The most jaw-dropping thing I have read in a twenty-first century newspaper was a culinary item. The writer was recommending what most Southern English people would call blackberries but I would call brambles. There was a time, they said, when you could just go out to the countryside and pick them, but urbanisation and modern farming practices had changed all that and now you had to buy them in shops. I quickly concluded that the writer and I lived in parallel universes and that they were not so much metropolitan as subterranean. For those of us above ground it is obvious that from August to October England groans under the weight of the fruit of over a hundred and fifty varieties of blackberry, ninety five per cent or more of which goes unpicked. I could find you them easily in London in parks, on wasteland and, most of all, on railway cuttings. Urbanisation has had almost no impact on supply and modern farming practices involve minimal labour which means there is nobody to tidy up the uneconomic corners of farmland which become perfect locations for wild fruit.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by the error because I wish I had a stiff drink for every time someone has approached me in the countryside while I’ve been picking what any five-year-old child could tell you were plums or cherries and asked, “Can you eat those?” Just below the surface I am wanting to say, “Of course you can – they’re f***ing plums (or cherries)”, but I am fairly socialised and invariably make polite conversation. The fact is I’m a forager, one who collects inanimate material which is edible or useful, and I see things with a forager’s eye. I’ve been a forager for well over seventy years. It all started with my maternal grandfather who couldn’t pass ripe brambles. I remember picking and eating them and I remember him being castigated for us being out so long, but I can’t remember any containers so perhaps we just ate them on the spot. My first paid work was as a forager: at the age of eight I discovered that if you picked the hips of the dog roses which grew profusely alongside pretty well every lane in what is now branded as “Lancashire Hill Country” a lady sitting in a room in the town centre would give you 4d a pound for them. When I was nine this went up to 5d. For someone who got 6d pocket money a week which ran to a comic and some sweets three or four pounds of hips meant a considerable increase in the standard of living. The fruit went away to make Delrosa Rose Hip Syrup which was believed to have almost mystical powers of protecting babies and small children from disease and was massively endorsed by the Ministry of Health to a degree that looks rather suspicious from this distance. We were told it was made in Newcastle; actually, it was Wallsend so our information was not wildly misleading.

We foragers are a minority. According to research carried out for TOG24, the outdoor clothing company, in 2021 fewer than 20% of the population have ever foraged more than once. More than 25% have no interest in the matter which leaves a majority who are interested in foraging but don’t do it. I think they fall into a category introduced to me during my very first research interview which was with an official of what was then the Council for the Protection of Rural England. The core support of the organisation, he said, came not from “townsmen” nor from “countrymen”, but from the “countryman in the town”, a vast swathe of the English population who lived urban lives but with rural interests and aspirations. But we have to add to this the Noma effect because of the “mad Nordic” restaurant which was founded in Copenhagen in 2003 and which Restaurant magazine, in the throes of eating away at the soft power of the Michelin guides, declared to be the world’s best restaurant in 2010. The distinctive Noma contribution was foraged food and it has branches all over the world and many imitators. More importantly it has helped create an awareness of foraging possibilities disseminated through magazines, websites and television programmes.

So there are many millions of aspirant foragers who don’t forage. The most common reason given is that they fear poisoning themselves, but in my experience it’s as much a matter of not getting round to it. There’s also a fear of committing theft though in England the law is very generous and it is roughly what people assume it is. You can take anything, irrespective of the ownership of the land it is on provided it is not deliberately cultivated and not for resale; in a field full of brussels sprouts with brambles growing round the edge you can take the fruit but not the vegetables. For the record I have never in England been accosted or criticised when foraging, but I have in France been accosted by an old peasant who claimed that the chataignes on the sentier public belonged to him. Also for the record I have very occasionally scrumped an item from a vast cultivated crop and have discovered that commercial maize is nigh on inedible, that sugar beet makes an interesting pickle and that young field beans are good to eat – they are, after all, a variant of the broad bean. (Apologies, m’lud – mere curiosity.)

