Sustainable food from foraging #FLsustain

After yesterdays post on hunter gatherer diets I thought I'd share some of the foraged foods I use most regularly and which form a regular part of my families diet. We don't have an entirely foraged diet by any means but we do regularly eat food that has never seen the inside of a supermarket or a cellophane wrapper.

Every Summer  I make lots of meadowsweet root beer with my children, meadowsweet grows in large quantities in wet areas such as ditches. We collect bag loads of it from alongside country roads near where we live. 

Wood Blewits are a delicious seasonal fungi and have the added attraction of being a wonderful purple colour.   

I'm not fussy about fish, I'll eat just about any of them, rainbow trout like the ones in this picture but also the fish that most people wouldn't normally bother eating like the pike below.

None of these fish come from artificial farms which can impact the local ecosystem with the artificial feed that are fed like the Australian salmon farm pictured below.

CSIRO [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Traps like this were used for years by game keepers and are still legal for catching pheasants and partridges, while I most often catch up birds now to use as breeding stock to provide birds for the next year these are an excellent low impact way of catching birds for the table as long as you have permission. 

Burdock roots require a bit of sweat and hard work to dig up but one large root might be the equivalent of two fairly average potatoes.

Colts foot is a delicious vegetable but you may struggle to find it in lowland areas. Although I did find loads growing through the gravel of a service station car park last year. 

The wild garlic before it flowers, this is a really nice wild vegetable, often people think of wild food as very bland but actually there are plenty of ingredients to be found out there which can add loads of flavour. This is one of them but there are also plenty of wild cresses to add a bit of pepper, hedge garlic, lady's smock for a mustard taste and plenty more.  

I love foraging for fungi and these shaggy inc caps are very common, easy to identify and absolutely delicious. 

Even children can get involved with fungi foraging as long as your careful.

My children love egg sandwiches and a bit of foraged cress makes a welcome addition and this particular species, hairy bitter cress grows just about everywhere. 

As well as being pretty flowers can be a tasty sweet snack, my daughter Lillie has never managed to finish making a daisy chain because she eats them too fast. 

Rosehips are one of the best natural sources of vitamin C, these large Japanese roses are often planted in supermarket car parks and can be found all over the place, in fact they are considered an invasive species due to their colonization of some coastal areas. Our smaller native dog rose tastes just as good though. Every year we try to make a big batch of rosehip syrup which is delicious when diluted like a cordial and great for treating colds as well. 

Another supermarket car-park find, Japanese Raspberries 

Mulberries

The biggest puffball I have ever harvested, I have seen some larger ones but they have all been past their best and no good for eating. 

Last years Christmas Dinner a Mallard with a pigeon stuffed inside it. All shot by my own fare hand; there will be another post later this week about preparing duck.  

Most animals will yield more than just a meal, skins for clothing, down and feathers for insulation or making fly's with which you can catch more food, bone for making primitive hooks or tools. 

Venison with peaches, so maybe the peaches would be hard to come by in the British countryside but venison is just as good with hawthorn ketchup, sloe jelly or any number of other things that could be found with ease in your average English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish field or hedgerow. 

Now this is just a small sample of the potential wild foods available to someone who wants to forage for food to make their diet more environmentally sustainable or just because they want to try their hand at foraging, you can find more ideas for foraged foods in our regular series Foragers Diary,  but if you were going to put a foraged meal on your table every day that would require more or less a full time commitment to foraging, certainly more time than is convenient to fit around a modern lifestyle.

So as a move towards sustainability foraging probably isn't the answer in densely populated countries but it's certainly fun and rewarding. TRY IT

Geoff 

Hunting and Gathering for Sustainable Food Production #FLsustain

During the MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) I have been participating in over the last few weeks the idea that a hunter gatherer style diet or a 'Paleo Diet' could be more sustainable than a diet which comes from intensively farmed food, particularly livestock such as beef.

By Mopane Game Safaris (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Having more than a little experience of foraged food I think this is a little over simplified, although there is no doubt that the diet the modern and prehistoric hunter gatherer societies had access to does not require the same impacts/inputs or withdrawals from the environment than a modern diet provided by agriculture does.

For example a diet provided by agriculture requires that we input fertilizer and insecticide for crops and medication for livestock, impact the natural ecosystems of an area by rearing non-native crops or livestock and changing the landscape to suit them, and withdraw water and nutrients. So yes a diet supported by agriculture does have those drawbacks and yes there are certainly some agricultural products which are more of a drain on the environment than others. For example we saw the agriculture of the British Isles change drastically during the Second World War; away from primarily pastoral farming to arable farming as it allowed more food to be produced per acre to support the population while food was rationed. 

It's not as simple as that though, when hunter gatherers last roamed the British Isles the total population was thousands rather than tens of millions. They migrated to take advantage of seasonal resources and their entire life revolved around gathering food and other resources that they would use to sustain life. Now I can't imaging the entire population of Birmingham travelling to the coast each year for several weeks or months to catch fish and collect limpets and if they did what would happen? That's right all the food would be used up very quickly. The British Isles can't support it's population through hunting and gathering like it once did.  

