Ohio Wild Food Fest 2024

We are a passionate group of wild food foragers who hunt, fish, and search for wild foods. In 2023, we came together to collaborate on a day-long event to celebrate and educate wild foods. We will share our knowledge and curate presentations, experiences, and vendors to provide a broad base of knowledge that both green and grizzled foragers will enjoy. Many of us are experienced at bringing people together to learn, and we hope to create an educational and fun experience that becomes an annual celebration of regional wild foods.

Learn more about the organizers below.

Here we are working away at organizing this event... scroll down to learn more about who we are and how we work with wild foods!

Don King, aka the Mushroom Hunter, to learn about mushrooms. Don loves to share his knowledge of wild foods, and how to prepare them, through private and group identification workshops and wild edible hunts, as well as video tutorials and other appearances. He has been featured on NPR's Good Eats with Vivian Goodman, and has made over a dozen appearances on Fox 8's New Day Cleveland. Don has been foraging for two decades, and has been teaching mushroom identification for 15 years.

Leah Wolfe is the archetypal herbalist. You know the one, living at the edge of town with all the weird plants. A childhood in a village sandwiched between two national forests led to a lifetime study of the wild. In 2013, Leah started the Trillium Center in NE Ohio, an educational project for natural arts offering hands-on and online experiences in herbalism, foraging, homesteading, folk arts, and disaster preparedness. Join her to see what kinds of wild plants can be used as dyes, foods, tools, and medicines.

Nicki Schneider has been actively foraging, eating and using wild plants for over a decade. Having a B.S. in Biology, she began her career as an Interpretive Naturalist with the MetroParks Serving Summit County, went on to manage a health food store and now teaches about wild food, herbalism and other esoteric topics with her business partner under the name of Earth Wisdom Wellness. They will be reopening an education space in Lakewood, Ohio called the Galactic Oasis.

Cristiana Vespucci is a culinary enthusiast and herbal storyteller whose journey weaves through vibrant vegan culinary adventures to the serene landscapes of Washington's mountains. As the creative force behind CC Tea and Apothecary, Cristiana crafts elixirs that seamlessly blend wellness with indulgence. Cristiana believes profoundly in the power of plant-based medicine and sees food as a vital aspect of overall well-being.

John Wright is fundamentally an organic farmer at his farm, Red Beet Row. This is where he and his partner Stephanie grow new and interesting crops for our region while saving seed and selling interesting hard-to-get nursery plants. Some of their long-term projects include: mushroom log cultivation, ecological forest management, prairie restoration, plant breeding, beekeeping, animal husbandry and natural building.

Sarah Culliton has been foraging and learning about wild edible plants and mushrooms for eight years. During those hectic eight years, she graduated from Hocking College and began pursuing a bachelor's of science in biology with KSU and Hiram College part time while working full time for Ohio EPA. In her free time she loves to volunteer for various nature-related programs such as ODNR's Scenic Rivers program, The Nature Conservancy's Bissell Nature Center, and local mushroom group events. She is especially passionate about fungi; in addition to eating them, she collects them for genetic sequencing with Ohio Mushroom DNA Lab, including from some metroparks with research permits.

JB Douglas is a forager and food maker based in Cleveland, OH. His recipes and food photography featuring foraged ingredients have been published across a wide variety of digital and print publications, including VegNews, Edible Magazines, and the New York Times. He directed culinary content production at Foraged Market after working with food access programs and farm retail operations in New England for several years. He’s passionate about leading demonstrations and creating educational materials to teach people about the value of wild foods in their diet.

A lifelong camper and nature lover, Susan Majercak graduated from Hiram College with a BA in Environmental Studies. She spent her internship performing a forest survey at the Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic site in Hyde Park, NY along the bank of the beautiful Hudson river. Her interest in foraging began with joining a mushroom hunt, and then during covid when everything was shut down she headed outside! She downloaded the iNaturalist app on her phone and proceeded to identify many of the plants and “weeds” within a half mile of her apartment. From field research on invasive earthworms to kitchen experiments with tincture making and adventures in foraging, Susan is creating a life that allows her to explore and live within the cycles of nature.

Host or Publisher Ohio Wild Food Fest