Catch 22

Catch 22 (wild food year week 9)

Nature's abundant treasures, the heart's treasures as well as the infinite wealth of time - both everywhere and nowhere, throw up a reality at once both as rich in meaning and significance as in the solidified phantoms of an anxious mind.
Breakfast, lunch, dinner: What will they be? Where will they be found? How long will it take - today, tomorrow, the next day, next week, next month? Relentless! Relentless! Relentless!

Catch 22: I have no money. Foraging takes a long time. I need somewhere to live: I can't afford the rent and am in debt, therefore I have had to put on extra foraging courses and write more magazine articles in order to pay the rent. Having put on more foraging courses to pay the rent I now have no time to forage. Not putting on more courses and writing more articles would, of course, free up plenty of time for foraging but, then, no money and, hence, nowhere to live. Catch 22. The project is over.

A Buddhist parable.
Sometime long ago there was, there still is and, sometime in the future, there will still be, a poor and very troubled man. He had grown so deeply and inescapably in debt that in sheer mad frustration, exasperation and desperation he ran away to hide in the wilderness. One day while wandering there in search of food he came upon a large chest that had been filled with rare, beautiful and exquisite treasures. Whoever had placed the treasure inside the chest had also attached a large and brightly polished mirror to the inside of the lid. When the poor man saw the chest he was overjoyed. Without hesitation and with great excitement he immediately set about opening the chest, but as he lifted the lid and pushed it to rest upright on its rusty hinges he saw his own face and become agitated and extremely frightened. He nervously wrung his hands together and said to the face before him, "I thought the chest was empty and did not belong to anyone. I didn't know that you were inside. Please, sir, I beg of you, don't be angry with me. I shall leave you in peace with your amazing treasures and be immediately on my way." He then dropped the mirrored lid and with even greater desperation than before, fled further and deeper into the impenetrable wilderness.........

The Mirror in the Treasure Chest, adapted from the Bayu jing - the Chinese Buddhist One Hundred Parable Sutra

A year eating 100% wild and foraged food: week 7

Raining Flesh and Blood

Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness, - to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us deriving health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the hallow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially at night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organisations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp' - tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood!

- extract from Walden; or, Life in The Woods by Henry David Thoreau (1854).

No tortoises or toads on the menu as of late; and yet, after not seeing any serviceable roadkill for months - since 25th Dec 08 to be precise, last week I broke my vegan wild food challenge - a month that became 40 days, in a veritable torrent and macabre freshet of roadside flesh and blood.

The Wild Recipes of Young Werther

The Wild Recipes of Young Werther
(Eating nothing but wild and foraged food diary, weeks 4-5 ish, 19th July - 3rd August)

Nick Cave's favourite seeds: Yew Taxus baccata

Recipes for success, for disaster, for life and death. What will be the recipe of the day today, tomorrow, next week?

Reflecting on my current situation, as well as on other peoples situations, I often wonder what comes as given and what is created or, rather, what is the scope for manoeuvre, the scope for creating outcomes different from those that existing conditions, perhaps conceived as limitations, would seem to render inevitable? There are many ingredients contributing to the arising of this present moment and the way it is experienced: Individual psychology, level of emotional and spiritual maturity, physical and mental health, diet, immediate surroundings - including both its sentient and non-sentient aspects, underlying geology, climate, plus an almost infinite number of other contributing factors. How do they interact this instant and over time? Right now, is one factor the defining contributor to the current situation in which I find myself? For the past 33 days I've eaten nothing but wild vegan fare. How do I feel? Different, yes; good, no. For the past 16 months I've felt the joys but mostly pains and sorrows of unrequited love. How do I feel? Perturbed and contracted as opposed to feeling expansive and joyous, miserable, stuck in an emotional quagmire, wanting to move on but spell bound, drugged and weak? In July 2007 I carried out a trial run for this year living entirely on foraged wild food. That month was also vegan. Both vegan and, more to the point, a great success. After that month alone the effect on my mental state was profound. Not deep, just profound. 'Deep' would imply long-lasting effects of which, unfortunately, there were few. The profundity resided in the degree of change, the qualitative change to vibrant mental clarity, emotional stability and general joy and positivity. In part I think I gained some insight as to why such changes were so short-lived. The reasons involve long-standing habits of mind and behaviour. Bad habits indeed; habits so ingrained to the very core of my being that they lurk unseen, colouring every thought, action, dream and desire with the blackest shade of personal bondage. Can they be undone and if so does the answer lie in extreme behaviour; after all, eating nothing but wild foraged food for an entire year is certainly somewhat extreme? Indeed, whilst believing that extreme situations require extreme solutions, I could, nonetheless, simply be believing this according to the dictates of underlying and dysfunctional patterns. In that case, I live merely to dig a deeper and darker hole from which there is truly no escape. Conundrums! Sisyphus here we come.

This fascination with uncovering the most significant contributing factors to the experience of the present moment lies, in part, due to what I consider to be the influence of two factors that, on the face of it, are both extreme and both happening right now: 100 % vegan wild food diet with its unique challenges, stresses and strains, and love in its cruelly unrequited aspect, again with its own unique sorrows , stresses and strains. Everyday now I burst into tears at random moments and am unable to function effectively if at all - in spite of taking even further extreme measures, about which I'll probably write in a later blog. Today it was Alexander Pope's poetic Essay on Man that set the tears flowing, touching as it does on themes that have always struck me deeply.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast,
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such
Whether he thinks too little or too much:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

Between heaven and earth we reside in the absurdity of being, so wonderfully described here, yet also given astute philosophical expression by Thomas Nagel in one of my favourite books - that offers very little in the way of answers: The View from Nowhere. And yet one (absurd) escape from the absurd 'between' is to live at the extremes ? Today's recipe then is an extreme one taken, perhaps, from an imaginary cook book entitled Last Supper Recipes of the Sorrowful Young Werther: Yew Berry Tart.

If you know anything about the toxicology of yew, you might consider this recipe as being the plant-based wild food foragers version of the notorious Japanese Fugu or blow fish dish. Hence, careful preparation is everything.

Makes two individual tarts

Ingredients
For the pastry:
5 oz (150g) arum flour
1 1/2 oz (50g) sweet chestnut flour
1 1/2 oz (50g) wild oat flour
1 1/2 oz (50g) mixed wild grass seed flour
3 ½ oz (100g) walnut oil or badger fat (or a mixture)
1 tbsp 3x concentrated yew berry juice
1 tbsp of garden-wall-overhang verjuice or stag's horn sumac extract
a little water if necessary

For the crème Patisserie:
1pt (570ml) cherry plum kernel milk
3 pt (1.8 L) water
1 large handful dried sun blanched carragheen seaweed
3 ½ oz (100g) 5 x concentrated wild pear juice
2 oz (60g) arum flour
For the fruit topping
10 ½ oz (300g) fully ripened yew berries
5 sweet wild apples
a cup of wild apple juice
a heaped teaspoon of hedgerow jam and a tablespoon of water to make a glaze

Method

Pastry:
Thoroughly sift the flour into a bowl. Add in the fat/oil and work it all in with your fingertips until you are left with a crumb-like consistency. Make a well in the centre and pour in the sumac/verjuice and yew berry syrup. Gradually mix with the flour to form a smooth dough – but don’t over work it. Add the some chilled spring water if necessary. Roll into a ball, wrap in cling film or put in a plastic bag and cool in the fridge for a couple of hours.

