Where the wildings are

Henry Thoreau was its great 19th-century champion, in wartime it was seen as patriotic and it enjoyed a revival during the hippy era - now, in our age of ecological awareness, gathering wild food is fashionable again. Richard Mabey, author of the 1970s cult book Food for Free, explores the literary and social roots of foraging

The omens are promising. Drought-baked earth, stressed roots, torrents of rain, an early whiff of autumn - the same conditions that brought about that annus mirabilis of wild fungi in 1976. It was a fruiting that permanently dented our ancient suspicion about eating the things, to the extent that, in our town, entrepreneurial schoolkids were hawking bags of horse mushrooms door to door. Thirty years on the foragers will be out again this autumn, and not just for fungi. If you want a field-guide to their curious and atavistic behaviour, read Gary Alan Fine's Morel Tales (1998), an anthropological study of "the culture of mushrooming" in the United States.

The tales are edgy, almost surreal at times, but their combination of urban sophistication and backwoods yearning are instantly recognisable in our own foraging culture. There is the trace of gung-ho competitiveness (whose stinkhorn is biggest?). There is the ecstasy of discovery: "Suddenly it is there in the shadows. A single, exquisite morel ... stands by itself, boldly etched against the edge of the orchard. Awestruck at first, I am afraid to remove it. Perhaps it is the last morel in the world". An insightful Minnesota man talks about the quality of "gatheredness" that makes wild foods taste different from shop-bought ones. And a forager mistakes a child's plastic ball for a puffball, and is still chuffed by his hunter-gatherer's sharpness: "it looked exactly like the real thing."

Foraging in Britain has a touch more sophistication, and it's going through one of its periodic hey-days. At least two television series are in preparation. Local authorities are laying on guided forays in their country parks. Star restaurants are offering customers the chance to go feral with bonnes bouches like nettle froth and rowan sorbet. And this summer, supplies of citric acid (kept under the counter in most chemists) ran dry because of a national craze for making elderflower cordial, in which it's a crucial ingredient.

Most telling maybe has been the change in the fortunes of that delectable seashore succulent, marsh samphire. In the sixties it was an arcane, liminal food, a "poor man's asparagus". In 1981 it was served at Charles and Diana's wedding breakfast, gathered fresh from the Crown's own marshes at Sandringham. Now (imported from Brittany) it's a widespread garnish for restaurant fish, an indigenous seaside holiday souvenir, sold by the bag to those who don't want to get their own legs mud-plastered, and along the north Norfolk coast, an occasional bar snack, lightly vinegared in bowls next to the crisps and pickled onions.

All of which raises the question, why? Why should 21st-century eaters-out, with easy access to most of the taste sensations on the planet, choose to browse about like Palaeolithics, or primates? They're opting for the most part for inconvenience food, for bramble-scrabbling, mud-larking, tree-climbing. For the uncomfortable business of peeling horseradish and de-husking chestnuts. For the sour, the insect-ridden, and for the historic duty of eating the frankly rank ground elder, just because it was brought here as "a pot herb" two millennia ago. A far cry from the duty that Edward Hyams, doyen of the domestication of plants, spelt out - "to leave the fruits of the earth fine than he found them." (Strawberry Cultivation, 1943)

When I made my own contribution to the literature of foraging with Food for Free (1972), I was rather earnest, not to say pious, in my justifications. I lamented our remoteness from the origins of our food, our conservatism with ingredients, our wastefulness. I talked about a vanishing local knowledge of wildings, the root source of all our cultivated vegetables. And I talked excitedly about a lost world of exotic scent and flavour, about how the hunt sharpened your senses, your connection with the natural world ("search inside hazel bushes for the nuts, as well as working round them, and scan them with the sun behind you from the inside, so you can glimpse the nuts against the light".)

But a snapshot from the 70s reveals another agenda. I'm sitting cross-legged on the lawn in a kaftan, and cradling, with something of a snigger, an immense puffball. This wasn't tapping into some ancient rural heritage. This was counter-culture stuff, hedge-wise, cheeky, a poke in the eye for domesticity as much as domestication. It was also a literary pose, the framing of an imaginative quest as much as a bit of folk-lore revivalism. I went about it like a scavenger, raking through the diarist John Evelyn's waspish vegetarian tract, Acetaria, A Discourse of Sallets (1699), through learned papers on the stomach contents of mummified neolithic corpses, through Eric Linklater's novel Poet's Pub, for an improbable medieval recipe for a roast crab-apple and beer winter cup.

The New Foraging had always had literary roots. One of the first accounts of local edibles, from a writer who'd tried them himself, came from Norfolk. Lilly's Wigg's Esculent Plants, (c 1790) is a handwritten manuscript in the British Museum. The author was from Great Yarmouth, and worked, in turn, as a shoemaker, schoolmaster and bank clerk, and he set out early the urban, artisan middle-class profile of the forager. Much of the wild food writing of the 19th century was in this enthusiastically participant, folk-lore collector's mould. The fungus foray was pioneered by the Woolhope Field Club in Herefordshire, a band of leisure-rich amateurs who were on the cutting edge of Victorian natural history. Their Proceedings for the autumn of 1869 describes a fungus-gathering expedition by 35 of their members (nine of them vicars). They ranged around the local landscape by carriage, stopping off at likely hunting grounds, measuring fairy-rings, and gathering an extraordinary hoard of wild mushrooms: milk-caps, ceps, chanterelles, witch's butter, hedeghog fungi. The day ended in the Green Dragon in Hereford, with the exhibits strewn out on the pub tables, and a late lunch of the day's best trophies: shaggy parasol on toast, fried giant puffballs, and fairy-ring champignons in white sauce. The puffballs especially were voted a great success, as was the day itself.

