Edible treasures: foraging for food

admin — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 12:33:02 +0000

Their names won’t exactly make your taste buds tingle: chicken of the woods, hairy bittercress, beefsteak fungus, giant puffball, shaggy ink cap, white dead nettle and jelly ears (which are shaped like a human ear). But give them half a chance, and their unconventional flavours will certainly earn your respect – and a special place at your table.
Foraging is the age-old process of gathering food from nature. Almost the whole year round, in woodland, fields, on hedgerows and oozing from cracks in trees, you can find a surprising range of wild fungi, leaves, fruit, nuts and berries.
It wasn’t long ago that gathering wild food was a normal part of British culture. During the second world war, rosehips were commercially gathered because of their high vitamin C content. Now we’re seeing a ‘real food’ renaissance, including a resurgence in the number of allotment holders, people growing their own food at home, and more and more people interested in foraging and wild food.
1 Get to know your inner hunter‑gatherer
Foraging for your dinner will make you see the world with new eyes. The inner hunter-gatherer is alive and kicking when you collect food directly from the earth. Grubbing under hedgerows, rummaging among fallen leaves, and using your instincts and knowledge of how the earth, weather and seasons interconnect to find a tasty morsel can be very rewarding.
2 Start nearby
Wild food is not just for people with access to countryside – even in cemented cities, it appears in the most unexpected locations: edible greens poking from the edge of car parks; morels soldiering up through wood-chipped soil beds, even pavement mushrooms defiantly bursting through the tarmac. And the scraggly weeds in your garden could actually be an edible treasure trove – look out for things like goose grass, dandelions, nettles and wild garlic.
3 Follow the seasons
Spring is the start of the wild food year. It is the time to look for ramsons (an edible green that tastes mildly of garlic) and to keep an eye out for oyster mushrooms and morels, which are the ‘holy grail’ of the foraging world. It is also when young leaves from certain trees, such as beech and common lime, are edible. In summer, the highlight is St George’s mushroom, as well as mousserons (fairy ring mushrooms) and chicken of the woods: a bright-yellow bracket fungus that oozes like lava out of trees. In autumn there are hundreds of wild mushrooms, and mountains of fruit, nuts and berries to be found. In winter, there’s less on offer, but you can find things such as chanterelles, which can take freezing and defrosting.

4 Forage sustainably
Environmentalists warn that hundreds of varieties of wild mushroom could be wiped out if the popularity of foraging continues. So never pick more than you need (it’s illegal in the UK to forage for commercial gain, under the 1968 Theft Act). One key foraging philosophy is if you see something once, keep walking – if you see it again, it’s okay to stop and pick it. Always cut mushrooms at the base rather than ripping them up, which damages the underground web of mycelium.
5 Identify wild food thoroughly
Hospital admissions for people with suspected mushroom poisoning doubled last year, as foraging became more popular, so get a good identification guide and follow it methodically. If you confuse the leaves of Fat Hen with Good King Henry, it’s not a disaster, as they’re both edible. But there are around ten deadly wild mushrooms in the UK, and others can make you feel very unwell. Even things listed as edible can affect some people – 10 per cent of the population has a violent allergic reaction to chicken of the woods fungi for example. Always start off by trying just a small amount.
6 Make it social
In France, Spain and many countries in eastern Europe foraging is still the norm, especially when it comes to mushrooms. In autumn, whole families go to the local woods to pick mushrooms to last the year. Why not get some friends together, and make finding and eating wild foods a social activity?
7 Banish the bland
It’s worth remembering that wild food tastes totally different to domesticated varieties. Watercress from the supermarket is bland in comparison with its wild-grown sister; and while authentic wild strawberries may be about an eighth of the size of their supermarket cousins, their taste really packs a punch. So find recipes online that bring out the flavours. Try www.eatweeds.co.uk

European Social failure?

admin — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 17:31:02 +0000

What location could be better for this year’s European Social Forum (ESF) than historic Istanbul – where, in tourist-brochure lingo, ‘East meets West in spectacular style’. What a fantastic opportunity to explore Turkey’s domestic issues: the Kurds, relations with Greece and the Turkish military presence in Cyprus – and perhaps, most crucially, how the people of Europe should respond to the financial crisis and get the P.I.G.S out of the IMF/EU pen?

