Finally Coming Home: Wild Ocean Forager Roushanna Gray's Journey Through South African Tidepools

Big Deep - An Ocean Podcast

In today's episode, I speak with South African edible ocean and landscape forager Roushanna Gray.
When I first heard of Roushanna's unique take on eating from the wild landscape, I was intrigued, particularly as it related to her deep dive into the seaweed off her local coast in Cape Town. I was interested in her foraging with the over 900 edible seaweeds found in South Africa's intertidal rock pools.
But, maybe unsurprisingly, what came out of our interview that interested me was less about what she did and more about why she did it, and I found her way of talking and relating to the ocean to verge on the magical, and it was exhilarating.
And this view has now led Roushanna to teaching this way of foraging and cooking with the edible landscape around her through her immersive culinary school, Veld and Sea. And when we did our interview, Roushanna spoke openly about the journey to having her eyes open to the edible landscape in the sea around her, what it meant to have your passion for the ocean connect with discovering a sense of purpose in her own life, and a largely unremarkable free dive in South Africa that ultimately unloved the mysteries of the ocean for her.

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