Recently I was awarded a research bursary by New Midland Group to undertake a period of “researching traditional and contemporary medicinal, nutritional and practical uses of abundant (non)native and invasive species of plant life” around the grounds of DARP (Derbyshire Artist Residency Program), where I’m currently living and working.
This is the first text I’d like to share: aiming to ground my wider environmental practice in historical class struggle, radical self-education and chaotic multispecies realities – and pose questions for my future research.
It’s an expansion on a text I wrote in National Food Service London’s Community Cooks’ Handbook that I co-edited and designed earlier this year with Will Dorman and Beth Martin. The section is called “The Commons and Connection to Wild Food”, and can be found on p39 of this pdf.
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29 October 2021
Conservatism in our ever-shrinking commons
Our everyday interactions and movements with nature in the city are carefully monitored and cordoned by a litany of (in)tangible agents: pathways, fences, cctv, glyphosate, social code, class oppression. Within itself, the term ‘nature’ is a linguistic boundary designed to separate humans from the earth. The delineation between public and private land, in British towns and cities alike, is often purposefully blurred, with parks and greenspaces being among the most pertinent examples, bringing to the forefront questions of a relationship with something we are part of mediated by bodies that compartmentalise all aspects of our existence. Who do the spaces of ‘nature’ belong to if we pay taxes towards their upkeep but are so frequently gated out? What is the motivation behind councils pretending a patch of grass is in shared ownership when it legally is not? Why are some demographics of visitors tolerated and others not?
Ever since rural peasants were forcibly bought out of, or ejected from, their own land to create enclosures for countryside landlords, and forced to emigrate to the rapidly industrialising city in the 1600s, the shrinking of common spaces in the UK has followed as a direct result of increased private ownership facilitated by ruling classes and their governmental coalition. Moreover, in symbolic logic, the institutional ‘protection’ of dedicated greenspace has prevented us from reforming a deeper connection with more-than-human lifeforms: physical barriers to ‘nature’ spiritually and physically remove us from wild plants while pertaining to construct a language of conservation.
The political and emotional work of pushing back on these restrictions in the UK has historically been taken on by the demographics directly targeted by systemic oppression. In her essay On Watermelons, featured in the brilliant collection “Strangers: Essays on the Human and NonHuman”, Rebecca Tamás details The Diggers’ –a group of religious and social dissidents self-organising in 1640s– aims of reclaiming privatised land to -
“create a form of Christian proto-communism: where wage labour, class hierarchy, economic inequality, the enclosure of common lands which threw peasants into destitution, private property and landowner power, became things of the past.”
Small acts of rebellion, rather than outsized systemic protesting, were very effective in both their capacity to be carried out easily, and to confuse and intrigue adjacent campaigns groups, journalists and landlords. Working within manageable resources and using methods that were part of their everyday lives almost seemed too obvious, but were exponentially received, as Simon Fairlie describes in his article “A Short History of Enclosure in Britain” on The Land Magazine:
It is slightly surprising that the matter of 50 or so idealists planting carrots on a bit of wasteland and proclaiming that the earth was a "Common Treasury" should have attracted so much attention, both from the authorities at the time, and from subsequent historians and campaigners.
As a direct result of people being excoriated from their land, the gradual loss of traditional ecological practice and knowledge, and a modern, urban reliance on consumerist habits and institutional markets, has blinded the collective conscience to taking matters into their own hands, self-organising around horticulture, and the availability of free, delicious, nutritional, readily-available wild food all year round. The simple acts of picking, growing or preserving one’s own food are convincingly radical acts within the context of an overwhelmingly bureaucratic landscape of privatisation and class struggle.
Perhaps we might notice the correlation between the systematic eviction of people from their land and loss of knowledge of wild food or the correlation between the forced migration of bodies into the cities and the increased dependence on private markets for sustenance. The formula is apparent over the world in violent colonialism, the pattern is also on our doorstep.
Tamás goes on to quote Gerard Winstanley (co-founder of The Diggers) in his 1649 book The New Law of Righteousness:
Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud me to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children?
Other small acts of rebellion, in the spirit of The Diggers, carry on today. Much to the dismay of landlords and tories everywhere, mass trespass events occur regularly among strong rambling communities, newly emboldened by middle-class soft-left eco-warriors. For example this year XR Derby organised a walk on Saturday 24 April, the anniversary of the Kinder Scout trespass in Derbyshire in 1932. Tim Bonner, of the Countryside Alliance, called the action ‘blatant anarchism’.
4 November 2021
Green police
Last autumn, I walked to my local park to scavenge some wild food (for meals, ferments, medicines) and while collecting some tri-corner leek, a mostly-unknown relative of wild garlic, I was approached by a White middle-aged man carrying a bulging supermarket bag. Instantly, I assumed he might be inquisitive as to my finds. But without invitation, he said species I was picking was rare (sharing the Latin, Allium triquetrum) and advised I shouldn’t be harvesting it.
