Ever since I met Frank Cook back in 2008, I’d always wanted to interview his friend, Sandor Katz. The two of them were good friends and conducted workshops together. In this short video Sandor talks about his friendship with Frank, and the ways they were exploring wild foods and wild fermentation…

“My name is Sandor Katz. I am the author of a book called Wild Fermentation and another book called The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved.

I met Frank around 2003 (I believe) for the first time. Our first encounter was at a gathering in North Carolina that was called the Pollinator Gathering, and Frank arrived just as I was leaving. But all weekend long people had been talking about him and that he and I should meet each other.

While I was teaching people about many different modes of fermentation, making sauerkraut, making tempeh, making miso, making meads. Frank was mostly focusing on making meads, specifically herbal elixir meads. As a means of preserving plant medicine from his foraging walks.

For me it was a pleasure to teach with someone who I liked so much, who I had so much to learn from and really tag-team teaching was wonderful because we could really put ourselves into it 100%, and then have a little bit of downtime where we could rest and relax and rejuvenate and get ready for the next bit of teaching.

He was always getting people working with their hands in the kitchen and then getting them outside, getting them to know the plants that were right around them.

Frank was so amazing on plant walks, because he rarely got very far. He had such a really comprehensive knowledge of plants that you would just get out in the yard and there would be hours of things to talk about within an easy walk around the house.

The students and Frank would always bring back bags of leaves, roots, berries and fruits and things that they had harvested and we would figure out how to incorporate them into fermented vegetables as well as into herbal elixir meads.

On our workshops that were more than one day, we would always make tempeh and incorporate that into the meal, and we would often make ‘Idli’. Frank had travelled the world much more extensively than I had, so he had experienced a food like ‘Idli’ in its indigenous context in a way that I hadn’t. So he knew the right kind of ‘Dal’ stew and the right kind of chutney to prepare with it. So we always had a really fruitful collaboration.

And actually the last workshop that we taught was just about a week before he died. He wasn’t feeling very well and it was a two day workshop, and at the end of the first day he told me that if he wasn’t feeling better in the morning, that he didn’t think he’d be able to be there for the second day.

But in the morning he arrived and said that he had slept great and felt much better, and he threw himself into it. And then that weekend he went to a permaculture gathering, the South East Permaculture Gathering in North Carolina, and he led a plant walk there. He was definitely low energy but I had no sense at all that he was seriously ill, and on the verge of death. I don’t know if he did either.

I get the impression from talking to mutual friends that he realised that he was dealing with something serious and that he was making a little bit of an effort to downplay it, so as not to worry people.

But really since Frank’s death I have had a lot of reflection, trying to take on the important work that he was doing and trying to incorporate some of the teaching that I had always deferred to him, because he was doing it so much better than I could imagine doing it myself.

I do have this huge sense of loss not only of a beautiful human being and friend but of someone who had a really specific gift that he was sharing people in an active way.

I have been really trying to take on some of that sharing with people that he was doing. One way that I have been doing that is incorporating acorns into my life, and into the teaching that I have been doing. That was something Frank was absolutely passionate about. This abundant, protein rich food source that was so widely available, and so widely ignored. So I have been working more with acorns, and incorporating that into the work that I do with fermentation.
Also, to the more limited extent that I have knowledge about plants that are edible and useful and common. I am trying to share that information with people more.

You know Frank influenced many, many people. It was funny, at his memorial service I met 7Song who was his first plant teacher who he talked about a lot. And 7Song talked about how gratifying it was for him to have a student who really got out into the world sharing this information so much. Wherever 7Song went he would meet people who would say “Oh, you’re Frank Cook’s teacher”. And what an honour and gratifying thing it was for him.

So yeah, Frank really put himself out there and was so passionate and so willing to share what he knew and what he’d learned.”

Tom Hodgkinson is editor of The Idler and best selling author of How to Be Idle & How to Be Free. Last weekend I managed to grab him for a quick interview to talk about the idler lifestyle and the benefits of wild food foraging. Watch the video or if you like to read, then you’ll find the transcript below…

Tom: Before I met you Robin, I had only really foraged for elderflowers, blackberries and elderberries, and the odd mushroom. Most of which we got from the woefully incomplete Hugh Fernley Whittingstall’s River Cottage Cookbook. Which is good to sort of get you going, but is lacking in some accuracy and detail.

But even in my foraging early years, which was the day before yesterday, it is pretty obvious that Nature is doing a lot of the work for you. Oh and something else we have around here is whortleberries which are like a little bilberry, and they grow on the windy coast of Exmoor near where we live.

