Collectors items

 

"Food gathering is the instance,par excellence,of time spent

procuring and preparing something to eat out of all proportion 

to the time spent in consuming it."

Patience Gray -`Honey from a weed´

Our ancestors were hunters, gatherers, fishers,and farmers. There were no airline pilots,advertising execs, installers, computer programmers, or telemarketers ( that reminds me must change the phone number) Food was either gathered, raised, or killed fresh and served in relative purity straight from Mother Nature.

Today, most consumers live in close proximity to a large supermarket, where hunting through the butcher´s chill cabinet  and foraging in the produce section is about as close to the food source as they will ever get. It has been observed with sagacity that if all meat eaters had to slaughter their own meat there would be mass conversion to vegetarianism. Needless to say, that may never happen, but it does show how far most of us are from the real process of food foraging and/or production.  

As a child, I loved to traipse along ditch banks and shallow river beds in the spring and summer to find rosehips,blackberries,wild garlic,watercress and whatever else was free and edible. Nowadays,shopping for a worthy dinner at Casa Rosada means you will find me grovelling in the earth for nettles, dandelions, mushrooms, samphire grass, spinach, asparagus and prickly pears,thorns and all.

Fresh Spring Acelga leaves ( wild spinach beet )

As I always say - "ask the elderly what wild plants they used to help them survive the depression. You might learn more from them than you ever expected".