27/09/2024  Please note that this is the last new content I will post on this website. I have a new one in the pipeline.

Much (though nothing like enough) has been said and written about the looming collapse of civilisation. This typically refers to techno-industrial civilisation globally rather than just the West (although it was the West that invented this form of civilisation), and the aspects of collapse that are usually addressed are ecological, economic and socio-political. I believe there is another aspect – one which is arguably even more fundamental, because it is the reason why we are finding it so difficult to make any progress on the others.

Psychosis is detachment from reality. It can include hallucinations (apparently being aware of things that aren’t actually real), delusions (believing things that aren’t true), denial (refusal to believe things which are obviously true), and generally disordered thinking, and leads to secondary symptoms such as loss of motivation and self-neglect. I think Western society is already well on its way towards a major psychotic breakdown, and that things are probably not going to improve (on the scale of the whole of society) until we’ve hit rock bottom.

This psychosis manifests in many different ways. Each is a very serious problem in its own right, but it is the interplay between them that makes this crisis – the Metacrisis – so profound.

The delusion that economic growth is sustainable and desirable

Economic growth is unsustainable in a finite physical system. Anybody who ever thought about this for more than five seconds should have always been able to understand it, but for anybody who found that too difficult then the Club of Rome spelled it out in The Limits to Growth back in 1972. Most people didn’t listen, and those that did listen either didn’t know what to do about it, or couldn’t convince enough other people. The reasons why things played out this way are extremely complex, but the consequences are relatively simple: humanity is now well into ecological overshoot and the unwanted results are proliferating all around us. And yet regardless of how obvious it is that growth cannot be sustained, there is no sign of mainstream politicians and economists making contact with reality any time soon. Politicians spend plenty of time talking about climate change and our many other systemic ecological problems, but the entire political spectrum, including the left, continues to conduct all serious debate under the assumption that growth is both sustainable and desirable, on both national and global scales.

There is a movement against this, but it is small and insignificant. “Degrowth” acknowledges the reality that growth-based economics has to end, but it too suffers from a detachment – in this case from the realities of geopolitics and human nature. It advocates for managed economic contraction on a global scale, done in a way which is deemed to be globally fair. In other words it is based on the idea that people in the West and other relatively rich parts of the world will accept a voluntary drop in living standards to allow the rest of the world to catch up. It demands that the West not only acknowledges that the global pie must get smaller, but that our own share must get smaller while the share of the global poor increases. No politician could implement anything based on this idea, either in a democracy or in an authoritarian state, for if they tried to do so they would swiftly be replaced, either democratically or otherwise. If this reality is acknowledged then it follows that the politics of the future will be driven by the desire and demand for survival of various in-groups as the global situation deteriorates. The West is not going to take responsibility for the plight of the global poor and the most immediate victims of climate change, because it faces an existential crisis itself. Hence Degrowth is (politically) an impossible fantasy.

The materialistic denial of consciousness

Materialism is still the dominant philosophy of “serious thinkers”, certainly outside of philosophy and arguably inside it as well. However, there is a growing realisation that materialism cannot be true, because it is either incoherent or it requires us to deny the existence of our own minds. Whole books have been written about this, but I have to do it in a few paragraphs. If readers are unfamiliar with the wider debate I suggest starting with Thomas Nagel’s What is it like to be a bat? (1974). For our purposes here, I will boil materialism down to four types: emergent, reductive, identity and eliminativist.

The emergent version claims that consciousness “emerges” from brain activity (or a combination of brain activity and the rest of the material world). There are two problems with this. The first is that it makes no sense to claim X can emerge from Y when Y does not contain the necessary components for X. In other words there is nothing about brain activity that makes it even remotely comprehensible how something like consciousness could emerge from it. The second is that the thing that allegedly emerges has a completely different set of properties to those of brain activity, and there’s no obvious reason why it should be categorised as ‘material’ or ‘physical’ – consciousness appears to be something completely different, so if we label that ‘material’ then we’ve got two radically different sorts of materiality. Emergentism is actually a particularly weird sort of dualism (epiphenomenalism) which some people slap the name ‘materialism’ on to.

