Which is the finest wild food? This changes with the season but one mushroom—the cep, the porcini, known in English as the Penny Bun—has risen from the forest floor to stake its claim. I’ve been dreading writing this: the story of the king mushroom. The problem with ceps is that they decay very quickly. When …
Category archives: Now Then
The Myth of the Nettle
What is it that holds us to the earth? Sensing gravity, giving it meaning. How do we grow roots in a place when we don’t quite recognise the smell of the soil? Angga came to the UK in 1997 as a child, a minor, with his sister, two brothers and parents, his father a doctoral …
The Elusive Pignut
Seeking a small, chickpea-sized tuber above Bradfield. As I walk through fields and woods in the valleys above Bradfield with a group of friends, I stop various people innocently walking and ask them what sort of wild foods they collect, if any. The responses are what I might expect: blackberries, wild garlic in the spring, …
Illicit knowledge, imagination and nature’s bounty
Collecting wild foods draws us into a landscape from which we map the foods we eat. Food pornography generally indexes its lustful or gluttonous representation. For me, it refers more precisely to psilocybin mushrooms. Scouring the fields surrounding my mother’s village in Wales in the late 1970s, I carried with me an already-tattered first edition …
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