5 Reasons I Love Urban Foraging

 
 
I must admit, I quite enjoyed Celia Brooks’ description of me. It was at the beginning of our collaboration at the Demo Kitchen at Borough Market on Friday 27th May 2016, when she was cooking up some wild food  I had found locally. We were both in conversation about the ingredients and how to cook them and she introduced me to the gathering crowd  as ‘a Mistress of Wild Food’.
Whenever I receive the label ‘Expert’ in wild food, I have to say I’m not. Because I really am not. There’s so much I don’t know, I don’t know latin names, if you can’t eat it, I don’ t know it. I really know my 30-40 plants and that’s about it. I’ve always said on the Invisible Food foraging project that I share my learning, not my knowledge …. I want to learn something … want to come too?
After publishing and spreading the word about my book Street Food: Urban Foraging and World Food in 2013/14, I thought my time on this project was almost up, as I wanted to dedicate time to working with Communication, conflict and mediation, but this year I have been asked to do a few walks and feasts (At Soundcamp and at Borough Market) and I so completely enjoyed them both, that I remembered why I spent 6 years working full time on this project. So these are, once again, 5 reasons I love Urban Foraging.

1. It gets me outside, away from a computer and off my phone. I am blessed in London with such a patchwork of green spaces, some delightfully managed, others left alone and wild. Just treading on grass, just walking under trees, just slowing down enough to tune into the birds really relaxes me. The more stressed I am, the deeper the effect on me.
2.  It gets me connection to nature in a way I had never before experienced in my life. Learning a bit about wild plants gives me another lens to view the world. I know them, I feel them. When I’m walking from A to B, I can spot Shepherds purse shooting up from the cracks between a pavement, its seed heads bobbing in the wind. It just pops up year after year at noone’s bidding. Year after year, the plants return. They are company. They are one thing I can rely on.  I am free, for a while, from walking to get from A to B as fast as possible, looking in a fixed direction and listening mainly to the stories running round and round in my head. Instead, my eyes are cast to the ground, looking for clues about what’s in the trees above. 
3. Looking for plants is relaxing and surprising. You never know what you’re going to find .. there’s always an ‘oh! Here’s a nice bush of mallow. Wow!’ moment. Never more is this true than with blackberries. Looking, finding, spotting more, higher, further away, more challenging, going deeper into the bush, unhooking thorns from your clothes or leg (“Ow!”), just a few more, just a few more. Foraging is, for me, a ‘peak experience’ and by this I mean a moment lost in an activity when time stops, or when relationship to time is changed. These are moments which impart a strong physical memory beyond the ordinary consciousness of everyday life.
4. Being in this state of being with other people is connecting.  The experience of foraging also lives in the conversations held and the relations that spring up during walks. When I walk in step, looking at the ground or turning to my walking companion to speak, I’ve talked about plants and what they bring me back to; childhood, games played with them, family members, herbal remedies, other countries, 'the country'. Snippets of chats, emotions triggered by words, blasts of an idea or a different approach remain after returning home and shutting the door.
5. And doing this ‘curious’ activity of collecting food out in the streets invites comments and connection from people walking by. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘What?! You can eat that?!’ … ‘Oh yes, my grandmother used to do that back in Romania.’ ‘We have this tree (Mulberry) in Congo’. Plants connect people.

 
Having recounted all of that, I still don’t know why the word ‘Mistress’ made me stop momentarily, I don’t know why the word ‘Mistress’ seems to fit, when the word expert absolutely doesn’t. Maybe it’s something to do with ‘letting myself go’ with the plants … a convergence … a surrender … a union …? . How Celia Brooks knew all of that is also a wonder. But I’m happy that, after 8 years of urban foraging, the blackberries are still there to lose myself in.
(Well … mid July I reckon, this year, in London)