Last month, writing on the topic of blackberries for Lubera, I made the observation that the British don’t have a tradition of foraging. It made me wonder again when and why we lost it (which I started wondering when I was writing about Sea buckthorn on FB for Lubera). So far I haven’t found a definitive answer – ethnobotanists spend a lot of time exploring the reasons for loss of traditional/indigenous knowledge about plant use, but generally focus on societies where it is being lost now, and where there is hope of conserving it.
The Greeks are still famous for collecting wild greens, horta, particularly in spring. In France you can gather a basket of mushrooms and take them to the pharmacist to be checked for edibility. Wild berry picking remains a Scandinavian tradition.
My hypothesis is that, in Britain, the decline (and it’s not a total loss, even now) in wild food knowledge probably began with the enclosure movement that brought the land into private ownership, and continued through urbanization and industrialization. Perhaps, as a small country, we just lost too much land to agriculture and urbanization; we certainly have no ‘wilderness’ to speak of (although now that we’re polluting the seas and the air there are no habitats untouched by human influence anywhere in the world).
So I have started researching the use of wild foods in Britain through the ages, and I decided to start at the point where 100% of us were still hunter-gatherers. At the end of the last Ice Age, modern humans (Homo sapiens) colonized the British Isles as the ice retreated. They weren’t the first human inhabitants, but their arrival marked the start of the permanent human presence here, and they are our ancestors.
Britain was a very different
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