Picked clean

Elderberries

Continuing a theme begun in the previous post...

I find elder because often its leaves are paler than those of leaves on other trees. I am always happy to see it, not least because elder and I both like the sun. I usually find it on the margins of fields, meadows or woods. Its twigs can be a pinkish-red and the stalks holding the dropping umbels of dark berries are a similar colour.

Elder is a native tree much-loved by foragers. In folklore it was said to keep the devil away. According to the Woodland Trust the Anglo-Saxon word 'aeld', meaning fire, named the tree because the hollow stems were used as bellows to blow air into the centre of a fire.  The wood is good for whittling and carving. Many caterpillars eat the leaves which are also a natural fly repellent. The flowers make a delicious summery fizz which can be alcoholic.  Birds and small mammals enjoy the berries. They are often found by badger or rabbit setts. I had come across what looked like a badger sett below an elder tree just recently on the thinnest piece of woodland, threatened by a housing estate behind Quarrymill between Scone and Scone Palace. The berries make an intoxicatingly delicious cordial or syrupy vinegar that is like nothing you have tasted before. They are used also for wine. All parts of the tree were apparently once used to colour the Harris tweed tartan.

I had been exploring woodland in Coupar Angus, then walked down a track that had once been a railway.  Nature often gives me a vibe, one of those unscientific inexplicables. I will go out looking for one plant but feel nudged towards another. I had an uneasy feeling about the track, but persisted, sensing it was somehow a mistake.

Then I noticed the elder. Something seemed wrong with not just one tree, but with all of them. I realised they looked wrong because they were all bare.  None of the trees had berries, when at this time they should still be dripping with them. 

Where were the bird-pecked umbels? On this sunny site, even on the most straggly tree there should at least be a few bunches of berries, some picked away by birds, leaving thin stalks behind, like skeletal pink fairy fingers, or like veins, semi-calcified. But there was none of this. Someone had come along and very efficiently cut off every bunch of berries, picking every tree clean, all down the track. There were none left for the plant to seed itself, none for the wildlife to feed upon and none for other foragers. It was that rapacious, exploitativeness, that I had turned away from in town, in the world at large, turned to the countryside to escape, applied here to nature. It was a stark reminder of who not to be, when faced with even the most bounteous tree or bush. Some foragers say take 1/5th of what you find. Some say 1/20. Some say 1/100th. But what does any of that really mean? A child though could understand: take only so much that it would be hard to see that you had been there at all.

Foragers are not, in the grand scheme of things, the bad guys. Foraging in the UK is largely about plants, meaning, the food focus is not on environmentally damaging, intensively farmed meat.  Many foragers care about plants, nature and the countryside, at least, in a self-interested way, and perhaps more than that. 

Still, I had seen a pattern: There was a professional, teaching foraging courses in a UK habitat ten times rarer than ancient semi-natural woodland, of which itself only 50,000 hectares remain in the UK. The necessity of these plants to the stability of this environment was explained.  We were advised not to overpick, but these figures and the rarity of this habitat I discovered later, reading about it. In a way the course which was interesting, fun and enjoyable, had had a beneficial outcome far greater than teaching me about the edible plants in that habitat.  But it also meant I now questioned the ethics of foraging from and more particularly teaching foraging in that same rare and threatened environment. 

On other courses some students clearly believed they were picking into a communal basket to be shared later while others just picked quietly for themselves.  The latter I noticed tended not to be from the UK. Perhaps there is still some vestigial concept here of fair play.  I encountered a forager who allowed their students to add to a communal basket, promising to share the spoils but then taking nearly all of it home. 

I saw people boasting about the kilos of wild food they were stripping (not the word they used) from the hedgerows.  Perhaps they have permission from the landowner.  Perhaps they have a deal with the landowner.  Perhaps they were the landowner.  Perhaps not. 

People who say, "Good for them, let them get them on with it" remind me of those on Facebook  - generally a sinkhole of idiocy - mindlessly egging on the local jetskiers. A noisy, polluting jetskier is nothing like a forager, even one filling their boots, but I mean the audience.  The jetskiers park on the pavement, take over an entire stretch of river and bomb up and down it egotistically, noisily, and according to local councillors legally, dumping petrol into a site of international conservation, destroying habitat, disturbing and almost certainly killing the wildlife.  Many locals think it's fine.  But to what point are these things fine: exploiting, for your own personal or commercial gain, a common resource, more particularly a natural resource, one essential for the local ecology?   

Each foraging professional would, doubtless, talk about how their teaching and tastings were actually making people care about the countryside. And, many foragers do share recipes and provide a wealth of free advice on the subject on websites and social media.  The more commercially canny titillate the reader with crumbs of information, while withholding the elements key for its recreation at home. In general, American foraging professionals are far less coy, with adverts not quite, but along the lines of that tried and tested formula:  "Do you know the three essential secrets that will let you...."  I remembered a friend commenting on someone defending an approach of not sharing information.  I mentioned that the man happened to be a barrister though he was commenting in a non-professional context.  "That profession is based on hoarding knowledge", replied the friend, with characteristic concision, acuity and bite.