Crème patisserie:
Boil the seaweed in the water for 30 minutes, allow to cool slightly then stain through muslin. Simmer gently until you are left with about1/2 pt. Set aside to cool. Grind 2 large handfuls of prewashed and dried cherry plum stones. Transfer to a bowl with 2 pt hot water. Stir for a minute and allow to stand for 15 minutes. Strain off the liquid and boil down to reduce by half, mix in the pair juice concentrate then leave to cool. Once cooled whisk together with the seaweed extract and chill.

Take the pastry and form into two separate balls. Roll each one out in turn by first slightly squashing down on a lightly arum floured work surface. Roll out until it’s about 2 mil thick and large enough to line a 4”/10cm greased flan case; I use the ones with detachable bottoms – much easier to remove when cooked. It’s also just under an inch (2.5cm) deep. Line each case leaving about a 1/2cm overlap. Then line the other case. Press the index finger and thumb of one hand together. Squash the overlap into this with the index finger of the other hand, working around the top of the tarts to create a regular pattern. Allow the bases to rest for an hour in the fridge or even freezer. Then, prick the bases several times with a fork. Bake for 15 minutes at 180 deg.C until they are just very slightly coloured. In the meantime, juice 3 sweet wild apples. Peel and core another two and cut lengthways into thin slices. Stew these in the apple juice for a couple of minutes. Then remove from the juice, set aside and allow to cool. Rewhisk the chilled crème patisserie and spoon into the tart bases, leveling it out to leave enough room for the fruit.

Fruit topping:
Remove the seed from each yew berry using a pair of tweezers without damaging it in any way. Working in from the outside place individual berries on top of the crème patisserie forming ever smaller concentric circles of berries. Keep doing this until you are left with a 1 ½ “ (4cm) circle of exposed crème patisserie in the centre. Peel and core the apples and cut thin slices approx 2 mm thick. Boil these in apple juice for 15 seconds, remove from juice and set aside . Once cooled arrange the apple slices in an over lapping and circular fan pattern. Heat the jam with the juice in a small saucepan reducing it to thicken. Use this to glaze the top of each tart using a pastry brush or carefully dripping on with a spoon.

Tips and WARNING

It is easiest to collect yew berries by laying a sheet or blanket under a fruit laden tree and then giving the branches a good shake. ALL parts of the yew are extremely poisonous EXCEPT the flesh of the berry - so they say. This, then, includes the seed, which must be very carefully removed. Also, when making the yew berry syrup, remove the seeds this way first rather than crushing the whole fruit first. This tart also works very well with bilberries and wild strawberries in particular, but also with many other fruit.

Although this recipe is both somewhat extreme and absurd it does serve to illustrate some important points. Firstly, trying to mimic more conventional dishes using entirely wild ingredients is extremely challenging, time consuming and prone to failure. Perhaps more importantly, the more determined one is to utilize the full range of food plants potentially available, the greater the chance of poisoning. This point is quite obvious; in the case of yew berries and other such foods (cherry plum kernels) though the problem lies in their toxicologically ambiguous status.

.I have never seen conclusive scientific proof that the flesh of the fruit is 100% safe to eat in quantity. Information in the literature is often contradictory and confusing on this specific point - and often poorly referenced. The toxic substance taxine found in the leaves bark and seeds, but reportedly absent from the red flesh of the fruit (aril) may, for all I know, still be present in trace amounts in the fruit. If that is the case then making concentrated yew syrup would be problematic as would consuming a large quantity of fruit. I like to dry them to concentrate the sweetness so would dearly love clarification on this point. About 10 years ago after making my first batch of yew berry syrup I contacted Kew gardens in London to get clarification on this issue. After a month with no response - and somewhat frustrated, I imagined what response I'd get if I wrote again telling a rather twisted porker. Would it elicit immediate clarification? Describing myself as a cook working at an old people’s home, I'd mentioned that it was a lady there called Grace's 100th birthday. The staff and residents, I'd explain, knew of my home wine making and were keen for me to bring some in to celebrate the occasion. Only having a few bottles of elderberry wine and yew berry wine, I'd explain that I was planning to take in both, although I wanted to know for absolute certainly if the yew wine was safe to consume. Of course, I didn't do this! Nevertheless, I have just written to the relevant department so will hopefully have an answer within not too long a time?

Wild food wise, what else have I been up to apart from picking lots of fairy ring mushrooms?

Of course, the main thing has been trying to eat 3 wild food vegan meals a day. It's difficult. The challenges are made clear by nutritionist Simone Food (no joke, real name) who has been helping me recently. Read her comments and analysis here.

A typical dinner at the moment might be something like the following.

Roasted burdock root, apple and chestnut stuffing, fairy ring mushrooms, sea beet and a mixed seed/grain roti. The roti consists of chestnut and wild oat flour, mixed grass seed flour, ground walnuts, and the seeds of the following plants: love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena), sea sandwort (Honckenya peploides) and sharp rush (Juncus acutus).

Inspecting hard rush and wild asparagus after jogging 5 miles - hence the tracksuit bottoms

Hard rush seeds (tiny seeds within the individual small seed pods shown here) - edibility unknown.

Sea sandwort with seeds

Love-in-a-mist seed pods and seeds

Apart from this I've set myself a new goal: to make 150 fruit leather rolls by 1st November. There is a very good reason for this that I will explain later. So far I've made 12.

Fruit leather rolls

Cherry plum fruit leather composition No.1
(click on picture for surface of Mars effect)

Finally, and importantly, I've been admiring the local wild life. The deductive method can be most satisfying when the conclusion deriving from fairly basic knowledge proves to be correct.

What is this beautiful caterpillar, I thought? It has a 'tail' so must belong to the hawk moth family? It's feeding on some sort of spurge. We're by the sea so perhaps it's sea spurge. Perhaps then this hawk moth caterpillar feeding on spurge is a spurge hawk moth larvae (Hyles euphorbiae)? All correct I think! OK, I didn't deduce the Latin!

Eating 100% foraged food for a year. Week 2-3: July 6-18th

Mermaids and Munchies

It's been a really difficult few weeks, what with the mermaids AND the munchies. I feel hungry quite a lot of the time especially when I cycle - which is most days. Well, it's day 18 of this year-long attempt to eat just foraged food and so far I've only felt like packing it in 18 times. That's quite good/bad - delete as appropriate. The truth is I'm not sure. Certainly it represents a heavy dose of realism that seems to inform my thought of late - friends call it negativity, but what do they know, they're not realists. Even if it was bad it would still be good or rather irrelevant because I'm taking this a day at a time. After 24 hours the day is forgotten. Lucky then that my memory is like a goldfish. I forage around all day in my bowl, go to sleep and voila, clean slate, what a fascinating goldfish bowl - never been here before.

