Organic, natural and wild food has been getting more and more popular and known to improve your wellbeing, as top chefs are using ingredients foraged from our woods and hedgerows. Finding foods in the woods is much cheaper than buying it in the supermarket; however there could be a price to pay after all.
If you don’t know much about mushrooms and you pick the wrong type, they could make you seriously ill or even kill you. There are special courses that you can go on in order to learn where to find wild food, what’s good to eat and what’s not if you are interested in foraging for edible treats in the countryside, but the rule is: if you don’t know what it is, don’t eat it.
According to Marcus Harrison, who runs a wild food school in Cornwall, teaches courses and has written books about foraging ‘Many foods have fallen out of favour like dandelion, wild garlic and chickweed’ but there’s a vast array of wild food just waiting to be picked such as berries, acorns, cobnuts and mugwort. However, buying a book to do it yourself or getting an iPhone app with pictures and descriptions to help you forage and identify plants is ‘only half the story’ says Harrison, as he recommends hands-on identification courses with someone who knows exactly what they are doing.
The mushroom is one of the hardest foods to correctly identify, and incredibly dangerous. The Health Protection Agency’s poisons experts urge that you take extra care when foraging for mushrooms, as with all wild foods, because scores of people need medical attention every year due to eating toxic varieties of mushroom that they have picked themselves. Some varieties of mushroom which grow wild in the UK are so toxic that they can prove fatal if eaten, and cooking does not generally destroy these toxins.
In 2011 the National Poisons Information Service (NPIS), which is contacted by frontline medics who need expert assistance when dealing with poisonings, was consulted for advice on treating more than 120 mushroom-related poisonings, 40 of which being moderate to severe cases. The director of the Cardiff NPIS unit, Dr John Thompson says ‘it is not always easy, even for people with experience, to differentiate between toxic and non-toxic species.’ Therefore, you need to have a great deal of training to ensure your wellness when foraging.
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