In the 1930s, a ruralist, romantic note entered wild food writing. Florence White (founder of the English Folk Cookery Association) described her collection of recipes as an "intriguing" literary hobby, that "proved full of unexpected interests. It brought the country into the town house or flat." In her Flowers as Food (1934) she encouraged her readers to experiment by making "small quantities of flower syrups, vinegars, herb-teas, wines, confectionery etc".

Dorothy Hartley, a redoubtable Daily Mail journalist, toured the countryside by bike, sleeping in ditches and collecting traditional recipes. Her quirky masterpiece, Food in England, wasn't published till 1954, but is stuffed with wild snippets: the Kentish hop-pickers way of cooking hop-trimmings; an ethereal blackberry junket made simply by leaving the strained juice in a warm, dark room; and, anticipating that breathless American paean to morels, a eulogy to chanterelles, "sometimes clustered so close that they look like a torn golden shawl dropped down among the dead leaves".

The patriotic tone of these books found its moment during the privations of the second world war, when they were joined by Vicomte de Mauduit's splendidly titled broadside, They Can't Ration These, (1940) and by the Ministry of Food's own pamphlet, Hedgerow Harvest (1943), which moved the Home Front out into the wild, with recipes for the obligatory rose-hip syrup, and sloe and marrow jam: "if possible crack some of the stones and add to the preserve before boiling to give a nutty flavour". An epicurean touch, but prefaced by the first strictures about picking etiquette: "None of this harvest should be wasted, but be exceedingly careful how you gather it in ... don't injure the bushes or trees. When you pick mushrooms, cut the stalks neatly with a knife, leaving the roots in the ground."

When the foraging habit resurfaced in the 1970s, it was among a very mixed constituency of hippies, supermarket refugees, organic foodies and nostalgic countryphiles, and quite soon two separate, though far from exclusive, factions emerged: those whose interest in wild food was principally about the food, and those who were enthralled by the wild.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's books and TV programmes, such as A Cook on the Wild Side (1997), have made him the guru of the food faction (though his enthusiasm for fried human placenta might have bracketed him on the other side). But the absorption of wild food by conventional - and commercial - food cultures was already under way. Elderflower gathering - and eventually growing the bushes in "elder orchards" - became big business in the Cotswolds. So did the garnering of Argyllshire heather tops for the honey-scented ale sold as "leann fraoch" from Bruce Williams's Glasgow brewery. And in tune with the increasing coachloads of French mushroomers scouring the Sussex woods, the United Kingdom became a net exporter of wild fungi.

But ominously, an attempt in the 1980s to start an all-wild-food restaurant in Covent Garden foundered from the difficulty of sourcing sufficient raw material. Instead, smart restaurants have begun to copy France's cuisine sauvage by adding little accents of wild things to their miniaturised dishes. The menu at Simon Rogan's L'Enclume in Cumbria reads like a collection of food haiku, spiked with Cumbria's indigenous sproutings: "Poached brill, English mace, wild tree spinach, pickle from then mixed with a bit of now ... Bottled aromas, sweet cicely, passion pipette."

But the poetry - and honest accomplishments - of vernacular weeds have flowered in the humblest of spots. In the small Suffolk village of Milden, named after that neolithic staple vegetable fat-hen (melde in Old English), the council has put up a cast-iron statue commemorating their name plant, in seeming derision of the local farmers, who are forever trying to eradicate it from their sugar-beet fields. In the United States, meanwhile, it was the wild tendency that flourished, with practical but lyrical guides like Euell Gibbons's Stalking the Wild Asparagus (1962), and Alix Kates Shulman's feminist forager's memoir, Drinking the Rain (1995), in which she drops out to a shack on the Maine coast, and comes to terms with middle-age by feeding herself from the shoreline.

For myself, I dithered between the two schools. The nutritional tendency began to seem too dull and correct, and I was terminally alienated by a meeting with a distinguished portrait photographer, about 10 years after Food for Free was published. "Ah yes", he pronounced, eyeing me as if I were an exotic species of turnip, "you're the man that eats weeds. What an interestingly earthy face." But I hadn't the temperament to be a full-blooded back-to-nature survivalist either. Instead I flitted about the hedgerows in my native Chilterns, a curiously down-to-earth aesthete, searching for wilding apples. Hunting for these happenstance fruits, sprung from thrown-away cores and bird droppings, seemed to catch, numinously, all that was exhilarating about foraging: a sharpness of taste, and of spirit, an echo of the vast lost genetic diversity of cultivated edibles, a sense of possibility, of things that happened beyond our ken. I can still recall the trees along my apple elysian way, a stretch of ancient green-lane: a tree sniffed out from 50 yards away, lemon-yellow fruit, scent like quince, too acid and hard to eat raw, but spectacular with roast meat; another with the bitter-sweet effervescence of sherbet; a third with long-pear shaped apples, and a warm smoky flavour behind the sharpness, as if they had already been baked.

