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I Only Ate Food That I Grew Or Foraged For One Year

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One man in Orlando decided grocery stores were optional for an entire year.

Rob Greenfield had already built a reputation as an environmental activist willing to live out his arguments in public. In his “Food Freedom” project, chronicled by BuzzFeedVideo in I Only Ate Food That I Grew Or Foraged For One Year, Greenfield spent 365 straight days eating nothing that came from a store shelf, a restaurant kitchen, or anyone else’s cooking. Everything on his plate, he grew, fished, or foraged himself.

• Greenfield began the challenge on November 11, 2018, after roughly 10 months of prep work converting front yards in Orlando into edible gardens and building a 10×10 tiny home with an outdoor kitchen.
• His rules banned grocery stores, restaurants, food cooked by friends, and store-bought supplements or medications for the full 365 days.
• By the time he finished in November 2019, he had produced more than 100 foods and foraged over 200 more, relying on staples like sweet potatoes, cassava, yuca, pigeon peas, and Seminole pumpkin.

Building the Infrastructure Before Day One

Greenfield didn’t just wake up one morning and swear off the supermarket. He spent close to ten months laying groundwork — consulting local growers, taking classes on foraging and food preservation, and physically ripping out grass to plant edible crops in front yards around Orlando. Central to the setup was a 10×10 tiny home he built himself, complete with an outdoor kitchen designed for cooking everything from scratch with no electricity-dependent shortcuts.

The prep mirrored the kind of yard-to-garden conversion that’s become a broader trend among backyard growers, similar to the approach detailed in How To Turn Your Lawn Into A Vegetable Garden. For Greenfield, though, it wasn’t a side project — it was the entire food supply he’d be living on for a year.

The Rules That Made It Real

What separated Food Freedom from a typical “eat local” challenge was how absolute Greenfield made the restrictions. No grocery stores. No restaurants. No food prepared by friends, even as a gift. No store-bought supplements or medications, meaning any nutritional gaps had to be solved through what he grew, caught, or gathered himself.

Over the year, Greenfield produced more than 100 foods and foraged over 200 more — proof, he argued, that hyper-local food independence isn’t just a rural fantasy.

Actual Components of the Meal

Sweet potatoes, cassava, yuca, pigeon peas, and Seminole pumpkin carried the caloric load as Greenfield’s primary carbohydrates. Fresh produce came from moringa, papaya, and bananas grown in his converted yards, supplemented by foraged roadside fruit that most Orlando residents would walk right past. For protein, he caught his own fish. For fat, he harvested cooking oil from foraged coconuts. He even kept beehives for honey and boiled down collected ocean water to make his own sea salt — closing the loop on virtually every category of food a modern diet depends on.

The mushroom and produce side of his operation echoed techniques growers use in home setups like those covered in Cultivating Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms, though Greenfield’s version had zero backup plan if a crop failed.

The Grind Behind the Footage

None of it came easy. Greenfield weeded by hand, fought off pests without chemical shortcuts, and had to figure out food preservation methods on the fly to make sure a good harvest didn’t rot before he could eat it. It was manual labor stacked on manual labor, day after day, with no grocery run available as a fallback if the garden underperformed or the tide didn’t cooperate for fishing.

He finished the full 365 days in November 2019 in good health, which was itself the point he wanted to prove. Greenfield used the completed project to argue that urban foraging and hyper-local agriculture are far more accessible than people assume, and to push for stronger community-centered food systems rather than total reliance on global supply chains.

Greenfield closed out Food Freedom having eaten across four seasons entirely off a quarter-acre of converted Orlando yard space and whatever the roadsides and coastline gave him — a full calendar year without a single trip through a checkout line.