Using quantitative and qualitative data gathered through a series of
questionnaires, this Survey has profiled the modern forager and the wild foods that they are currently gathering. It has explored the perceptions of the legal relationship between their activities and the owners of the land on which they forage. Finally, it has opened the discussion as to the motivations of the modern forager in venturing out into the countryside to harvest wild foods. This Survey, though not necessarily generalizable to the entire population of England, has nevertheless provided insight into the foraging environment that exists in England today. These findings are robust, novel and relevant and provide the foundation for considerable additional research.
5.7.1 Who Is Picking and What Are They Gathering?
Many people in England do still gather blackberries and sloes from time to time, but less than half of the actively foraging respondents gathered anything else. This finding has wider implications with respect to our changing relationship with the land upon which we live, but should be followed up with an even larger survey conducted at a variety of venues. Regardless, at minimum, it indicates a wholesale loss of general knowledge as to the location and use of foods that were once a core part of our diet. Those out foraging today are likely to be middle aged; female and highly educated and foraging efforts are generally confined to a few very well known plants, fruits or nuts. This finding corroborates a profile derived from a survey of foragers in Scotland, but the implications of this need further elaboration. For instance, what are the reasons for the relative lack
171 of foraging by younger individuals? By men? What are the key reasons for a narrowing in the variety of foraged foods?
Foragers have selected roughly 73 wild foods, with the most popularly gathered wild foods including: blackberries, elderberries, field mushrooms, sweet chestnuts, elderflowers, sloes, hazelnuts, puffballs, nettles, ramsons, wild
strawberries and mints. This selection differs from that obtained through the Scottish survey and the reasons for this should be explored further. Also, it would be interesting to track the rise in popularity of books and television programmes and to correlate the results with the variety of foods that are being gathered to see what impact this novel source of information has upon modern foraging behaviours.
The survey uncovered that foragers tend to specialize somewhat in the category of wild food that they gather. Fruit picking is the most popular activity of foragers, yet fruit pickers tend to pick little else. Likewise, those picking nuts tend to stick to nuts, those picking fungi to fungi. The potential reasons for this are interesting, but are not obvious without additional research. It may be due to the scope of knowledge, the proximity of food sources or seasonality, but this will require additional research.
5.7.2 What is The Nature of the Modern Foraging Environment?
Most foragers in England are uncertain or unconcerned as to the laws that govern their right to be on land for the purposes of foraging. This finding
provides empirical support one of the findings of Chapter Four: that foragers view wild foods as free for them to gather. Thus Lee and Garikipati’s (2011)
172 classification of foraged plants as “inherently public property” seems justified. An additional finding supports Ostrom’s theory that systems of self-organisation emerge in such situations: whilst there is a pervasive ignorance of specific laws, there appears to be an adherence to certain cultural rules or norms. Thus, harvesters may view the process as free and unfettered by laws, but they nevertheless seem to ascribe to some ill-defined form of self-policing, which merits further exploration.
A surprising -and potentially related - finding of the Survey is that there is a very strong correlation between an individuals’ knowledge of the law and the variety of wild foods that they harvest. It seems that there is a subset of
individuals who are well versed in the law and who forage widely. Further
research is required, as from the data it does not appear that this correlation is in any way connected with the individuals’ jobs or vocations and not reliably
connected to age or educational attainment. Conservation legislation expressly removes some plants form the pool of inherently public property and yet these acts appear often to be ignored. This raises important issues for conservation and land management. If foragers treat all wild foods as inherent public property, regardless of the legal strictures, what recourse do conservationists have,
particularly where enforcement is difficult? One place may be with the voluntary codes produced by interested bodies and increasingly referred to by those conferring information about foraging for wild foods. An area for future research will be to further explore forager’s attitudes towards and reference to these voluntary codes.
173 Many foragers surveyed, as in the past, learned where to pick through “local knowledge” or “knowing the area well” as a result of passing foods whilst on walks. Yet, there appears to be surprisingly little inter-generational transfer of knowledge or foraging traditions. Thus, many foragers today are garnering their understanding of wild plant foods from books, the Internet and television and this appears to be supplanting the hands-on inter-generational flow of knowledge of the past. This has implications for the dissemination of many types of
knowledge, including what and where to forage, but also how to conserve and manage the land upon which the foraged plants grow and is an area that is ripe for additional research.
Finally, people clearly still are gathering wild plants and yet they rarely appear to do so purely for sustenance. Rather, as proposed after the application of optimal foraging theory to the modern forager, there is a complex mix of
physical, psychological, social and cultural drivers. Foraging is done today for an array of reasons encompassing physical, psychological, social, cultural, and even quasi-political. These reasons need to be unpacked and this is one of the
174 CHAPTER SIX: THE BILBERRY - A LENS FOR EXAMINING THE
CHANGING RELEVANCE OF WILD FOODS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE FORAGING ENVIRONMENT
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
-John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911, p. 110.