Alexis Nikole is TikTok's queen of foraging
Alexis Nikole is TikTok's queen of foraging. In October 2021, Alexis Nikole quit her job. The decision, in retrospect, was a long time coming. As the 29-year-old told In The Know, her friends and family had been encouraging it for months. For them, it was clear she couldn’t balance full-time work with a massively popular TikTok page. “I think the turning point was just like, ‘Oh man, I really can’t do it all,’” Nelson told In The Know. “Like, ‘One of these things is constantly going to be trying to beat out the other”. By that time, Nelson was already arguably the most famous forager on social media. Her videos had earned her features on NPR, in Fortune and in The New York Times. She now has over 3.3 million TikTok followers, plus another 875,000 on Instagram. Still, it felt strange for Nelson to turn her love of foraging into a career. As a kid learning about the plants in her mom’s garden, botany was always just a hobby — something she did simply because she loved it. Nelson grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and spent countless summers at an outdoors camp, learning about the mushrooms, weeds and berries of her home state. In the early days of the pandemic, Nelson posted a clip about how to “stretch” groceries by foraging and realized, for the first time, that her hobby had a much larger appeal than she’d thought. “That was the first video that I felt like I put myself into that did really well,” she recalled. “And I was like," ‘OK, I’m going to be foraging anyway … I can make a couple of videos and see what happens.’
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