In her film The Gleaners and I, Agnès Varda talks about the practice of gleaning: salvaging things after they have been discarded or left behind, as creating a certain kind of self, a gleaner. The gleaner, the forager, finds beauty in the strangest of places.
When I forage for food in my local environment, I enter into a relationship with nature, animals, and other people existing in the same space. If you are foraging ethically, you will never take more than a third of the produce you find. You are conscious of others, human or otherwise, that may come across the same patch.
Being in touch with nature ensures you are personally invested in seeing it thrive; it encourages you to be involved in climate justice and anti-consumerist practices. Perhaps more than these lofty goals there is beauty in the simple acknowledgement that I must eat and so must we all, and this consumption is a kind of love. I fill my belly and heart as I stand in green spaces that are increasingly hard to find, and the person I feel myself becoming is one I can be proud of.