Michael Ridge shares insights into life as a nomadic practitioner of traditional food systems
By navigating remnant gardens across the West on horseback, this lifestyle emphasizes deep ecological pattern recognition and the pursuit of autonomous living, blending ancestral teachings with a modern presence while advocating for the preservation of these fragmented, vital natural resources.
Michael Ridge came up on horseback. His introduction to the American West, the plants, the food systems, the land, happened from the back of a horse at 21, when he crossed paths with a teacher named Finisia Medrano at a Pine Nut Camp in the Nevada desert.
Twelve years later, Michael moves between the Rockies and the Cascades, learning the remaining Indigenous food systems, wild plants, medicines, materials, and carrying that knowledge forward in a world that has mostly stopped looking for it.
We spent a day out together before this conversation. Michael pointed out wild garlic, wild asparagus, wild carrots, food I’d walked past a hundred times without ever seeing. One afternoon. That’s all it took for things to start clicking.
“This episode is about what it costs to live inside knowledge the modern world has mostly abandoned, and what comes back when you start. We’ve been estranged from the world. We need to be reintroduced.”
StageOne Studios: – from April 14th, 2026
