  • “We should have been doing it since the 50’s or 60’s”
  • “Vague image of a fancy startup company on sustainability” 
  • “A good thing”  
• Invasive species
  • “there’s a lot of invasive flora in the US” 
  • “Bad, like spotted lantern flies”**
• Weeds
  • “Demonized euphemism for random wild flora because it’s not traditionally ornamental” 
  • “Undesired plants”
  • “Unwanted plants in gardens and lawns like dandelion” 
• Herbs
  • “Herbs and spices
  • “food and cooking” 
  • “smelly smell”