Alexis Nikole Nelson built a career and a community by wandering around in the woods, identifying edible plants and fungi, and telling people how to eat them.

Internationally known as the Black Forager, Nelson will tell stories of adventurous eating to a capacity crowd in Rackham Auditorium from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Sept. 30, as part of the university’s celebration of Climate Week. The event will be co-hosted by the School for Environment and Sustainability and Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum. She will be interviewed by SEAS graduate student Will Brinkerhoff, a soil scientist who is also a chef, former farmhand and science communicator.

“Happy snacking, don’t die,” Nelson cheerfully tells her followers on social media — more than 6 million across platforms, including nearly 3 million on Instagram — as she harvests grasses, roots and other items in the wild. It is also the title of Nelson’s new book being released this month. 

An Ohio native, she studied theater and environmental science at Ohio State University and discovered that she could blend the two disciplines to chart her own path to a career in food advocacy that has included appearances on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” a TED Talk stage and college campuses.

Similarly, Brinkerhoff combined disciplines that rarely go together to chart his unique route through academia. A native of Ann Arbor, he grew up watching his parents collaborate with farmers and ranchers to create Argus Farm Stop, an everyday farmers’ market that has inspired similar businesses across the country.

As an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, Brinkerhoff studied molecular biology and spent summers working on a biodiversity research station in Indonesia and a farm in Australia.

“The more people I talked to on farms,” he said, “the more I was like, ‘Wow, this is all coming together. Using my science background to understand food production is the impact I want to have.’”

With that revelation, Brinkerhoff returned to the Berkeley campus and walked down the street to Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’ famed restaurant that inspired the national farm-to-table restaurant movement.

Brinkerhoff asked if he could help and the kitchen staff gave him an internship and put him to work chopping onions, peeling carrots and generally doing anything anyone asked him to do.

“I don’t have a huge ego,” Brinkerhoff said, “which is a powerful thing in the kitchen.”

In between shifts at Chez Panisse, he worked in a research lab on campus studying frog genetics and later as a research assistant in an agroecology lab, where scientists studied the interaction between cattle grazing, the grasses they ate and the carbon in the soil to determine if specific grazing practices could mitigate the effects of climate change.

When Brinkerhoff thought about what he wanted to do after college, he knew returning to Michigan made sense. He returned to his parents’ house and started talking to the network of ranchers and farmers they knew through the Argus Farm Stop. He asked if he could sample soil from fields that had been grazed and fields that had grown corn or soy. The farmers agreed and now those family farms provide the data for Brinkerhoff’s dissertation.

Both expert science communicators, Brinkerhoff and Nelson share a gift for making science accessible to anyone, especially via social media. Brinkerhoff’s dissertation in June went viral on Instagram, and Nelson’s content regularly reaches a young demographic.

When Brinkerhoff and Nelson come together on stage, they will discuss the importance of building a relationship with the land and taking care of it. And the audience will undoubtedly hear two foodies going deep into the weeds about the joys of eating, farming and playing in the dirt.

The event is free and open to the public, but a ticket is required for entry and the event is currently full. A waitlist has been started, and those on it will be notified if space becomes available. Everyone on the wait list will be emailed a link to the livestream.

This story originally appeared on the University Record website.