I survived my first social occasion with flying colours - at least I think so. This was a barbecue last week. I knew that it would be possible to knock up a half descent salad by rooting about the large garden - actually, as it turns out, probably easier to do in deepest darkest February than at the height of summer - but given that it was a BBQ I didn't want to be left out with nothing to stick on the grill. I was delighted then to find a perfectly dried cluster of Pale Oyster mushrooms on a beech log. OK, perhaps fresh would have been a little better, nevertheless sometimes you can come across large fresh specimens only to discover that they're full of maggots. So, climatic elements had conspired to perfectly preserve this particular young specimen at its absolute best. Only 20 minutes of soaking in spring water was needed to reveal its full potential. What had seemed like a small quantity soon filled the bowl. BBQed till crisp on the outside but hot and succulent within, it was delicious. This was served with a salad the notes on which can be seen in the picture below. I lost the pad so will have to zoom in to see what was in it. (note: clicking on all these pictures makes them huge - that's how I could read it).

It consisted of ground elder, perennial wall rocket, sea purslane, smooth sow thistle, prickly sow thistle, crushed nettle tops, nasturtium leaf and flower, wild rose petals, immature crow garlic seeds, brine pickled cherry plums, walnuts, garlic mustard and Duke of Argyle's tea plant (goji leaf). This was served with a not entirely successful dressing - because the seaweed wasn't processed properly giving rise to off flavours, made with spring water, carragheen seaweed, wild garlic bulbs, sea water, dwarf quince juice and dittander flowers.

A typical day/meal's forage produces the following sort of medley right now: things to eat and a few items for experimentation. On a daily basis I'm pretty much just copying the menu of my trial run for this two years ago - with a few improvements.

As a thunderstorm broke outside, rather than stay in snug and warm, a friend and I decided to dash out and become imbued with a spark of that primal energy. Did that happen? Certainly it provided the opportunity to find my first Boletus mushroom of the year, an Oak Bolete (Boletus appendiculatus). True it looks somewhat decrepit but was nonetheless quite edible.
Served with a rustic acorn and wild garlic leaf curd pasta it was quite tasty - especially with a little fat hen and a few dried morels thrown in.


Breakfast itself has improved as well courtesy of the Bristol community allotments and council flowerbeds that I liberated a few excess dandelion roots from in the spring. Actually, 3 hours of digging allowed me to gather enough roots for three weeks worth of dandelion root coffee - two teaspoons per mug. At the time I air dried the roots, only getting around to roasting and grinding them the other day: 20 minutes at 220 degrees Celsius, turning over once.

At the same time I took the opportunity to try something new - roasting some of my dried breakfast chestnuts. Yet another excellent wild coffee was discovered. Of course, chestnut coffee is a very traditional wild roast but, in the past at least, I've considered that it's a bit of a waste of good, plump, sweet and nourishing chestnuts.


As for the cherry wine I started two weeks ago, I can only describe it as rampaging - the yeast that is. Of course, this is most likely down to the secret ingredient. I've decanted the infant wine once already - cooking the excess yeast with salt and wild greens. "That doesn't sound very nice", you say. You're right! After decanting I added 1 litre of genuinely wild cherries to provide additional sugar and nutrients for the yeast, but also to balance the acidity (the previous cherries supplying the wine were foraged from a hedgerow but were a cultivated variety nonetheless). On the next decanting I'll boil up a few oak leaves with some cherry juice to round the flavours off with some additional tannin.

There are several reasons for making wine. In the first place it's a good source of calories, in the second place it will allow me to drink occasionally when going out. Also, after a touch of unmentionable tweaking, I will be able to use the alcohol as a preservative for all sorts of things - fruits, roots, fungi etc. That's just a few of the positive reasons for producing some alcohol, sorry, wine. The negative and potentially dangerous side of the equation comes in its calculated use as a sedative to lesson the pain of ambiguously unrequited love. Falling head over heels, heels over head, falling, falling, falling...... in love with a mermaid is both tragic and beautiful, dangerous but wicked magic.

Above and below: Genuinely wild cherries (Prunus avium)

Genuine wild love (Amo insania)

Until my dream is realized then I must bathe alone or with watercress and pretend I'm having a good time. No need to waste good water after all.

A bath tub full of watercress combined with 15 burdock roots, some red goosefoot, oak-leaved goosefoot, spear-leaved orache, fat hen, goji leaf, a kilo of hogweed flower buds, wild garlic bulbs, dittander, spring water and sea salt makes quite a good soup - especially when served with wild seed bread. Ah, wild seed bread and, as I expected to arrive at the beginning of this journey, the first of many toxicological conundrums. Below is a picture of sea buckthorn seed collected last year. The berry is incredibly nutritious and the seed a valuable source of oil and other vitamins, minerals, amino acids etc. This was what was left over after one particular method of juice extraction. Seeds, bits of twig and very fine sand.

The problem is two-fold. First, how can one separate - on a small scale, i.e at home - the seed from the thin outer sheath to reveal the seed. Below you can see the black seeds after removing the outer sheath - one seed still enclosed within.


The second issue concerns the possible toxicity of the black seed casing itself. Information is hard to come by. Basically it's impossible to efficiently separate the two so they must be ground up together. Last week I ate 200g.

Of course, my wild bread didn't consist only of sea buckthorn seeds but, additionally, comprised escaped rye grains (infected), ribwort plantain seeds, tall fescue grass seeds and false oat grass seed (infected) - although not absolutely sure on the latter's identification. Grass seeds are something I've always steered clear of due to the risk of ergot poisoning.

False Oat-grass (Arrhenatherum elatius) showing both seeds and ergot formations.

This year seems to be especially bad. Of course the ergot can be separated from the grain with relative ease during winnowing and sieving, Nevertheless it means that grasses with tough husks can't be rubbed to aid there removal before all the ergot is manually picked out. Also the question remains as to whether the washed grain is impregnated with the Claviceps fungal mycelium and, if so, is that toxic also? So far I've eaten about 500g grams or ergot infected wild grass seed (after separating the obvious Claviceps fruiting bodies and washing well). There have been no symptoms of poisoning.

Another area of concern is the fungi. Of course, many are both edible and distinctive such as the beautiful Dryad's Saddle (Polyporus squamosus). The one I found this week was interesting for it's ability to correct a mistaken belief on my part. No, it wasn't that 'one shouldn't eat ergot infected wild grass seeds' but, rather, that the fungus can fruit generously from the same tree more than once in the same year.


