Wild Desires

It s fun, fulfig It’s fun fulfilling and, best of all, it’s free - Heidi Fuller-love Fll love goes on a wild food weekend in Limousin, France, to scavenge for her supper

What is it about foraged food that can get a group of successful 30-somethings out of their beds at the crack of dawn, dressed in flapping anoraks and fart-making wellington boots, ready to re-enact the life and times of prehistoric man?

The short answer is: sheer madness! The long answer is: I’m here in lush countryside near Limoges in France to find out.

Bleary eyed at dawn, the neolithic four of us – who’re about to spend the weekend horsing around in the fields and forests foraging for roots and fruits – are monosyllabic enough to make our cave dwelling ancestors proud. The perfect foil for our lethargic state, Katia Jacquel, sprints into view. Wild-haired and barely buttoned, our teacher for the weekend is sporting a basket of snails culled en route and is muttering about “something extra for the pot”.

Praise be to our eco-friendly souls, we are gathered here today to indulge in a spot of what the French call gastronomie sauvage – which sounds ominously like we’re going to be savaged by a foodie, but actually means we’re going to scavenge, as opposed to sing, for our supper. Like my four urban companions, I was brought up to believe that edible greens are those squeaky clean, dirt-free things sold in supermarkets, so it comes as a shock to learn that many of the plant species that I’ve carelessly classed under the umbrella term ‘weed’ are part of the staple diet of countries like Spain and Greece.

Submerged in a wave of depression, it occurs to me that plant knowledge that was once vital for human survival has become a fad for city dwellers, like us, who are so divorced from our roots that we have to pay someone to teach us what our ancestors already knew. Talk about reinventing the wheel. However, for full-time wild foodies like Fergus Drennan, who earns a living selling his spoils to restaurants in the UK, foraging is not just a fad, but a way of life.

“The way we grow and gather our food, the kind of food we eat and the way we eat it has much to do with our civilisation. The choices we make can bring about peace, understanding and respect, and can relieve suffering,” he says.

For Drennan, gathering his haul is a way of life Drennan, who also stars in his own road-kill TV series, is just one of a bunch of wild food aficionados taking the countryside by storm. Back in the UK, these include chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall with his hedgerow banquets, and survival expert Ray Mears and his pine needle cuppas.

But if the wild feeding fashion has spread like crazy among the UK’s foodies, the foraging seed was actually sown more than a decade ago by French chef Marc Veyrat. After being expelled from school for setting light to a teacher, he then went on to set the French culinary world ablaze with his eatery in the Haute-Savoie region, serving wild food dishes.

“Veyrat is an innovator – his root and flower preparations are excellent. I’m not so sure about his caramelised frogs, though,” says Jacquel, as we march out under April showers for our first foraging expedition.

In Katia’s French kitchen the foragers get to chopping and measuring Foraging often attracts a maverick crowd, and there are certainly a lot of strong characters stomping their way through the lush Limousin countryside in our group today. Straggling in a sullen crocodile behind discipline-crazed Jacquel, there’s Claudine the bossy chemist, Isabel the know-it-all doctor, “been there, seen it, done it” Luce, and moi the fly-on-thewall journalist.

OK, maybe we look like a pretty primitive bunch as we cluster around Jacquel to touch, smell and taste her finds, but the rabid energy that animates our hunting quest springs from a very modern source of professional rivalry. It comes to a head when Claudine, who’s squabbled most of the journey with Isabel over the best way to pick stinging nettles (“just dive in, they wont hurt you”), loses the argument by swelling to a single, solid hive. Urged on by our constant bid to outdo each other, we scramble through bramble-tangled forests, muddy pastures and ice-cold streams.

When night falls over a forest full of twittering owls, we drag our bedraggled bodies, and plastic bags stuffed with wild mushrooms, chestnuts, nettles, roots and flowers, back to Jacquel’s cosy kitchen. We then set-to – like Macbeth’s wild-haired witches – and moil, chop, steam, boil and bubble. Later that evening, gathered around a scrubbed farm table, we plough into our foraged fare with “oohs” and “ahhs”, and heartily agree with Marc Veyrat, who says that “food garnered from the wild has flavours you can’t find anywhere else.”

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