It’s that time of year again. There’s a glut of black and redcurrants at my friend’s allotment, at the market everyone is selling raspberries and old ladies at the bus stop at the bottom of the road pick blackberries with a death defying disregard of traces of lead from the traffic. Last year, for some reason, I was asked to help on a couple of wild food days run by a good friend. She had me helping prep food infront of a group of a hundred in the woods at a festival. I managed to mash the beech nuts in their shells (they should be de-husked before grinding) and had to get volunteers to painstakingly pick one from the other, which they did with a surprising degree of tolerance that probably had a lot to do with it being the third day of festivities; long past the point of doing much more than taking events as they came with a kind of glazed bewilderment.
Other conspicuous staples on the menu included acorn flour (progenitor of acorn burgers, even acorn cupcakes) and fruit leather (sloes and hawthorns mostly, mashed and pressed and dried to form a kind of preserved sweet that can be eaten all year round). There are also all the other fruits and a bewildering variety of tubers and greens that help us form some approximation of what our ancestors may have considered a good diet. And people come out in scores to partake of this knowledge, enthused perhaps with a love of what is natural, wanting to connect with something real and meaningful, or simply build up their experience of utilizing the great treasures that nature offers us, away from the florescent glare of supermarket aisles and their well attested vulnerabilities of just-in-time deliveries.
To what extent does such knowledge present any kind of real solution to our collective predicament, given that we are an island of 61 million people growing less than 60 percent of our own food with a very possible global food crunch on the horizon? Even if we were all clued up experts, doesn’t expecting these wild food to provide for any significant proportion of our needs seems idealistic? Are all such efforts little more than palliatives, well intentioned window dressing that verge on a kind of idealization of a way of life we only can surmise at, attempts at its revival left looking almost like a slide into semi-fantasy? Or do some survivalists hold some glimmer of the hope rooted in our Christian heritage that a chosen few will survive the coming turmoil and be lead into a golden future where the dandelion root coffee is always strong and sweet and the hedgerow greens are near perennial?
As far as learning about wild food and other associated skills goes, however much they may be of very real value to an individual in a given situation and however much they fall short as some kind of strategy en masse, their use is not necessarily some all or nothing absolute. Cultivating such skills is not just an insurance against hard times, as it was for the many who, in World War Two, augmented meager rations with a residue of knowledge that had been handed down for centuries. Like making tentative or more solid steps towards growing our own, or supporting community agriculture, developing an itinerary of plants that we can call on is rendered pretty wise behaviour even if we are not pressed by dire necessity.
Such skills can enhance our lives, can give us cause to walk beneath the trees and can help us train ourselves to really look at what’s around us, to enter into an appreciation of the species we would otherwise not notice. And to make some step away, however apparently token or small scale, to put something in our bellies we’ve gathered ourselves, that does not come spoon fed from factories, or which was produced in conditions we know little of – this is a kind of reclamation of what really matters. Spending time – as my friends do – in collecting and straining and drying and grinding endless acorns is in a way an act of belief in both our own resources and that which is given us direct; untrammeled, a taste of something heaven-sent that – while such efforts alone may not meet our every need – provides something we can navigate by, something that is as valuable for what it represents as for its ability to keep us alive, or at least to make our daily plates more lively. This is a kind of other sustenance, a reminder that – in using our own nouse – we can provide ourselves with something that adds meaning to our lives, something that rises above any toting up of calorific value in and of itself. It speaks of the satisfaction of a thing done well, of knowledge brought to life, of connection to a way of doing things that somehow leaves a strange and almost hard to grasp feeling of grace.
For many of my friends, when given the opportunity, it is almost a kind of observation of duty, an article of faith, to gather berries for the autumn wine, or look for puffballs and the edible brackets on trees – routines as natural as breathing. Occasionally I get roped in – soaked in the Midlands looking for sloes, on my knees in Sussex gathering acorns from prodigious or more poultry masts, looking for elusive fungi while nursing toxic hangovers – and it's always a reminder of where things are really at, a kind of tangible reality amid the myriad abstractions that often constitute our daily lives amid the modern world.
Reaching out to these ways of seeing and engaging with the world forms a kind of bedrock of experience that starts as a tentative putting down of roots but which may well lead to the day when such strange rituals become at last the norm, through love of them if not from necessity, and by stepping outdoors we step into our real inheritance, we are reminded of what it means to come back to some sense of being in the world that rings a little truer with the way that things are surely meant to be. It goes beyond grand plans and leaves us with a simple message – that the best things still come unadulterated and that when we choose to align ourselves more closely with what is natural we are given gifts that constitute much more than the merely material.
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