Taking away daily basics certainly made Tyler get creative. “I might have thought before that was too strong-tasting, but now I think it’s really nice.”įorager Courtney Tyler at work. The only cooking fat she had was venison tallow, fat from around venison kidneys that had been rendered down for cooking with. She knew there weren’t going to be any easy fixes, “you can’t use onions or garlic or olive oil or milk or cheese or butter, you know you have to become really creative”. She foraged for extra stores of nuts and leaves and flowers to dry, and she swapped, bartered and was gifted harder-to-come-by wild foods such as venison, duck and fish, making biltong from duck and jerky from wild salmon. She’s a professional wild food and fungi forager and educator based in Wicklow, so there’s already an excellent knowledge base along with a well-stocked store cupboard, and I assume there was already plenty of wild food in her diet? “Some, but to be honest, a lot of them might have sat at the back of the shelves.”īefore she began she raided her cupboards and found forgotten stashes of nuts, dried berries and preserves she could use. I didn’t ask for help on social because I wouldn’t have survivedĪdmittedly, Tyler embarked on the challenge with more of an advantage than you or I probably would. “It was simply anything that could be foraged from the wild or that we had previously stored from other seasons.” She relied solely on these foods, there were no cheat days, no just-in-case supermarket staples (except for one jar each of local honey), or even eating anything you’ve grown yourself. “We were living a hunter and gatherer lifestyle, so there’s no cultivation and no cultivated food,” she says. Tyler is one of 26 project participants in the UK and Ireland who have lived on wild food, some for one month, and others for three months. Tyler is part of a study called the Wildbiome Project, the brainchild of the aptly named Monica Wilde, who spent a year living off foraged food in Scotland and noticed a profound improvement in her gut microbiome and health and has now set up the study to delve deeper into her theories. Fancy eating a breakfast of acorns and dandelion with bramble tip tea or a lunch of foraged greens, duck jerky and some seaweed jelly? It may read like a menu from a hot new restaurant opening, but is actually a snapshot of foods Courtney Tyler ate during May when she embarked on a month of eating only wild food.
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