Henry Thoreau loved his wildings, and in his essay "Wild Apples" (1859), he writes a wonderful litany of cod botanical sub-species and datelined varieties: "the apple that grows in dells in the woods (Malus sylvestivallis) ... the Partridge Apple; the Truants's Apple (Malus cessatoris), which no boy will ever go by without knocking off some ... the December eating; the Frozen-thawed (Malus gelato-soluta), good only in that state ... the Hedge Apple; the Slug Apple; the Railroad Apple ..." Thoreau understood that quality of "gatheredness", that the circumstances of finding and picking wild food somehow infuses its whole savour.

Foraging came of age in this country in 2004 when the Oxford Food Symposium (www.oxfordsymposium.org.uk) - that annual gathering of erudite foodies - chose "Wild Food" as its theme. And it was a chance for the wild and the food factions to hear each others' points of view. There were papers on "Wild Food in the Talmud" and "Fake leg of Venison: Recipes for Ersatz game", a tasting of "The Feral Oils of Australia".

Caroline Conran gave a key address on her work on south-west French tradition of la ceuillette, the seasonal gathering of wild mushrooms, berries and greens. This is still a useful bounty for the well-off, but no one would pretend it's any longer essential for survival, or commercially important. Rather, Conran suggested in an argument that has resonance with foraging over here, la ceuillette is a ritual rehearsal of ancient rights, a snub to the idea of nature as private property or domesticated pet, a celebration of belonging to one's pays. Many speakers, if sometimes uneasily, echoed the ritual value of foraging. It puts you in touch with your roots, with the very notion of food as a product of natural processes. It sharpens your sense of the seasons, your reading of the landscape. Thoreau, again, was much quoted: "The bitter-sweet of a white-oak acorn which you nibble in a bleak November walk over the tawny earth is more to me than a slice of imported pine-apple."

Thoreau's unfinished manuscript Wild Fruits, from which this sentence comes, wasn't published until 2000, but has become the seminal text for New Foragers. It's a flamboyant celebration of tanginess, of the buffers that agriculture and commerce put between human eaters and the sources of life. In the description of "Going a'Graping" he relishes the difficulties of harvesting wild grapes, the scrambling and crawling and nosing-out: "What is a whole binful that have been plucked to that solitary cluster left dangling inaccessible from some birch far away over the stream in the September air, with all its bloom and freshness." The otherness of the wild. This is the paradox which is inherent in Thoreau's view of nature, and one which all foragers have to ride: is it possible for a civilised human to absorb the wild by searching it out, grasping it, eating it? Or does it in those very acts become domesticated, consumed?

Having a mite of responsibility for the revival of foraging, I said my piece at Oxford too, rather hesitantly, because I've reservations about the whole business now. Such whole-hearted, Thoreau-like relishing of armfuls of the wild might have been acceptable in wildernesses of 19th- century America, and even now in the empty expanses of south-west France. But could a built-up, over-farmed and over-populated country like Britain really sustain foraging as more than a minority habit? Don't we need a kind of foraging ethic, which regulates our leisure whims in keeping with the needs of other organisms in the eco-system? And, just as foraging is a metaphor for a larger connected relationship with nature, mightn't such an ethic have the rough shape for a model of responsible consumption?

As it happens, I've become more of a wayside nibbler than a forager these days, probably out of laziness as much as ecological worthiness. I like serendipitous findings, small wayside gourmet treats. Making do. Lately I've been pleased by having to use fennel flowers in a sauce, from a plant whose green leaves had been shrivelled in the heat; by finding a bough from a roadside damson bush that had been flailed while it was still in fruit - and experiencing the improbable taste of sun-dried English raisins. And still in my rucksack, waiting for a moment of courage, are a handful of thistle galls, wasp-grub-induced swellings on the stem, like miniature kohlrabi. Can I go down this path? Can food?

I've found a phrase to catch that feeling in the fruit aesthete Edward Bunyard's book, The Anatomy of Dessert (1933). Talking of evening meanders through his gooseberry patch, he described the pleasures of "ambulant consumption". "The freedom of the bush should be given to all visitors". The freedom of the bush. What a liberty!

But then, a quite different way at looking at self-discipline, at an etiquette for consumption. Down the lane to our common, there's been a vegetable road-kill. Windthrown cherry-plums, yellow and scarlet, like a painted doll's cheeks, are scattered all over the road. They're rare fruiters here, and almost without thinking, I'm crouched on the tarmac amidst the puddles and trash, stuffing them into my pocket. And suddenly it occurs to me that this is how many of the planet's citizens, of all species, find their food. Opportunistically. Scavenging the surplus. Making do. Somewhere between this variant on the old idea of gleaning and ambulant consumption - between working the margins and working the imagination - might lie the outline of a code for planetary foragers. So just a side serving, please.