Our Editor in the Field

Kyra Pollitt meets Mo Wilde

Kyra Pollitt

You may know her as Monica Wilde— forager extraordinaire —but if you've been enjoying her first book, The Wilderness Cure (Simon & Schuster, reviewed in our June issue), you'll now feel you know her well enough to call her Mo. I caught up with her on Zoom, just as the whorl of publicity around the impending book launch (23rd June) was beginning to gather real momentum.

The Wilderness Cure documents the year Mo spent surviving entirely on a wild food diet. Back in May, she had very kindly asked her publishers to send a proof copy to Herbology News and when we meet, in June, she has just read our review— the very first review her book has received. I asked her how it felt to be a published author:

Well, I'd been thinking about writing something for years, and the idea came from the question people always ask when I'm teaching foraging, which I've been doing for some seventeen or eighteen years now. People always want to know if you could live just on wild food. So, when Claire Conrad approached me and asked if I'd like to write a book for a publishing house, my answer was "Hell, yes!".

Mo tells me that, although a couple of authors in Canada have documented similar undertakings, the only other book on the shelf in the UK was written by John Lewis-Stempel (The Wild Life, Black Swan, 2010), whose venture was strongly underpinned by his ownership of a large estate from which to gather his sustenance. Mo felt it was time to test out whether this could be done the hard way.

I wonder whether starting the challenge in November was perhaps imposing an unnecessary level of difficulty, and Mo concurs:

I'd originally intended to start the challenge at a different time of year, but that would have meant waiting into the following year and, as we all emerged from the first Covid-19 lockdown, I was so profoundly disappointed in the human species— Gaia couldn't have sent a clearer message, but here was everyone just resuming 'business as usual'. Black Friday was the final straw. I felt I had to do something.

So, if Mo were to take the challenge again, what would she do differently? "Store more nuts!" is her resounding and immediate response. The horror of watching her nut store dwindle as her hunger grew is recalled all too vividly in her facial expression as she talks. "I've been planting nut trees like mad ever since!", she confides. She talks about the ideal diet and about how her vegetarian balance of green vegetables and carbohydrates was disrupted during her wild year, by both the need to seek permissions from landowners to dig roots on their land, and the challenge's preclusion to growing her usual garden vegetables. To be wild and vegan in Scotland, she concludes, one would have to mix the wild vegetables with a partly farmed diet. This would provide the necessary calories from root crops, instead of meat, to get you through the hunger gaps of the Scottish growing year.

From here our conversation turns to what Mo's eating now. I'm keen to know how she transitioned back from such a dramatic diet. "Well," she begins, "I've already put a stone back on!" I have to confess I'm somewhat relieved to hear that, after her venture saw her lose almost five stones in weight. Her diet remains mainly foraged, and she's heading back towards the vegan end of the scale, significantly reducing the amount of fish and meat she found she had to eat to survive, supplementing instead with an organic veg box. She's still eating a little dairy and seems quietly delighted that she can once again enjoy her evening cheese and biscuits— albeit with the vegetarian cheeses she continues to make.

I ask whether the reduction in meat consumption feels better, and whether her gut microbiome has readapted. She reports that, although she sent regular samples to the lab for testing throughout her wild year, she was only told that her gut bacteria had become 'super responsive'. Science was unable to offer any deeper analysis, it seems, because there's no access to a broad population base of people eating a wild food diet in the UK. There's simply nothing to compare her samples to. Mo frowns and recalls a statistic she attributes to environmental campaigner George Monbiot (cf. Regenesis, Allen Lane, 2022), that some ninety per cent of the world's food is managed by four global corporations. Humanity really isn't in a good place, just now.

So, we ponder instead the genesis of some of the physiological benefits she experienced during her wild year. I'm particularly intrigued by the abundance of energy she maintained throughout the year, even as she shed such dramatic amounts of weight. Mo tells me that when she is teaching foraging, she often encourages her students to engage in a little "live juicing in the field", adding freshly picked Cleavers (Galium aparine) or Nettles (Urtica dioica) to something like apple juice. "The effect is almost always commented on". Her theory is that when food is so freshly picked, the enzymes in the plant remain alive at the point of consumption and so are able to pass that life, that energy, to their new hosts.

I ask her what three tips she would pass to those of us who might want to edge more gently towards a wilder diet:

- "Eat one wild food every day." This, Mo explains, will entail getting out into the fresh air, providing vital exercise. It will also keep you connected to the natural world and help to establish a "pattern of gratitude" to the earth. The "absolute benevolence and generosity of nature" was one of the great joys of her wild year.

- "Never buy anything wrapped in plastic." Not only will this help you to avoid the health consequences of wrapping food in hormone-laden petrochemicals, you'll be making an obvious contribution to reducing the consequences of plastic pollution.

- "Ask questions, question the answers, then ask more questions." The situation we find ourselves in is super-complicated, Mo explains, so we should avoid taking anything at face value. She confesses that the original manuscript for her book ran to some 140,000 words. Cutting it down meant sacrificing some of her "big rants"— about the way we handle municipal rubbish, for example.

As we wrap up, I wonder what might be next for Mo. Are there more books in the offing? She laughs. Right now, she's enjoying speaking at book festivals and lending her expertise to panels on wild food, rewilding, and more. As far as Mo is concerned, there are so many wonderful natural things in this world and she's happy to be helping others to open their minds, explore, and fall in love with them. She does mention a few requests for a cookbook, and hints that might be something she'll take forward. Of course, this is Mo Wilde, so "it won't be a traditional cookbook". I, for one, can't wait...