Ohio Wild Food Fest 2025

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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.

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.

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.

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.

Also check out other Festivals in Youngstown, Photography events in Youngstown.