The hardcore forager does all this and more. When a visitor to your garden compliments you on your chenopodium as well as your tomatoes, you know he's a hardcore forager. Where you see a blaze of summer beauty in a stand of day lilies, the hardcore forager sees fritters and cooked buds and a salad made with the tubers. A lake fringed with cattails is liable to bring paroxysms of joy in the hardcore forager. There are flour, vegetables, and even something for the pickle crock there, not to mention a meat course of fish or frog legs.
Experienced foragers see food, medicine, and other useful things in every forest and field.
Becoming a hardcore forager is not difficult. It takes a fair amount of time to learn the basics of foraging, then a lifetime of honing those basic skills. The first thing to do is to find a reliable guide book to learn which plants are good for what. The classic in the field is Stalking The Wild Asparagus , by the late Euell Gibbons. The line drawings are very clear and make recognition easy.