Can man live on wild food alone? A one year experiment in self-sustenance…

Foraging – what’s all the fuss about? What exactly is it anyway? Who does it and why? I’m one of those clueless fools who thinks that answers can be found in books, so indulge me for a second while I forage about in my Chambers English Dictionary:

Forage: n. fodder, or food for horses and cattle; provisions; the act of foraging; v. intr. to go about and forcibly carry off food for horses and cattle; to rummage about for what one wants; v. tr. to plunder.

Mmm... I’d certainly never plunder. Foraging isn’t about detrimentally exploiting the environment; as far as I’m concerned it has more to do with establishing relationships of sustainable and interactive responsiveness within it, relations based upon respect and appreciation. Besides, I don’t have a horse.

In actual fact, before becoming consciously aware that what I did was foraging, I had considered the concept as being applicable only to the animal kingdom – a term focusing the research activities of behavioural ecologists – or if it had any bearing on the human world at all, as a word used by anthropologists to describe the food acquisition methods of our early hominid, Stone...

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