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.

Miles Irving popped round to my house with his family for a ‘cuppa’ on his way back from Cornwall the other day. I managed to persuade him to take 10 minutes out and give me an interview. Listen as this master forager discusses his outlook on wild foods and foraging and then goes on to talk about his latest book The Forager Handbook, which some are calling the new Food For Free for the 21st Century.

Running time: 9:52

ROBIN: OK it’s Robin Harford from EatWeeds.co.uk, and I am sitting here in my garden with Miles Irving who is the author of The Forager Handbook.

Miles, so tell me, about wild food, why do you think that foraging and wild food is so important. Why can’t people just go in to a veg shop and eat from the veg shop?

MILES IRVING: I suppose it’s the quality of the relationship between yourself and every other part of the process that results in having food on your plate.

If you’re eating wild food you’ve got to get to know your surroundings. You’ve got to get to know a little bit more about the living things that co-inhabit the place that you live and it’s just a bit more about being connected and switched on to the other things around you, and the place that you live.

That’s one way of looking at it from a positive point of view. And if you look at it the other way round, what happens in the food chain with stuff that you buy, there’s obviously all sorts of issues there that you are managing to side step and avoid. Like food miles and the use of agricultural chemicals and so on to produce those vegetables.

And lets face it, to just how fresh it is. I mean how fresher can it be that you go out and pick something and either eat it on the spot or take it home and eat it later that day. It’s about as good as it gets from that point of view.

And then I suppose the other thing is nutrition. We find that those plants that have been analysed for nutrition, on the whole, the wild ones seem to have far more nutrients in them than anything that you are going to buy in the shops, so I guess that’s quite a bundle of reasons.

You’re getting involved that’s the thing. I suppose that’s the strongest word that I would say about it really, in terms of the experience of gathering wild food is that you are involved. You’re involved in the place, you’re involved with the life cycles of these other species.

I think the problem with virtually everything that’s negative about our modern way of life is the un-involvement, the kind of putting up of barriers, the putting up of mediation of one kind or another between you and another thing or another person.

ROBIN: Mediation is a good word, we become spectators haven’t we?

MILES IRVING: Yeah.

ROBIN: So do you see foraging as quite an empowering process?

MILES IRVING: I think it is profoundly empowering, and life enhancing really. I’ve kind of banged on in the book a bit about how we are still hunter-gatherers. That’s one of my favourite trains of thought about this. Because you know, our genetics and our biology haven’t changed just because we have been sowing wheat and herding domestic cattle for 10,000 years. It hasn’t altered our make-up. So I think there is something about it, not that we can all go back to a traditional hunter-gatherer society, of course we can’t. But to make moves back in that direction is in keeping with who we are I think, and what our bodies are made to do, both in terms of nutrition and what you end up feeding yourself.

But also the kind of stuff you end up spending your day doing, like just being aware. Keeping your eye on the growth cycles of plants and noticing things about your landscape. That’s what our psychology is made up to do, amongst other things obviously, but it is very fundamental because most life hinges on the ability to obtain resources. And of course we obtained all of our resources by finding and using things for how ever long we were here before we farmed, possibly 190,000 years.

We are certainly not fulfilling the capacity that we have to be tuned into our environment, and I think that’s something that makes you more alive. To actually be sensitive and responsive to what is going on around you.

The fact that for most people most of the time what’s been going on around you has been predominantly biological. Other species, you know. Whereas now living in cities and living in houses where there’s not living things. You know if you don’t go out all day, and you haven’t got your house full of house-plants. Whereas before people would have been all the time out there, hearing the sound of the wind through the trees, smelling things, touching things, you know all of that. I think that is doing something to our psychological well being, that we don’t have that.

That is the main characteristic I can think of people who get into wild food and foraging. I think they are already people that care about their surroundings. But the more you do this, the more sensitive you get I think, and the more involved. If you are involved with something you care about it you look after it, and all that sort of thing.

ROBIN: So stewardship?

MILES IRVING: Stewardship exactly, yeah. It’s changed me profoundly just in the last few years that I have been doing it professionally. You’d think it would be the opposite, as soon as something becomes about money it becomes mercenary and hard headed and all that sort of thing. But I just haven’t found that. It’s stepped up my involvement, that’s the thing. Because I’m more involved, I’m more aware. Obviously I’m receiving hard cash for what I do. But it’s still absolutely breath taking to go to this place that you haven’t been to for a year because it’s a bit of a journey, and you go there when you know there is something in season. You just go back to this place and you just feel a part of it because of last year and the year before that.

These kinds of rhythms and cycles and things which people obviously would have felt, even agriculturalists would have felt it, but there is something a bit more breathtaking about the rhythm and cycle that you actually have no control over. But that you are just tapping into, and participating in.

ROBIN: Let’s move on to your book, The Forager Handbook. How do you see it in the kind of library of wild food books that have gone before?

MILES IRVING: We have just brought it up to date a little bit. But also it is time for something a bit more thorough. Something a bit more comprehensive and in-depth, really.

I feel what Richard Mabey’s book did, because he’s such a gifted writer, I think he captured people’s imagination and inspired people with the idea. There were loads of wild food books around at that time. It wasn’t like he thought of this great new subject to write about. Loads of wild food books came out, but his is the one that stuck, just because it is so inspirational.

But at the same time it’s not that comprehensive in its scope. Nor is Roger Phillips’ one. Roger Phillips is obviously a photographer first and foremost. Those great pictures of these gorgeous dishes in context, you know, lovely. And also he dug up some great historical stuff.

I suppose the strongest thing that we’ve got in my book is the contemporary use and the fact that you do get told something helpful about all of the plants.

