I’ve been preparing this breakfast for days. Collecting acorns from the local park; rosehips from the graveyard; dandelion roots from the patch of weeds in the garden. It’s like the Mystery Box round of MasterChef, if the show was produced by squirrels. On the subject of squirrels, there will be more later.
Foraged food has been in fashion ever since eating began. It’s the diet we evolved on and, according to a newly published study, we should all be getting more of it. The study – organised by ethnobotanist and author Monica Wilde, in partnership with Zoe, the nutritional science company – challenged a group of 24 experienced foragers to spend up to three months dining like hunter-gatherers. The results? On almost every single measured health marker, the group showed dramatic improvements: the obese dropped kilos, blood pressures normalised, inflammation fell and gut biomes bloomed. But is it a diet any of us can hope to follow? I decided to try it for a day and see.
The rules are simple: anything growing – or running – wild is fair game. Mushrooms, hawthorn berries and sloes are in. Butter, eggs, cream, milk, sugar, coffee, pasta, rice, tofu, lentils and their ilk are all out. So, what’s for breakfast? For morning coffee, I roast and grind dandelion roots. They smell as fruity as the finest Ethiopian beans. They taste good, too. I have just enough to brew a single cup, which I savour while mulling over my mound of acorns. My stomach rumbles just thinking about them. I’ve wanted to try acorns ever since I was a child, reading the famously lush descriptions of meals eaten by the mice and badgers of Brian Jacques’s Redwall novels: acorn salad, acorn scones, soft acorn bread, acorn dumplings “with honeysuckle sauce” and, most intriguing of all, “devilled barley pearls in acorn purée”.
Raw, acorns are so bitter that if you tried to eat one, your tongue would writhe and curl like one of those fortune-telling fish. To make mine palatable, I’ve roasted them, shucked the nut meats and boiled them in several changes of water to leach away the tannins. That’s the first lesson. Wild food takes time. The second is: don’t expect it to look pretty. The hearty acorn porridge I opt for comes out as a grey and gloopy gruel. The taste is bland but comforting, like unseasoned congee. I’d eat it again, but only if I really had to.
As soon as breakfast is over, it’s time to start thinking about lunch, so I head out into the wilds of south London with a copy of Richard Mabey’s 1972 classic, Food for Free, in hand. He promises beech nuts, blewits and blackberries, but all I find are fag ends and fox turds. And what about protein? With no feral beans to speak of, realistically the only source is going to be animal. On my way to the station, I scan the pavement for roadkill, or a friendly pest-controller. City pigeons elude me, so I board a train to Kent, where I’m met by curly haired foraging instructor Michael White and his two lurchers, Willow and Vesta. White, 42, was one of the foragers in Wilde’s wild food study. Throughout its three-month duration, he dined like a medieval baron, tucking into rook, jay, magpie, woodpecker and even a fox.
“I slow-cooked the fox overnight,” White says as we drive along a country lane to a nearby wood. “It smelled like wet dog. Tasted like it, too. The dogs turned their noses up, which is never a good sign.” Mouse, on the other hand, he claims is very tasty. He recommends them spatchcocked, fried until crispy in venison fat, and then eaten whole, bones and all. “The only problem is that you need a lot of them to make a meal.” Reader, a word of caution before you run to grease your tiny frying pan. Some rodents carry diseases, such as leptospirosis, lymphocytic choriomeningitis, plague and typhus, and so should be handled in the kitchen with caution.
White grew up on a smallholding nearby, where his parents kept sheep and introduced him to foraging, as well as hunting with ferrets, guns and traps. Before the study began, he had some idea of what three months living on wild food might be like. In his early 20s, he walked across the country, from Wales to Kent, surviving only on what he could forage, which included a nice plump trout regurgitated at his feet by an agitated cormorant. Lunch is looking up.
White slams on the brakes. In someone’s front garden, a cluster of bovine bolete mushrooms huddle on the lawn. We lean over, snatch them and are gone before the lace curtains start twitching. While perhaps somewhat rude, this isn’t technically illegal. The 1968 Theft Act explicitly permits the picking of wild fungi, foliage, fruit and flowers, irrespective of who the land they’re growing on belongs to.
“That’s the great thing about foraging,” says White. “It’s truly democratic. We can all do it: whether we own land or not, whether we’re rich or poor, we can all get out and forage, if you just educate yourself. A lot of the aspirational things about food are very elitist. They come with a price tag. But foraging is literally for everyone.”
