18 Video Views·Mar 22, 2023
Mo Wilde, author of The Wilderness Cure, shares the story of the year she spent living solely on wild, foraged food.
Mo Wilde made a quiet but radical commitment: to survive for an entire year on free, foraged food. In a world increasingly disconnected from nature, eating wild food becomes both a culinary and healing act, as well as a social and political statement. At its core, it’s an act of love and community.
Using her expertise in botany and mycology, Mo follows the seasons to gather nutritious food from hundreds of plant species, fungi, and seaweeds. Along the way, she learns not only how to survive, but also how to thrive. Nourishing her body and mind strengthens her connection to the earth – a connection we have largely lost, yet all of us, at our core, long for.
This hunger is about far more than food. It’s about accepting and understanding our place in a natural network that is both incredibly complex and beautifully simple. The Wilderness Cure is a diary of a wild experiment: a timely, inspiring memoir that explores a deeper relationship between humans and nature and reminds us of the important lessons we’ve lost along the way.
I'm Mo Wilde, author of The Wilderness Cure.
It's interesting looking back at what I've learned during the year of eating only wild food.
What I was hoping to gain was a deeper understanding of how our ancestors would
have survived, especially in the Scottish landscape. When we move out of Africa as humans
and spend a lot of time along the Mediterranean coast and you know you can see there when you're
living you know with fish and shellfish and fruits and things you know how people would have survived.
But as they move further north into places like Scotland, people have been living in Scotland for
12,000 years. What were they eating? How would they survive? You know what I really wanted to
gain was that knowledge of how people did manage to survive in that landscape. The experience
really impacted me in a way that was more than just about food. Food nourishes you but nature
nourishes you in different ways as well. Wherever you are in life you know you go through a city
and look at the pavements and there's concrete everywhere and there'll be a tiny crack and
there'll be a plant coming up and sometimes people think of foraging as something special
you know just those prized mushrooms you know a chicken of the wood or a truffle.
But there's no shortage of nettles, there's no shortage of dandelions and these
humble little plants are nutritional powerhouses. For me sustainability is really really important
and what was so amazing was that so much of the food was gathered within you know a mile and a
half to three miles of where I live and although I'm out of the town I'm still very much in the
commuter belt between two large cities in Scotland and with foraging food when you introduce that
little bit of wildness in that nourishes you from a physical point of view it also nourishes
your soul, your spirit. There's that little chink where a little bit of wildness can get in
and the world changes.