The reductive version claims that consciousness “can be reduced to” brain activity, and suffers from the reversed version of the problem described above. Because the properties of consciousness are so radically different to those of brain activity, it is very difficult to see how it can make sense to claim that we can reduce consciousness to brain activity. In fact, the only way such a reduction could work is to leave out all the subjective stuff. This was exactly what Descartes and Galileo did at the dawn of science, so it is hardly surprising that we can’t just shove it back in to materialistic science now and expect this procedure to work.

Identity theory claims consciousness ‘is’ brain activity. The problem with this is providing an explanation of how X could possibly ‘be’ Y when they have entirely different sets of properties. How can the experience of pain ‘be’ neurons firing? What does this even mean? Whatever ‘is’ or ‘be’ means in these statements, it is not the same meaning as in the sentence “Water is H₂0”. We actually know what this second statement means – we know exactly how and why water is H₂0, because this is a scientifically discovered identity. Nobody has any idea what the statement “consciousness is brain activity” is supposed to mean. The people who say it do so in order to defend materialism, not because it actually makes any sense (to themselves or anybody else).

Because of the problems described above, a small number of materialists have abandoned all three of these attempts to explain minds in terms of brains and instead claim that our subjective vocabulary doesn’t refer to anything that actually exists. They call it “folk psychology” and say it needs to be replaced with purely objective vocabulary. These are the “eliminative materialists” – so called because their goal is the elimination of what they consider to be problematic subjective terms like ‘consciousness’ and “qualia”. Eliminativism is coherent, in the sense that it has (theoretically) got rid of the logical problem that plagues all the other forms of materialism, but in doing so it makes clear the psychotic status of materialism. Eliminativism is the equivalent of a psychiatric patient who refuses to believe that their own mind exists. It is Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum” reversed: I have thought, and I have concluded I am not!

Even though materialism is either incoherent or bonkers, and reduces life to meaningless mechanisms, it is as prevalent both in mainstream science and in western society in general as growth-based economics is in mainstream politics. In both cases there is no consensus about a sane replacement. They are broken paradigms, but the necessary paradigm shifts cannot take place because there is no agreement on what the new paradigms should be. In the case of materialism, the traditional options of dualism and idealism do have some defenders (mainly the latter) but they end up fighting old philosophical battles that none of the traditional positions can win. Perhaps a more promising alternative is neutral monism, but this has always been a minority view and remains very much that way today. The main problem with neutral monism, as I see it, is that implies panpsychism, which seems wrong to me. I don’t even think plants and fungi are conscious, let alone rocks, stars or computers.

The postmodern denial of objective reality

Postmodernism is the leading edge of Western society’s detachment from reality. It doesn’t even pretend to be attached to reality, because it is founded on the claim that there is no such thing. Postmodernism is a branch of philosophy which can trace its roots back to Nietzsche’s denial of the fixed meanings of words and his obsession with power. In its current form it emerged between the 1960s and 1980s, and its core claims are that reality is socially constructed, and that what ‘is’ cannot be separated from what those in power have deemed “ought to be”. Postmodernists claim that everything is a power game, including science. Postmodernism is relevant not just because of its corrosive effect on anyone and anything which is founded on science and reason (the defining characteristics of modernity), but because its influence has now permeated the whole of society to the extent that most people are willing to agree that there’s no such thing as a perspective-free truth. This even extends to scientists being unwilling to commit to the claim that the statement “humans are descended from apes” is an objective truth – a known fact about objective reality. They’ve been conditioned to believe that this amounts to dogmatism – to the denial that all scientific knowledge is always open to revision. In fact, this is just one example of an objective truth claim that will never be falsified, because it is too integrated into what we could call our structural understanding of reality. In other words, the only way scientific claims which are this well supported could ever turn out to be untrue is we completely give up on the idea that we can have knowledge of objective reality. Which is, of course, exactly what the postmodernists want.

The Metacrisis

These three forms of psychosis are mutually-hostile. If you take scientific materialism seriously then you cannot possibly believe that growth-based economics is sustainable, and vice versa. And though they take radically different approaches to knowledge of it, both materialism and economics recognise a reality that is independent of human power relations, which makes both of them incompatible with postmodernism and everything it has begotten.

