Was this chilled morel soup with charred ramps and a fiddlehead foam ethically harvested?

One of my very favorite activities is wildcrafting, or foraging for foods and healing plants. I get to bathe in the forest (is that still a trend?), hang out with my dog and at the end of the day I have some tasty or medicinal bits from the forest. However, as wild foods have more and more of a prominent place on every hip restaurant menu, (hello, ramp-a-palooza!) it makes me a bit nervous about how all these wild foods are being harvested. I personally have witnessed commercial harvesters or fiddleheads (the unopened fern frond), take every single fiddlehead from every single plant in a stand and beat up the plants considerably while they were in the process. Practices like these are destructive to a stand and are at the heart of my concern. I just wish the activity of wildcrafting were what was so popular as I think society could benefit from doing some good old fashioned (ancient fashioned?) hunting & gathering. It is with hope that I want to put out into the multiverse some information about how to be an ethical wildcrafter/forager.

I have put together a little book with ideas, tips and a bonus page on some common edible weeds so you can start wildcrafting right now in your very own backyard. Please click on the link so you can see it better. See you in the woods!