‘The sense of creativity, anticipation and reward in growing your own vegetables and raising your own animals for meat has to be experienced to be fully understood. But there is another whole dimension of pleasure, comparable yet different, to be had for the adventurous cook who learns to harvest truly wild food. If growing your own affords the deep and lasting satisfaction of hard work rewarded, gleaning the hedgerow provides a thrill that’s more primordial – you’re not just out of the supermarket, you’re back to being a hunter–gatherer. It’s something that can make you feel very alive.’
The sense of creativity, anticipation and reward that comes from growing your own vegetables and raising your own animals for meat has to be experienced to be fully understood. But there is another whole dimension of pleasure, comparable yet different, to be had for the adventurous cook who learns to harvest truly wild food. If growing your own affords the deep and lasting satisfaction of hard work rewarded, gleaning the hedgerow provides a thrill that’s more primordial: you’re not just out of the supermarket, you’re back to being a hunter-gatherer.
At River Cottage I have found that the one thing guaranteed to raise my spirits (especially, in fact, when some garden disaster or livestock anxiety is getting me down) is a walk into the surrounding hills and hedgerows in pursuit of some free food. Not everyone understands this. Many regard eating nettles as downright eccentric – and killing rabbits or squirrels for the pot as simply appalling. Why, they are inclined to argue, in a country where there are no significant shortages of food, need anyone resort to such primitive behaviour? While some regard my enthusiasm for the wild larder as barbaric, others seem to think its only value is in knowing how to look after yourself in some bleak, post-holocaust scenario. ‘Do you reckon you could survive,’ a taxi driver recently asked me, ‘if you were dumped in the middle of the countryside with just your Swiss Army penknife?’ Yes, is the answer – provided the nearest pub wasn’t too far away, and the landlord was prepared to take the penknife in lieu of cash.
For me, learning how to glean the wild larder has never been an exercise in survival. The shortages I mean to address are not the urgent ones of nutrition and shelter but the more widespread modern social famine in quality of life. I happen to believe that our lives will be better if we can achieve some closeness to the natural environment, and some understanding of the nature and origins of what we eat. Growing your own food fosters these aims to a considerable degree. But a knowledge and appreciation of the wild larder completes the picture.
Remember that every single plant and animal that is used for food is descended from a wild ancestor – and many of those wild ancestors are alive and well in our fields, forests and hedgerows. Wild food also comes with a unique guarantee: unlike almost every kind of cultivated food, it has not been messed about with by people. It is pure, natural, and untampered with. An understanding of wild food is therefore, in part at least, an education about food history, and food safety. Best of all, it is not a force-fed education but one that both taps and nourishes inquisitiveness, a delight in the natural world, and a sense of adventure.
One thing, however, that you will definitely need to reap the benefits of the wild larder is a little time. And perhaps it is the time famine that is the greatest blight of our age. But as we strike out into a new millennium, many of us are growing discontented with the questions that sustained us through the decades of greed: ‘How long have I got?’, ‘How much can I have?’ and ‘How fast can I get it?’. Some of us are beginning to ask new questions – about how our quality of life might be improved by a more fulfilling relationship with the land around us. Gentle answers to these questions, or hints at them, can occasionally be found, I feel, while gathering our own food in wild places. For this is an activity that not only demands a little time, it gives a little back: time spent in pursuit of wild food – walking, picking, diving, fishing, hunting – is your time.
Ironically, though, gathering wild food is something that can still be enjoyed by people who don’t have the time – or space – for the more high-maintenance pursuits of gardening and stock rearing. You only need a couple of hours to go blackberrying or mushrooming. And if your life is busy and stressful, that may be just the couple of hours you need to save your sanity.
More therapy for the beleaguered is on offer back in the kitchen, when you prepare a meal, a free meal, with the fruits of your foraging. Here there is time to be creative, to make something special out of something commonplace, which cost you nothing. And with any luck there is also time to spread the enjoyment to others. I have always found sharing food with friends to be among the highest of pleasures. Sharing wild food is particularly satisfying: I see those who partake in it sharing an unsung communion, ingesting a little of the wilderness spirit into themselves. And it reminds me that wild food is more than just something for nothing. It’s something for everyone.
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