They say that foraging is about the four Fs: fruit, flowers, fungi and firewood. Of these I am very much a fruit man. I’ve picked many a mushroom in my time, but they tend to be watery and tasteless when in abundance and full of maggots if more than a day old. I also felt very odd indeed after eating mushrooms on one occasion. So, although my walking companion is happy to pick a dozen types of wild fungus I am not so keen. I generally acquire enough firewood without really trying and I don’t like picking wild flowers (though Autumn foliage is a different matter). And there are other, non-alliterative items such as shellfish, herbs, seaweed and, above all, nuts. I’ve done them all at one time or another, but herbs and nuts are strictly in France for me. There are plenty of walnut, hazelnut and almond trees where I live in England, but the gray squirrels get the lot; this just doesn’t happen in France. I grow on average two to three dozen fresh herbs in my garden in England whereas in Languedoc where we often stay, oregano, bay, thyme and forms of mint are among the commonest roadside weeds so it would be odd to bother growing them.

I’m not surprised that I foraged in my childhood. Nor am I surprised that I do it in old age, sometimes assembling a crack squad of grandchildren to assist. What does surprise me is that I did it in the middle of my life with not only a job and a family and successive book contracts, but also being chairman of this and director of that. Yet still I did things like amassing buckets full of elderberries and combing them carefully with an “Afro” comb to make wine. It was not a serious contribution to the family fortunes and was arguably an extremely irrational way to behave. (A significant exception might be the more expensive fungi, especially truffles, but only if you illegally sold them to restaurants – which practice is a problem in woods round London at the moment.) The particular argument I have in mind is to be found in one of the best selling economics textbooks of all time, Kenneth Boulding’s Economic Analysis (1941). Using a version of the theory of comparative advantage Boulding demonstrates that the doctor should not do his own gardening because he, the gardener, and the general welfare all benefit if he pays a gardener to tend his garden. The argument is about gardening, but it clearly extends to foraging. Actually, whenever I came across this argument as an actual prescription – which was usually in the USA – I would normally ask why it was not extended to hiring a prostitute or gigolo to make love to one’s spouse.

Because there are, of course, many other kinds of theory that can be brought to bear on the phenomenon of foraging. In particular there are varieties of the hunter-gatherer hypothesis. This says that as human beings spent possibly as much as two million years living by hunting and gathering and we have only been farming for around ten thousand years our skills and satisfactions are essentially those of hunter-gatherers. There’s quite a subtle nineteenth century version of this line of in the writings of Ernst Haeckl, inventor of the concept of ecology, but also a rather punchy version provided by Nigel Calder who edited New Scientist from 1962-66. Calder insisted that we must understand ourselves as hunter-gatherers gone wrong and pointed out that if we had evolved to plant things we would have longer arms and not the ones we actually have which extend only to the buttocks and are suitable for picking fruit and handling weapons. Many versions of the hypothesis insist on a fundamental gender distinction: men are hunters and women are gatherers. As it happens I’ve never hunted; I have fished which turns out very well if you have the right ghillie. In any case I think the hypothesis is of a level that is to be borne in mind rather than to be proven or used substantively.

The more answerable and practical question concerns how a forager might persuade a non-forager to take it up. A proper answer would fall into two parts. The first would be gastronomic: I would take them into the Avon valley in late summer where it merges with the Vale of Evesham. This is old orchard country and both ancient and self-set fruit trees abound. You can also find, for example, hops growing in the hedgerows and asparagus growing wild though I have never been there at the right season to try it. I would have charged my potential convert in advance to buy an apple, a pear and a plum from the supermarket and they would compare them with fruit picked and eaten in the same motion. Not that there is any comparison. And that is one of the gastronomic delights of foraging – the plum from the valley, the figs in the mountains or the bilberries eaten on the moor on a sunny day, all, perhaps, to complement your picnic. At the other end of the spectrum are the joys of preservation which include the granddaughter who drops in for tea tossing out the remark that the August ’22 bramble and apple is probably the best jam she’s ever tasted or the more senior relatives cooing over the 12-year-old sloe gin you have discovered in the cellar. It is brilliantly smooth and complex in flavour, but also unique, not one of hundreds in the supermarket.

Finally there is the spiritual dimension of foraging. This is a combination of a sense of freedom and a relation to the land. To forage you don’t need to be picked for any team, you don’t need the approval of your boss or publisher, you don’t need a contract . . . What you do need is an ability to read the seasons and the land so you are not just gawping at it like a rambler, but reading it and understanding it and benefiting from it. These skills may or may not descend from the way your ancestors spent a couple of million years. Who knows?

Lincoln Allison March 2023