I wondered what his expectation for the exchange was. Having been told the day before by friend and expert forager Chris aka Spores For Thought that it was categorised in the band of most invasive species along with dandelion and nettle, I politely corrected him and asked him why it was so bothersome? He became flustered; I can’t remember what he said because it didn’t make sense and I zoned out.
Being policed on wild food by someone with no depth of knowledge was like being given a lecture on craft beer by someone that only drinks pale ale. I continued my counter, asking him to compare the responsible picking of wild, free, invasive, delicious plants to the plastic-wrapped, pesticide-sprayed, carbon-expensive, imported purchases in his bag (of course, this was a total guess but I was feeling sassy). Why was he overlooking this incredible resource in favour of giving his money to an institution that perpetuates exploitative labour and monocultural traps? He was looking quite defeated. As a result of his own insecurity, he ended up publicly condemning a legal activity carried out by a stranger because he lacked the conviction to do it himself.
The power dynamic here switched up when I questioned his motives and learned conformity. As a young, White, able-bodied man, I am very privileged to move around the city as I please, frictionlessly, and I was prepared to deflect this person’s critique back onto him without the threat of becoming embroiled in drama or conflict. The architecture and laws of public greenspaces were designed by, for and with people like me, and are therefore inherently misogynist, racist and ableist, in other words supremacist. How can it be that within publicly accessible private greenspaces, one of the last bastions of free movement and expression in the city, dominant White bodies are happy to thrust unwritten and often incorrect interpretations of the law upon other citizens?
We know that this retort I demonstrated is not a safe option for everyone. Non-white bodies are criminalised for the same actions a white body would be unchallenged. Last year, Christian Cooper, a Black birder walking through Central Park in New York, politely asked a White woman to put her dog on a lead (a written law). Whilst being filmed by Cooper on his phone as a means of documentation and pre-emptive self-protection, the woman, who was dragging and choking her dog by the collar, called the police and confidently claimed “an African American man is threatening my life”. Footage clearly proves nothing of the sort, yet the violence in this accusation lies with her self-inferred status as a victim, immediately endangering Cooper’s life should the authorities turn up and believe her. In this way, weaponising her own Whiteness to entrap a Black man is a painful example of the unwritten social code adhered to in greenspaces that includes some and expunges others, and the consequences could easily have been fatal.
We need to ensure that as denizens and park peers that all members of our community are safe to use these public spaces without being approached, intimidated or persecuted. Whether birding, collecting wild food or scavenging consumer leftovers, it’s sure as hell no-one else’s business unless it’s directly affecting them.
7 November 2021
Upturn in trend
Currently in this country, ‘foraging’ – widely understood as spending time outside collecting wild food – is having a minor resurgence, which I believe eventually has potential to positively impact our diets and decrease dependence on unsustainable global food chains. What is currently appearing in contemporary culture as a hot trend (mushroom hunting in tweed, people obsessing over wild garlic) is a survival skill most undomesticated animals are born with, and many Europeans are taught from an early age; they search for, harvest and eat vegetation in a way that maintains hyperlocal ecological balance and multispecies harmony. This could be through repeated removal of invasive, non-native plants, the trimming / nipping out of valuable species to encourage growth, or partly digesting hardy plants for the benefit of other herbivores. (It’s interesting to note here that Western permaculture thinking –a human design for natural systems deeply influenced by Indigenous Knowledge– include these types of passive maintenance methodologies.)
I have my own conflictions over the ‘extreme leisuring’ of activities like foraging, hiking, climbing, which can and have become highly aestheticised (and therefore gatekept) by city folk. In 2019 I led probably a dozen free-or-pay-what-you-can wildflower walks and edible rambles, so could be partly to blame for the uptick in £70 “foraging masterclasses” I’ve seen advertised in Peckham coffee shops. This aggressive search for quick-fix outdoor pastimes is linked not only to the capital-induced over-professionalisation of all hobbies that supports niche supply, but also the failure of consumers to decouple their competitive flair from even the most banal of activities. Learning about wild food is far from banal, but the eager know-it-all attendee will likely forego listening and observing to prove their own intellect to anyone who will listen.
As members of a society indoctrinated with a consumer mindset –meaning the premier mode of exchange is of money for goods or services– our acquisition of knowledge follows the same rules. The neoliberalisation of our universities and their clear function of Businesses Delivering an Educational Product to its Paying Customers has helped frame our post-institutional interactions within a simple transference of dosh for stuff to improve our lives. Our addiction to high-consumption lifestyle has been masterfully curated by smooth transactional reality that obfuscates labour and material extraction.