These core psychoses are just part of a much bigger problem. Another big part of it is social media, which creates and maintains echo chambers where people’s subjective ideas about reality are reflected back at them to the extent that they become convinced that their perspective is objective and everybody else is wrong (and probably immoral). We live in a thoroughly post-truth world.

The psychosis I’m describing is not merely a symptom of specific social or political ideologies, but a much broader and deeper problem with the way the Western world interacts with reality. It is a kind of epistemic disease, where not only do we fail to see the truth of things, but we actively construct barriers that prevent us from doing so. This disease of detachment stems from several roots, both ancient and modern, and it has grown over time into something systemic—woven into the fabric of Western civilisation.

The worship of technology as salvation

Another major aspect of this detachment from reality is the quasi-religious belief that technology will save us. This belief permeates both mainstream and progressive thought. The mainstream sees endless innovation as the key to eternal economic growth, while progressives often place their hopes in “green technologies” that will supposedly allow us to keep living our high-consumption lifestyles while mitigating environmental damage.

In fact, while technology can certainly help solve specific problems, it is ultimately a tool, not a solution. The problem is not that we haven’t invented the right kinds of technology yet; the problem is that we are living in a way that is fundamentally incompatible with the ecological limits of our planet. The worship of technology as the solution to all our problems blinds us to this fact, preventing us from seeing the need for deeper, more radical changes to the way we live.

This techno-optimism is another form of psychosis — a refusal to confront the hard reality that there are no technological fixes for problems that are inherently systemic and moral in nature. Our obsession with technology as the answer to everything is an extension of the Cartesian split: it is the idea that we, as detached, rational beings, can control and manipulate the world through our inventions, without ever having to change our fundamental relationship to it.

The pathological fear of limits

Perhaps the most pernicious manifestation of this psychosis is the Western fear of limits. Since the Enlightenment, Western civilisation has been driven by a desire for infinite expansion—whether that means economic growth, the conquest of nature, the construction of empires or the pursuit of personal freedom. The idea that there are limits to what we can achieve or consume is not just denied; it is actively repressed.

This repression is visible in our economic policies, which cling to growth at all costs, and in our personal lives, where the idea of voluntary simplicity or restraint is seen as backward or undesirable. We are a society that revels in excess — excess of choice, consumption, and stimulation. But this obsession with limitless growth is leading us straight into ecological collapse. The idea that we might need to accept limits to growth — to consumption, to the kind of technological solutions we rely on — is anathema to the Western mind, which equates limits with failure or oppression.

This fear of limits is not just an economic or political problem; it is a metaphysical one. It reflects a profound disconnection from the reality of our situation: that we are finite beings living in a finite world, and that any attempt to live as though this were not the case is guaranteed to end in disaster.

In this sense, the psychotic breakdown of Western society is not just a matter of failing to solve our problems — it is a failure to even perceive what those problems really are. We are trapped in a hall of mirrors, unable to distinguish between our fantasies of limitless growth, technological salvation, and personal freedom, and the hard ecological and physical realities of the world we actually live in.

The Cartesian Split and the fragmentation of knowledge

One of the primary sources of our detachment is what has become known as the Cartesian split — the division between mind and matter, subject and object. This metaphysical divide, formalised by Descartes, has had the effect of turning human beings into disembodied spectators of the world, rather than participants in it. The real world becomes something “out there,” an inert backdrop to our personal or societal dramas, to be manipulated, controlled, and objectified for human ends.

This split is responsible for the profound fragmentation of knowledge that now dominates the West. Our intellectual culture is divided into increasingly narrow disciplines, each speaking its own language, each focused on its own microcosm, without no attempt to connect with the whole. This hyper-specialisation might work for creating technological advances, but it’s disastrous when it comes to addressing complex, systemic problems like climate change or the collapse of ecosystems. As British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist points out in The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, this is a result of the left hemisphere’s unbridled dominance over the right—the part of our brain responsible for context, meaning, and the understanding of wholes. The left hemisphere, obsessed with details, categories, control, and measurement, has taken over our intellectual culture, cutting us off from the larger picture and, by extension, from reality itself.