On the first occasion back in late March I cursed after coming across the mushroom when it was huge and maggot infested. There hadn't even been a small piece I could wrestle from the squirming mass for the pot. Basically I 'd thought, 'Oh well, there's always next year'. But then a few days ago there it was again. Even more splendid and magnificent than the first time. I needed a bigger basket!


I served this (cooked) with steamed sea beet and roasted burdock root. As a treat I followed this superb meal with wild grass, sedge and various-other-things seed bread with added blackberries and hot birch sap syrup! Ummmm, my first real treat. Comfort food indeed!


These blackberries, from my first real harvest of the year, set me thinking: Why don't we eat unripe blackberries? Is it because, as my mother informed me the other day, I'd most likely get a case of the .....actually, I can't remember what she called it now.....but some strange word that meant stomach ache. Anyway, that didn't put me off an experiment: unripe green and unripe pinkish blackberries treated in different ways. Below you can see them in brine. Later I'll put them in vinegar or oil - if I can get it. The second experiment involves candying them. This I've also begun. Unfortunately because I've used conventional sugar I won't be able to try them - unless I come off this 100% foraged diet.


Another experiment. The immature seeds of Tilia species (Lime trees). Richard Mabey in his classic food for free mentions that during the 19th Century a French chemist used them to created a chocolate substitute, "by grinding up a mixture of lime flowers with lime fruits, the spherical capsules that follow in July and August." Mabey goes on to say that, in fact, "the paste tastes nothing like chocolate but is an intriguing confection for all that." On the basis of this I experimented a few years ago. Nothing like chocolate indeed. Eventually I turned the paste into lime 'chocolate' biscuits which, actually, tasted very good. Nevertheless, this chocolate theme needs more exploration.........


Breakfast on a trip to London.

The stress I feel at present is so great that I really think I might have a nervous breakdown. My worries are all, ultimately, financial. I can't afford to pay the rent or do anything at all other than paint flowers with fungal spores, reedmace pollen and cherry plum tree resin and hope the problem will magically go away. It won't. That is why I feel this project is doomed to failure from the outset. No funding, not enough income to pay the rent, no time to put on extra foraging courses or write more magazine articles because foraging requires enormous commitments of time and energy.
I feel very sad but, of course, this is just the welcome of what most people call 'the real world'.

The year-long wild food adventure begins!

1st-5th July
Bee The Change

I'll define the terms of this wild food project in a later blog. I'm too busy right now as I need to start thinking about dinner - what will it be, where will it be found, how long will it take to process the particular ingredients that may or may not be found? Is there a magical tree where I can harvest more time?

I woke on the first day of this month, the first day of my year-long endeavor feeling utterly famished at the daunting prospect of the year to come whilst gasping for a coffee - my main source of sustenance of late. My recent diet, for the past 6 month at least has, to put it bluntly, been utter crap. But love is an illness and I've suffered deeply. In short, my preparation for this challenge has been a disaster - at least emotionally and mentally. But I don't really want to say too much about that.
No coffee but, fortunately, a good supply of that headache banishing miracle plant feverfew. Caffeine withdrawal headaches can be as bad as the acutest migraine for which feverfew is renowned as an effective herbal treatment. Still, no caffeine jolt to shock me awake.......

Feverfew Tanacetum parthenium

...........but then I began blending up some sweet chestnuts from my stores to make some chestnut porridge. Fortunately or unfortunately -I'm really not sure which, because the blender was standing in a puddle of water and the usual toxic mess that invariably accompanies my cooking, after shaking it a bit I screamed and dropped it. Why? Because I received a massive electric shock! Who needs coffee!!

This put me in a good mood, hence morning playtime with the porridge's accompanying stewed cherry plums.

Actually, I discovered something very interesting about the pan scrapings that make up the eyes here. But that's another story with some exciting culinary possibilities.

No coffee but shocked into life nonetheless my mind turned to thoughts of my favourite tea: lime blossom tea or, strictly speaking - for the pedantic, tisane. I have moved to Boughton in Kent for this project and have only been here a few months. You can imagine my delight then at discovering that lime trees line the playing field just a short walk from my front door.

Tilia europaea

I picked this for hours as the blossom season is short - usually only a week or two at the end of June and begining of July. Up north, of course, it will be later. Here's the freshly gathered blossom lying on my table prior to drying. Spreading it out this way for allows the hundreds of tiny black beetles to fly off and congregate around the window to await release.

Then came something unexpected. Bees love to forage for lime blossom with its fragrant pollen as do I but the general buzz from the tree was that from large bumble bees. It became louder and disconcertingly louder but was not the bumble bees........ A huge humming, buzzing, swarming amorphous cloud had descended upon the playing field. After about an hour the swarm headed, surprisingly, not for a lime tree but for a lone sycamore. There it settled into a heaving noisy mass of bees.


I was in for an educational treat because cometh the hour cometh the man. Bee man!


......with his tools.

And he sets to work.


First he tries to bring the swam within reach by pulling down the branch. He attaches a rope to the branch to aid the process. But who will hold the other end? Finding his small audience too scared to come any closer, lateral thinking was required.


A wheelie bin from the adjacent row of council houses should do the trick although, having just been emptied perhaps that won't be heavy enough?


It isn't but there are plenty where that one came from. So he adds another to increase the weight. Who would have thought a humble bin could cause such a buzz with its amazing pulling power? But then, of course, these are no longer bins, rather they have become essential tools in the hive capturers trade.



With the swarm in reach from the top of his ladder there's no need to cut down the branch, just carefully but with vigorous intent, he shakes the congealed swarm into a temporary box of a hive........


.....brings it down and places it on a ready laid out sheet.


The open side of the box faces the ground, one side being wedged up to allow the rest of the swarm to migrate down to join the rest of the bee colony.

Job done? Bee man isn't so sure as he looks back up amongst the sycamore branches.

It seems that half the colony is still up there, perhaps including the all important queen bee?

Time to carefully cut away the branch after all.


Now most of the colony is contained the successful results of all this activity can bee displayed.


The all important wedge.

It takes several hours for most of the bees to join their boxed brothers and sisters - the perfect opportunity to sit, chat and learn from the bee man himself. Then it's time to spray the wings of the last few stragglers. That adversely effects their ability to fly so rather than buzz about they just give in and head for the box. Time to wrap things up.....


......literally.


It's a wrap!

Bee man makes off with his haul after a successful day.

The temporary hive goes in the boot of the car for a short ride. I'm kindly allowed to go back to the house to follow the story.

First, the bees are left as they are overnight before being transferred to a small temporary hive.

Some days later they are placed in a bigger hive with more racks.

Far too soon to see the next stage but I was curious as to how the honey is separated from the honeycomb. One whole side of the waxy structure is carefully cut away with a sharp knife to expose the honey in the honey cells. Then, the racks are placed one or several at a time in the manual spinning contraption shown below. The honey spins out and is left at the bottom of the bucket for collection. Fascinating.

