While many younger Black people didn’t grow up going to the woods to “shop,” they have learned about lesser-known fruits such as serviceberries and the common cold remedy burdock root through books or the internet. The idea that Black people just don’t do the outdoors developed over time and centuries of dispossession, said Justin Robinson. An ethnobotanist, farmer and cultural historian in Durham, N.C., he rejects the term “foraging” and its practice as anything new to Black Americans and humans in general. He believes the word separates the world into a disturbing cultivated-versus-wild binary that doesn’t reflect reality. The slave master’s meager rations turned the enslaved into naturalists out of both necessity and opportunity.

Source: International New York Times July 30, 2021 13:58 UTC