A man is standing at my front door holding a dead fox. It is stiff with rigor
mortis and seems to be grinning at me. The man wants to put it in my fridge
and wonders if I’d like to roast and eat it later. This might be a slightly
less bizarre scenario in the countryside but here in the big city, I find it
a bit shocking.
Fergus Drennan, the man with scratched forearms and dirt under his
fingernails, at my door with a dead fox, is a professional forager. He is
one of the few people in the country who genuinely lives off the land. “I’m
vegetarian, but I do eat roadkill,” he says.
“If you haven’t seen or heard it being killed, and it’s not been killed on
your behalf, then it’s OK. A lot of the meat that people buy from
supermarkets doesn’t even look like it comes from an animal.”
I enlisted Drennan to see what we could find to eat on the commons of South
London. His foraging business, Wild Man, touts the freshest wild weeds,
mushrooms, nuts and berries at the Goods Shed co-operative market in
Canterbury (01227 459153), and to the kitchens of some of London’s leading
restaurants, including Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen and the Ivy Group.
For someone who forages six days a week in the Kentish woodlands, a morning in
one of London’s parks might seem a poor prospect. But when I went out into
the woods with the bushcraft expert Ray Mears earlier this year, he told me
that the big city was a veritable larder of wild foods. “We have allowed
ourselves to become desensitised to Nature’s abundance,” said Mears. “If it
doesn’t come in a sterilised package with a shiny label we wouldn’t dream of
consuming it.”
He’s not wrong. When Drennan and I head for Wandsworth Common, South London,
armed with a woven basket, a copy of the foragers’ bible Wild Food,
by Roger Phillips (Little Brown, £16.99), and a couple of knives, it’s
against the tide of people ambling down to the specialist food shops on
Northcote Road on a Saturday morning, armed only with their wallets.
We rummage in the long, slightly damp grass beneath the trees by the railway
line, delve into prickly bushes and wade through clumps of stinging nettles.
It’s not long before the basket starts to fill with crimson hawthorn
berries, sloes, blackberries, hazelnuts and a feast of salad leaves: common
mallow, fat hen, chervil, chickweed, wild rocket and sorrel.
I must have run this route hundreds of times and never once thought about
harvesting my lunch here. “Once you know what you’re looking for, it is a
pick-one-get-many-free paradise out there,” says Drennan. He’s right. The
common, it seems, is one big salad bowl.
As well as a sharp eye and nimble fingers, foraging requires “patience,
passion and awareness”, he says, adding, with a chuckle: “Everything’s
edible — once.”
Although he has had a few run-ins with landowners and borderline fungi, he
believes that as long as there’s enough left for other people, and the
birds, and that you leave it looking nice, then it doesn’t harm anyone.
And, dodgy fungi aside, foraged food is good for you. Many of these weeds
contain more vitamins and minerals than ordinary vegetables. According to a
study in Germany in 1987, there are 333mg of vitamin C in 100g of stinging
nettles, compared with 13mg in 100g of lettuce.
Each year Drennan turns a glut of elderberries and rosehips into vitamin
C-rich cold and flu remedies. He has made his own healthy snack bars (with
concentrated wild apple syrup, hawthorn berry purée, dried apple pieces and
ground walnuts) and he keeps hundreds of portions of homemade soups such as
nettle and wild garlic in the freezer. He is planning to produce a totally
wild Christmas pudding.
As well as the benefits of natural, healthy food, foraging has also offered
Drennan a way out of the fug of depression. “By drawing you out of
introspection and connecting you with the calm of Nature, foraging energises
you and helps you to forget your anxieties.”
He has been inspired by Richard Mabey, the author of a guide to edible wild
plants in Britain, Food for Free, whose latest book, Nature Cure
(Chatto & Windus, £15.50), reveals how foraging helped him to overcome
depression.
Mabey knows the best city sites to lift the spirits with a free-food fix. They
include canals, churchyards, garden squares and rubbish tips, where spices
and herbs such as cumin and coriander sprout from restaurant debris. He has
even seen mung beans growing between the cracks of the pavement from the
throw-outs of Chinese restaurants and exotic markets.
In London, for instance, there are allotments abandoned since the Second World
War along the railway embankments near Willesden Junction where loganberries
and asparagus grow wild; there are truffles on Hackney Marshes; and a feast
of wild fungi on Hampstead Heath.
“If you’re squeaky-clean about pollutants then urban foraging is a
non-starter,” says Mabey. In addition to the hazards of animal excrement,
there have been reports of lead pollution reaching alarming levels in urban
blackberries. But, Mabey says, “occasional consumption is no worse than
breathing the city air”.
The botanist David Bellamy says that the changes in London’s biodiversity are
not all bad: “We have lost a lot of urban green spaces and hedgerows, and
pollutants such as pesticides are used everywhere. But it’s neither as cold
now nor as smoggy as it was 50 years ago. The city’s microclimate is about
five degrees hotter than in the surrounding countryside and this has
encouraged the urban fox into Soho.”
Back at home, I decline the offer of fox for dinner. So Drennan cooks chunks
of a giant puffball, a woodland fungi foraged in Kent, in a beer batter, and
serves it with chickweed sautéed with a splash of soy sauce. The puffball
has a marshmallow texture and tastes a bit like chicken; the chickweed is
like tart watercress.
Later in the week I received an e-mail from Drennan: “Pot-roasted the fox with
wild mushrooms and red wine. It was tender and tasty.” I’m sticking to the
weeds.
Fergus Drennan can be contacted through his company Wild Man on 0790
4801047, or by e-mailing wildman22@fsmail.net
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What to pick
All of the following can be found in wooded or grassy parts of the city.
AUTUMN
Apples, rowanberries, rosehips, elderberries, hawthorn berries, sloes
are good for pies, jellies, wines, jams, pickles and syrups; hazelnuts and
cobnuts can be eaten raw or roasted with a pinch of salt; and there are
mushrooms galore.
WINTER
Chestnuts, for stuffing, made into flour or soup, or roasted; sea beet can be
used like spinach; pine needles make a refreshing tea; and dandelion leaves
are an alternative to chicory and endive.
SPRING
Wild garlic, watercress, lime leaves, wild chervil, chickweed, wood sorrel,
fat hen, nettles, wild rocket — all great for soup and salads. Sorrel works
well with eggs, wild fennel can be dried or eaten fresh with fish, and
elderflower make syrups or a cordial.
SUMMER
Marsh samphire can be pickled, used in tartare sauce or as a vegetable;
camomile makes a soothing tea; wild strawberries, raspberries, cherries and
blackberries are great for puddings, fools, jellies and jams; and ceps and
chanterelles go well with pasta, risotto.
To identify, read Food for Free, by Richard Mabey (Collins, 2004)
Tips for first time foragers
Urban foraging is not to be confused with scavenging — either rummaging in the
bins behind McDonald’s or, in its more sophisticated form, gate-crashing
parties that serve free canapés.
Here are some tips from Tim Webb, of the London Wildlife Trust:
- Make sure that you know what you’re picking; many edible plants have
toxic cousins that look similar.
- Always seek permission from landowners before foraging and stick to public
rights of way — this includes public parks.
- Always try to target only leaves, fruits and berries. Never remove whole
plants by the roots.
- Restrict your foraging to personal use.
- Wash all leaves and roots thoroughly before eating.
