Foraging

Foraging is the gathering of food and medicine from plants and fungi that are already there - greens, berries, nuts and mushrooms growing on ground nobody planted or tends. It adds variety to a diet and it fills the lean weeks in the year, the gap after stores have run low and before cultivated crops are ready. What it is not is a food supply. Counting it as one counts the same safety net twice.

Three things decide whether it is safe. The first is identification: many good plants and fungi closely resemble poisonous ones, and a wrong call here harms somebody rather than wasting a trip. The second is preparation, which is a separate matter - a plant identified correctly can still need to be picked at the right growth stage and cooked the right way before it is safe to eat. The third is the ground itself. Nothing should be gathered where pesticides or weedkillers are used or can drift in from neighbouring land, because a sprayed plant looks exactly like a clean one. Permission from whoever holds the land comes before any of it, and above a certain volume many places also require a permit, with the threshold set locally.

The supply itself cannot be pushed. Birds take the berries, drought shrinks them, insects get into the nuts and mushrooms fruit when they choose, so a poor year cannot be answered by working harder - which is the weakness of a buffer that fails hardest in the years it is most wanted. A good year is little better unless there is somewhere for the surplus to go, since most of what is gathered keeps only days without drying, freezing or some other means of preservation arranged beforehand. And the practice eats into its own supply: taking only part of what is standing, even when there seems to be plenty, is what leaves enough for wildlife and for the stand to carry on producing.