HISTORY OF FORAGING
World map showing the location of some modern civilisations who incorporate foraging into their lifestyles. (Fig.1)
In the UK foraging is seen as an activity that mainly takes place in the countryside (Survey Q8) and is associated with the countryside lifestyle. So many people are uneducated on what can be foraged, and where you can forage, so they do not go. There is so much produce on our doorsteps that goes to waste. There are growing communities across the country, such as the Abundance Network, that promote the awareness of how much produce is wasted in the UK, they provide ‘picking sessions’ and workshops, in an attempt to educate the public.
Foraging is the sourcing of natural, wild produce that is ever changing with the seasons; people can forage all year round, in the countryside and in the city. There is so much available produce in our streets, parks and even our back gardens that goes to waste due to us not being educated on what is safe. Being able to pick apples from a tree in your local neighbourhood seems much more appealing than buying a bag of apples pumped with fertilizer and pesticides that has been flown across the world onto supermarket shelves.
“But if food is different, should it treated as any other merchandise in our global economy, traded at will across international borders, shipped around the world by boat, train, truck or plane, managed by faceless corporations that buy it as if it were all homogeneous and all the same?”
(Rosset, P. (2006), p9)
Irving, M. (2006), Foraging is more than just a middle-class leisure pursuit, The Guardian, 12.09.16.
Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/sep/12/comment.ruralaffairs
Ovenden, S. (2011), Foraging, BBC Good Food Magazine.
Available at:http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/foraging
Unknown, (2011), The Food at Our Feet: Why is foraging all the rage?, The New Yorker, 21.11.11.
Available at: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/21/the-food-at-our-feet
Figure 1, World map showing the location of some modern civilisations who incorporate foraging into their economic portfolio. (Kelly, R. (2001) p3)
Foraging is not a new or modern activity; hunter-gatherer societies have been around since the beginning of time, “for 90,000 years, all humans were hunter-gatherers” (Irving, M (2006) The Guardian) but it is hard to determine exactly how long civilisations have been foraging. Before human adaptation and the growth and development of agriculture, foraging was the only way for people to source food.
"It is tempting to think of hunter-gatherer behaviour as the first version of human food-getting strategy: that 'the first hunter-gatherers' is the same as 'the first eaters'. If this were true then, given the unbroken continuum of the evolution of humans from primate ancestors, it would be impossible to identify the first creature to get its own food: any species that you picked out as a possible 'first' would itself have an ancestor."
(Jordan, P. & Cummings, V. (2014) p177)
As a society in the 21st-century, we solely depend on farming as a way of sourcing of food. Less and less individuals and communities still forage, and are even aware of foraging. There are very few hunter-gatherer civilisations that still totally rely on foraging as their main way of finding food. Today “there are virtually no people today who live exclusively, year-round, on foraged foods. But there are populations for whom foraged foods are an integral part of their subsistence” (Kelly, R. (2001) p3) (fig.1).