That partly came from people that were giving us feedback while the book was being written. Because they said, “Look, that’s the thing that excites me so much, the idea that we can actually go out and find something, and be able to reproduce a restaurant recipe. Instead of thinking this is exciting that we’ve got this, but we don’t know really what to do with it.”

And that confidence that you have knowing that this is a recipe that worked, that people bought and then bought again, and I think it just elevates the status of it from this desperate measure that you take because you’re skint or you got lost in the woods or something like that. Or you are just trying to prove that you could if you did get lost in the woods.. all that stuff.

So I think it is great for people to have something that they can do with all of the plants. And then we’ve just expanded the range of things.

ROBIN: Because it’s not just wild edible plants it’s also includes cultivated flowers like day lilies and stuff like that?

MILES IRVING: Strictly speaking they are all wild in the sense that they must be naturalised. If it doesn’t appear in the Atlas of the British Flora then it is not in the book. So even if it is in there as a naturalised garden escape, if the Botanical Society are recording it as a wild plant, then I class it as a wild plant.

One of things I find most exciting about wild food, apart from all this glorious kind of back in touch with the land stuff, which obviously I do feel is very valuable and important, but also I just love the idea of a neglected resource being put to use. So that’s why I definitely don’t feel purist about say a day lily or anything else that’s jumped over the fence, because I think, well there it is, let’s use it.

ROBIN: Yeah it’s shouting at you. Excellent, well thank very much Miles.

A friend recently told me about a secret Wild Cherry (Prunus avium) tree in my neighbourhood. I knew the village, and roughly where it was. And so Zillah, me and our trusty Cairn terrier when off to stalk it.

We’d nearly given up hope, when around a very overgrown corner we were presented with a sight I haven’t seen in a long while. A Wild Cherry that was so laden with fruit the branches were hanging right down. In fact there was more red/black than green leaves!

We harvested a couple of pounds in less than 10 minutes. And even though I knew another family had harvested too, both our activities had made virtually no impact on the abundance of this wonderful tree.

If there is one thing that foraging has taught me, it is that Nature is truly abundant, you just have to be smart and aware of when to harvest. Sometimes a crop can be gone within 48 hours, so grab your chance while you can, because Nature doesn’t take pre-bookings.

This week I discovered that the leaves of the Sea Aster (Aster tripolium) are edible. They have a very refreshing texture, and a lovely delicate flavour distinctly unique.

Chocolate combined with sweet violets and nettle has, quite simply, got to be experienced! The deep, earthy flavours of nettle combine beautifully with the bitter-sweet taste of rich, dark chocolate.

In this video, Simone, a forager with 40 years experience, talks us through not only how to make this scrummy treat, but also her philosophy of foraging, and how wild edible plants have transformed her life.

Ingredients

1 large bar of organic dark chocolate (70%+ cocoa)
handful of nettles that have been mashed up in a food processor, or by hand
pine nuts
sweet violet flowers

Instructions

Watch the video

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.

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.

Stinging Nettle (Urtica dioica) has traditionally been used as a Spring tonic, and in this video I show you just how easy it is to make a nourishing Nettle infusion.

Last week I went on a two-day Nettle infusion fast. Now I’ve fasted numerous times over the years, but using Nettle infusion was one of the most enjoyable ways to do one. Plus minor skin irritations cleared up within hours of starting it, and my skin became super soft.

Don’t worry I’m not suggesting you fast on this ‘green nectar’, but as a Spring tonic just consume 2-3 cups a day for seven days, and then drink a cup a day for as long as your body tells you it needs it.

Oh, and if the taste is a little earthy for you, you can always serve it with a little local honey, or a slice of lemon. Personally I love it as it is.

So folks, it’s time to blow out the cobwebs of the past seasonal over-indulgences, and re-energise yourself with this nourishing Nettle infusion.

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.

Lesser Celandine (Ranunculus ficaria) is one of the earliest spring greens to emerge. In it’s raw state the leaves are perfect in salads or sandwiches (IMPORTANT UPDATE: Since writing this article over two years ago, I now no longer recommend you eat Lesser Celandine leaves raw. They contain protoanemonin which is toxic, but destroyed by heat and drying). The leaves of Lesser Celandine in the Middle Ages where used by sailors to treat scurvy as it is high in Vitamin C.

It is also great as a potage vegetable as this recipe will prove.

Warning: Lesser Celandine leaves should only be eaten before it flowers as during and after flowering it becomes slightly toxic. Make certain that you do a Tolerance Test if this is the first time you have tried this plant.

Ingredients

• 2 large bunches of Lesser Celandine leaves (picked before flowering)
• 1 pack of Tempeh
• 1 glass of red wine
• 1 medium onion
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 250g of chestnut mushrooms
• 1 tbsp paprika
• 2 tbsp tamari
• 2 tbsp Dijon mustard
• 3 tbsp flour
• 1/2 cup of milk
• 1/2 cup of vegetable stock
• black pepper to taste

Serves: 2 people

Step 1

Hunt down a patch of Lesser Celandine leaves.

Step 2

Dice the Tempeh and fry in a little oil with the Tamari.

Step 3

Heat the red wine, garlic and onion in a saucepan over a moderate heat until the onion is soft, about 5-10 minutes. Now add the sliced mushrooms and cook for a further 3 minutes.

Step 4

Stir in the paprika and Dijon mustard. Next slowly add the flour and make sure that you keep stirring quickly all the time until the flour is well mixed with the other ingredients.

Step 5

Now add the chopped Lesser Celandine leaves. Stir until wilted.

Step 6

Next add in the fried Tempeh, vegetable stock and milk. Turn the heat to low and simmer until the Stroganoff begins to thicken.

Step 7

Season with lashings of black pepper and serve either on its own or with rice or baked potato. Enjoy!