x: Book Club
The Wilderness Cure: Ancient Wisdom in a Modern World (Wilde, M.: Simon & Schuster, 2022) Reviewer: Kyra Pollitt
The lockdowns affected us all in unique ways. To me, the pandemic was yet another scream from Mother Earth that I couldn’t bear to hear. To block it out, I disconnected from my body and the natural energies that flowed through it. I stopped practising yoga, anaesthetised myself with alcohol, and consumed sugar and fat until my arteries furred, my chakras blocked, my creativity ceased, and I could no longer feel anything, nor recognise myself. I’m still clawing my way back. Monica (here ‘Mo’) Wilde did the opposite. She turned away from Mammon and plugged herself directly into Gaia. On 27th November 2020— that day of orgiastic capitalist consumption known as Black Friday —Monica embarked on a year of eating only wild food. The agreed parameters for the challenge are clearly laid out at the start of the book. The following pages are a diary of this ‘wilderness cure’. Part foraging guide, part cookbook (though you’ll find few recipes, as such), part personal journal, part political manifesto, and entirely a paean to nature, this is a timely book. The prose is fluid and honest. Although strongly connected to the non-human world, Wilde is not directly walking the path of her ancestry, like Wall Kimmerer. In many ways, this makes the book more immediately relatable. Whilst it would be hard to replicate either Wilde’s expertise in foraging, or her indomitable resourcefulness in the kitchen, it is easy to follow her sharp mind as it explores science and deconstructs many of the myths and false narratives by which we live and, more directly, eat.
nausea”, “a horrible sensation that I’m going to suddenly break into a hot or cold sweat and vomit”, and feels “weak, blurry-eyed, dizzy, and wobbly, with very loud tinnitus“. Hitherto a vegetarian, Wilde finds she must eat fish and meat if she is to have food on her plate and remain well through the hunger gaps the wild year brings. In January, Wilde confesses “without the food in my freezer, I could not survive in this climate on foraged food alone”. February finds her “aching for fresh greens”, but these hunger gaps can also occur at other, surprising times of year here in Scotland.
Don’t buy the book looking for the latest gimmicky diet to help you shed a few pounds. Wilde does drop innumerable dress sizes as the year progresses, calculating an overall loss of almost five stone (thirty-one kilos). However, she also experiences “light-headed dizziness”, “[l]ow blood sugar”, “waves of
Sometimes the diet is repetitive and monotone. So, instead of boring us with the menu, Wilde takes us on interesting and informative diversions. Here Wilde is an Everywoman, falling in step with us as we travel through food chains, archaeology, the making of the landscape, ethnobotany, 53