Back to the foraging. I gave the above a lot of attention because many people have asked me if, during my year eating solely wild and foraged food, I'd be eating honey? My answer has always been that if I knew how to capture a wild swarm and had somebody to instruct me in the art of bee keeping then perhaps I would. Nevertheless, I have always added, not only have I never seen a wild swarm, even if I were so lucky I would not know what to do. Well......

Not being vegan I need not address the issue of honey consumption that divides some of them. Is it or isn't it a vegan product? I mention veganism simple because for the first month of this wild year my diet will in fact be 100% vegan. To that end I will not be ravenously gorging on pots of honey a la John Lewis-Stemple (The Wild Life - A Year of Living on Wild Food) nor, again a la Lewis-Stemple, will I be roaming the land with a shot gun in an orgy of hunting and butchering. For me the predominant interest is in the utilization of plants in creative ways that can bring forth their full culinary versatility and varied sustenance.

Over the past few days I've made a couple of different soups - 15 portions of each. The first one is rose hip soup. These where rehydrated from my dried stores. I boiled 15 kg (their fresh weight).

Once cool enough to handle the cooked pulp was pushed through a sieve to leave the seeds.


The resulting liquid was quite thick as, apart from the pulped flesh of the hips, it still contained all the little hairs that can act as an irritant to the skin and throat if consumed.

Nevertheless, for the first time I decided not to further strain this as to do so in order to remove the hairs would also remove the lovely pulp. Instead I added 2 kg of wave exposed seabeet roots.

Below the root can be seen in cross-section.

These were boiled in spring water for 30 minutes. And mixed with 300g of cooked and blended wild garlic bulbs.


A large handful of Herne Bay sea salt was added. To be mixed in when serving I prepared some dittander flower seasoning.

First the flowers where stripped off the stem.

Then they where air-dried for two days on a windowsill.

Once fully dried they where ground to a powder. Half a teaspoon is quite sufficient per bowl of soup. This pungent spice is quite wasabi-like in flavour.

Last year I made spicy rose hip and beetroot soup - now one of my favourites.

The one I've just made is the nearest equivalent I could come up with but using only wild sourced ingredients. Indeed, much of what I'll be doing will involve trying to adapt more conventional recipes to 100% wild/foraged versions.

Then came my first disaster: Seaweed soup.

Seaweed soup in itself is fine but a combination of dulse, laver, kelp, carragheen and serrated wrack seaweeds proved impossible for my liquidizer to cope with. Consequently, after cooking the above seaweeds, I was forced to chuck them on the compost heap and start again. At least I did manage to squeeze out all the liquid after cooking for a few hours in spring water. This became the stock base for my second attempt. On that ocassion I gathered about one kilo of each seaweed, sun-dried them until crisp before grinding them to a powder. This I mixed with a combination of spring and sea water and cooked together with 1.5 kg of burdock root.

That's 30 portions of soup put aside. Perhaps I'll do another to keep things varied this month - nettle, fat hen and watercress maybe. For each soup though I need to find some sort of nourishing and sustaining potato substitute. Not that easy. To that end I began collecting and processing reedmace rhizomes this week. Collecting them is a messy business as they need to be prized from the most noxious smelling pond or ditch mud. A good wash was in order of both the rhizomes and myself - in the bath of course, just not at the same time.


Once scrubbed clean the starchy core needs to be extracted. Below you can see a cross-section of the rhizome showing the starchy but, nevertheless, fibrous core.

It took me about an hour to remove these from their outer casing.



The stringy cores were then pulled apart and dried in the sun.

Then ground and sieved....
...to give reedmace rhizome flour.

Actually, for quantity of starchy material, the height of summer is the worst time to do this. The winter is best when the starch content is higher. This flour will not be going in my watercress soup. For that, once the core has been extracted, it will be boiled and mashed in spring water then strained to leave the fibres behind. These can be discarded (actually, I've a better plan) whilst the vegetables can then be cooked in the starchy liquid. I'll do that next week. This week must be, and has been, all about gorgeous ripe cherries and their daily harvest.

The cherries shown above and below are a cultivated variety that just happen to be in the hedgerow along a footpath. Genuine wild cherries are just about ripe but I'm leaving them for a week to sweeten up.






After gathering about 20kg of mixed variety cherries from about 5 different trees I went to wash them in spring water. Not, of course, because I plan to wash everything in such a wonderful way but, rather, simply because I needed to get a few gallons of the vibrant stuff.

Viva my local spring!!!

With such a good haul of cherries there lay many possibilities, the first being simply to boil some, extract the juice and bottle it.

Without overloading the pan and letting it all boil over - honestly.



Two bottles for this month and three for my winter store cupboard.


Much more fun - unbelievably intense fun, lay in the making of my wild year's first wine, in the traditional style. First crush the cherries.....



....then bottle in a suitable sterilized container. I found three of these put out with somebody's rubbish in Brixton a few years ago. They have proved to be invaluable. Well worth the mutterings and cursing I received when trying to squeeze onto an already packed tube train with them.

But what about yeast? Should I try for a spontaneous wild fermentation or help the process on its way somehow? I think the latter will produce just marginally less unpredictable results. A few years ago I made a completely wild bullace plum wine that fermented out really well. I used the skins, which had a really nice looking yeast bloom on them, to start an initial culture. Unfortunately they aren't available right now so I had to look elsewhere. The following picture shows the fruit of what I think - but am not absolutely sure - is Berberis darwinii. Clearly though the skins reveal a promising looking bloom.


I put these together in some cherry juice sweetened boiled and cooled spring water. This was then left in a warm place for three days. As you can see the yeast had become fairly active.

Time to add to the juice. (Below; only two days after adding the starter culture fermentation appears to be going well). Fingers crossed. Later I'll introduce a little tannin and greater acidity by way of some staghorn sumac berry extract.

Some of the other cherries were boiled and squashed through a sieve to make fruit leather. This is the first time I've done this in my recently purchased food dehydrator.


The results were excellent although rather too sweet. Genuine wild cherries are much better for this as the sweetness is counter balanced a delicious acidic twang. But, hey, sugar rush here we come!
I also stoned and dried some of the fresh cherries and put them to dry with the fruit leather. Stoning these took 4 hours!

Mind you, the results are excellent

Now I have my first ingredient for my 100% wild foraged Christmas pudding. "Pucker", "happy days", as a well known chef would probably say!

The Pearl of Great Price

It's been a strange week, or should I say weak? This strange week has a recipe, the ingredients are purely verbal and can be found in condensed form amongst the following quotes - beware though, it's a very potent and potentially dangerous recipe:

"Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. 'Co-incidence' means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time..." Milan Kundera

"In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents." William Burroughs."