The opening ceremony on the Wednesday 30 June certainly showed that some of this initial optimism was not unfounded, featuring a large Kurdish delegation performing a traditional dance. Under normal conditions, that action would have resulted in the swift and heavy-handed arrest of those involved. What’s more, the 2010 European Social Forum took place just five weeks after Israeli soldiers shot dead nine Turkish activists on board the flotilla bound for Gaza. Surely Istanbul would be the place to unite those wishiing to work together to end the siege of Gaza and challenge Israel’s impunity?

Although workshops and seminars on Palestine cropped up (with some inevitability) in the ESF programme, they tended to cover old ground rather than harnessing the opportunity to agree a forceful post-flotilla where-do-we-go-from-here? What’s more, the pro-Palestinian demo that we planned to attend on Friday at 8:30pm (as advertised in the booklet we were given on registration) actually took place 24 hours earlier, with no warning or advert of the change. By word of mouth alone, around 60 people show up. Not exactly a healthy number for a solidarity march at an event that – in theory – represents a dynamic international meeting of like-minded activists and organisations.

Sadly, the lack of organisation around the Palestine demo was far from a one-off. Of course, criticising the organisation of a social forum is a favourite pastime of many participants but that the Istanbul ESF was organised on a shoestring doesn’t entirely excuse the Turkish and English programmes advertising different schedules, that the demonstrations weren’t advertised properly, or that they ran out of food for the paltry number of participants. We spent hours on hot streets and crowded trams trying to find the forum’s main venue, which was particularly difficult in the absence of directions or signs. We were mildly encouraged by other red-faced delegates, equally lost. Finally we registered late on the Thursday morning. Our lanyards suggested we were only the 36th and 37th people to do so.

Cropping up in the conversations of the more disgruntled participants of these things, since Porto Alegre in 2001 is: ‘What’s the point of social forums anyway?’ A kind of lefty existential ‘why are we here’ from those who’ve taken the time to show up in the first place. It’s certainly a struggle to find a definitive answer to that question, at an event supposedly characterised by plurality and diversity. Nevertheless, forums certainly seem to work best when they operate as an opportunity to share ideas, establish networks and agree strategies for action between activists or organisations working on similar issues.

For us the greatest criticism of this forum was its failure to provide non-hierarchical, participative, polycentric spaces in the meetings themselves. With notable exceptions, every seminar or workshop (there seemed little difference between the formats) was conducted in the same way: the ‘experts’ sat at the front, the floor listened to them reciting what they already knew. This series of laborious, monotonous monologues would come to an end, after two and a half hours, to allow for ‘questions’ – and a further 30 minutes of non-sequiturs. Even when direct questions were asked, the sessions were so poorly facilitated that those asked the questions were rarely given the opportunity to answer. All this made engaging and productive dialogue a practical impossibility.

These kinds of problems have been evident at previous European Social Forums, and in any case the hosts cannot necessarily be blamed. In the spirit of the forum we must all take collective responsibility for injecting creativity, passion, flair and excitement into the process. Nevertheless, when groups like Climate Justice Action or the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation attempted to break down these front-loaded sessions by creating smaller discussion groups, they were not unilaterally welcomed. Where was the New Economics Foundation with their dynamic ‘Fink Club’ debate format when we needed them?

This said, sessions such as ATTAC’s workshop, exploring people’s proposals to deal with the European debt and social crisises, provided proof that forums like these can still, at times, work effectively. Activists from Austria, France, Germany, the UK and Italy converged to agree a strategy for resisting EU governments’ coordinated attacks on social and welfare systems in EU countries.

War on Want was one of only a handful of UK-based organisations at this year’s ESF. One of their delegates, David Tucker, reminded us that the success of social forums should be measured not by what happens during them, but by what happens after. Such things are undeniably hard to quantify.

However, with its great potential squandered and the stakes so high in Europe, what should happen now that the ESF 2010 is over is a thorough assessment of social forums as a means of actually transforming opportunity in to reality.

Red Pepper » Sophie Haydock

Edible treasures: foraging for food

European Social failure?