6: The future of foraging

14/04/25

Foraging has been a big part of my life. For over a decade I was one of those very lucky people who managed to earn a living doing something that most people only ever do for fun. I taught people to forage, both in small private groups on public access land and larger workshops open to all, which is only viable on private land. The reason it is only viable on private land is because of the lack of suitable publicly accessible locations – there just weren't enough places where I could take large groups of individuals, and show them exactly where to find wild food, because doing so would “bust” those locations. It would work OK for the first year, but after that I would increasingly find they had been stripped of anything worth eating. In other words, it was unsustainable. Foraging in the modern western world is always at risk of becoming a victim of its own success. And for the deep irony for me is that, as a professional foraging teacher and the author of two groundbreaking books on wild food, I am liable to feel disproportionately responsible for this state of affairs. It would, of course, have happened with out me – I didn't change the general trajectory of affairs. But on the other hand I can't deny my own contribution to the process, for better or worse.

     I will start at the beginning. I grew up on the southern tip of Greater London. To the north lay suburbia and all the attractions of one of the biggest cities in Europe, and to the south lay the woodland and grassland of the South Downs and beyond that the lush countryside of the Weald. I was always interested in wildlife and always felt at home in the woods, even from an age so young that these days most kids wouldn't be allowed out to explore on their own. Directly opposite our house was a small pocket of unmanaged woodland which was basically inhabited only by nature and myself – in all the years I entertained myself there, I never saw another soul. It was out of the way and there was no reason for anybody else to go there, so they didn't. We didn't own it, but nevertheless those were my woods.

     My specific interest in foraging was sparked as a teenager, when I went looking for magic mushrooms (Liberty Caps) and my attention was drawn to the enormous variety of other fungi, prompting me to start learning about which of them are edible and which aren't. This was the 1980s and there was nobody to teach me how to safely forage for fungi, and very little in the way of useful books. At that point foraging was obscure as a pastime, and still associated by many people with the food shortages during and after the Second World War. Fungi foraging was viewed with particular suspicion, as it has been right across the English speaking world for most of its history, and probably still is. Richard Mabey's Food for Free had started the ball rolling towards the contemporary rennaissance in foraging back in 1972, but none of the versions of that book covered anything like enough species, and the pictures just weren't good enough, especially if your interest was fungi. The first book comprehensive and well-illustrated enough to enable people to become more than a perpetual beginner was Roger Phillips' Mushrooms, the original version of which came out in 1981 (when I was 13).

     This state of affairs had both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand it was a slow and painstaking process, because I had nobody to help me identify anything at all, and my information sources were strictly limited. On the other, I had the fungi pretty much to myself. I would walk around places like Limpsfield golf course and find penny buns (ceps, porcini) growing abundantly by the sides of the main fairways and in little copses. Nobody else had any idea that these were highly prized culinary delights. The only competition I faced was from slugs, insect grubs, deer and the occasional golf ball. The reaction from golfers was mostly either amusement/bemusement (“Look at the strange man collecting mushrooms!”) or concern (“A lot of wild mushrooms are poisonous. What you're doing is dangerous!”).

     What is there to not like about foraging for wild mushrooms? It is one of the things that humans actually evolved to do. Our ancestors have been doing it, or something very like it, since some time around the Cambrian Explosion. It is the perfect activity for soothing the brain's left hemisphere. It is leads to a direct engagement with the wild world, gives you an excuse to get outside and get some proper exercise and satisfies the “collecting” urge that motivates birdwatchers. You never know what is around the next corner – could be the biggest mass-fruiting of one your favourites that you've ever seen, or it might be something you've known only from foraging legend and though you never expected you'd ever actually see it in the flesh, you always knew it was out there somewhere. And unlike in the case of the birdwatchers, at the end of it all you get food which is free, organic and healthy, as well as usually being something that is impossible to buy because nobody sells it. To what it extent it is sustainable is another question, and not one that should be answered simplistically.

     It is all down to the details. What is being foraged, by who, when and where?  What is its ecological status? Is it native, naturalised, alien or invasive? And always most important of all – how abundant is it compared to the demands of the local population of potential foragers of that thing? In other European countries there are all sorts of regulations, and now they are being introduced into the UK, especially in high population areas (especially around London). Unsurprisingly, there is resistance to this from some parts of the foraging community, but at least in some places it is undoubtedly necessary. I've seen for myself in ten years how the seaweeds were impacted by foraging in the best location for seaweed foraging in south east England, and was well aware of my own contribution to that process (not because of my own foraging activities, but because I was teaching others how to do it).

     At some point in the future foraging may well become again what it was for most of human history: a backup for when the orthodox food supply fails, after which the regulations aren't likely to make much difference. Foraging will be a survival skill, although we cannot go back to it as a full-time way of life, regardless of the aspirations of anarcho-primitivists. Going backwards, culturally, is not one of the options available to us. Ultimately the food production strategy of the future has got to be scaled-up permaculture (literally “permanent agriculture” – agriculture which is indefinitely sustainable), which is the diametric opposite of foraging. Foraging is what you do when nature is  allowed to run wild, and humans just take what they need, with some very minimalist intervention. Humans have been doing that for tens of thousands of years. But this only remains foraging if the intervention remains minimal – increasing intervention leads back to agriculture, or it has done until now. The permaculture of the future – the food production system of a mature ecocivilisation, is going to involve even more forethought and planning than agriculture does.