Foraging for Sustainable Innovation by Abigail

Foraging for Sustainable Innovation by Abigail - February 2025 Scholarship Essay

Roadsides and hiking trails hold a hidden treasure: delicious food! During childhood hikes, I constantly pointed towards leafy (and, to my naive self, edible) greens and asked, “What’s this? Can I eat it?” Returning home, I’d beeline towards our family computer and search for plants with silvery fuzz or spiky red berries.

Hearing about my insatiable curiosity, a family friend and expert mushroom hunter volunteered to bring me to his favorite spots at Mount Pisgah, patiently answering my never-ending questions and instilling a deep-rooted love of foraging. With his guidance, I studied field guides to hone my botanical identification skills—but foraging requires hands-on experience and observation. Each woodland outing became a lesson in distinguishing tasty treats from painful indigestion. I began joining online groups and sharing cultural knowledge; teaching strangers to harvest bamboo shoots, I learned about indigenous clamming methods—a mutualistic exchange of tradition. Now, spring fiddleheads, summer clams, and fall honey mushrooms frequently appear in my family's dinnertime stir-frys and soups.

Foraging became a gateway to other subjects. Amidst the world’s vast flora and fauna, I’ve explored unique cultural harvesting methods like an ethnobotanist, expanding both my environmental awareness and cultural perspectives. Noticing how some areas teemed with mushrooms and others with garlic mustard or nut trees sparked the question: how does geology impact biodiversity? I aspire to double major in computer science and earth science. Foraging has inspired me to blend innovation with nature to create sustainable advancements. Using machine learning, I created a wildfire forecaster that tracked their spread, allowing residents and governments to monitor and combat them. So in college, whether I’m developing computer models to track and mitigate invasive species or researching the medicinal properties of wild superfoods, I’m dedicated to combining my foraging insights with computer science to foster environmental progress.