The result is a society that is brilliant at solving tiny problems but utterly incapable of dealing with the big ones. Our entire worldview (if you can describe a chaotic, shattered mess as that) has been constructed in such a way that we cannot even begin to see how all these problems—economic, ecological, political, spiritual—are connected. The fractured state of Western thought is itself, in this sense, a kind of psychosis: a delusional belief that knowledge can be fragmented and yet still provide us with the tools we need to create an ecocivilisation.

This process began with the materialism that came packaged with modernism, to which postmodernism is a reaction. However, in this case the reaction – the nihilistic deconstruction of any ideas deemed to deliver power into the wrong hands, and the systemic refusal to seek or acknowledge coherent whole pictures – is itself a left hemisphere activity. Instead of a restoration of the integrated, holistic thinking of the right hemisphere, postmodernism is the left hemisphere turning on itself.

Conclusion: The Metacrisis as a crisis of perception and knowledge

The metacrisis we are facing—this intertwining of ecological collapse, economic instability, and social disintegration—is, at its heart, a crisis of perception and knowledge. It is the result of centuries of detachment from reality, a collective descent into psychosis where we no longer know how to see the world as it is, or ourselves as we truly are.

The first step in healing this condition is to recognise it for what it is. We must begin by acknowledging that our current ways of thinking, living, and organising society are not just flawed but fundamentally broken, and that they cannot be patched up with technological fixes or economic reforms. We need a profound shift in how we understand ourselves, our place in the world, and our relationship to each other and the Earth. Only then can we begin to find real solutions to the crises we face, and build a future that is not just sustainable but sane.

03/02/2024

This is a more accurate description of my life these days, so it is now the name of this website, after over a decade of being “Geoff’s Fungi and Foraging”.

When I created this blog/website over a decade ago, fungi foraging was an experimental new career for me, after escaping from software engineering and making myself otherwise unemployable by studying philosophy as a mature student. Not long after that I moved to Hastings, which is one of the best places in the UK if you’re interested in fungi, surrounded as it is by pockets of diverse woodland, much of it ancient. There I wrote two books on foraging (Edible Mushrooms has now sold well over 20,000 copies and its sales increase every year), and eventually got to the point where I was just about earning a respectable living from running foraging courses in Sussex.

The problem with south-east England, of course, is that the property market is insane and there’s far too many people everywhere. When my mother died, and I inherited some money, we had to decide where we were going to move to next. Had we chosen to stay in south-east England, our budget might have stretched to a decent three bed house on a plot of half an acre. A step up from a terraced house with a 5x20m garden, but not enough to seriously change your way of life (I’m old enough to remember the original broadcast of The Good Life). So we looked at many different options and eventually homed in on Ceredigion because it is pretty much the only place in England and Wales where smallholdings are reasonably abundant and relatively affordable. Foraging potential wasn’t on the list of things we were looking for.

As you have probably guessed by now, Ceredigion cannot compete with Sussex and Kent for fungi foraging, and it can’t compete for coastal foraging either (though Pembrokeshire can). It is simply not possible for me to run the sort of courses here that I ran there. I’ve also run out of things to say — when you’ve written two 500+ page books on foraging, and blogged and posted about foraging for over a decade, then it is hardly surprising that there is not much you can say without repeating yourself.

In future I shall therefore be focusing not just on foraging but the much wider topics of smallholding with the goal of resiliency and self-sufficiency, and also the philosophical and theoretical foundations of Ecocivilisation. Much more on that to follow!

28/04/23

Fungi never fail to keep me guessing. Usually at this time of year I am out and about in search of St George’s Mushooms (so called because they traditionally come out on St George’s Day, which was 5 days ago). I made no effort at all this year, because there are very few records in West Wales, and none at all in our part of Ceredigion (we moved here last summer from Sussex). And so I was absolutely delighted to find some this morning, by the side of a footpath no more than 20 metres from where our main drive meets the public road. The downside is now I am going to have to spend considerable time trying to find out where else they grow around here!