This would trouble me for many years and still does.  People have to make livings.  When is it OK then to ask people to pay for knowledge, through books or courses so that you can eat and pay bills.  And when is it not?  Maybe he just meant that the man was so soused in the concept of paying for knowledge that he could no longer see the world any other way.  When should you just share your knowledge, free?  I suppose the answer is, when you are able to.  But when is that and with whom?   Just with friends? With interested strangers, when you can, today?  When you have your retirement covered? When the spirit takes you?  Or always?  And to what extent is giving away information free when it could or does support you, different from giving away your money and possessions? 

To return to foraging, if the people the professionals were teaching then went out to replant or protect the countryside it might even things out. But how many of these students who then go out and also forage from the countryside are doing anything to replant or protect the hedgerows and habitats they use? How many of those professionals making money from these habitats go out, I found myself wondering, and campaign for the same? It's not something I see much, actually anything of, on their Instagram feeds. 

I sometimes wish I did not feel so driven to question things.

I have benefitted from the exquisite pleasure of wild meals prepared by a professional forager for a few customers at a time, and once, on the scale of a banquet. There are wild food businesses that call on local foragers to supply them in various wild plants and berries in exchange for money or vouchers. This is quite canny because individuals foraging could claim they were doing so for themselves and avoid prosecution whereas a business foraging for itself would have to pay staff, overheads, licence fees etc.  Calling on individual "freelance" foragers, they provide a wage or vouchers, employment - at the cost of the commercial exploitation of our most natural resources, taking from the wildlife and the local ecologies which have no means at all to defend themselves or even object.  But maybe it's  OK if just one company does it?  What about when two or three or four, get in on the game? We who enjoy foraging all say, oh it's fine, it's wild, it's free, it's abundant.  But for how long? And what are our own roles in that? 

There are now businesses which will ship wild food and wild mushrooms to you.  Curiosity and my poor wild mushroom ID skills got the better of me.  I wanted to see hen of the woods for real, before I picked the wrong thing for my own plate.  With considerable guilt I awaited my order.  When it arrived I recognised some items easily gathered on the seashore and was staggered at the price I had paid. Some of these plants help stabilise the coastal environment.  I wondered if this fact featured at all in the company's harvesting policy and how that policy was applied in practice.   

Still, it is one thing trying to see a mushroom on a course for an hour or two in a forest, with others, in a rush, maybe not holding it or smelling it, or taking much time with it. It is another altogether to examine it at your leisure, cutting it, smelling it raw and cooked, tasting it, knowing it is safe.  While you do not get to see them in their environment, ordering wild mushrooms for study and food is an excellent, and tasty, learning technique from which you can become more independent in your own identification skills. 

But is stripping hedgerows to supply a business OK? Is it more OK than commercial farming or is it just the same model, applied in a different way?  Or does the fact that the product is different mean it's OK?  Mark Boyle, businessman turned woodsman, writer, forager, standing in his health food business years ago realised that importing food from all over the world and selling it in plastic packaging was really not much different as a business model to that of a supermarket or any other business plugged into exploitative, commercial processes. How different then, is the commercial foraging business model?

It seems that no matter where I go, town or country, everyone is in on the commercial exploitation game which cumulatively have led to the industrial processes that are stripping the planet and disrupting its vital rhythms.  The leap of faith in Boyle's writing and behind his "pay it forward" philosophy is that the universe will provide.  Actually, "pay" would be a clanger of a term to use, "give", or "share" being more appropriate to his idea of the free economy. The idea is the ancient one from Luke:  "Give and it shall be given unto you".  

Certainly, it worked, repeatedly for Boyle and seemingly, still does.  He gave and gave and was repaid - no, 'given to' -  either by the people to whom he gave but, I think he might say, he was provided for in a "what goes around comes around" kind of way.  I don't think he thinks we should be thinking about giving in a tit for tat, reciprocal sense.  

I remembered trying to give away a service, years ago.  Someone I don't think I knew but who knew I spoke good French was going to put me in touch with a family who needed a French tutor.  I was happy just to be doing something useful, that I was good at and offered to do it for free, especially as I had no formal track record in teaching other people's children.  An email was accidentally sent to me which described me as something like harmless but a bit kooky.  I never did hear from the people.  People expect to be exploited.  They don't expect and they generally distrust being offered free stuff except in certain well-known contexts.  This week I responded to a Freegle advert asking for a piece of equipment I happened to have no more use for.  I wrote offering it but received no reply.  Giving things away can be harder than it might seem.

I thought about another man who would seem to be trying to live in a way that avoids the exploitation of the planet's resources.   I had heard on a long podcast recently Kyle Chamberlain, an apparently thoughtful, knowledgeable American forager, botanist and educator. He talks about living without electricity in the country, his discomfort with canning (American for bottling / preserving) as, even at home, this is apparently part of an industrial process.  I suppose he means the jars required, maybe even the fact of processing itself. But nearly all food has to be processed in some form to provide us with sufficient and safe nutrients.  He acknowledged this but was interested in the natural drying process of plants being in some cases, sufficient processing with no use of man-made energy.   Yet despite this, some would say, extreme focus on the avoidance of industrial processes, he has apparently, a truck, works, on the land it would seem for money, runs foraging courses, presumably also for money and has an Instagram profile (so perhaps, a computer or phone) where he has recently railed against the shallowness and misguidedness of his followers. I could see it was well-intentioned and more ethical way of life than almost all of us and yet there was a but in there somewhere.

