A pot of birch sap simmered on Eva Gunnare’s stove. It was an early morning in May in Jokkmokk, a small Swedish town on the Arctic Circle, and outside the snow was melting. On the table was a plate of cookies made from dried bilberries, a native fruit that Ms. Gunnare last season.
“Most Swedes eat blueberries imported from other countries,” he said, pouring some juice into a small glass. “They don’t know we have these delicious bilberries in our own backyard.”
For more than a decade, Ms. Gunnare, a 56-year-old Swedish woman, restores people’s relationship with nature by teaching them how to find food. Through her lessons on picking wild herbs, identifying edible plants and making dandelion honey, among many others, she aims to help local and foreign visitors better understand nature.
His approach differs from other tourist operators in the region, who often focus on outdoor expeditions such as trekking or skimobiling. These, Ms. believes. Gunnare, doesn’t always help people better understand or respect their environment.
“I don’t want people to run into nature,” he said. “I want them to crawl.”
Jokkmokk, with a population of about 3,000 people, attracts domestic and foreign tourists throughout the year. During the winter, thousands of visitors come for Winter Market, a 400-year-old event celebrating the Sámi, the Indigenous people of northern Scandinavia, Finland and western Russia. Others are lured by the promise of seeing the northern lights, or by skiing and dog sledding. In the summer, many tourists come to hike and canoe in the national parks.
Part of the region’s appeal is its pristine nature. Sometimes called “Europe’s last forest,” it is home to some of the last intact old-growth forests on the continent.
“People come here to experience something wild and remote, but a lot of people rush here,” Ms. Gunnar. “They don’t stop to notice the flora and fauna. They don’t always see that some of it isn’t very good.”
Forests cover about 70 percent of the land in Sweden. But primary forests, or old-growth forests, consisting of native tree species undisturbed by human activity, are largely cut down. Today, the country’s forests consist mostly of tree plantations used for logging, which can be had destructive effect on the environment. These plantations, often monocultures, are more vulnerable to disease and natural disasters than old-growth forests. They also store less carbon.
And the problem is only getting worse. Between 2003 and 2019, Sweden’s remaining old-growth forests were logged at a rate of 1.4 percent per year. If logging rates continue, the last remaining old-growth forests will be gone in about 50 years, according to some estimates.
Many tourists who travel to the region, however, cannot identify an old forest and a tree plantation. “I brought a journalist here a few years ago and asked him what he saw,” said Nila Jannok, a local Sámi reindeer herder. “Where he saw the forest, I saw destruction.”
This is precisely the knowledge gap that Ms. Gunnar. Many of the edible plants he eats can only grow in primary forests, which have a large number of species, and where plants and fungi, such as mushrooms, can thrive. By showing tourists the abundance of what can grow in a primary forest, he teaches them why biodiversity is necessary to maintain a healthy environment.
From Stockholm, Ms. Gunnare north in 1987 to Kvikkjokk, a village about 75 miles from Jokkmokk, to work at a hiking lodge. She married a Sámi shepherd, and together they raised their son in Jokkmokk. Over the years, Ms. Gunnare in various tourism jobs. But in 2009, he felt a call to interact with tourists, and with nature, differently.
“It’s great to hike or ski in this land,” he said. “But to really know it, you have to understand its flora and fauna, to see how it’s all connected.”
In 2009, Gunnare enrolled in a culinary class at the Sámi Education Center in Jokkmokk. He describes the course as one of the biggest changes in his life. In the summer, when the Arctic sky is clear, he stays out foraging until midnight and comes home full of mosquito bites, with splinters in his fingers and toes. “I really felt that this would be my way to help people take care of nature,” he said.
Two years later, he started his own company, the Essence of Laplandand he has been giving tours of the search ever since.
In Sweden, foraging has long been an important culinary and cultural skill. For the Sámi, forage foods — including herbs, roots and lingonberries — are at the heart of their diet. In other parts of the country, non-Native Swedes have been foraging since 1867, when famine forced many to use lichen to make bark bread.
In the last two decades, however, interest in the search around the world has grow up big. In the mid-2000s, foraging experienced a revival with the rise of New Nordic cuisine, inspired by the famous Danish restaurant Noma, which puts local, seasonal and foraged ingredients at the heart of dishes. In recent years, a wave of looking for influencers appeared; on TikTok, the hashtag #foragingtiktok has over 160 million views. Foraging educators say they have seen a burst of interest in their work.
But even amid this renewed interest in search, many people remain disconnected from the production of their food. A survey found that 41 percent of Americans never or rarely ask for information about where or how their food is grown. As people become more urbanized, increasingly eating nonseasonal and imported food, their connection with nature is destructive.
“So many of us are disconnected from our own flora and fauna,” Ms. Gunnar. “We are afraid of it.”
Reconnecting people with nature — and, in turn, raising their awareness about the forces that threaten it — is what motivates Ms. Gunnar. “I’m not trying to make everyone a trader like me,” he explains. “I’m trying to get them to understand it, to build a relationship with it.”
“It’s a simple but powerful thought,” he said, adding: “The more people know about their environment, the more inclined they will be to protect it.”
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