I grew up doing a lot of foraging and thought it was normal. Perhaps it was normal in my little sub-culture; my tribe was sleeping in longhouses & hoarding fish for a living a mere 150 years ago. People up there still catch & dry fish, collect berries & sea asparagus, pick & dry seaweed or Hudson bay tealeaves, dig up cockles, and hunt the odd deer even though we have access to grociery foods. People do it for fun, but mostly they do it because that's what their parents do.

How did it work for us? It was great. We'd eat dried salmon with our meals throughout the winter. We poured ooligan oil over our potatoes. Dad & I would spend the day picking blueberries, and Mom would make cobbler out of it. We'd set shrimp pots, crab pots, and dinner would be fresh & cheap. We harvested herring eggs laid on kelp, a delicacy that I haven't seen anywhere but at the res. My diet was probably a lot healthier back then than it is now.

Much of that wasn't "normal" behavior, or even considered to be fair treatment of nature, when I moved to Seattle. I get yelled at by passers-by when I wander a few paces off the trail to pick some huckleberries: "You're contributing to erosion, dude! Get a clue!" These people wear funny looking nylon shorts, they carry ski poles while hiking on dirt, and I have to pay money to park my car in what was probably somebody's ancestral hunting ground.

And what the people yell is right. If everybody in this area grew up with the same background I had, the woods would be ravaged. It just isn't sustainable, not for the hiking population that this area has. Back where I grew up, I might have shown respect to the berry bush's spirit by thanking it for what it provided. Now I'm repsectful from a distance.

All of this changes my outdoors philosphy on a base level: I'm a guest. Not a resident.

Edit: In regards to hiking, I can't say I've thought of foraging as such. I suppose we were hiking much of that time, but the aim was to collect, not cover miles. Our packs held tupperware. The only place I can picture as abundant enough to collect food conveniently during hiking trips is a tidal beach.