With the proliferation of tour groups, apps, and societies dedicated to foraging, it seems that interest in nature is on the rise among young people. Websites like Wild Foods UK are receiving increasing numbers of visitors and Youtube channels such as UK Wildcrafts and Forage for Knowledge have accumulated tens of thousands of subscribers. Whilst some of the digital content surrounding foraging has been subsumed by the more conspiratorial side of “healthtok” (think: “this is what they don’t want you to know”), much of it remains part of an enthusiastic and genuinely informative movement, helping to spread awareness and information on how to safely pick mushrooms and other wild foods. Yet of course, supply does not come without demand – and the demand for democratised foraging content has more problematic roots.
First is the issue of urbanisation. As cities have expanded, our ties to nature have been severed, and the little access to green space we do have is often of the well-mowed lawn variety. Working and living via screens and among the noise of city life, we find the quiet and the variety of a forest acquires an almost mythic appeal. We associate the ‘wild’ with repose, stress reduction, and sanctuary, and we posit it as the solution to all our corporate woes. This attitude is nothing new, and in many cases, it oversimplifies the line between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’. Of course, city life isn’t something to be absolutely spurned, but disconnection from flowers, forests and fungi is perpetuated by urban life, and is an important reason behind the rise of foraging.
Linked to urbanisation is the issue of land ownership. According to Guy Shrubsole’s 2019 book Who Owns England?, half of England’s land is owned by less than one per cent of its population. This means that for many, the conventional ways of engaging with nature (growing crops and gardening) are not practicable. Moreover, with so much controlled by the hands of so few, mismanagement (or non-management) proliferates; notwithstanding this, the land remains gatekept, meaning that those who do not own land cannot engage with nature via the more reciprocal and long-term processes of gardening and rewilding. Whilst foraging obviates the need to own land –it can be carried out in any public space which is not protected by environmental laws– it is often a contingent and one-way process: one identifies a plant or fungus and takes it out of the ground. This is not to diminish the value of spore-spreading (picking a mushroom and leaving it in a different place to help it grow in a new area), but rather to highlight the paucity of access many people have to wild land. The growth of the foraging community is a wonderful development, yet it is also a sign of deeply unequal access to land.
Illustration by Hannah Shen