A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1323 entries
forage
To forage is to go out and look for food, and the noun means the food itself, particularly the rough plant material that grazing animals eat. In ecology, it names an activity with a shape: A foraging animal is solving a problem about how long to stay in one patch before the return drops below what it would get by moving, and the mathematics of that decision is a field of its own.
Etymology
The word came into English from Old French, and behind the French is a Germanic word for fodder, the same root as English food and fodder. The military sense arrived with it, because an army on the march sent parties out to collect provisions from the country, and that is where its twin comes from. Foray is the same word: A foray was originally a foraging expedition, and only later a raid or a brief venture into anything.
Notes
The modern popular sense of foraging as gathering wild food for the table is a narrowing of a word that used to cover the whole business of provisioning. Optimal foraging theory, developed in the 1960s, predicts how long an animal should stay in a patch and holds up well against observation in birds, bees, and fish.