"People who ingest the wild, whether plants or landscapes, do something civilized people never do, they take inside themselves the wildness of the world; they eat the Wild Redeemer. In that moment something unique happens, some invisible thing enters inside them. And when that happens everything changes. They become aware that there are intelligences in this world far older than the human and that the human and the older intelligences of the world are intended to make contact" Stephen Harrod Buhner

Within an eight-day period I found beauty, pain and death. It started with a beautiful pearl,

(encased within the hidden confines of a Herne Bay oyster)

a visit to the Dalai Lama in Nottingham, whilst often immobilized and utterly crippled by pain,

and pulling a dead man from the river Stour - an event that has left me feeling unexpectedly traumatised.
Given that all these events occurred within an eight-day period it offers, I suppose, a fairly condensed narrative history, a merely curious story perhaps, but certainly a history bound by fortuities and magic that unnerves me, even scares me or - to reflect that sense of uneasiness in another way, in my most neurotic of perennial questions - a question become mantra: does it mean anything at all; does it mean nothing; is the spontaneity of complete chaos and randomness the architect of such happenings or magic the true creator? Where does truth and meaning lie - in the realms of objectivity or in the dynamics of mutual co-creation beyond the bounds or divisions of subjective/objective?
Buhner speaks of the Wild Redeemer - capitalizing Nature as the supreme spirit in contrast yet not necessarily opposed to Christ - Christ the pearl, Christ as the traditional Redeemer - as the one to save us all from the state of hopeless sin and its consequences:
"....the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it."
The implied analogy was that the Kingdom of Heaven was of such worth that his disciples should gladly be willing to give up their wealth and comfort to obtain it. Christians typically take the parable to mean that heavenly riches are far greater than the full sum of all worldly riches. Though the idea is not present in the text, some also teach that Jesus is the pearl that some men found, and sold all for, and became his disciples, hoping for an eternal kingdom." Wikipedia
Today I know two things: my health is so bad and I'm in such diabolical pain that, although not being gladly willing to give up wealth and comfort, it has been forced upon me. In the last few days I've lost several thousand pounds (and am set to loose more) due to my physical inability to run foraging courses and events that I have been forced to cancel. Things are so bad that I can no longer afford to pay rent on the house where I was supposed to be living (but never actually had time to move into) and have, today, been forced to move out off. The vicious cycle or, perhaps more aptly, the downward spiral, has meant that being physically unable to gather wild food I am becoming weaker, becoming weaker I am less and less able to feed myself. Weakness compounds weakness, pain compounds pain and restful healing has become a mere cherished dream. All the Wild Redeemer can do for me now is, not save me from a state of sinfulness and its consequences but, rather, save me from a state of stubborn stupidity and its particular dire straits. First let me explain more prosaically about pain, pearls and death.
PAIN
About seven weeks ago a friend (plus something more) asked me to help her move from Canterbury to Bristol. She hired a van that I was to drive; we loaded it up with the accumulated stuff of life and set off, driving for 4 1/2 hours without a significant break. That night my back muscles - I expect the Longissimus muscles running down either side of the spine, went into painful spasms that kept me awake all night. Over subsequent weeks up until today the pain has ebbed and flowed - although the last few weeks have punished with nothing but a continuous high tide of ferocious pounding wave upon stormy wave of agonizing pain. I've spent over £400 on chiropractic, acupuncture, shiatsu massage and various other therapies - some providing short-lived temporary relief, others merely aggravating the problem.
Initially, after a month, the main problem was sleep loss due to the continuous wakeful inducing and cattle prodding nature of the pain's sheer relentlessness. Not wishing to take any conventional medication I turned to wild lettuce for its sedative properties - this amounted to about 300g of fresh whole plant or the extracted juice from the same quantity.

(It is the bitter white liquid that has the sedative properties.)

It worked a treat and I could finally slumber in peace. The temporary respite that I mistook for healing led me to do something very stupid: I ran two back-to-back 12 1/2 hour foraging courses over one weekend - finding six hours between the first and second to prepare for that second one when I ought to have been sleeping. Being so busy attending to the class I skipped dinner after not having allowed for time to prepare a completely wild alternative. That was a terrible mistake. The day after both (very successful) courses I really felt so exhausted I thought I might die (terribly ironic given comments in an email I received from one of my weekend foragers: "We wish you all the best with your 'wild food year'; may the energy levels continue. On the amount you ate on Sunday that must surely be an advert for foraging.") From that day on (5th May) pain became my increasingly vocal and irritating companion.
Six months earlier I'd bought tickets to go and hear the Dalai Lama speak at the Nottingham Arena so like the stupid Transcaucasian Kurd in one of Gurdjieff's stories, having paid my money and in spite of my wise friend Lucy's sound advice not to bother going but to stay and rest instead, off I went to be enlightened. Here's the Kurd's tale:

This Transcaucasian Kurd once set out from his village on some business or other to town, and there in the market he saw in a fruiterer's shop a handsomely arranged display of all kinds of fruit. In the display, he notice one fruit, very beautiful in both colour and form, and its appearance so took his fancy and he so longed to try it, that in spite of his having scarcely any money, he decided to buy without fail at least one of these gifts of Great Nature, and taste it .Then, with intense eagerness, and with a courage not customary to him, he entered the shop and pointing with his horny finger to the fruit which had taken his fancy he asked the shopkeeper its price. The shopkeeper replied that a pound of the fruit would cost two cents .Finding that the price was not at all high for what in his opinion was such a beautiful fruit, our Kurd decided to buy a whole pound.
Having finished his business in town, he set off again on foot for home the same day .Walking at sunset over the hills and dales, and willy-nilly perceiving the exterior visibility of those enchanting parts of the bosom of Great Nature, the Common Mother, and involuntarily inhaling a pure air uncontaminated by the usual exhalations of industrial towns, our Kurd quite naturally and suddenly felt a wish to gratify himself with some ordinary food also; sitting down by the side of the road, he took from his provisions bag some bread and the fruit he had bought which had looked so good to him, and leisurely began to eat .But.....horror of horrors!......very soon everything inside him began to burn. But in spite of this he kept on eating.
And this hapless biped creature of our planet kept on eating, thanks only to that particular human inherency which I mentioned at first.........
And so, just at the moment when our Kurd was overwhelmed by all the unusual sensations proceeding from this strange repast on the bosom of Nature, there came along the same road a fellow villager of his, one reputed by those who knew him to be very clever and experienced; and, seeing that the whole face of the Kurd was aflame, that his eyes were streaming with tears, and that in spite of this, as if intent upon the fulfilling of his most important duty, he was eating real red hot pepper pods, he said to him: "What are you doing, you Jericho jackass? You'll be burnt alive! Stop eating that extraordinary product, so unaccustomed for your nature."
But the Kurd replied: "No, for nothing on Earth will I stop. Didn't I pay my last two cents for them? Even if my soul departs from my body I shall go on eating."
Whereupon our resolute Kurd - it must of course be assumed that he was such - did not stop, but continued eating the red hot chili pods."
(p19-21 All and Everything, G.Gurdjieff .Routledge and Kegan Paul. London 1973)

On the third day of my visit to hear the Dalia Lama speak I had to miss the whole proceedings and remain, instead, lying on my back all day - well, except for a farcical attempt to gather reedmace stems and a few nettles. This involved taking over an hour to walk the 100 metre distance from where I was camping to the bullrush (reedmace) stream. The journey was punctuated by repeated contortions as I fell to my knees doubled up in excruciating pain. I must have looked like a modern dancer rhythmically contorting to the chimes and clashes of an imaginary so-called cutting-edge musically cacophonous beat! Also, being unable to bend down I had to pull the stems from the top thus leaving behind the lovely and firm water-chestnut-like base. No doubt I expended more energy collecting the food than I gained from eating it.

