In Free Food,award-winning author and forager Mo Wilde explains how to identify the plants, seaweeds, nuts and spices that are safe (and delicious) to eat, including foraging staples like wild garlic and  lesser-known herbs like the fragrant sweet cicely. Organised into plant families, it gives you the tools to develop a deeper understanding of a plant’s visual cues and their place in the ecosystem.

Once you have identified the plants, Wilde also describes ways you can eat them, whether that’s making jams from wild berries or gluten-free flour from roots and nuts. The possibilities go on. You can deep-fry hogweed tempura; top your dishes with cow parsley; create a wild pantry of herbal infusions, spices and fermented drinks,  and even tap beech trees for their sap.

Gorgeously illustrated, Free Food  will awaken your sense of wonder. Whatever your lifestyle – whether you are an enthusiastic forager or simply curious about wild food – this book will  inspire you to get outside and re-connect with nature.

‘A triumph’ The  TLS

‘This special and magical book has changed the way I see the world’  Dan Saladino

‘Inspiration and delight sparkle from every page ? This book [is] a revelation of joy to the general reader for whom wild food is another country’  John Wright, author of the River Cottage handbooks
 
A captivating and lyrical journey into our ancestral past, through what and how we eat.

Mo Wilde made a quiet but radical pledge: to live only off free, foraged food for an entire year. In a world disconnected from its roots, eating wild food is both culinary and healing, social and political. Ultimately, it is an act of love and community. Using her expert knowledge of botany and mycology, Mo follows the seasons to find nutritious food from hundreds of species of plants, fungi and seaweeds, and in the process learns not just how to survive, but how to thrive. Nourishing her body and mind deepens her connection with the earth – a connection that we have become estranged from but which we all, deep down, hunger for.

This hunger is about much more than food. It is about accepting and understanding our place in a natural network that is both staggeringly complex and beautifully simple. THE WILDERNESS CURE is a diary of a wild experiment; a timely and inspiring memoir which explores a deeper relationship between humans and nature, and reminds us of the important lost lessons from our past.
 

‘This special and magical book has changed the way I see the world’  Dan Saladino

‘Inspiration and delight sparkle from every page ? This book [is] a revelation of joy to the general reader for whom wild food is another country’  John Wright, author of the River Cottage handbooks
 
A captivating and lyrical journey into our ancestral past, through what and how we eat.

Mo Wilde made a quiet but radical pledge: to live only off free, foraged food for an entire year. In a world disconnected from its roots, eating wild food is both culinary and healing, social and political. Ultimately, it is an act of love and community. Using her expert knowledge of botany and mycology, Mo follows the seasons to find nutritious food from hundreds of species of plants, fungi and seaweeds, and in the process learns not just how to survive, but how to thrive. Nourishing her body and mind deepens her connection with the earth – a connection that we have become estranged from but which we all, deep down, hunger for.

This hunger is about much more than food. It is about accepting and understanding our place in a natural network that is both staggeringly complex and beautifully simple. THE WILDERNESS CURE is a diary of a wild experiment; a timely and inspiring memoir which explores a deeper relationship between humans and nature, and reminds us of the important lost lessons from our past.