I don't believe that the reason for that is that people don't know as much about wild food or are too squeamish, although yes that is as a rule true, but if the circumstances demanded it, and by that I mean hunger, I think people would be very quick to adopt wild food into their diet. 

This is a bit hard for me to admit because as a 'bushcrafter' and wild food enthusiast I'd like to think I'd have a headstart on most people when it comes to getting food from the wild if I need to but people are adaptable and I honestly don't think it would take people long to thinking of blackbirds and field fares as just small bony chickens if they got hungry. Also if you look at wild food in general the ones that you would rely on as staples aren't the kind you would mistake for anything else; cat tails, acorns, burdock etc.. and meat and fish is fairly self explanatory. So it wouldn't take long for people to get back into the swing of using wild foods. It's just us wierdos that want to eat fungi, and black nightshade berries and to tell the difference between hogweed and hemlock and things like that that need to be really careful when we are foraging.       

The problem is if we can't provide a 'paleo' diet through hunting and gathering how do we get it, that's right we'd have to farm it and as soon as we have to do that we have the same problem as before with the impacts of intensive agriculture. Yes it wont be the same impacts, we wont be making the massive environmental water withdrawals that are required to rear beef, although in the UK this is hardly a problem especially given the recent weather. Instead we'll be 'farming' something else like limpets, which made up a significant and important part of the prehistoric populations diet in the British Isles, 

Now here's some homework for you; google 'environmental impacts of shellfish aquaculture' and just have a look at the environmental issues associated with it. 

You see as much as we need to do something to improve the sustainability of our food production the solutions aren't as simple as they sometimes seem.  

Geoff

What does landscape mean to you? #FLsustain

A view of the Southern Alps of New Zealand from the top of Mount Sabestapol

Over the last few weeks I have been taking part in a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on the topic of; "Sustainability, Society and You" through Futurelearn and The University of Nottingham.  

One of the topics covered was what the landscape means to individuals and I thought I'd share some of my feelings and the reasons that I have a particularly strong desire to engage with the landscape and my natural environment. 

As I grew up I spent a lot of time outside, my parents were not the kind of people to encourage (or tolerate) lots of time spent playing on the computer and as such I never owned a games console or a game boy and spent my time outside instead. I will be forever grateful for that kind of upbringing and now really enjoy any chance I get to work out of doors with my family. My Dad is an avid bird watcher and so I learned from a young age not only how to identify the birds I saw but also to appreciate the wildlife around me. Later he taught me how to shoot, we learned to fly fish together and we have put our knowledge of  wildlife to great use over the years to put many a tasty meal on the table. 

Some people might call me a hypocrite when in one sentence I proclaim my admiration and appreciation of wildlife and the natural world and in the next talk about shooting and eating said wildlife. Well you are entitled to your opinion but I have always felt that being able to sustainably harvest my own food from the environment helps me appreciate it more. 

But landscapes and wildlife come in all shapes and sizes and I'm not more attached to one than another;

The view from Rödbergetsfort, Boden, Norrbotten, Sweden 

Lathkill Dale in the White Peak area of Derbyshire

Svartån, Västerås Sweden.

Storforsen, Sweden

Striding Edge and Helvellyn, Lake District.

Now I've had many opportunities to visit these places and each of them is uniquely attractive in it's own way. I find it quite easy to go down the route of analysing different habitats and landscapes and thinking about their 'value' in terms of the wildlife they support, the edible plant species that might be found there and a whole host of other things but sometimes it's nice to just to look at the beauty of an area and be grateful that it's there just to look at. 

That brings me on to sustainability: A lot of people, in the name of sustainability talk about reducing or removing human influence on the landscape/environment/nature but if that approach was adopted  many of the landscapes pictured above would simply not be there. They are not sustainable, but not because our pollution, waste or urban expansion is going to destroy them, although that is a risk for some places, but because constant human management and intervention has kept these places in the condition that they are in. The idea that nature makes these beautiful places on it's own is completely wrong, yes left to it's own devices nature does create beautiful landscapes but they do not stay the same for very long. 

Imagine for a moment that suddenly every person vanishes from the British Isles, along with every all our cars, domestic livestock and rubbish. Additionally imagine that all the species that have become extinct as a result of our impacts suddenly come back, wild boar, reindeer, elk; those beautiful views of the peak district and lake district and any other area of heath or moor would soon disappear, they are not a 'climax' community, that means that without our constant management they would naturally become something else, probably woodland.  Nature is not static, it constantly changes and moves according to it's own pattern. 

One of the things which connects me to the landscape so deeply is not the chance to look at theses views or visit them or take pictures of them but the part I have been lucky enough to play in shaping, maintaining and hopefully improving the landscapes that I have been lucky enough to work in. 

So think about that: Think of what you can do for the environment rather than just what you can stop doing for the environment. 

Geoff