Sick of spiralling prices? Meet the woman who turned to foraging all her food from the forest
Soaring food prices are enough to turn anyone to a penny-pincher with keen eye on discounts.
But one mother decided to use her shopping bills as a reason to embark on an unusual, year-long personal challenge.
Monica Wilde decided to ‘see if it possible’ to eat only wild food after becoming disillusioned with the spiralling costs.
And she claims she did not spent a single penny on groceries in the 12-month period – but instead used the nature’s larder to feed her.
The 61-year-old, who has three children, foraged all her meals from her local area going for long walk every week through a five-mile radius picking berries, fungi and salad leaves.
She obtained hunted venison in return for her skills as a herbalist and was gifted animals that had been culled on farms to protect crops.
Her condiments consisted mainly of powdered seaweed, which she said is salty, and she was given some actual sea salt from friends who ferment vegetables.
The forager estimates to have consumed around 300 varieties of vegetables in the 12-month period.
Monica Wilde explains the difference between cow parsley and poison hemlock
Home-smoked salmon with a wild spring salad
But she insists her diet was far from boring – with dishes such as venison fillet with shredded burdock root, wild vetch and ox-tongue leaf salad on the menu.
Other delicacies included salmon home-smoked over oak twigs with a wild spring salad, vetch tendrils, chickweed, gorse flowers, cuckoo flowers, dog violets and ground elder.
With January around the corner – a time where money is often tight – she has shared tips for how others can save cash by sourcing their own ingredients.
Ms Wilde told Need To Know podcast: ‘There would be at least one day at the weekend where I would go out for a long walk and get and gather lots of things.
‘I got all the vegetables that I needed for the week, mushrooms and things like that, and I’d take them back and maybe freeze some of them to preserve them or put them in the fridge. ‘It was about an hour and a half each day, either prepping food or cooking food or doing something with food for all the meals.
‘The weaknesses in what I could get were filled by community, which is how we lived in the past.
‘It was an experiment to see what is available and what is possible while still living a modern life.
‘I still used a car, a freezer and an oven.’
Cranberries, feral apple and bog myrtle leaves for a festive sauce
Nut milk and carragheen panna cotta
She said she had always been interested in foraging as her family spent a lot of time outdoors when she was growing up.
As a young adult and bringing up her children on her own, she admitted money was always short so she would complement her larder by foraging.
She said of her year-long experiment: ‘I spent absolutely no money on food.’
However, Ms Wilde admits that she was in a particularly good position to eat wild because she knew a lot about plants to begin with. But she believes anyone can pick this up quickly. She said: ‘It’s not difficult to know how to make a meal.
‘Wild and store-bought food are prepared in very much the same way.
‘You have to know what to pick.
‘But that’s not difficult either because, as humans, we are really good at noticing the small differences between things.
‘Most people could possibly identify, for instance, a dandelion leaf or a jaggy nettle.
‘It’s just a question of building on that.
‘Looking out the window onto the little paved courtyard, I can already see three things to eat.’
Ms Wilde said that nature had something to offer pretty much all around the year with oyster mushrooms and pig nuts plenty at this time of the year.
However, she reminded that digging up roots require the landowner’s permission.
She first started eating wild full-time in 2020, when she did her year-long challenge.
But she will now occasionally treat herself to a box of organic vegetables and the occasional item from the shop while most of her diet remains foraged, depending on the time of year.
The expert forager, who moved to Edinburgh in 1995 and lives in a self-built wooden house, has even written a book on the topic, called ‘The Wilderness Cure’.
Ms Wilde claims that her year of eating wild had a positive effect on her health and improved her blood and gut microbiome results.
She added: ‘A lot of people think that foraging is a bit niche but in actual fact, it ties in with food security.
‘We live in less certain times, you know, with the prospects of civil disruption because of politics and warfare and climate change and adverse events.’
