A woman fed up with inflation and soaring supermarket costs claims to have not spent a single penny on food in one year.
Instead, as a personal challenge to “see if it is possible” to eat wild only, Monica Wilde, foraged all of her meals from her local area.
She went for long walks every week through a five-mile radius of the Scottish countryside – picking mushrooms, salad leaves and berries.
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As for protein, Monica 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 gifted some actual sea salt from friends who fermented vegetables.
The forager estimates to have consumed 300 varieties of vegetables in those 12 months.
But the 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 include 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 – the 61-year-old is sharing tips for how others can save cash by sourcing their own ingredients.
“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,” she told Need To Know.
“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.
“Foraging is something that I’d always been interested in, since I was a kid, because we spent a lot of time outdoors.
“We would cook outside and things like that.
“And then, when I was a young adult, bringing my kids up on my own, money was always short, so I would forage.
“[During my year-long experiment], I spent absolutely no money on food.”
Monica 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.”
Looking to the New Year, Monica suggests several foods that anyone can forage to add to their plates.
She said: “You can easily forage oyster mushrooms and pig nuts.
“Remember to get the landowner’s permission to dig for roots and Alexander’s leaf.
“We had Alexander stems as the vegetable last Christmas and dandelion roots.
“And you can roast them with a little bit of maple syrup to sweeten them up.
“That’s really nice.
“A porcelain fungus soup is also an option.
“For pudding, you could have a buckthorn cheesecake from foraged sea buckthorn berries, which are in season now.”
The best time to forage? Spring.
She said: “The easiest thing to do is to learn from another person and go on a course.
“And there’s lots of people teaching nowadays.
“There’s [even] an organisation called the Association of Foragers [that offers information].
“But you might also be able to learn from somebody else in your community, who was taught by their parents and still remembers.”
Monica first started eating wild full-time in 2020, when she did her year-long challenge.
These days, she will treat herself to a box of organic vegetables once a week and the occasional item from the shop.
But most of her diet remains foraged, depending on the time of year.
The expert forager, who has lived in Scotland since 1995, has even written a book on the topic, called ‘The Wilderness Cure’.
Monica 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.”