It’s just a question of making a countryside walk into something productive, and using what Nature has already done for you.

I know as a now hard working vegetable gardener actually what a lot work it is to grow the vegetables that you want, at the time that you want and in the place that you want. And the results are fantastic, but clearly from a strictly Idler point of view, the much more sensible thing would be to go foraging for what is already there under your nose. And it is quite amazing to me that the elderflowers and the blackberries are completely free and the process of harvesting them is so healing and enjoyable in itself.

Robin: As a novice forager how confident do you feel to actually engage the countryside from a foraging perspective? Do you feel safe doing that? Do you feel that it’s just one of those things that’s too complicated to ever get your head around, or do you think it’s something that could really be incorporated into your lifestyle?

Tom: Yes it can definitely be incorporated into my lifestyle without any doubt.

Clearly like any other area ‘husbandry’ (I suppose) you could study the subject for years and years. But we’ve already made a start. I mean I didn’t realise that we had chickweed and fat hen growing here. I’d heard them mentioned in other books but I had never bothered to try and identify them. And I’d actually be quite nervous to identify them just from the book. I wouldn’t be quite certain if it was the right thing. It’s not always easy to tell from a book. Perhaps you need to check three books to be completely sure.

But obviously the best way of learning something is by your own direct experience and someone teaching you and showing you. So I’m just thinking about how to remember in future, because if you don’t do something quite regularly then you tend to start to forget it.

We knew that we had the camomile thing, the pineapple mayweed outside, but I didn’t really know that you could eat it and put it into salads. We didn’t know, as I said, that we have this huge amount of chickweed and fat hen growing everywhere. We knew that dandelion leaves could be used in salads a bit, but I have always found them a bit bitter. There’s actually much more delicious stuff out there. And we’re surrounded by food. So it’s really exciting for that reason, for the useful reason that it’s free food.

It’s rather like when we first went to catch rabbits with our ferrets, and sent them down the rabbit holes. I was actually engaging with the landscape in a way that I hadn’t done before, when we just walked through it and over it. And you’re sort of separated from it because you look at it as a photograph ie. a view, ie. you’re looking at something that’s out there, rather than being in it.

And so when we went out with the ferrets I suddenly felt much more deeply connected to the landscape in a way that’s quite hard to describe. And that was the experience of going out today with you Robin, you suddenly feel connected to it. You actually sort of feel your eyes are open and you’re looking at it for the first time, actually seeing what’s there, seeing what’s actually under your nose. Which is actually an extremely difficult thing to do because you’re not generally encouraged to do that.

Robin: The kind of common perception of a lot of wild foods is that they’re just survival food, they’re kind of last resort. From the flavours that you’ve tasted over the last two days, would you say that’s true, that it’s just ‘grunt food’?

Tom: I remember I was coming down on the train back home from London one day, and I was reading Richard Mabey’s Food For Free. And I bumped into a friend on the train who also lives down here, and he looked through it and said ‘that it was a pretty meagre meal’. I mean it’s not going to be your entire meal is it? You’re going to have it in risotto, and it’s going be a salad. I haven’t seen big thick, juicy things out there, really. So it’s an addition, but the point is I think, is it feels like a medicine more than the food that you can get in the shops, and probably more than the food that I’m cultivating as well. Because it’s really sort of meant to be where it is it’s grown up naturally, so it’s in exactly the right place at the right time. I can see that the range of flavours is massive. The chickweed and fat hen were much tastier than I thought, and so was the pineapple thing.

Robin: And what about the estuary greens that I brought up?

Tom: They were absolutely fantastic! I mean really, really good. Rather like when we made our own jam from the sloes and blackberries in the hedgerow and the hips and the haws. Just one taste of it and you can feel the energy sort of filling you. So just like the cultivated plant, those things have been sitting there soaking up the sun, and the rain all year round, and that energy is now being given to you in the form of a plant. Yeah, it was delicious guys.

The other day I went out with Fraser Christian of CoastalSurvival.com to film how to gather and cook limpets.

It was a glorious day, with a deserted shoreline, and a super abundance of shellfish and seaweeds.

Fraser is a master coastal forager, and will be running a one day seashore foraging course with me shortly. Get on the notification list by filling in your name and e-mail address in the form below.

There’s nothing quite like going for a wild food forage, gathering wild edible plants as you go, then arrive at a small, hidden beach, and prepare a fire to cook up your wares.

