A short interview I did with Carl Munson of New Exeter Radio Show where I discuss my personal philosophy of foraging, and how eating wild food can awaken your body to a deeper appreciation of the Natural World and our place in it.
You can either listen to the podcast or read the transcript below…
Carl: It says on your card Robin that you offer a wild food guide to the edible plants of Britain. Now how long have you been doing that?
Robin: Basically eatweeds.co.uk was set-up in September last year (2008).
Carl: That’s a great name, sorry to interrupt straight away, but eatweeds.co.uk… what a fantastic name.
Robin: I set it up (its a blog), to basically document my own private foraging activities out on the land. And it has kind of progressed rather rapidly over the last few months because I go around filming foragers and other various plant teachers. From it has come a whole different life.
Carl: And you are still alive?
Robin: And I am still alive. Yeah. Luckily enough I have experience with eating very deadly plants, and how they impact my body. So I am very, very conscious of (1) Teaching sustainable foraging, (2) If you’re going to commercially forage to forage appropriately so you’re not stripping the land to bits and (3) For fun.
Carl: So the website started last year, but how long have you actually been eating weeds yourself? Where you like one of those kids who’d eat earth and worms and stuff like that?
Robin: I was, I used to eat ants and all the little bugs and stuff when I was a nipper. I grew up in the countryside and I used to get the nature awareness books.
Carl: And the Richard Mabey classic?
Robin: Not in those days, no, I didn’t know about Mabey. I had another nature/outdoors book that I followed that had foraging in it. Not a lot, more kind of berries and nuts and stuff from the trees.
So I did that as a child, and then when I was 19 I went to North Devon and I learned from a couple who where big foragers and they would just take me down the lanes, and we’d go fishing and get some edibles and do cook-ups and stuff like that.
And then I had to go back into work, and I had children and kinda forgot it. And then five years ago I had to walk away from my business interests and I wanted to get to know more of the plants that I was walking by everyday. And so I started identifying the wild flowers, and then 80% of those often medicinal, in the past, historically. And then because I like my food, I started to focus on the edible plants, and that’s what I do.
Carl: You mentioned 80%, so 80% of the things we see?
Robin: No, 80% of the stuff I was IDing, had been medicinally. So what that percentage would be, generally through all the wild flowers, I’m not sure, but it’s pretty high. It’s not down in the 1 or 2%. I mean we’re talking a lot.
Carl: So we are literally as a culture walking around with our eyes closed? And often our belly’s empty? When we could be eating god-given things in the hedgerow?
Robin: Very much. In Britain we have a problem. I am not trying to encourage people to go back to hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Nor am I trying to encourage people to eat solely from wild food.
Carl: Awww, but I must say that the loin cloth does look very good.
Robin: Laughter… You haven’t seen the G-string underneath.
Carl: Laughter… Did you make it?
Robin: Well someone did?
Carl: More laughter… It caught my imagination, the hunter-gatherer idea, because I have a sort of romantic notion about that. You know, even if we are tracking down the last bargain in the supermarket, that’s the hunter-gatherer instinct kicking in.
Robin: No it’s not.
Carl: Right, okay go on…
Robin: The kind of consensual understanding of hunter-gatherer societies, is that they were very scarcity-driven, they were very fear-based, there was a lot of dominance, and a lot of war and violence.
There’s a whole knew school of Palaeontology and Paleoarchaeology that’s coming out (I think that’s the word) where actually we moved from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists, growing the grains, because we actually had an abundance, a huge abundance of wild food. Protein based, fish and game and stuff. But also wild edibles.
And actually what happened was that as hunter-gatherers moved around the land, it was hard work. It is hard work you know, you’re on the go all the time, but you’re eating maybe 300 plants in the course of a year. Which is hugely different to our 20-25 plants that we get in a supermarket or a veg shop.
Carl: Is that what it is?
Robin: Yeah, that’s it, yeah. So what happened was the hunter-gatherer societies slowed down. They got savvy, because they’re very observant hunter-gatherers. And they realised that at X times of the year the salmon or the fish would come down the rivers or there would be gluts by the sea. And so what happened was the hunter-gatherers became a lot more sedentary. And with the sedentary lifestyle, they were still foraging obviously because they weren’t growing anything, but they didn’t have to forage very far and not over great distances, which they had to do before.
So with the sedentary lifestyle came cave paintings. And that’s when the cave paintings started developing because they had more time and they could develop artistic skills etc., and then from that they started thinking about growing. And as soon as people started growing (modern day agriculture came in 10,000 years ago), what happened was is you ended up with hierarchies, you ended up with far more violent communities and you ended up with propertarianism.
Carl: They call it civilisation don’t they?
Robin: They do call it civilisation and some people think we are coming to the end of that, and we maybe moving into a new form of culture.
Carl: I hear the band practice in the background, almost like a fanfare for a… well what are we going to call it? If this is the end of the western civilisation, what is this new thing that we are moving into? Where we might be foraging again and harking back a little bit to that hunter-gatherer…
Robin: I have no idea what the people are going to call it. The importance for me for foraging and why I go out teaching it to people is that, not only is it the most local and seasonal food around, it also awakens very primal instincts in our bodies. Our bodies become far more sensitive and attuned to the landscape and the countryside. And that can only be a good thing. Because with that comes appreciation of the Natural World, and our place in it.
Carl: And we are talking about food millimetres rather than food miles?
Robin: We are talking food steps… literally.
Carl: Superb. Well I think people are ready to make a move, because we are going to go on a forage around Exeter University grounds now. If people want to find out more about what you do, what’s the website address?
Robin: www.EatWeeds.co.uk
Carl: Fantastic… thank you for that.
Robin: Thanks Carl.
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