07 May 2020
Eat Your Weeds
Foraging for food.
By Amelia Power
Ever since my two-year stint in Australia I have been fascinated by foraging. Inspired by Aboriginal bush tucker and the abundance of edible plants, fruit, roots and fungi which I discovered whilst travelling the deserts and beaches in my trusty van, I found that it becomes pretty easy to make whole meals from wild shrubs as long as you’re careful. The nutritional and medicinal qualities of native foods has always been and remains one of the key pillars of aboriginal culture and is representative of their connection to and symbiotic relationship with the land, something which most Western cultures have long since forgotten. As Western people, we have become disassociated from the source of our food and lazy, expecting our food to come wrapped in plastic on refrigerated shelves. Anything else is viewed with suspicion as dirty or primitive, an opinion with which I fundamentally disagree. There is something very satisfying and rewarding about preparing a whole meal from weeds: weeds which a few years ago I could not even identify, let alone consider picking and eating.
On my return to England, I made it a goal to continue this passion for wild eating in my home country, and picked up a book called Food for Free for four measly pounds in a second-hand book store in Exeter. I started off small, with the easy things that I knew were definitely not poisonous; blackberries, sloe berries, nettles, dandelions. This in turn resulted in an obsessive curiosity, looking at every weed or bush thinking, “I wonder if I can eat that.” I began to take pictures of every plant and flower I saw whilst out walking the dogs. I joined many Facebook groups, “Wild Flower Identification”, “Wild Apothecary”, “Fungus Identification and Discussion” and found a whole new world opened up. Not only was I learning a lot about flora and could now identify so many new plants which previously I’d overlooked, but was having a lot of fun experimenting with all sorts of teas, infusions and salads.
Fast-forward to 6-months later in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Luckily I have found myself locked down in a mountain paradise in the French Alps with an alpine forest on my doorstep and one of the sunniest and most abundant Springs we’ve had in years. May in the Savoie region is a forager’s paradise and has given my sanctioned daily exercise of thirty minutes within a one kilometre radius of my house a whole new meaning. These aren’t just walks, these are grocery shopping trips, where, like a member of the Von-Trapp family, I skip into the woods with a basket on my arm and my government papers in my pocket to go and see what food I can find. I have even taken to writing a ‘woodland shopping list’ for which I go through my foraging book to see what might be found in the area and is in season, and then add it to the list to see if it can be found. So far I have found: wild garlic, sweet violets, nettles, cow parsley, burdock, wild spinach, sweet woodruff, the list goes on…
Teas have been my favourite and most successful venture; nettle tea, a fool-proof recipe which never fails, as well as a variation on dandelion root tea with varying levels of success. Most weeks now I sit down to a lunch of wild spinach with dandelion leaves, cow parsley and sweet violets and am still working on gathering enough burdock root to make a brew from that as a digestive aid. Indeed, most of these wild herbal teas have a variety of medicinal benefits, like rosehip for aching joints and dandelion flowers for an antioxidant boost.
Not all of my recipes go to plan, to be honest, and some taste like dirt no matter how much honey you add to try to mask the bitter after-taste. Nonetheless, learning to love weeds and discovering the nutritional value and rich medicinal properties of otherwise benign wild greenery has opened up a world that, pardon the pun, feels like a return to our human roots as hunter gatherers. It has also brought magic to the forest and meadow which, before, was just a pretty excuse for me to leave the house.