For any readers not already familiar with this famous mushroom, it is very safe to collect at this time of the year, because so there is very little chance of confusion with dangerous lookalikes. You do need to be aware of the Livid Pinkgill (Entoloma sinuatum), which can looks similar and occasionally fruits in spring, but the smell of that mushroom is much less pleasant — it smells more like cleaning fluid than the melon rind smell of St George’s.

As for what to do with them….their strong taste means they pair well with strong-tasting partners such as offal or oily fish. They also work with goose and duck eggs.  Speaking of which…our first three domestic ducks are teenagers now (more due to hatch tomorrow). Sadly for my hopes of St George’s and duck eggs they are not laying yet, and we now know that two of them are drakes.  Doubtless St George’s mushrooms would make a fine accompaniment to roast duck too.

14/03/2023

This post has nothing to do with either foraging or fungi, but I hope at least some of my readers will be interested in what I have been doing since we moved to a smallholding in West Wales. As well as turning an ad-hoc equestrian property into a food producing holding, I have been restoring a system of three wildlife ponds which had been totally neglected for years – decades maybe. When we moved in in July the top two ponds were silted to the top and totally obscured by fallen willows and brambles. When I had hacked my way through to the top pond, I found it had a trickle of water flowing over deep mud and disappearing over a partially-collapsed dam I couldn’t access at all. The middle pond had a tiny pool of water in the centre, and the bottom pond was bone dry. The previous occupants told me that the bottom pond clay liner was cracked, but the real problem was the water supply.

I have now (just) finished the restoration work and the whole system is ready for wildlife to come roaring back in the spring. The story of the restoration is best told in pictures. A five minute video taken today of the fully restored system can be found here.

29/07. Bottom pond is to the left, obscured by grey willows.

29/07. Bottom pond, completely dry.

29/07. Middle pond from the side.

29/07. Middle pond with a tiny puddle of water in the centre. The mud is more than half a metre deep under the puddle.

17/08. Exit of the top pond cleared. I have started to dig a new channel in the bottom of the leat so water can reach the middle pond.

17/08. Top pond. The mud is deeper than it looks!

1`7/08. Top pond from below the dam. This was my first attempt to rebuild it. At this point I just wanted all the meagre water to go the other way. We were in a drought at the time.

17/08. Looking towards the top pond from half way down the leat to the middle pond, showing the new channel.

17/08. Water starts reaching the middle pond in drought conditions for the first time for many years. I’ve just started the job of clearing the bur-reeds.

17/08. Middle pond from below the waterfall.

17/08. Bottom pond from the bridge. I’ve had the first big fire, so this was the first time there was easier access in this area.

17/08. Far end of the bottom pond.

03/09. The drought had started to break at this point, but still no water in the bottom pond.

07/09. The water level in the middle pond has now reached the pipes for the first time. I later replaced the pipes with a slate “ford” and raised the water level, but at that point I wanted the bottom pond to start filling.

07/09. Water starts to collect in the bottom pond.

16/09. Attention now turns to the major task of clearing the willows from the top pond. This involves clambering around on branches, over 1 metre deep mud, with a pruning saw. I was too scared to use a chainsaw in these conditions (having never used one before).

29/09. Ducks arrive for the first time. Water still just trickling over the waterfall.

14/10. The willows are now mostly cleared from the top pond, and it is just beginning to look a bit like a pond again.

14/10. Top of the dam taken down again in order to lower the water level because I have started dredging the top pond (entirely by hand).

21/10. Dredging complete apart from the topmost section, which I will dredge later this year. Plenty of water coming down the stream, and two bridges installed.

30/10. The first large contingent of ducks arrive. They will come and go throughout the winter. Only one pair have set up permanent residence.

01/11. The stream is in full flood for the first time, and I realise I am going to have to change the dam so that when it floods like this, most of the water goes the other way!

01/11. Water flowing out of the bottom pond like this will cause serious erosion in no time at all. First I need to reduce the flood flow, then I’m going to have to think about this outflow channel.

18/11. Reedmace and willow at dawn. Bottom pond looking towards the outflow.

18/11.

11/12. Winter arrives. Top pond looking very tranquil.