The low carbon footprint, woodsman lifestyle has also had more than bad press.  By his own admission Chamberlain is or was curmudgeonly, wanting from a young age, to drop out of society.  Take that quite a bit further and you find Ted  Kaczynski an unhinged environmentalist who also lived in a cabin in the woods, on a subsistence lifestyle.  During the seventies, eighties and nineties he embarked on a campaign of letter bombing targeting people involved in some form of industrial process, which could just mean they were a computer scientist academic. He killed three people, maimed 23 others, was finally caught and will now die in prison. 

But in ordinary life is anyone actually bothered about the ethics of foragers potentially exploiting the countryside.  Almost immediately I found that the answer is, in fact, yes.  Landowners very quickly get upset and say there is nothing potential about it, it is happening all the time.  In Scotland I had seen a woman on Facebook insist that while she accepted people had the right to walk on her land, they didn't have the right to pick "her" wild mushrooms for their own consumption, a position she would have trouble defending legally.  A Polish guy just laughed at her trying to keep woodland spoils to herself. In Poland, gathering mushrooms is a social event.  Someone had told me about a Polish wedding they had been to in the woods.  

If we saw land not in terms of ownership but as a common good, how would we agree to use it?  That is theoretically how things are in Scotland now.  We are not at the stage of land being thought of legally as in custodianship, and therefore with more responsibilities to look after it than rights to exploit but since the 2003 Land Reform Act a landowner cannot keep people off land, nor prevent them for foraging for personal use there, though many still try to restrict access with fencing or illegal signs.    

A different woman told me recently about three people from Glasgow she came across in a wood on land she owns.   They had containers filled with kilos of her mushrooms   They said they were travelling round the Highlands they said, picking every forest clean and planning to sell the spoils back in the city.   She explained this was her wood, that they were evidently not foraging for personal use, that she sold the mushrooms from her land to local restaurants and that they should move out sharpish.  That struck me as brave, but sure enough, they moved on, leaving the mushrooms for her - "and no effort of picking them!" she said, with a grin.  

Later, I discovered the commercial foragers had been picking into the same crates used by a well known Glasgow-based foraging company.  She made the point that in her area there was a lot of croft land but in Moray, where she'd lived before, it was estate land and she knew the estate hadn't minded.  "It's less about whether landowners mind, and more about whether they're asked [by commercial foragers]," I replied. 

This case will seem clearcut to most but are those three actually, any different to people who don't own land nor rent it, exploiting it for commercial gain? And how different is it again to people who do own or rent land, exploiting it commercially?  Is the idea of land ownership or tenancy and the custodianship of land for those of today and tomorrow nothing more than a moral distinction? In Wales they have a commissioner for future generations, whose role may have influenced the cancelling of a motorway in that country.

Clearly, the arguments shift depending on what the land is used for.  It is one thing to farm land intensively for plant crops, another to farm animals, another to plant sitka plantations, another to farm organically, another to run a croft, another to forage mushrooms commercially from your own private land. What about bee-keeping?  Is it OK to take bees' honey? And from there we slide easily into discussions over the use and slaughter of animals. Where do we, where should we, draw the lines?  

As a society, the legal lines are clear - you can use your land in the ways people currently do: intensive farming of crops, animals, timber are all OK, more than that, our entire country's functioning now depends on it.  Grouse moors are OK (the watchable Dragon's den spoof is here).  But should they change, will they change?  Meanwhile, there are our own moral choices. I know I am reflecting on mine. 

I came across an idea recently: that we can vote politically three times a day - in our choice of what we eat and from whom we buy our food. It has long been obvious to us all that we can make more or less ethical food choices, depending on income and to what extent we can be bothered but the idea of it as a political act, of a kind of vote was an empowering notion, as well as one that might lead to a more reflective mindset regarding our consumption of food and more generally. 

So is there any way of living that isn't exploitative of other people or the planet and its resources? Or is much less so than the way most of us live and without being hypocritical?

I thought for the nth time of Boyle, living quietly, zealously, cheerfully, in a cabin in the Irish countryside. No internet, no phone, no electricity, no running water, no truck, no money, no bills; a wood burner, a spring, a lot of manual work and, it would seem, good health, a reasonably clean conscience, a good deal of freedom.

Then I thought of the young environmentalist and anarchist I had met who said it wasn't necessary to go to such lengths.  Wasn't it? I still wondered, while at the same time knowing that few would want and still fewer be able to take up such a lifestyle despite Boyle's insistence that anyone can learn the skills he has.  I wondered if he underestimates the many years he had, before embarking on this lifestyle, slowly honing the skills that would later support him. I know too that our current use of land would not permit such a lifestyle for all but the smallest numbers. So did that mean that those adopting it were conscientious, selfish, independent, misguided, brave, mad, privileged? Does it matter?