A forager spends just £40-a-week on shop-bought food by eating ROADKILL and wild plants - and insists we should treat “plants like people”. <br /><br />Eric Joseph Lewis, 41, discovered foraging when his late uncle, Tom Lewis, 64, took him on a plant walk as a child and pointed out edible herbs and plants.<br /><br />Now, he eats wild food on a daily basis with his girlfriend, Jess Russell, 26 - who studies breath work - and they cook up meals such as wild berry smoothies and nettle pesto. <br /><br />Eric will also eat roadkill - such as deer - and says a carcass can provide up to 100lbs of meat. <br /><br />He also finds and eats opossum, groundhog, squirrel, and occasionally wild turkey or ducks - as well as using roadkill fox for fur.<br /><br />He will use every part of the dead deer - including for meat, bone broth, bones for his dog, Leela, and to make leather.<br /><br />The plant educator still relies on supermarkets for luxuries such as kombucha and coconut yoghurt – but spends just £40 ($50) a week on supplies.<br /><br />Eric, from Knoxville, Maryland, US, said: “I eat wild food on a daily basis and grow a good amount.<br /><br />“We should treat plants like people.<br /><br />“We eat roadkill.<br /><br />“If you can get over the fear and discomfort of this being a dead animal, you can recognise it was a life lived in freedom and respect it.”<br /><br />Eric began getting into yoga and mediating in his late 20s and spent time living in a tent in the woods – working just one day a week as a painter to fund his food shop.<br /><br />When a friend pointed out he was living on top of a blueberry patch in Spring 2010, it reignited his desire to learn about the plants humans can eat.<br /><br />Now he lives in at a nursery, which grows fruit and nut trees as well as edible plants.<br /><br />Eric said: “I eat nettles, sochan - which is the same family as a black-eyed Susan - and sunflowers.<br /><br />“Now the berries are coming in – we have it in smoothies for half the year.<br /><br />“We pick goumi berries and blackberries.”<br /><br />Eric spends half the year in Florida - foraging mushrooms, and setting traps for animals such as wild hogs and iguanas.<br /><br />He will also fish for invasive fish to eat – such as catfish. <br /><br />He said: “We gather coconuts, avocados and different mushrooms.<br /><br />“I’m teaching Leela - a mix between a blue heeler and beagle - to forage for mushrooms too.”<br /><br />Eric is a “huge mushroom enthusiast” and picks out fungi such as morel mushrooms, and hen of the woods.<br /><br />Eric and Jess often have a meal consisting of home-grown onion, sweet potato, chayote topped with a wild mushroom they have foraged and garnished with stinging nettles.<br /><br />To make sure they get enough protein, the couple will use eggs from friends with chickens, as well as eating roadkill.<br /><br />Eric said he saves dead deer that would have otherwise “rot” or be “incinerated”.<br /><br />He said: “We turn it into leather. Use the bones for bone broth and for Leela.<br /><br />“One deer could be 60 to 100lbs of meat – about 60,000 calories.<br /><br />“Nothing had to die for it.”<br /><br />Although he tries to eat as much wild food as he can, Eric still gets staples such as lenti
