‘I slow-cooked the fox overnight’: my day living on foraged food

‘The first lesson is that wild food takes time. The second is, don’t expect it to look pretty’: Charlie Gilmour in the woods. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Observer

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.