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00:00Genuinely the only thing I miss is having a nice milky cup of tea, but I think that's the only
00:04thing that I miss actually. I never want to eat carbs again, I never want to eat normal food again.
00:10These are elm seeds, very tasty from the witch elm.
00:15Metals of course, that's marsh marigold,
00:21three-cornered leeks, hazelnuts, black trumpet mushrooms, chestnuts, crab apples,
00:30field mushrooms. The study is important because it gives us a window into the past,
00:36you know, it gives us this insight into what our ancestors might have eaten and what the effect
00:41of that might have been on their body, so it's this sort of window into ancestral health and then
00:46we can compare that with the effect of a modern diet on our bodies now, but it's also a window into the
00:53future because our food systems are so vulnerable and so broken at the moment that it's very likely
01:02that we might just lose access to a whole bunch of food that we're relying on at the moment,
01:07so if that were to happen we would have to fall back on wild food to support ourselves.
01:13This is me eating a normal diet and you can see the range of my blood sugar is very up and down and
01:19the range is quite big and I'm often crashing quite low, so this is before it's very up and down
01:27and then this, this is when I started. You can see the difference, it's a much smaller range
01:33and it's much more consistent.
01:36I never want to eat carbs again, I never want to eat normal food again, honestly, I mean I will because
01:42I can't live like this forever, you know, unless you're actually in a tribe of people and everyone's
01:46doing it together collectively, it's just not sustainable. To live this way, this isn't an
01:53individual lifestyle, like it's not possible as an individual lifestyle, we, to live off wild food,
02:00it is a collective effort, we would have done that collectively, people going out hunting, people
02:04going out gathering, different people preserving and cooking and processing at different times.
02:09To do all of that yourself, it's like a one-person tribe, it doesn't work. It's okay for a short
02:16period but it's not sustainable in the long term. So yeah, I've really felt that and felt the sort of
02:22sadness of that, that there aren't more people doing it and I've really felt supported and really
02:28buoyed up when people have joined me, so like someone else who's doing the project comes and cooks
02:33with me or people have given me stuff, like people have been so generous, people have given me fish
02:39and mushrooms and all sorts of things and tomorrow a friend is cooking a big wild feast. So that's
02:45like really sort of made it like, oh yeah, it's given me the motivation to carry on because it's about
02:52connection ultimately, it's about relationship. Previous to coming into wild food, I didn't care about food,
03:00I wasn't interested. It was something that I had to do to just, you know, to get out of the way,
03:08um, to get rid of the discomfort of hunger, to get on to doing more interesting things.
03:14And since I've really started eating wild food, like food has become relationship, it's connection,
03:20it's meaning, it's story. You know, I have a direct relationship with all of the plants
03:25and the animals that I'm harvesting and they are part of my body and I feel grateful to them and
03:30so I want to give back to them and it becomes this reciprocal relationship. Um, that just doesn't exist
03:37if you go to a shop and just buy something in a packet. There's no connection, there's no story,
03:42there's no relationship. Um, I think it's, it's a sort of fundamental right that everybody should have
03:49access to wild food. You know, it's, it's in our DNA, this is the food that we are supposed to eat
03:55and there's a real justice issue that most people don't have access to a lot of wild food, even to
04:02green space. I think if you're interested in eating wild food, um, a really easy way to start is just
04:08to start with something really familiar that doesn't have any sort of poisonous lookalikes,
04:12um, and that's really abundant. You can get hold of easily, um, and just work it up species by species.
04:19So starting with something like nettles. Nettles are such a superfood. You really get to know the plants,
04:24um, because it's not about just taking, it's not just a free resource to take from, um, it's,
04:32you really have to know the plants that you're harvesting because you don't want to damage them,
04:36you want to be able to give back to them. You really get to know, um, the place that you're in
04:42so that you can do it responsibly, um, not even just sustainably by taking a sustainable amount,
04:47but regeneratively. So you're actually able to give back and to leave the world in a better state
04:51than when you found it.