6 Minute English / Foraging for wild food

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.

Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I m Beth.

And I m Neil.

Nowadays we are so used to getting food whenever we want that we ve almost forgotten how we managed in the past. But for thousands of years before supermarkets, humans found food through foraging moving from place to place looking for wild food to eat.

Since the Covid pandemic, foraging for wild food has become popular again. Why go to the shops when you can walk into nearby countryside and parks to collect edible plants, mushrooms, and fruit for free?

Of course, you can t eat everything you find growing outside - some poisonous plants can make you very ill. But there s something exciting about setting off on a culinary treasure hunt to find new edible plants for dinner.

In this programme, we ll be hearing about a new foraging project taking place across the UK, and, as usual, we'll be learning some useful new vocabulary as well.

But first I have a question for you, Neil. 2019 was a good year for the group, Wild Food UK, with the launch of their foraging pocket guide, a handbook aimed at helping foragers find and identify safe wild food to eat. So, according to the group s website, what is the most popular food foraged in the UK? Is it:a) seaweed?b) berries? or,c) mushrooms?

There s so much coastline in Britain, I reckon it must be a) seaweed.

OK. I'll reveal the answer later in the programme. Monica Wilde, known as Mo, is the author of The Wilderness Cure, a book charting her year of eating only wild food. Mo is one of a group of 26 experienced foragers taking part in the Wild Biome Project , a three-month experiment into the health benefits of introducing wild food into your diet.