Unfortunately, in spite of the obvious sincerity and wonderfully down-to-earth rapport of the Dalia Lama, contemplating his words just seemed to aggravate my pain - although, admittedly, not contemplating them would probably have produced precisely the same result. Speaking on the somewhat misleadingly described or translated term 'emptiness' - a term much better expressed by the delightfully lucid and straight talking Thich Nhat Hanh by his concept of interbeing, just led to waking daylight nightmares concerning Zeno's paradox. On the previous day His Holiness the Dalai Lama started down the dead end road of beginning to explain the concept of emptiness in respect to the relative illusion of being as it relates to the concepts of coming and going. Who is it that comes and who that goes? The argument was pure Zeno's paradox. Goodbye Tibetan Buddhism Hello Chan! But don't get me wrong, this is not a criticism, merely a grumpy pain-fuelled observation - and besides, perhaps I'm just not ready for such a strong burning chili!
At the end of the five days I was well and truly stuffed - in so much pain I could not go home! Fortunately synchronicity threw me an ace card just as I was leaving Nottingham arena in despair: Carmel. She very kindly gave me a buqi treatment, enabling me to find sufficient pain-free resources to make the 200 mile journey back to Canterbury - but only sufficient for that.

Hence this was my breakfast two days later:

Chestnut porridge made with spring water and Mahonia berries
served with
codeine phosphate hemihydrate, paracetamol,
sodium metabisulphite (E223),
pregelatinised starch,calcium stearate, aerosol OT-B (dioctyl sodiumsulfosuccinate and sodium benzoate (E211)),gelatin,
titanium dioxide(E171), erythrosine (E127)
and indigo carmine(E132), shellac,
soya lecithin, 2-ethoxyethanol, dimethylpolysiloxaneand iron oxide (E172)and diazepam, anhydrous lactose, magnesium stearate and microcrystalline cellulose.
AND LUNCH...
Snail, Oyster and limpet Soup

And for dessert

Elderflower tea
with
..... yes you guessed it....
codeine phosphate hemihydrate, paracetamol, sodium metabisulphite (E223),
pregelatinised starch,calcium stearate,
aerosol OT-B (dioctyl sodiumsulfosuccinate and sodium benzoate (E211)),gelatin, titanium dioxide(E171), erythrosine (E127) and indigo carmine(E132), shellac, soya lecithin, 2-ethoxyethanol, dimethylpolysiloxaneand iron oxide (E172)
and
diazepam, anhydrous lactose, magnesium stearate and microcrystalline cellulose.

I had succumbed to the feeling that there was no other choice but to visit men who push the codeine around: the doctor .

One of the mottoes that guides much of what I do - although if you knew me you'd be surprised (but it does apply equally to making a mess and being generally disorganised as well) is, "Do things properly or don't bother doing them at all." In other words, in many situations it's all or nothing with me. Consequently the all of my wild food diet has been so irretrievably compromised by the inclusion of unpronounceable chemical tongue-twisters that nothing now looms large. True, medication isn't food by conventional standards but to my mind that distinction doesn't really exist. In the untamed world food is medicine and medicine food. So the consequences for my project should be self-evident - but I'll say a little more about that at the end.

PEARLS
The reason I managed to hold out for the whole five days in Nottingham - in spite of the foraging obliterating pain was due to oysters and muscles. Knowing how problematic foraging had become due to my back problems, I took up a large bucket of live oysters and muscles. These stayed fresh and alive in a bucket of seawater for three days. So, in spite of the pain and police (I was stopped and questioned on the banks of the River Trent for photographing oysters due to the inherent security issues involved! - well, last year I was stopped and questioned by police for picking daisies so it really came as no surprise) these served me very well.

But all this is besides the point - I want to tell you my pearl story.

A few weeks after crossing the boundary from eating a purely vegetarian diet by collecting snails (except, of course the roadkill element - but the vegetarian reasoning is sound in my opinion), I thought I may as well turn to the abundance of nourishing shellfish that are readily available. For the first time I gathered oysters - twenty in total, and went to my parents' house to cook them. As they boiled in the pan we discussed the possibility of finding pearls. My oysters came from Herne Bay - only seven miles from Whistable which is famous for its oysters. We considered that perhaps pearls were only found in large non-native varieties of oyster living in warmer climes. My argument for this was that because oysters are harvested commercially in Whitstable, if pearls had been found we would all know about it. Those involved in the harvesting and selling would engage in a frenzy of publicity and we'd hear all about the world famous pearly oysters of Whitstable. Given that that has never happened and that thousands of oysters are harvested there every year, I concluded that the probability of finding a peal in a Herne Bay oyster was virtually zero. Of the 20 oysters I was cooking, nineteen of these I removed from the pan and liquidized. The cooking water tasted absolutely sublime so, not ever having eaten a cooked oyster I decided to keep one back. I bit halfway into it when my teeth encountered something hard: a pearl!

DEATH
Death is something that as a culture we shy away from - especially in terms of any truly deep reflection. Of course we see it in films and on television news bulletins daily, and such classic works such as Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying are readily available for anyone in search of a little positive insight regarding the matter. Nevertheless, when encountered raw and in the flesh death's visceral and decomposing immediacy is deeply shocking and disturbing (I think a link to this story would be insensitive just on the off chance that a relative of the man may read it because, of course, for them it's not just another story).
Last week I was carrying out an early evening reccy of a riverside walk prior to a foraging event to make a detailed list of all the wild plants there (of course, due to ill-health I had to cancel anyway). Shortly after arriving a man approached me from the direction I was heading and asked if I had a phone. To cut a long story short, he called the police as we walked down to the suspected dead man he'd seen whilst attempting to retrieve a punctured and deflated dingy from the river. The police arrived and attempted to pull him out - the poor man was face down in the water, his dead weight hindering efforts to negotiate his movement around a large half submerged tree branch . It was difficult to help because of my back pain but as the police officer tried to pull the man clear his colleague who was physically supporting him slipped and fell. On the next attempt she held her hand out to me for additional support and naturally I helped. Up on dry land and still facing downwards, the situation did not touch me at all. True, his puffed up white swollen hands captivated ones attention - yet more in fascination than in disgust or horror.
Walking back with the police and the chap who had found the man the surreal situation arose - because the police woman asked what I did for a living - whereby I found myself explaining briefly about the wild food plants we passed. Then my phone rang and a lovely young lady I'd met several weeks previously in the Lake District was on the other end. What struck me at the time was how wonderfully alive she seemed. Slightly shocked now by what had happened it took a while for her to explain to me who she was - in spite of my hope she would call. As soon as I understood who she was that's when the image of white puffed up decomposing hands flashed before my mind's eye for the first time: vibrant life and death competing for my attention, also there was a complex sense of shame or guilt. Having been so unwell and therefore physically unable to gather sufficient wild food supplies over the proceeding weeks, before departing that night I had said to my parents, half joking, half serious, that if I didn't find sufficient quantities of nourishing food that night then I might as well just throw myself in the river and die .One thing for certain is that I have a new respect for the police - they may hassle me when I'm out taking pictures or picking daisies but to encounter such disturbing events at a frequency way beyond that of the average person takes a certain courage and commitment - it can't be easy.

