On the first day of spring in 2026, Robin Greenfield was 162 days into one full year of foraging 100% of his food and medicine. While many of us mark the season by power-washing the pool deck and hauling bags of mulch from the home improvement store, Greenfield is quite literally becoming a part of the landscape.

Greenfield’s journey from a wealthy entrepreneur in his mid-20s to a barefoot environmental activist didn’t happen through some sort of lightning-bolt epiphany. There was no sudden visitation or miraculous vision. Instead, it was a slow, quiet awakening born of curiosity. Growing up in a low-income household, he initially chased the American Dream, finding success in sales, marketing, and advertising. But his informal self-education—through watching documentaries and reading books—eventually revealed a painful hypocrisy: the lifestyle that brought him wealth was the same one harming the Earth he loved.

Since 2013, Greenfield has made his internal process public through radical activism—from wearing every piece of trash he generated for a month, to biking across the country fueled by a dumpster-diving diet to highlight food waste. His projects aren’t about judgment; they are about alignment. In each endeavor, he probes more deeply into one question: “Am I living the life I really want to live?”

Inspired in Florida

The seeds of Greenfield’s current Foraging Year were sown in right here in the Sunshine State. In 2017, he wanted to find out if it was possible to break away from the industrial food system and, instead, thrive on only what he could grow and forage himself.

“Orlando was never the plan initially, but I was traveling through and got connected with the permaculture and urban agriculture community,” Greenfield says. “They were really excited for me and encouraged me to move to Orlando as the spot to immerse myself in a year of growing and foraging 100% of my food.”

Foraging Year Tour: the Sarasota Stop

On February 13, Greenfield visited Sarasota, partnering with CocoRootz—a local education and wellness collective dedicated to the philosophy that “nature is the culture”—and Community Harvest SRQ. Within the green embrace of the Orange Blossom Community Garden (OBCG), approximately 100 people gathered to hear Greenfield speak and check out his mobile foraging “pantry,” which included wild rice, fermented vegetables, dried mushrooms, herbal tea blends, and two dozen other foraged staples. As part of his Million Tree Project, Greenfield helped plant three new fruit trees at OBCG, representing the first of 20,000 trees the project aims to plant this year.

“It was wonderful to see that there are a lot of people in Sarasota who are truly passionate about growing food, foraging, breaking free from the grocery store and the global industrial food system, and creating a local, resilient, sustainable food movement,” Greenfield says.

Q&A: Foraging the Suncoast

We caught up with Greenfield as he headed north toward Jacksonville for the final stop on his Florida circuit.

Edible Sarasota: You’re getting close to halfway through your foraging year. How are you feeling, physically?

Robin Greenfield: Overall, I feel really good. I feel confident that I’m meeting all of my nutritional needs. I had a checkup the day before I arrived in Sarasota, and the doctor saw no concerns whatsoever. I have a pretty low body fat percentage of 9%, so he said he doesn’t recommend losing any more weight.

I do feel tired because of what it takes to be on a speaking tour while foraging all my food and running a nonprofit. But one thing that I love is that I’m not thinking about any food that I don’t have. I’m not craving or yearning for different foods. To me, that’s the ultimate sign that things are going well.

ES: For those of us in Southwest Florida, what forageables should we be looking for right now?

RG: Oh, man, I’m looking out the window right now, and I’m seeing perfect dollar weed. That’s in my “top five” Florida greens, along with Spanish needles, peppergrass, wood sorrel (or oxalis), and cucumber weed. Wild yam is my calorie staple here; coconut is another big staple. We also have so much citrus available, grapefruits and oranges being the main ones that you’ll find growing abundantly. Other top fruits for foraging in Southwest Florida are banana, mango, loquat, and Surinam cherry. And then yaupon holly is the only caffeinated plant we have growing that we can use in place of coffee. Brazilian pepper is another mention. People consider it an invasive plant—it is, but it’s also a nice food. We can work with it as a spice, especially on our fish and meat.

ES: At your talk in Sarasota, you shared your number-one foraging safety rule: If you’re not 100% sure it’s edible, don’t put it in your mouth. Do you have any other practical tips for beginning foragers?

RG: The key is that each of us has to make personal decisions about what we feel comfortable with, just like if we’re buying our food at the store. When we start foraging, we begin to think critically and question. And what we need to do is make sure that we’re thinking just as critically and questioning the food at the store. There are all sorts of industrial food practices that we don’t see, but if we did, we would be concerned about. So, thinking critically about the food we’re already eating is very important.

If you’re concerned about pesticides and such, you want to search out the areas where the food is cleanest. Many people have unsprayed yards with so much food growing in them. Find organic farms and harvest in those areas; small, local farms have an abundance of weeds growing along their edges that can become so many different foods and medicines. Get to know your community, talk to your city or county and find out about their environmental practices. I harvest a lot of my food from the roadside, but you can start in more natural places, and definitely start with just one plant at a time. Take it slow. Go within your means. If you learn to forage one plant per month for a year, that’s 12 plants. And for most people, if they could walk out their door and find 12 different plants they can work with as a food or medicine, that’s life-changing.

If you’re interested in supporting Robin Greenfield’s work and learning more about foraging, visit RobinGreenfield.org to request or download a copy of Greenfield’s new book, Food Freedom: A Year of Growing and Foraging 100% of My Food. The book is free to order, and any donations go to Gardens of Liberation in support of Indigenous and Black-led food sovereignty initiatives.