10/11/2022

I haven’t had much to post about this autumn, having taken the year off running fungi foraging events because I have just moved to Ceredigion in Wales, and I’ve spent most of my time since then getting our smallholding up and running, and restoring a neglected system of 3 wildlife ponds. Which meant I didn’t even bother checking what was going on in the field beyond our top field, and didn’t realise there was a bonanza on offer. Until today the only Agaricus species I’ve seen growing in our new vicinity was moelleri (aka “Inky Mushroom”) — a relatively small species that smells of TCP and gives people headaches and stomach aches. But today, on a hunch, I decided to go in a direction I hadn’t been for weeks, and I was treated to the biggest mass-fruiting I have ever seen of the biggest Agaricus of them all – the Macro Mushroom (Agaricus macrosporus syn. urinascens).

Agaricus is a relatively tricky genus. None of the 30-odd British species are seriously poisonous, but working out which species you’ve found is frequently rather difficult, since they all look like relatives of cultivated mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus, in all its domesticated forms). A handful are easier to be sure of, and this is one of them — it is one of the few fungi that can be distinguished from its many otherwise-lookalikes by size alone. The largest fruit bodies can reach 30cm in diameter. See 50p for scale in the last photo. This species is a very close relative of the much more common (and smaller) Horse Mushroom (Agaricus arvensis) and has the same mild aniseed aroma. Found in grassland throughout the British Isles, often in rings (in this case about 20). My freezer is now full of perfect, grub-free specimens, and there are several large mushrooms lodged in the branches of trees on the other (upwind) side of our property, in the hope that this species will colonise our fields.

I also have some good news regarding events for next year. I have found a great location to run fungi foraging events — a 420 acre sheep farm near the village of Talley in Carmarthenshire. There is plenty of woodland, both deciduous and coniferous, and a grassland ridge that was covered in waxcaps when I visited in late October.  Dates and booking information here.

30/09/22. Note: This is a guest post by Cathy.

How do you like them apples?

We have apples coming out of our ears. There’s a beautiful Bramley apple tree here at our new place, with another non-cooking apple tree next to it.

Back in Hastings, if we had a surplus of anything, it was easy to find someone who wanted it. Here, we nearly got laughed out of a meet-the-neighbours group for even suggesting it; everyone else has too many apples too!

Dora has started school and they did a cooking lesson where she learned how to make a blackberry and apple crumble, so we’ve already made a few crumbles at home using her new-found skills.

Frozen apples

This week, I’ve started devoting some time to preserving some of the Bramleys for the longer term. Firstly, the obvious: freezing. You peel them, core them, cut them, toss them in lemon juice and spread them out on a baking sheet to ‘open freeze’ them. Then you transfer them to a bag. The advantage over putting them straight in the bag is that they don’t stick to each other, which makes it easier to defrost the right amount when you want to use them. So far 30 apples have met their demise this way.

Dried apples

A further eight apples have been dried. Peel, core, thinly slice, then put them into a bowl of cold water with the juice of a lemon while you finish the rest. (I skipped the lemon for the second batch and can confirm, you need the lemon to stop them going brown.) Drain them and put them into the dehydrator, where they take a good eight hours or so to dry. You can also use a low oven.

They’re sweet, sour and chewy, and the internet tells me they should last six months stored at room temperature.

Fruit leather

Twelve more apples have gone into chewy fruit leathers, and I’ve made three different flavours: (apple and) rosehip, elderberry and sloe.

The basic recipe is the same: peel, core and chop four apples (this makes two baking trays worth of leather), bring to the boil in a saucepan then simmer for 5-10 minutes until soft, then remove from the heat and drain off the water. Make sure you drain off the water before the apples disintegrate into mush (and I speak from experience here). Then put the lid back on for a few minutes to let them soften a bit more. Then add any other fruits you’re using, and a spoonful of sugar or two if you like.

In each case I used about two cupped handfuls of the ingredients below per four apples.

Sloes: Nice and easy – just simmer with a little water until soft, allow to cool, then pick out the stones.

Elderberries: Also easy, just remember it’s important to cook them because they are toxic raw. Remove all the green parts, add the berries to water, and simmer for 15 minutes. I also strained mine, but only to avoid lumpy leather.