Chinese proverbs save the day.
I tend to switch from one perspective to the other with disturbing regularity, nevertheless at the moment I'm in a "in-the-magical-universe-there-are-no-coincidences-and-there-are-no-accidents" state of mind. Pearls, Dalai Lama (and by association a number of Chinese proverbs I've been reflecting on these last few days), pain and death all inform my current decision to temporarily postpone my year-long wild food adventure. As I mentioned in a previous post health is number one; it is the pearl, without which you have nothing, can do nothing. Pain has disrupted my ability to harvest from the wild and my diet has been broken with medication. That is fine, I must just be patient; I wish to pursue my wild food adventure and challenge as thoroughly as is theoretically possible, yet as the Chinese proverb says: If you do not change your direction, you are likely to end up where you're heading, and I have no immediate plans to die. Nevertheless, I must do certain things differently for as, yet another delightful Chinese proverb informs us: Insanity is doing the same thing and in the same way and expecting a different outcome! The Dalai Lama spoke insightfully about compassion and that, of course, such compassion is not just something to be outward directed; one must also have compassion for oneself .So when will I begin the challenge anew? Until a few days ago I considered the 1st of July as being most appropriate. That was before I gathered a 16 1/2 kg chicken of the woods fungus with my friend Kris.....

(Actually, this is Kris with the fungus two years ago which was then 13 kg. Below is this year's fungus that Kris helped me lift from the same tree)

(Next year 20 kg!?)

.........He told me that he's currently reading Karl von Clausewitz's On War, and proceeded to tell me that all my current troubles could be summed up in one word: FRICTION - as described by Clausewitz. Cue two final Chinese proverbs:

When men speak of the future, the Gods laugh!
and
A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials

In Clausewitz's philosophy friction refers to the numerous chance events that influence everything and the numerous difficulties that inhibit accurate execution of any preconceived and precise plans. Somewhere between the realms where these two proverbs point there lies the prize of year-long wild food-living success. True, to decide to live on nothing but wild food for a year is a very precise aim, and its two-month 'success' has thrown up many questions - perhaps the most important of which is: has my inability to heal been due to poor or inadequate nutrition or, worse, due to some unknown and perhaps cumulative toxicity? Nevertheless, perhaps even more absurd is to engrave in stone July the first as the day I will begin the endeavour again. I will begin again but no date is fixed. I will begin two weeks after I have been completely pain free without medication. I hope this will be 1st July but it could equally be 2 months or 2 years from now. I am more determined than ever so watch this space. So, no problem. In a world where everything is relative, why worry?

Visiting the nurse the other day, she left the room to consult with a doctor concerning my prescription. On the computer screen was a detailed breakdown of my past medical history. Reading it, I laughed out loud. When the nurse returned, still hunched over with back pain, I said, "Actually I feel fine, at least relatively speaking. Not just fine, but I think I look pretty good as well!" She looked confused so pointing to my medical history I showed her the following gem of accurate reporting:"Patient had problems with sciatica 112 years ago"! For a geriatric I was more than fine!

One final thought, again on the theme of relative notions, on the first day of this project after having eaten my first completely wild meal, I calculated on the basis of 365 x 3 -1 that I now only had another 1694 meals to go. At the time I thought it a fairly small figure and, perhaps, as a result, started to think the project would be slightly easier than I'd originally imagined. Yesterday my perspective shifted. It's a huge number when you consider that we may be only nine meals from anarchy!

Slow Food

Slow Food: The torturously slow trials and tribulations of one man's attempt to eat nothing but wild food for an entire year.

It's kind of obvious I know, but blogging for me is futile in the sense that nutritionally speaking its value is worse than zero - resting and typing metabolism must be taken into account as sources of food energy consumption. That statement in itself should give you a good insight into my state of mind. Actually, in describing my anxieties and troubles (all of which seem to flow quite freely from the absurd task I've set myself: eating like a Stoneage man in the modern era - when I have so many other commitments other than just feeding myself) I would like to use the phrase, "perhaps I've bitten off more than I can chew". Yet, although it would be incredibly apt, taken literally it seems to imply a surfeit of, no doubt delicious - all be it challenging - nourishing chewables: Succulent, wholesome and delicious chewables, all reflecting a luxurious abundance which is light years away from my current reality - they reside somewhere on planet supermarket no doubt. I'm struggling. I'm struggling big time! I'm struggling spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, socially, philosophically and physically - amongst the many other ways one can struggle. Chewables abound but sourcing them is a full time commitment. I both want and don't want to give up and the ambivalent tension is quite disabling!

So, no time to blog. Time is at a premium and other resources must be called upon: discipline and faith, they're my current allies - despite my repeated efforts to rebel against them in the past. Now I shall get to know them face to face.

All I can offer is a few pictures from the last few days and a few unusual statistics.

Typical meals:

Pot roast pheasant cooked with chestnuts, japanese knotweed, apple juice and winter chanterelles, served with steamed hogweed shoots and stir-fried alexanders root and St.George's mushrooms.

Pot roast rabbit cooked with boletus fungi, sea purslane and wild garlic, served with burdock root mash and steamed sea kale.

...and slow food!

equals....

Steamed sea kale and reed mace stems with stir-fried morels and immature pine cones, served with wild garlic leaf curd cooked snails on acorn and alexanders root toast!

STATISTICS

777 snails take 1 hour to collect, 40 minutes to cook and 1 hour 5 minutes to shell.

777 snails in shell weigh 5 kg 200g.

777 snails gives 2kg 200g of cooked snail meat.

Also made my first wild vinegar mother from birch sap.....

.....and have been filtering sea water for salt

....as well as krauting the Sandor Katz way with sea kale, dittander stems, wild fennel and sea salt.

.......whilst taking advantage of the sun to dry plants for future teas and beers: lemon balm, yarrow, birch leaf, ox-eye daisy, fennel and fever few.

And finally, today's number one find: some lovely chicken of the woods fungi.

Have also been sampling my first attempts at wild wines - intoxicating!

So let's raise a glass to Fergus Drennan, self-proclaimed vegetarian and say, with glutenous snail-like voices, rest in peace vegetarian Fergus......