A mum-of-three who foraged food from the hedgerows to help make ends meet when she was a hard-up student and a struggling first-time parent has told how she now creates gourmet meals for free. Iona Fraser, 40, used the foraging skills she learned as a child from her dad to bulk out her sparse meals when she was living on benefits and then when she became a single mum to her son at 19.
Now a professional foraging instructor and living in the village of Scaynes Hill, West Sussex, with her dairy worker husband, Josh Hubrick, 30, and her two youngest sons, Alexei, seven, and Ever, three, her ability to pick her own food from nature means she can conjure up mushroom pate or wild rose Turkish Delight without paying for the ingredients. Recalling how foraging helped jazz up her meals when money was tightest in her life as a student, she said: “After I’d paid the bills, I had £7 left a week for food, so I got used to surviving on very little.
“I then started to realise I could supplement the very basic things that I was buying for very little money by picking things that were much more exciting.” Still spending up to eight hours a day foraging, Iona believes that learning what to pick could be a helpful tool for other people facing the cost of living crisis – as long as they have enough spare time to do it.
