{"id":342,"date":"2019-07-05T12:40:44","date_gmt":"2019-07-05T16:40:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=342"},"modified":"2022-04-14T16:55:19","modified_gmt":"2022-04-14T20:55:19","slug":"what-is-foraging-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/what-is-foraging-meaning\/","title":{"rendered":"Foraging for Food: What It Is & How It’s Done"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What is foraging for food? How do you forage, and why do people do it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today most of our hunting, gathering, and food-growing is a hobby or form of recreation. But there are lessons to be learned from exploring foraging. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

What is Foraging? Is it Natural?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Foraging (both hunting and gathering) is the food chain that natural selection<\/a> designed us for.<\/strong> As we switched from food found in nature to food produced by agriculture, we\u2019ve developed new traits, for instance greater adult tolerance for lactose. But we still retain the traits of foragers: we\u2019re predators and our bodies are designed to eat meat as well as plants.
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Anthropologists say that typical hunter-gatherers worked about 17 hours a week to find food in nature,<\/strong> and they were healthier and lived longer than they did after adopting agriculture. One theory for why they gave up this comparatively easy lifestyle in favor of labor-intensive agriculture is: humans had to switch to agriculture because they ruined hunting by killing off too many animals and ruining their habitats.<\/strong>
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By exploring our earliest food chain by foraging, the author sought to learn more about the ecology and ethics of eating than could be learned from buying food from a supermarket or farm. For instance:<\/p>\n\n\n\n