Musician Bo Brown on the roots of his passion for foraging

We could write a whole piece just about Bo Brown’s music career: How, as a young man, Brown strummed guitar in a band at Silver Dollar City, and then played for several years with the Undergrass Boys, a progressive bluegrass band that opened for the likes of Emmylou Harris. Or how, more recently, he performed on the soundtrack to the Oscar-winning film Winter’s Bone. But these days, Brown is focused more on sharing a lifetime of wisdom gleaned from the Ozark woods. A lifelong hiker, Brown moved into a log cabin on 15 forested acres in the mid-’80s. He got a gig doing field observations for biologists at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville (he observed the effect of cicada emergence on birds). He still does such contract work, but a big chunk of his time goes to showing people how to forage and make primitive tools through First Earth Wilderness School. His book Foraging the Ozarks was published by Falcon Guides in 2020, and he’s now at work on a second title, Foraging the Tallgrass Prairie. 

Some may see foraging as an exotic hobby, but I understand that your mom did it for a different reason. During the Great Depression my mother’s family moved near Yellville, Arkansas, to start a subsistence farm, but the dirt was so poor, they couldn’t grow much, so they had to forage. My mother had her favorite greens—poke greens, lamb’s quarter, watercress. She’d have us kids go out and pick them. 

What’s your favorite foraged food? Whatever I happen to be eating. As far as fruits, pawpaws and persimmons are hard to beat. There are many others, like ground cherry. But to me, that’s our problem: We get a favorite food and eat that to the exclusion of others. My whole point is that industrialized food has narrowed down the species we eat too much, whereas with hunter-gatherers, it’s hundreds of species you’ll be eating, of all kinds of different things. 

Do you eat insects? Larvae. I heat my home with a wood stove, so I cut a lot of wood, and if the bark sloughs off and there’s big old juicy grubs in there, I’m gonna eat ’em. They taste like nutty scrambled eggs. All the insects I eat, I cook, and there’s some prep with adult insects, like grasshoppers; they have sticky spurs on their legs, so you have to pull those off. 

When you’re teaching people to make tools, where do you start, and why? Stone tools. You can’t do much without having a knife, and if you have an area with lots of flint, like we have down here, it takes nothing to knock a flake off that you can use to gut an animal or make your fire kit. After that it’s adequate cordage, because of all the traps and bow for your bow drill. 

What do you think about the survivalist shows? All those shows— Naked and Afraid, Alone, Dual Survival—it’s so contrived. I am not the pit-myself-against-nature kind of person. If you’re really out there trying to save your life, you’ll do whatever it takes, but it’s a fad now, and new instructors are from the military side of it, and it’s just strictly What can I take from here that will benefit me?, with no thought to the impact. The first one I saw, they caught a big blacksnake and cut its head off and ate it, to show people that you could. But I thought, Not that snake! That’s a really beneficial snake!