Public Profile
The American Council on Wild and Volunteer Foods is a nonprofit standards and advocacy body devoted to the study, classification, and responsible promotion of foods that grow without being deliberately planted — wild forage, escaped cultivars, and what the horticultural literature calls “volunteer” plants, meaning those that arrive on their own. Founded in 1971, the Council occupies an unusual position between conservation science, food policy, and what its charter describes as “the dignity of provisions no one intended.”
The Council maintains the Register of Acknowledged Wild Edibles, a continuously updated taxonomy that distinguishes between foods that are forageable (safely gatherable), technically edible (consumable but inadvisable), and present (existing in the environment but unaffiliated with any food system). The third category, added in 1994, has become the Council’s most cited contribution and the subject of frequent dispute, as it includes a great many organisms — pigeons, ornamental crabapples, the contents of decorative fountains — that the public assumes to be either food or not-food, but which the Council insists are neither until a determination is made.
The organization does not itself certify foods as organic, a point its leadership stresses with some weariness, and it has no enforcement authority. Its assessments are advisory. Nonetheless, federal agencies, municipal foraging ordinances, and at least one national park system have adopted the Council’s three-tier framework, and its annual State of Volunteer Provender report is closely read by the small community of professionals who care about such things.
The Council is led by executive director Dr. Audra Stenholm, an ethnobotanist who has run the organization since 2016.