Emma Stark

Emma Stark lives in Los Angeles, California where she loves to take advantage of the long growing season which is 365 days a year. She enjoys finding wild-growing food as well as growing her own in her limited space. She delights in making delicious dishes with what she finds (and friends give her) as much as she loves sharing them with others. She is a board member and volunteer at The Hollywood Orchard, a non-profit organization which harvests hundreds of pounds of excess local fruit and delivers it it to people who have limited access to food. Emma is an artist and obtained a degree in Textile Design at Camberwell College of Arts in London, UK. She is inspired by color and texture and integrates her love for it in everything she does. “I was lucky as a little girl to be able to watch the adults around me gardening. I grew up in the English countryside and it seemed that everyone knew how to grow things to eat, no matter who they were. I watched my mother sowing seeds and saw those little seeds turn into big healthy plants and I had the deeply satisfying experience of harvesting something I had helped to grow. Being able to go out into the garden and dig up potatoes, choose peas and beans to pick from a living plant, and then eat them for supper an hour or two later is such a great feeling and I highly recommend it! I was introduced to foraging at a very young age, as many British children are, with the fabulous blackberry. It’s not only delicious but abundant almost everywhere at the end of summer and easy to harvest in large quantities. I highly recommend researching local foraging opportunities wherever you live, just use common sense and never eat anything if you don’t know for sure what it is. In a city like Los Angeles, where I live, there’s food everywhere! It’s in the ornamental hedges and trees, in the flower beds, and growing wild on the sides of hiking paths. People have fruit trees that bear far too much fruit for their own use and will often give it away. We’ve become brainwashed into thinking that food comes from stores and in a very short period of time, we have lost the knowledge of how to grow our own food. It’s time to take that back, the ability to grown your own food is a superpower! Even if you live in an area that has no foraging opportunities and you have no gardening space, you can still grow your own food if you learn how to sprout seeds”.