Wild Food Challenge

(Photo taken from www.wildmanwildfood.co.uk)

Today is 7/7/07! It’s fun to look at numbers, as they are especially infused into our modern-day lives. The number 7 is oftentimes associated with investigation, analysis and keen observation. Fergus Drennan of Wild Man Wild Food is definitely embodying the spirit of that number in this, his 7th day, of eating only wild foods. Fergus has taken on this Wild Food Challenge for one month, as a preliminary study, for a one-year Wild Food Challenge he hopes to begin later in the year.

He’s subjected himself to medical tests prior to the Challenge, and is taking it while doing the gruelling work of writing a book. You can read daily accounts of his Wild Food Challenge, which includes the search for a wild seed coffee and the making of wild food flours, by clicking here. Fergus lives in England, and is tired of pondering whether a person can live by wild foods alone. Susan Campbell, in a paper ‘The Hunting and Gathering of Wild Foods: What’s the point? An Historical Survey’ (a paper delivered at Oxford and reprinted in Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2004), states that, “….nor have I yet met anyone who could convince me that modern man could subsist on wild food alone, legally or illegally, the year round, in a northern climate.”

Fergus is attempting to answer this, and instead of simply ‘subsisting’, he wants, “… to live fully, to be nothing less than a whole man, to transcend the everyday, to feel the struggle of the impossible and know that it can be surpassed.” Here, here to readjusting Ms. Campbell’s paradigm. Send email support letters to Fergus the Forager at: info@wildmanwildfood.co.uk