The Food Beneath Our Feet: An Evening of Ethical Foraging & Film

The Food Beneath Our Feet Overview

The Edmonton Permaculture Guild hosts Denis Manzer and Kimberly Gray from Calgary for a screening of the documentary The Food Beneath Our Feet. This film follows an educational plant walk through Calgary’s river valleys and urban forests, showing how wild foods and healing plants thrive in spaces most people walk past without noticing.

Denis Manzer and Malcolm Saunders guide viewers through the city, identifying edible and medicinal species, explaining sustainable harvesting techniques, and sharing the ecological relationships that make wild foraging possible.

The film treats the urban landscape as a living classroom, where attention and respect reveal abundance.

After the screening, Denis and director Kimberly Gray answer questions about foraging ethics, herbalism, plant identification, and the process of making a documentary that centers place-based knowledge.

Whether you’re curious about starting to forage or want to deepen your understanding of wild plants in Alberta, this evening offers practical insight and inspiration.

The event creates space for conversation about how we relate to the land around us. Foraging is not just about gathering food. It’s about learning to see what grows, understanding seasonal patterns, and developing reciprocal relationships with the ecosystems that sustain us.

NOTE: Denis will be leading our Ethical Foraging Workshop on the Sunday following this evening’s film screening. Be sure to secure your ticket for the afternoon of foraging.

What You’ll Discover

• How to identify common edible and medicinal plants growing wild in Alberta’s urban and rural landscapes
• Ethical harvesting practices that protect plant populations and support ecosystem health over time
• The ecological relationships between wild plants, pollinators, and the broader food web
• Practical methods for using foraged plants in cooking, medicine making, and fermentation
• How urban foraging connects people to seasonal cycles and builds resilience in local food systems
• The process of creating documentary films that capture place-based ecological knowledge

About the Speakers

Denis Manzer is a Calgary-based wild forager, herbalist, and educator who has been leading hands-on workshops in Alberta for well over a decade.

He teaches plant identification, sustainable harvesting, and traditional food preparation through The Light Cellar and his project Forage Your Food.

Denis is featured in The Food Beneath Our Feet, where he guides viewers through Calgary’s urban landscapes, showing how attention and respect reveal the wild foods and medicinal plants growing in river valleys and forests most people walk past without noticing.

Kimberly Gray is a Calgary-based documentary filmmaker whose work explores the relationships between food, land, and community.

As co-director of The Food Beneath Our Feet, she turns a simple urban plant walk into an exploration of ethical foraging, following Denis and fellow forager Malcolm Saunders through Calgary’s wild spaces.

Her award-winning documentary The Root of It All has resonated with audiences across Canada, reflecting her commitment to stories that inspire more resilient, place-based food systems and deeper ecological awareness.

Why Wild Foraging Matters

Foraging shifts how people relate to the landscapes around them.

When you learn to recognize edible and medicinal plants, parking strips become food sources, vacant lots become medicine gardens, and river valleys transform into living libraries of ecological knowledge.

This changes the questions you ask.

Instead of “What can I buy?” you ask “What grows here? What does this plant need? How do I gather without harm?”

The Food Beneath Our Feet documents that shift in perspective. The film shows foraging as more than gathering food. It’s a practice rooted in observation, respect, and reciprocal relationship with place.

The knowledge Denis and Malcolm share comes from years of attention, from learning plant names and seasonal rhythms, from understanding what happens when you harvest too much or at the wrong time.

At the Edmonton Permaculture Guild, we focus on building systems that work with natural patterns rather than against them.

Foraging embodies that principle.

It teaches you to recognize abundance where others see weeds, to value diversity as resilience, and to understand that healthy ecosystems provide without depletion when approached with care.

This evening connects to broader conversations about food sovereignty, ecological restoration, and community resilience.

Wild plants have fed people in this region for thousands of years. That knowledge persists, evolves, and spreads when people gather to learn from those who practice it daily.

If you’re curious about foraging, herbalism, or place-based documentary filmmaking, this screening and Q&A offers a starting point grounded in Alberta’s landscapes and seasons.