Rosehips: It’s important to get rid of the seeds and irritating hairs from the insides. I did this by halving, scraping and rinsing, but I am a patient person! You can also cook them whole then strain them really well, though you get more wastage that way. Either way, simmer them in water for around 15 minutes.

Blend your ingredients to a smooth paste. Line two baking trays with paper and spread out the paste to about 2-3mm, then dry in a low oven for 2-3 hours. To save energy, you can time it to coincide with dinner and use the top oven above whatever you’re cooking, or put the trays near/above a woodburner, in an airing cupboard, or in a sunny spot. Just make sure it’s a fly-free area.

I’m expecting these to last around a month at room temperature, or much longer in the fridge (we previously made some that was still good at least six months later), and it can also be frozen.

What’s next?

Wine. Wine is next. I used to do a lot of wine making, but I haven’t done any since becoming a mum and not being able to devote areas of the house to bubbling glass containers. But now we have space, I’m going to dust off all the gear. Apparently Bramleys make a dry white, which sounds good to me and much more enticing than cider.

Also, there is a Latvian apple cake recipe in our family that I need to rediscover. It has a kind of meringue layer that rises to the top, which I remember being pretty amazing, if only I could find where I put the recipe.

Apple veterans, what do you do with yours?

17/08/2022

Our new home in Wales, the day after we arrived

This blog has been very quiet in recent months, and the reason was my life has been on hold as my family prepared to move from a small terraced house in Hastings (East Sussex) to a 6 acre smallholding on the Welsh coast, not far from the charming seaside village of New Quay. Having lived in urban south-east England for the whole of my 54 year life, this has been transformational for us. We have not moved for the foraging; there’s no way Ceredigion can compete with the ancient woodlands of Sussex and Kent when it comes to fungi, and if it was seaweeds I was interested in then we’d have gone further down to Pembrokeshire. The reason we’ve moved is because we believe big trouble is coming, and we wanted to get as far away from the overpopulated hinterland of London as possible, without having to face the dark winters and harsh climate of northern Scotland. This “cost of living crisis” is misnamed, because “crisis” implies it is temporary. We fear it is really the start of something much bigger, much worse, and permanent. We therefore plan to spend the coming months turning this land from an unorthodox “equestrian property” into both a place for producing food, and a haven for wildlife. It has plenty of potential for both, given that it has three long-abandoned wildlife ponds, along with a “canal” and a dam, plus a truly gigantic pile of well-rotted horse manure.

Totally overgrown wildlife pond, about the size of three tennis courts and currently dry because the “canal” which is supposed to feed it is silted up, and the dam partially collapsed. We have much work to do!.

Whether or not I start running public foraging events will depend on whether I can find a suitable location to do so. I have one experimental fungi foraging event scheduled near Newcastle Emlyn, but this is is already fully booked and I cannot add any more until I see how the first one goes (I am currently yet to visit the woodland where it will take place). I intend to spend much of this autumn exploring Wales in search of suitable places to take people fungi foraging, and I will be attempting to introduce all sorts of wild plants of foraging interest into our own land next year, but it is too early for me to plan any public events.

I will, however, be available for private foraging events in Ceredigion, Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire, though this will be on the understanding that I have no detailed local knowledge — I have no “spots” I can take people to. It is more likely to involve people suggesting to me places that they would like to go foraging than the other way around, although I obviously have a list of places I am planning to visit. If you might be interested in booking a private event then please email me and we can work out the details (I am not expecting to make much money out of such activities, since they will all be experimental).

Also, if anybody reading this has some land they think might be suitable for running foraging events and would be interested in collaborating, please do get in touch.

21/03/2022

Gracilaria is a genus of red seaweed much better known as food in Japan and Hawaii than in Europe, where in some places they have been foraged out of existence. In Europe there is no history of consumption (even in these post-foraging-revival times). The English name is the unattractive “wartweed”, so I generally use the Japanese common name of ‘Ogonori’. There are a number of very similar species, mostly found in sandy areas, especially where there is running

Gracilaria gracilis (Slender Wartweed / Ogonori)

water when the tide is out, and in areas only exposed during very low spring tides. They can be found all around the British coast, from spring to autumn. All of them consist of long, straggly annual strands, which grow from a perennial holdfast (so cut them off instead of pulling them up!). They should not be confused with the many red seaweeds which have much finer hair-like strands, or are more branching and angular. Although this is only a matter of taste and texture — there are no poisonous lookalikes. The species used here is Gracilaria gracilis (Slender Wartweed).

