Public Biography
Dr. Audra Stenholm is an ethnobotanist and the executive director of the American Council on Wild and Volunteer Foods, a position she has held since 2016. Her work concerns the boundary between food and not-food — specifically, the conditions under which a wild or unplanted organism can be said to constitute a genuine food source rather than merely an edible object that happens to exist.
Dr. Stenholm holds a doctorate in ethnobotany from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where her dissertation, Caloric Optimism: Overestimation of Yield in Informal Foraging Economies, examined the persistent human tendency to believe that more food is available in a given landscape than actually is. The work is credited with formalizing the now-standard concept of “load-bearing nutrition” — the threshold at which a food source can be relied upon to sustain a person rather than merely supplement a diet on a pleasant afternoon.
Before joining the Council, she spent nine years documenting urban foraging practices across North America, a period during which she catalogued more than four hundred plants that residents of various cities were confident they could eat and approximately twelve that they actually could. She is the author of Present but Not Provisioned: A Field Guide to Things That Are There (2019), a reference work organized entirely around organisms that the public mistakes for a meal.
Dr. Stenholm is frequently consulted by reporters whenever a public figure announces that nature is feeding, or could feed, people somewhere. Her assessments are measured, quantitative, and almost never as encouraging as the announcement that prompted them.