However often times you find the beach you are on is covered in stones and pebbles, potentially highly dangerous if they choose to explode and send shrapnel flying through the air.

You could be forgiven for thinking that you are suddenly experiencing trench warfare, and the dangers might not be too different.

In this short video my friend and bushcraft instructor, Chris Holland, teaches you how to build a beach fire safely that your family and friends can enjoy.

About 1min 15secs into the video you will see a speeded up clip with Chris adding extra sand to the bottom of the fire pit. He does this to absorb the heat and to stop any stones exploding that maybe underneath the fire.

For 40 years Simone has been passionate about wild food. Zillah and I went to visit her at her home in Calstock, Cornwall, where she prepared a most delicious wild food meal. In this video she talks about her wild food passion, and why it is important to her.

Course Dates 2010

• Calstock: 17th April & 8th May
• Bude: 5th June & 3rd July

Simone offers Wild Food Foray Feasts down in Cornwall. She has very limited spaces, and they book up very fast. Her courses run 10.30am to 4pm. To book a place, call her on 01822 832 964 (International: +44 1822 832 964). IMPORTANT: The best time to call Simone is between 6PM to 8PM.

It’s important when choosing a wild food foraging course that you go out with someone who is experienced and has at minimum a daily/weekly experience of identifying and eating wild edible plants all year round.

There are a lot of foraging courses out there, with some being run by people with little more than “book knowledge”. This could be very detrimental to your health!

Eating wild foods is safe once you have learned which plants are edible, as well as their poisonous look-a-likes. In this video Marcus Harrison from the Wild Food School aims to tell you what you need to be looking out for when choosing a good  foraging course.

In this short video Marcus Harrison from the Wild Food School talks about Three Cornered Leek (Allium triquetrum), its history and use as a wild edible plant.

It was introduced into Britain in the 19th Century, and is now endemic in the South West of Britain, and can be found also in the South East.

It looks a bit like grass, and has a keel down the length of it, which when crushed has a very definite garlic smell.

It is considered the nearest species we have in the wild to garlic chives, however it does have an aftertaste of leek, and is excellent mixed in with potato salad.

In this short video Marcus Harrison from the Wild Food School talks about Wild Garlic or Ramsons (Allium ursinum), its history and use as a wild edible plant.

Chris Holland from Wholeland discusses the many uses for Coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara). A member of the Daisy family, Coltsfoot is one of the first plants to flower during the year. It appears at about the same time as the Crocuses start showing up.

You should know that this plant sprouts from waste ground, often very waterlogged places, rough ground, edges of woodlands, building sites and those kind of places.

Coltsfoot has beautiful, bright yellow flowers with slightly scaly stalks, and the flowers have  a delicious honey like taste.

You can eat Coltsfoot stalks or flowers fresh. The flowers come out way before the leaves and appear around the beginning of February (depending on your location), and the leaves don’t come out until about May time.

Coltsfoot flowers, leaves & root have been found to contain the hepatotoxic (poisonous to the liver) pyrrolizidine alkaloid senkirkine. For research into the possible carniogenic effects of Coltsfoot, read this.

Watch the video to learn more uses for this wonderful sunny plant such as Coltsfoot Scotch Pancakes, Cough Syrup etc.

Running time: 4:36

Frank Cook (internationally renowned edible wild plant expert) discusses the importance of Nettle (Urtica dioica) as food and medicine.

Frank gives us a fascinating insight into the many uses of Nettles, and the why it needs to become the national food of England.

The nutritional profile of this fantastic plant is impressive…

Nettle Nutritional Profile
(calculated on a zero moisture basis per 100gm)

Aluminium: 13.8 mg
Ash (total): 8.4%
Calcium: 2900 mg
Calories: 0.60 /gm
Chromium: 0.39 mg
Cobalt: 1.32 mg
Crude Fibre: 11.0%
Dietary Fibre: 43.0%
Fat: 2.3%
Iron: 4.2 mg
Magnesium: 860 mg
Manganese: 0.78 mg
Niacin: 5.20 mg
Phosphorous: 447 mg
Potassium: 1750 mg
Protein: 25.2%
Riboflavin: 0.43 mg
Selenium: 0.22 mg
Silicon: 1.03 mg
Sodium: 4.90 mg
Thiamine: 0.54 mg
Tin: 2.7 mg
Vitamin A: 15,700 IU
Vitamin C: 83.0 mg
Zinc: 0.47 mg

Source: Nutritional Herbology: Mark Pedersen

Running time: 6:38