Those who are time poor and money rich tend to expect rapid or ‘efficient’ outcomes to their pastimes, to ensure they are getting a good return on their temporal or financial or experiential investment and can attract a speedy neurological reward. A fast existence leaves little time for inefficient activities like being. Guy Debord making his case for aimless urban walking in 1957 was inspiring to many, it might now seem impossible or drab in the eyes of the modern urbanite:
http://topologicalmedialab.net/xinwei/classes/readings/Debord,Guy/DebordTheoryOfTheDerive.pdf
What about leaving the city for a day? Guy Debord again: “Wandering in open country is naturally depressing, and the interventions of chance are poorer there than anywhere else.”
10 November 2021
Diet Decarbonisation
Before picking or eating a single leaf or flower, a slow practice of looking may involve frequent visits to the same patches across the entire year – a particular tree, river bank, heath, hidden verge. In this way –dedicating a daily / weekly / monthly recce– we become familiar with diverse examples of hyper-specific terrain in our neighbourhood throughout random weathers and incidents. So, falling into the beautiful swoop of season change constructs a framework within which we can encounter the germination, succession and proliferation of wild plants.
In addition to self-seeders and animal couriers, urban greenspaces benefit from human traffic as another potential transport stream, with seeds being shaken off clothes or launched from a shoe’s grip.
Introducing even a small amount of wild foods into our daily intake can be incredibly healthy, many common herbs provide roughage, minerals and vitamins that simply do not occur in domesticated or industrial crops. For example, dandelions notably contain vitamins A, C and K, while nettles are a known source of calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium and sodium.
The huge environmental impact that eating invasive plants is also criminally underappreciated: how much carbon, labour, electricity and plastic would it save if we were to swap spinach, grown in greenhouses in Portugal and flown in on refrigerated planes only to wilt and release methane into a single-use bag after two days, with nutrient-dense perennials and easy-to-learn invasive species like dandelions, mallow, sow thistle, sorrel, lamb’s-tongue plantain, burdock, that grow directly out of the ground in most soil types across the UK?
Learning to live with, in, amongst, and for wild vegetation, especially by harvesting seasonally and responsibly, is a significant basis for developing a more profound understanding of the herbaceous lifeforms that support us. I’ve been thinking about how my ongoing obsession with Donna Haraway’s “more-than-humans”, her ‘critters’, has spilled out from the confines of artistic experimentation and into everyday living practices:
Frequent bouts of enforced outdoor slowness to destress or defragment
Unplanned dérives and off-plan jaunts
Pre-arranged foraging walks with friends
Volunteering on a local organic farm
Attempting to grow my own food
Building and maintaining a wormery
Buying binoculars to birdwatch in the playground
Composting in my garden
Solidifying small interspecies encounters, developing methodologies to observe, non-verbally communicate, and co-create that require zero externalities. Tapping into existing animal rhythms, organic undulations.
Through increased sensitivity to natural time, and purposeful divorce from my own toxic relationship with industrial time, I have arrived at some interesting moments. Each autumn for the last few years, enhanced by my increased seasonal intimacy, I have noticed that our unique British climate generates a period of lush vegetal growth that I’ve come to call “Second Spring”. Once the hot, dry (yeah, right) summer ends, we slide into cooler patches of atmospheric temperature while the earth slowly gives up the warmth it’s been storing for past months. The sun still blesses the ground with occasional strong light, it’s job made easier by the lack of leaves on trees.
Some pointers for harvesting wild food
It’s necessary to consider carefully where you look, as many obvious places where edibles grow should be avoided. Never forage next to roads, paths or fences as these will be heavily polluted or soiled. Try going off-piste instead.
Pick above the knee to avoid animal pee!
As I mentioned earlier, if you really want to become knowledgeable about plant friends you should try and frequently spend slow time outdoors observing without action. Checking in on some familiar spots over the course of weeks and months will help understand organic lifecycles and patterns.
Identifying wild plants can be a risky business. Many edible and poisonous look-a-likes belong to the same family, or are almost identical, so you should never eat anything unless you’re 100% sure you have correctly named it. Books, apps, internet forums, or an experienced guide can all help.
For this reason, avoid the Apiaceae family (carrot) as there are some killers!
Pick responsibly. Never uproot an entire plant or harvest all the leaves from one stem. This will prevent it from coming back and damage the ecosystem. Collect a few elements from each plant and only take what you need.
Be mindful where you are stepping – while heading through the undergrowth, avoid stepping on fragile lifeforms, especially flowers and mushrooms. Having said this, groundcover plants like grasses and ivy are extremely durable.
A good place to jump off would be Lamiaceae – the family that contains mint, dead-nettle, sage – as it has no poisonous members. Lots of interesting aromatics here for flavouring teas, syrups, salads!
The Brassicacae (or Cruciferae) family contains no toxic species, and plenty of recognisable, resilient, iron-rich greens like rocket, mustard, kale – all related to broccoli and cauliflower.
Check out the Asteraceae family, which contains daisy, dandelion, sow thistle and many other distinguishable plants whose leaves and rosettes are abundant, tasty and have excellent digestive properties.