Back to Nature
The Wilderness Cure: Ancient Wisdom in a Modern World
Mo Wilde (Simon & Schuster, £16.99)
ON November 27, 2020, Mo Wilde, a herbalist, forager, Lyme disease specialist and member of the Linnean Society, decided to eat only ‘wild’ food for a year. Fortunately, she lives in West Lothian, with access to sea and rivers, stalker and wine-making friends and, albeit technically not wild produce, her own hens’ eggs.
Although ‘90% vegetarian’, she quickly realises that she won’t survive the winter without eating some meat (hare and pheasant casseroles, squirrel meatballs), shrewdly observing that, in the natural world, ‘entire food groups go in and out of season’ and that, long before supermarkets, humans—as natural omnivores—could only survive with a varied diet. Veganism in Scotland is, the author points out, only genuinely possible year round with imports.
She is happy to eat culled deer—shot wildfowl less so, however
