There are several essentials vital to your survival during times of crisis or emergency. Whatever the severity of any disaster that may strike, for instance, you are very soon going to need water to drink, a shelter from storms and other bad weather, the ability to start a fire, and food.
Preppers make provision for this last need for food by laying down stores of non-perishable and long-lasting stocks of food. But what if there are difficulties in getting to any of the store you might have stashed away remotely or what if there is an indefinite period of lockdown and you need to eke out the supplies that you have?
That is when the ancient art of foraging in your local neighbourhood may come to the fore.
What is foraging?
The website British Local Food explains that foraging is the activity of searching for, identifying, and gathering food in the wild. The kind of food gathered in this way can be anything from plants, fruit, herbs, or mushrooms that you find growing in any wild and uncultivated ground.
From that kind of description, of course, you might think that you need to be in the depths of the countryside to do any foraging. As an article on Country File explains, though, your sources for foraged food, plants and berries can be surprisingly urban – as close as your local park, your own back garden, or neighbour’s hedges.
Foraged food is free – you just need to find it, identify it, and pick it. Even so, beware that you might need permission to forage on privately-owned land and that all of this country’s wild plants are protected by the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 – which makes it illegal to uproot protected plants or to disturb the habitat of Britain’s wild animals.
Civilisations have always foraged for such a scarce resource as food. During times of crisis, foraging may become a life-saver – as the account of a professional forager in Britain told the Express newspaper in May 2020 about the food scavenging done by her grandfather in war-torn Poland during the 1930s and 40s.
Foraging today
It might be a practice that is as ancient as the hills, but foraging has seen a recent resurgence in popularity. Indeed, the supermarket chain Waitrose says there has been an 89% increase in interest in foraging expressed on social media sites, according to a story in the Independent newspaper on the 8th of January 2021.
General interest these days is less spurred by necessity, of course, and more by a fairly widespread concern to eat more locally and sustainably. For the prepper, these concerns are amplified by the prospect of learning skills that may become during any emergency in which food stores are depleted and when foraging might, indeed, become a necessity.
Like many other survival skills, foraging is not something learned from just one or two quick lessons but through knowledge picked up over time – and by practising and consulting the experts in this field.
If you are just starting out, for example, you might want to score some quick and easy wins by focusing on abundant and easy to identify wild plants such as dandelions, nettles, and elderflowers, which can be added to a soup or stew.
Another commonly foraged food is mushroom – but here you may need to be more careful in the identification of specific fungi before eating only the safe ones and avoiding those likely to poison you and make you ill. As the Woodland Trust warns, fungi are notoriously difficult to identify, so you might want to leave mushrooms alone if you are in any doubt – and in any case learn which fungi, in which woods, may be strictly protected by law.
Unless you become a very practised expert, you are unlikely to source all your requirements for nourishment from foraging. But in any emergency or crisis – and, indeed, responsibly living your day to day life – foraging may provide a valuable supplement.
There are a number of companies that offer foraging courses – you can look online to find one local to you – plus books on foraging that you can use as a guide.
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