Foragers' Diary - Part One

Foragers' Diary – Part One

It’s much easier for me to say what I am not than to describe what I am.  I am not some sort of eco-warrior; I am not a professional cook or writer; and I am not an activist.  I am not even very interested in joining things, preferring to plough my own furrow much of the time.  Certainly I am not a hardcore forager.  Foraging has become extremely trendy lately with several books written on the subject, and foraged ingredients now featuring in many high-end restaurants.  More humbly I see articles on the web from people who make salads out of roadside plants or eat snails caught in the garden.  Well, that is definitely not me!

However I am very interested in garnering nature’s bounty where I can.  I do view the countryside as a potential source of food.  It ticks all the right boxes for me being fresh, local, seasonal, traditional and FREE.  Who doesn't like getting something for nothing?  So from time to time I plan to update you on my success in getting a free feed all courtesy of the Suffolk landscape.

When I first settled here back in April it was right in the middle of the "hungry gap".  The hedgerows were a riot of colour and the evidence that summer was just around the corner was everywhere, from hares boxing in the bare fields to busy nesting birds.  But there was hardly anything to eat.

Alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum)

OK, there were nettles which are quite versatile, and a plant I had never seen before called Alexanders, which seems to grow abundantly in these parts.  I guess the description in Wikipedia which says it has a flavour between celery and parsley might have put me off. Neither of these are high on my list of favourites. Although I suspect if I am still here next year I won’t be quite so fussy.

In fact I had to wait until July to plunder my first treasure.  I picked two beautiful bowls of wild cherries in Tunstall Forest.  They were smaller than bought cherries but very sweet and delicious and I would have picked more except I couldn’t reach.

Today the hedges and trees are full of promise, and I look forward to gathering blackberries, sloes, elder berries, chestnuts and crab apples in late summer and early autumn.

For right now however the big story is plums.  Wild plums of every hue seem to be growing all over the place.  There are bright green or yellow plums, rosy pink plums and rich purple plums evident down almost every lane or path I take.  I see on the web a fair bit of discussion about whether these are true plums or damsons or bullaces.  I am not qualified to say but it seems likely there has been a great deal of hybridisation over the years so maybe names don't actually mean very much.

Anyway I picked some as an experiment. Again they are smaller than commercial varieties and disappointingly tasteless to my palette.  Additionally many of them seemed to contain a single small grub or maggot, so as I stoned them there was quite a lot of wastage.  But I added plenty of sugar and stewed them up to make a crumble which will serve as tonight’s pudding.

Sunflowers

Sunflowers

For various reasons It’s been about three weeks since I walked the local footpaths around my village, so today I decided to take a stroll and see what has been happening in the countryside in my absence.  I didn’t have to go very far to encounter the first big surprise of the afternoon.  Only a couple of hundred yards from the house I gazed idly through a gap in the hedge and was almost blinded by the bright yellow vista in front of me.  Until April this field had been filled with cauliflowers.  About a month after that I walked the footpath that crosses the middle of the field and puzzled at the large-leafed plants that had replaced them.  Some sort of brassica I wondered, or a variety of bean perhaps.  Today all was revealed.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Sunflowers growing in England before except in a garden. 






The sunflower is actually a wonderful plant.  The oil, which is used in cooking, is rich in monounsaturates.  The  leaves can be used as a cattle feed;  the stems provide an alternative source of cellulose fibre for the paper industry, and even the cake that is left after processing the seeds for oil can be used as a livestock feed.  In this case however I suspect the crop is destined to feed the ever growing bio-diesel industry.

Biodiesel is a controversial subject.  Advocates point out that it is renewable, secure and produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions than fossil diesel.  For example, according to research from the EnvironmentalProtection Agency biodiesel made with soy yields a 57% reduction in greenhouse gasses compared with fossil diesel.  Opponents object to scarce resources, particularly land and water, being used to produce fuel instead of food, and there is some evidence that a switch to biodiesel production is becoming a factor in rising food prices around the world.  Either way it is not the whole solution to the world’s energy needs.  Most countries do not possess enough arable land to grow sufficient biofuel even for their own motor vehicles. If the entire land area of the USA were employed in soy bean production it would not meet current demand for heating and transportation in America, although a lot of research continues into alternative crops, using waste products and developing more efficient conversion processes.

The debate will continue for some time, but for me the argument is clear.  Biodiesel is renewable but it is not necessarily sustainable when you take into account the water and energy used to produce it.  It is better than fossil diesel but it is not green, just less dirty than traditional sources.  Also if the lure of a cash crop leads producers in tropical countries into further deforestation that is potentially disastrous.  All told I am not a fan.

Still it was beautiful to see them resplendent in the East Anglian sunshine and they brightened my day.  I defy anyone to walk through a field of sunflowers and not feel even a little bit uplifted.

Don't Start From Here!

I suppose most people are familiar with the old joke about the guy who asks for directions and is told, “If I was going there I wouldn’t start from here”.   I guess I feel that way about a lot of things in the twenty first century, but the things that get me personally excited are mainly connected to food and the environment.  I like all aspects of food: growing it, cooking it, eating it and talking about it.  But in this interconnected world you can’t ignore the fact that food is a thorny subject.

Half the world is battling obesity while the other half faces a daily struggle to get enough to survive.  Supermarket chains and the big food companies dominate the entire supply chain linking a housewife in Manchester to a poor banana grower in Costa Rica or a cocoa farmer in Ghana.

Many traditional sources of food are under pressure or endangered, especially fish and other marine animals.

The TV is dominated by celebrity chefs, many sponsored by supermarkets, telling us how to eat better. While as consumers we are bombarded with messages about GM, saturated fats, transfats, free-range, Fair Trade, food miles, global warming, sugar, sodium, allergy advice and so on.  Meanwhile global food prices continue to rise and even in the rich west real incomes are static or declining. Shortages and prices rises have resulted in riots all around the world and are even credited with sparking the Arab Spring, yet the world population is forecast to rise to 9 billion by 2050.  Feeding those people, in a time of climate change, without further accelerating the already alarming rate of environmental degradation and species loss is to me the greatest challenge the world will face in the next twenty years.

Frankly I am not optimistic, but one thing I hope to explore in this blog is how one individual like me affects the overall picture, and what I can do to be a good world citizen and still eat well.  In so many ways I wouldn’t have chosen to start from here, but ultimately the destination, and in fact the journey you choose to take are more important than where you begin.

That said I am only human. I’m more driven by taste than trade issues, more interested in hedonism than hectoring.  There will be meat and fish in this blog, as well as chocolate and bananas from time to time.  There is room for alcoholic beverages and I hope there will be some fun and even joy to leaven the worthiness.  I don’t dress for dinner, but neither do I don a hair shirt!

Beyond that, I have no idea where this blog will take me, so let’s just tuck in our bibs and start chewing…