The recipe included here is taken from my recently published book Edible Plants. It has proved a firm favourite on my coastal foraging courses. It started out as a fusion of traditional Japanese and Hawaiian recipes, but has been evolved and refined sufficiently over the years to the point where I can claim it as my own recipe. If you would like to try it then I am planning on serving some at the book signing event at City Books in Hove at 6.30pm on Thursday March 31st.

Ogonori (Gracilaria) salad

For the salad: 100g fresh Gracilaria, 3 escallion shallots (peeled and sliced as thinly as possible with a mandoline), one quarter of a cucumber, 1 fresh fleshy red chilli (sliced), fresh grated root ginger, black sesame seeds.

For the dressing: 3tbsp rice vinegar, 2tbsp light soy sauce, 1tbsp toasted sesame oil, 1tsp clear honey.

Method: Slice the cucumber thinly, cover with salt, leave for 20 to 30 mins, then drain and pat off any excess salt. The goal is to get rid of as much water as possible – gently squeezing will help. Mix the rice vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil and honey to make a dressing. Optionally chop the Gracilaria into 4-5cm lengths (this makes it easier to eat using only a fork, which is what we do when this is prepared on the beach). Blanch the ogonori in boiling water for 40 secs (it will turn green), then immediately rinse in cold water, to keep it nice and crunchy. Place a layer of salted cucumber, sliced shallots and chilli in a circle on a plate. Mix the ogonori with the chilli and ginger, and place in the middle of the circle. Pour the dressing onto the mixture, and garnish with sesame seeds.

15/01/2022

Edible Plants is the most comprehensive guide to foraging for plants and seaweeds in north-west Europe ever published, by some considerable margin. It contains everything you need to know about every edible species worth knowing about, and all of the important poisonous ones too. In total it covers over 400 plants, seaweeds, lichens and cyanobacteria.  The RRP for the paperback is £25 (a hardback to be released later will be £35).

Signed copy of paperback £25 (incl P&P)

06/08/2021

This is my first blog post in a while. We have been very busy trying to get our forthcoming book Edible Plants ready for publication, which has included testing and honing the recipes, and I felt this one was worth sharing, partly because now is the time to do it. You will not be disappointed with the results, though it is not for people on diets…

Watermint (Mentha aquatica)

This is ice-cream how it used to be made — all you need is a freezer, though it dates from a time when the only way to freeze things in the summer was to have an underground ice room.

You could probably use any sort of mint, but the one that works best is Watermint (Mentha aquatica), and it is in perfect condition right now, just as it starts to flower (that’s its current state in Sussex, anyway). Watermint is distinguishable from other mints partly by its liking for aquatic habitats (here it is shown growing next to a lake, but you will find it in ponds, ditches, small streams). The arrangement of its flowers are also distinctive, with a large terminal clump at the top. Once familiar with it, you will also be able to recognise it by smell.

Watermint and chocolate chip ice-cream

Ingredients: 200g caster sugar, 180ml water, 8 tbsp watermint chopped leaves (these are too light to specify by weight),  1 tbsp broken-up watermint flowers and whole flowers for decorative purposes, juice of ½ lemon, 600ml double cream, small bar of very dark chocolate.

Method: Heat the water in a saucepan. Add the sugar and bring to the boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Add the lemon juice, mint leaves and the broken flowers, blitz for 30 seconds, then allow to cool. Then roughly chop the chocolate, passing it through a colander to make sure no large bits get through. Stir the mix thoroughly with a whisk when cold, then add the cream and chocolate, stir again then put in a freezer until it has the consistency of slush. Stir thoroughly again, then return to the freezer. You can repeat this process 2 or 3 times, the goal being to introduce air bubbles to lighten the final product. When frozen hard, serve with whole flower heads as a garnish.