Foraging for wild food is increasing in popularity. Ruth Campbell meets one expert who demonstrates how you can eat like a king for free all year round.

THE ground is still cold and hard. The trees are bare of fruit. Many plants are only just beginning to come back to life. If I were dropped in the middle of these woods in the depths of winter and left to fend for myself, I wouldn’t last long.

Luckily, today, I have Chris Bax with me. A cross between wild food chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and bushcraft authority Ray Mears, Chris is an expert on living off the land. He could probably happily, and comfortably, survive on this patch of ground for years. And he’d want for little.

True, some of the things on his menu, such as dry roasted, chocolatecoated crickets, mealworm omelette and woodlouse pizza, aren’t everyone’s idea of a slap-up meal. But his nettle gnocchi, wild garlic risotto and comfrey fritters, washed down with home-made elderflower champagne and hawthorn blossom liqueur, do sound good.

Chris, who is passionate both about food and the great outdoors, earns a living teaching others how to survive in the wild. And in these lean economic times, it seems more people than ever are looking to nature for wholesome activities that are free.

While most, like me, might not want to learn how to cook woodlice and grubs, or even skin and gut their own rabbits, there is, says Chris, a growing desire for information about all sorts of ancient woodland skills, from learning how to identify mushrooms and gather and cook food in the open, to knife and sheath making and building shelters from trees.

Thanks to the organic farming movement and the sort of television programmes made by Fearnley-Whittingstall and Mears, foraging is coming to more people’s attention. There has been so much interest, the National Trust is offering courses in gathering food outdoors for free. And the foragers’ Bible, Food for Free by Richard Mabey, first published in 1972, has been reprinted 11 times in response to growing demand.

“While people are becoming increasingly concerned about where their food comes from and the production processes, wild food is about as natural and organic as you can get,” says Chris.

We are walking in the grounds of Swinton Park hotel, near Masham, where Chris runs courses in foraging and cooking wild food. His students spend about three hours roaming the estate learning about those shoots, roots, berries and leaves that are nutritious, tasty and safe to eat. They are then shown how the ingredients they have harvested, supplemented by a few bought-in items, can be turned into a delicious three-course meal in the Swinton Park cookery school.

As we walk, Chris bends down and plucks some small green leaves from what looks like a clump of worthless weed at his feet.

This particular handful of wild greenery is bittercress, which tastes peppery, a little like rocket or cress. It is delicious, would taste great in a salad and, even better, it’s free. It makes me wonder why I spend a small fortune on green leaves packaged in plastic bags from supermarkets.

As Chris introduces me to a host of other things I am surprised to learn I can eat for nothing, he laments the fact we have lost the art of living off the land. Foraging was second nature to many generations and played an important role in the diet of people in rural areas during the Second World War.

“There are so many things in this country we have forgotten. People avoid red berries at all costs rather than learn about them. While we should be cautious, hawthorn and rowan berries are good to eat.” And why don’t more of us eat acorns?

“Acorn cake tastes great with pigeon and chutney made from hedgerow fruits, or turn them into acorn nut burgers with wild mushrooms,” he says, adding: “This isn’t just about survival. I like my food and I like it to taste good.”

BASED in Boroughbridge, Chris, 42, originally trained as a designer before travelling the world and discovering a passion for wild food in countries like India and Nepal. “When you go trekking with indigenous people in the jungle, they know and recognise all the plants, they understand so much more about their surroundings than we do.”

It was in South-East Asia that he was introduced to the art of cooking insects like locusts, ants and grubs.

Compared to our expensively produced farmed meat, food such as this is so much better for the environment, he says. “It makes a huge amount of sense to eat it.”

When he returned to Britain, Chris trained as a chef, working in Hazlewood Castle, near Leeds, and eventually set up his own catering company.

Inspired by his sculptor wife Rose, he decided to combine his love of the outdoors with his passion for wild, natural food.

The couple bought 17 acres of woodland in North Yorkshire, which they use as a base for their wild food, bushcraft and woodland craft course company, Taste The Wild. Children, particularly, relish the more adventurous forays. “Sometimes we show them how to cook and eat insects.

Most of them want to try them. We fry things like woodlice, wood ants, mealworms and locusts. The crickets taste quite nutty: you can coat them in chocolate or curry them. People quite like them.

“We cook in a pit, a clay oven and over a wood fire, wrapping food in leaves, pinning food to planks, maybe even roasting it on a spit. You can skin and joint a rabbit (if you want to) and help prepare other seasonal game such as pigeon and pheasant,” says Chris.

After helping to source wild food from the Swinton Park estate for use in the hotel menu, Chris, who has also worked as an advisor on a number of television programmes and has appeared on the BBC’s Countryfile, was asked to run his popular foraging courses there.

Even the bulrushes that we walk past on the edge of Swinton’s lake won’t go to waste. Their rhizome root, which tastes a bit like sweet potato or parsnip, is delicious roasted on an open fire, according to Chris.

He experiments with all sorts of ingredients, such as peeled thistle heads, which are a bit like celery, and chickweed, which tastes like newly podded pea. Pig nuts, he says, are “the caviar of peasants”. He points out that even building sites or waste ground in urban areas, home to salad and soup ingredients such as nettle, dandelion, ivy leaf toadflax and bitter cress, can be exciting places to forage.

The easily identifiable nettle is a good starting point for those new to wild food. “Nettles are fantastic, better than spinach nutritionally. The trick is to use the top four leaves; as they go down, they get more bitter.

Wrap them inside themselves and they don’t sting,” he advises He believes his courses, which attract everyone from merchant bankers to New Age hippy types, are popular because people are now looking closer to home for their entertainment: “Instead of nipping across to Prague for the weekend, they want to go to Yorkshire to learn some simple skills.

“Knowledge, skill and experience is the ultimate green gift. People are discovering that experiences like these, rather then getting more stuff, makes them more fulfilled and happy.”

■ Swinton Park: Wild About Food with Chris Bax on May 30 and Oct 3. (£90 including three-hour guided walk and three-course demonstration lunch) Parkland Food Festivals: May 25 and Sept 20.

Swinton Park, Masham, Ripon, North Yorkshire HG4 4JH. Tel: 01765-680900.

enquiries@swintonpark.com

■ Taste the Wild (wild foods, bushcraft and woodland skills) nr Boroughbridge, North Yorkshire: tastethewild.co.uk, info@tastethewild.co.uk. Tel: 07914-290083

NETTLE SOUP

5 spring onions

50g butter

350g nettles

2 large potatoes

1 ltr stock

1 tbsp creme fraiche per person

Chop spring onions. Melt butter and soften chopped onions in it. Chop potatoes. Wash nettles and add to pan. Add potatoes.

Pour stock in, bring to boil and simmer for 15-20 mins. Season with salt and pepper. Blitz in blender until smooth and return to pan to reheat. Ladle into bowls and add dollop of creme fraiche. (Serves 4)