We gather more mushrooms. Blushers from a sweet chestnut coppice; brown birch boletes from the mossy bank of a duck pond; a huge horse mushroom from a meadow. Then we move on to the greens: spicy water pepper leaves sprouting from a ditch; sorrel from a dappled stand of cricket-bat willows; sumac and wild carrot seed from a verge. At a yew tree, we pause for a midmorning snack. Every single part of a yew contains deadly poisons, taxines, which induce cardiac failure. Every part, that is, except for a thin film of red flesh around the seed. They’re sweet and gooey, but when one of my teeth glances on a seed, my mouth fills with the taste of poison – and we still haven’t found any roadkill. “I’m sorry,” White says. “I should have shot something.”
I have a trick up my sleeve. Or rather, a couple of defrosting grey squirrels in my bag, which I ordered in advance from a game supplier, just in case. Environmental activists have long advocated eating grey squirrels to extinction, to save the native red squirrels and prevent the damage greys do to trees and bird populations. They are a rare morsel: guilt-free meat.
“These are none too fresh,” White says, when we go back to his wilderness kitchen to cook them up. “Look, fly eggs.” He gestures towards my squirrel’s anus, and shrugs when I ask if they’re still safe to eat, instead showing me how to cut through the skin and use the tail as a lever to prise away the pelt. It is a brutal and sickening task, one that perhaps everyone who eats meat should experience. None of it goes to waste. The prime cuts are for us, while the guts, paws and heads will be dinner for White’s quartet of ferrets (Savage, Hot Chocolate, Flash Dancing Pony and Dave).
The lunch we make wouldn’t look out of place on the menu of a high-end restaurant: butterflied leg of squirrel with rosehip purée; wild mushrooms sautéed in venison fat; wood sorrel, sow thistle and yew berry salad (£45).
The squirrel is just the right side of rotten, gamey but good, counterbalanced perfectly by the sweet rosehips and the acid sorrel. It is filling in a way that goes beyond hunger. When we forage, it seems to me that we satisfy other appetites, caveman cravings deep in our brainstems. “We have evolved to forage,” White agrees. “We evolved to get food from the natural environment. It’s something we find innately satisfying.”
On the train home, my head starts to throb and I remember about Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, an incurable brain condition that, in the US, has been linked to the consumption of squirrels. “That’s the caffeine and starch withdrawal,” says Monica Wilde, the architect of the wild food study, over the phone. “Clears on day three.”
In 2020, Wilde, 59, spent an entire year living off wild food – an experience she documented in her book, The Wilderness Cure. “I lost all the excess weight – 31kg – that I had been trying various diets to shift for years,” she says, while her friend Matthew Rooney, who accompanied her on the diet, found his diabetes stabilised. Her curiosity sparked, she then recruited a cohort of willing subjects from among the members of the Association of Foragers and, with the help of food writer Dan Saladino, enlisted the support of Zoe, who analysed their blood and gut biomes.
By the end of the three-month trial, the group’s Zoe Microbiome score – which measures changes in good and bad bacteria, and overall richness and diversity – had improved by 13%, while the subjects classified as obese had lost an average of 16% of their body weight. Cholesterol and inflammation scores improved dramatically, too.
“Once you pass the first two weeks, you don’t miss anything,” says Wilde. “You say you’re going to miss coffee and chocolate and citrus, but you don’t. You feel alert, vibrant, energised, good.” And, she says, following the diet shouldn’t take over your life. A time and motion study revealed that, on average, she only spent 90 minutes a day foraging, processing, or cooking food. On busy days, her five-minute meal was sea spaghetti with rosehip passata. “That’s my Pot Noodle,” she says.
But what, I ask, if everybody started doing it? Wouldn’t the countryside be stripped bare? “If everybody did it,” says Wilde, “there would be vast armies of people who cared passionately about the environment, who would be spreading seeds and vigilantly looking after the land that we live on. In my experience, foragers are the environmental stewards.”
Back home, I make dinner for my children, who are going through their beige phase. Macaroni cheese, mashed potatoes, Caprese salad, no tomato, no basil. For myself, I simmer the squirrel bones with more wild sorrel. The smell is evil and soon I have the kitchen to myself.
Historically, we tend to resort to foraged food in times of extreme need. According to a new analysis of the UK’s food supply, published in the journal Sustainability, those times are coming again soon. Civil unrest due to shortages of common sources of carbohydrates – wheat, pasta, bread and cereal – is, the report suggests, likely to hit in the next decade. If so, foraging might become more necessity than choice. When our systems fail, we look to the earth to mother us.
The broth is ready. Dark and deeply fragrant, the flavour is so intense I can only manage a single spoon. But I’m not hungry anyway. I nibble a few rosehips and brew a cup of wild mugwort tea. Mugwort is known as the dreaming herb. It is said to induce lucid dreams or, so others believe, visions of the future. I drink the bitter brew and wait for the revelation to come. Scattered across the table are more acorns. Tomorrow, I decide, I’ll plant them. A few oak trees can go a long way.
Featherhood by Charlie Gilmour is published by Orion. Buy it for £8.69 at guardianbookshop.com
