Why Forage?

I am going to give you 10 reasons why you should start foraging today. I'm not going to lecture you about the 'self-sufficient' lifestyle adopted recently by so many pseudo middle class hippies, it's not me. I'm primarily a chef, I quite simply love good food and new flavours, but there are a few unexpected perks.

Foraging trip with family and family friends

1. Taste. When you begin to forage, it introduces your taste buds to flavours that you wouldn't otherwise experience. It heightens your senses as without realising it, you engage more that just your mouth when out in the open. Looking, smelling, touching, tasting. But it's even more complex that this. When tasting something for the first time in this context your tend to become far more aware of every single flavour compared to eating something more familiar. 
2. Nutrients. It goes without saying that most of the plants you forage will contain a whole load more nutrients than plants that can be bought in shops. For a start they are not 'artificially' grown and have sprung up in their optimum habitats with plenty of light and water which often means that they are not only far tastier but far more nutritious. There's a reason that a lot of the greens we forage are slightly bitter or stronger tasting than similar farmed veg, Cornell food science professor Rui Hai Liu put it best in a 2004 paper where she explains "the more palatable our fruits and vegetables became...the less advantageous they were for our health." We have intentionally bred out these 'unpleasant' flavours but at the same time we have lost a whole load of goodness.
3. Gets you out of the house. With the busy working lives of most of us in the 21st century, it's all too easy to waste an afternoon laid out horizontally on a sofa after a hard weeks work. We feel like this is our 'reward' when all we're doing in reality is making ourselves more lazy and less aware of the outside world. It's once you step outside that you truly realise where the reward is. It frees you from the constraints of social media, the internet and the media in general where life seems all so hopeless. I promise you that 10 minutes in the sun, truly submerged in the natural world will make you realise how false 90% of our lives are nowadays. 
4. It's completely free. Fact, foraging has saved me from an extremely unhealthy diet in times of poverty. Isn't it disgusting that fast food costs less than fresh fruit and veg? Well it doesn't have to be. I for one am not a huge fan of paying my hard earned money for something that I can get for free, with 10 times the nutrients. This one requires you to be a little less fussy, but you can survive on foraged food as a replacement for your green veggies. I have been so poor at times that fried wild garlic with nettles and butter has been a days worth of nutrients. Not healthy long term and I'm really not into restrictive diets, but it's been a whole lot tastier than a portion of chips. 
5. New and different flavours. Okay so this is pretty much the same thing as taste but there's more to be said about experiencing different flavours. Did you know that the same plants found in different areas sometimes have a completely different taste? 
6. Medicinal uses. I'm not for one second saying to go into your medicine cabinet and throw out all of the 'western medicine' contained within it, but there is a place for herbal medicine too. I will freely admit that using herbal cures for ailments that I could have gone to the doctor for and probably been given a prescription for antibiotics has worked well for me. It's important to know your body and foraging helps to bring you back into contact with not only the natural world, but your own body too.  
7. It brings people together. Okay, I go foraging on my own a lot of the time which is relaxing in a different way, but sharing the experience with others has it's own merits. It's not just the great time you have when you are out walking about and finding plants to forage, but it's the sharing of ideas of what to do with the plants, cooking a meal together and the best bit - sitting down and eating together with a nice bottle of wine. 
8. You don't need to be an expert i.e. it is beginner friendly. People tend to be scared of first time foraging, but as long as you are 100% sure of what it is you are eating, there's not really much more to it. Take nettles, for example- delicious and I don't think there's a single person in England that doesn't know what they look like. Wild garlic is similar and becoming more widely used, the smell of the crushed leaf gives it away. You don't need to be a chef to make the weeds you pick to taste nice either- I'm a great believer in simplicity when it comes to cooking foraged food. It usually packs a whole load of flavour on it's own and doesn't need much added to it.  
9. Foraging has the ability to heal the soul and change your outlook. So this point pretty much covers everything I have mentioned so far, it changes the way you see the natural world around you and it can teach you a more caring approach to your body and soul if you let it. It's so primitive but feeding yourself doesn't need to be a trip to a supermarket. There's a reason why people go fishing or hunting to relax, it's a dormant desire within us as much as foraging is, to nourish ourselves by our own hand. 
10. You will learn something new. Every single time you go out foraging, open your senses and really try and understand the plants around you I guarantee you will learn something. Reading up on plants and learning to identify them will train your mind into a new way of thinking about things and as it becomes second nature to look at the plants around you as food, medicine and possibilities rather than mysterious unknown green things that occur in the countryside and your garden, the process will have already begun.