Have just come across this interesting article, and thought I'd post it here:


Rustling up the roadkill

The Daily Telegraph
London, UK
24 June, 2006


Wild food is tasty and hip. Professional forager Paul Kingsnorth heads for the woods

'Before we do anything else," says Fergus Drennan, "guess what this is made of." He reaches into a wicker basket and pulls out what looks like a fruit tart. I bite into it.

"Rhubarb?" I say, suspecting correctly that this would be far too obvious.

"I knew you'd say that," he says. "It's not rhubarb. Have another guess.'

"Wild rhubarb?" I say.

"Nope," says Fergus. "I'll put you out of your misery. It's Japanese knotweed."

"Isn't that a horrible, invasive weed?" I say, looking at my tart suspiciously.

"Depends what you mean by weed," says Fergus. "Eat up."

Fergus is a professional forager. Take him to a beach, a wood or a bit of waste ground, and the chances are he could rustle up several square meals from it. It's a remarkable skill and, today, Fergus has promised to initiate me.

I couldn't wish for a better guide. Fergus has been foraging since he was a child. Now, he runs his own business, Wildman Wild Food, which sells his foraged produce at farmers' markets and to an increasing number of restaurants. Wild food, it seems, is an idea whose time may have come.

As we drive through the Kentish countryside to our first destination, Fergus explains his passion to me. "We're so cut off now," he says. "Very few people understand the land. But once you do, you start to appreciate the place you live in, and feel part of it. So many of my friends are constantly criticising this country - 'I've got to get out, it's all going to the dogs,' etc - but for me, this is what I do. I feel such a part of the English countryside through this that I could never leave."

This, then, is a mission, and one Fergus doesn't shirk from. He will, it seems, eat pretty much anything. He tells me how he once tricked a friend into eating badger burgers and segues into an enthusiastic defence of one of his favourite pastimes: eating roadkill.

"It's estimated that 10million birds, 20,000 foxes and 50,000 badgers are killed on the roads every year," he says. "If you assume that two million of those birds will be edible, and that a badger would feed six people, that's about 2,300,000 meals going to waste. And you can do so much with it. I used badger intestines once to make some chipolatas."


Fortunately, badger intestines are not on the menu today. Our first stop is a patch of green wasteland between the M2 and a housing estate. It doesn't look promising to me, but Fergus plunges into the grass and emerges with handfuls of Morel and St George mushrooms. They smell gorgeously earthy. Then he's in the hedgerow, cutting the tops off of young nettles and searching for wild garlic and hogweed. Where the rest of us might see an unexceptional field, Fergus sees a giant larder. "At this time of year," he says, "almost everything you see can be eaten." (Just make sure you know what you are eating.)

Basket full, we make our way back to Fergus's place, where he turns what we've spent the past hour gathering into lunch. He serves me nettle soup with a garnish of wild garlic and cream, and follows it up with a wild mushroom omelette and a salad of sorrel, hairy bittercress and chickweed. It's both novel and delicious. Everything tastes subtly, or in some cases strikingly, different from anything else I've eaten in Britain. This might explain why Jamie Oliver, among others, comes to Fergus when he wants intriguing ingredients for his London restaurant.

Lunch over, we head for the beach. It's a blazing day. Families are sunbathing and eating ice creams. Fergus hands me a sack and directs me towards clumps of dark green, waxy leaves growing at the foot of the chalk cliffs. "Sea beet," he tells me. "Like spinach, but better." I start picking.

Twenty minutes later, our sacks full, Fergus leads me to the shoreline. He's timed our visit to coincide with low tide, so that the seaweed is easy to disentangle from the slippery rocks. There are three types growing here: laver, bladderwrack and dulse. We pick them all. On the way back up to the shoreline, Fergus spots some sea purslane, and shoves that in his bag. I have no idea what he plans to do with any of it.

Later, all becomes clear. It's a still, summer evening on Reculver beach. Sand martins buzz around our heads as Fergus monitors two driftwood fires at the foot of the orange cliffs. He scales a couple of locally caught sea bass, wraps them in seaweed and places them on the hot embers, which are covered with shingle to make an oven. On the second fire, one pan contains sea beet, frying in butter and salt, and another contains dulse soup.

Within an hour they're all cooked to perfection, and we sit on the shingle, eating them under a setting sun. I haven't had a meal this good in ages, and I'm filled with a desire to know more about what grows under my nose, and how I can eat it. I tell Fergus, and he grins at me.

"That's how I got started," he says. "I'm warning you - once the foraging bug gets you, it doesn't go away."


Fergus Drennan's website can be found at www.wildmanwildfood.com

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/wine/mai...4/ixedmain.html



Wild food for beginners

Nettles
Pick the young tips to make a fresh, tangy soup, using potato and onion as a base. Or brew up with water, sugar and yeast to make a nettle beer, perfect for summer months.

Seaweed
While urban foodies are made about Japanese miso, some very tasty seaweed can be found on British shores. Particularly fine is the purple, sheet-like duise, which can be boiled in water and stock to make a gorgeous soup.

Elder
The flowers of this all-purpose tree can be used to brew elderflower champagne, lemonade or cordial. The berries can be used to make wine, jam, jelly or pickle.

Wild salads
The fields and woods are full of surprisingly tasty salad vegetables. Try wild garlic leaves, chickweed, clover, sorrel, sow thistle, lamb's lettuce or burnet, and you'll never want to go to Tesco again.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/wine/mai...24/edwild24.xml