Michelle Dowd PZ ’90 discusses foraging, growing up in a cult at CMC Ath Talk

With cloudy gray skies and autumn neigh, students flocked to Claremont McKenna College’s Athenaeum on Oct. 16 for Michelle Dowd PZ ’90’s talk “What I Learned from Foraging (And Surviving a Family Cult).” A Pitzer College alumna, Dowd is a writer and professor of journalism, with contributions in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and TIME Magazine. Her talk coincided with the publication of her memoir “Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult.” 

Dressed humbly in an olive green sweatshirt and knitted skirt, Dowd ascended the stage. She refused to stand behind the podium — it reminded her too much of church, she explained. 

Dowd spent her childhood in an apocalyptic cult founded by her grandfather. With no formal education, Dowd applied to Pomona College on a whim, but her application was forwarded to the Pitzer Admissions Office. She had written a poem for her personal statement, and was granted a full ride by the committee. 

“For a decade of my childhood, the mountain was the closest thing I had to a home, and I learned to forage for what I needed to survive on it,” Dowd said. “My real home wasn’t a place, it was an idea, an idea my maternal grandfather turned into an organization. He called ‘The Field’ a closed community.”

Dowd pivoted to foraging as the core of her discussion. Foraging was a means of survival, and translated to how she approached life outside of The Field. 

“8000 years ago, foraging was universal,” she said. “All of you have foraging in your DNA. Your ancestors didn’t survive without it, and you have it inside of you.” 

Dowd brought out a box filled with leaves, branches and twigs of various sizes and shapes, placing them onto a table on the stage. She asked for a volunteer, and chose Tutu Jereissati CM ’25 from among the few hands raised. 

“So everything I picked here, I picked just on my way in, within 20 yards of where we are at the avenue right now,” Dowd said. With Jereissati as her volunteer, Dowd asked her to identify various twigs and berries. Among the items she foraged were wild strawberries, elderberries, sage, and nettles. 

“[Nettles are] really good for the tea,” Dowd said. “But the thing about nettles, it’s interesting … they have these stinging properties to keep animals from destroying them.”

Dowd proffered Jereissati a nettle twig to smell, warning her not to let her nose touch the stem. 

“When you think something’s dangerous, you could also ask yourself, what is it hiding? What is it that it’s holding on to so much to give us?” Dowd asked. 

Dowd then transitioned to the latter half of her talk. She used foraging as a metaphor for her approach to life: using the resources that are tangible to you, in your immediate surroundings, to survive. 

Dowd discussed some of the conversations she had with students during the dinner portion of the evening, where she asked seniors about their futures and their life goals. 

“Many of you have already set up a career path. You set up a guided pathway to get where you want to go. Some of you have been laser focused on it,” Dowd said. “But how many things are you missing because you’re not looking around you and not noticing what doesn’t serve your long term interests?”

She went on to describe her own journey to Pitzer, and how her upbringing in a cult and in the mountains ultimately shaped her approach to college and her career. She wasn’t going through the system so much as moving around it. 

Dowd also talked about the dangers of foraging, and common questions she gets when discussing it. 

“People say foraging is dangerous. What happens if I die or I get sick? Don’t you feel irresponsible talking about something so dangerous?” Dowd said. “There’s that feeling too of you are not owned by a system, like you’re like moving around the system again.”

Dowd described the circumstances that led to writing her memoir. After submitting to The New York Times’” “Modern Love,” a publisher approached her with the idea of writing an autobiography. 

Similar to how foraging can lead you to dangerous plants, Dowd’s path in the literary world led her to being invited to Joe Rogan’s podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience.” 

“You don’t really think that when you write a book about foraging, you’re going to end up being interviewed by Joe Rogan.” Dowd said. “But there were just so many things that came to me because I just keep thinking to myself, there’s so much I don’t know, and unless I have direct experience that it is harmful to me, why not put myself in the way of learning?”

Attendee Luca Rudenstine PZ ’26 said that she found the talk unique from previous ones she’d attended. 

“I thought she was an incredibly engaging storyteller. And it’s not every day you go to an Ath talk and someone pulls out a bunch of gloves and plants and makes someone from the audience come up and feel and eat things,” Rudenstine said. 

She also said she resonated with Dowd’s approach to life through foraging. 

“I honestly related to her a lot, I think, not just as a Pitzer student, but how curiosity manifests, especially in sort of the metaphor of foraging, as kind of slowing down, looking at everything around you and really following what you’ve delved into or observed, rather than what makes most sense, or what you’ve been told to follow,” she said.

Aina Yukawa CM ’25 saw parallels between Dowd’s ideas of foraging and Hawaiian culture. 

“I think it really resonated with native culture and Hawaiian culture as I know it, because my father’s side of the family is heavily influenced by Hawaiian culture … and a lot of native Hawaiians emphasize giving back to the land, and the land giving back to you,” Yukawa said. “It’s a whole cycle, what you get to the land, the land will get back to you … If you treat the land poorly, then they’ll do the same to you.”

In a community like Claremont, where students of the Internet generation are thinking about their futures, a more tangible approach to careers and lives is refreshing. 

“And I think what foraging really is it’s gathering, it’s using or recognizing what’s around you and finding what’s valuable that’s already there,” Dowd said. “So from all the plants that are here within walking distance of this afternoon … there is a lifetime of learning without going any further than a mile.”

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled Luca Rudenstine PZ ’26 as “Rudenstein.” It has been updated to the correct spelling. TSL regrets this error.