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.

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 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.

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, witches, queer and gender theories— mushrooms, who knew? —COP26, an IPCC Report, Albrecht’s (2003) notion of solastalgia, the imperative to move beyond the Anthropocene to the Symbiocene, how to eco-clean your frying pan, and much, much more. Along the way we are treated to a live birth, a wild food dinner party, a trip to Poland, and learn to reimagine foraging as “wild shopping”— each trip just as unique and “memorable” as the experience of buying vintage clothes.

Wilde’s Polish colleague estimates “the average edible wild species available per community is usually about the 120 mark.” I’m certain Wilde would be able to identify all of these, and more. Tragically, “today over 50 per cent of the world’s daily calorie intake comes from just three species”. There are further consequences in turning from a “plantbased organic economy to a fossil-fuelled economy”; “one in two of us born after 1960 will get cancer”. As Wilde’s important book demonstrates, “the key to thriving is variety”. Her journey also reconnects us with seasonality, reminding us that our bodies are designed to intake particular fats at particular times of year, sugar when it’s in season. The freshness of the food imparts vital chemical constituents that have noticeable effect: “Emotions, feelings, memories: these are all energy and eating wild food releases them”.

By April, Wilde’s body “finally feels in tune again” and “matches the sprite inside”. We are invited to share Wilde’s sprite-like wonder at the natural world, her recovery of a relationship of innocence with the earth. Wilde’s very practical advice to beginning foragers is just to start learning, one plant at a time. More seasoned herbologists will particularly enjoy the tips on native species that can substitute for Cinnamon, Cardamom, and Coriander, and perhaps the experiments with wild plant rennets for cheesemaking. Everyone will benefit from the very handy index to plant edibility at the back of the book, and the table showing the calorific content of common wild foods (pp. 204-205 in my copy). I finished the book awed, inspired, and satiated. The only insight I wanted more of was from the gut bacteria analyses Wilde undertook regularly throughout the year. Perhaps these will form the basis of the next book. In the meantime, I really do hope someone commissions a podcast of the game she plays on long car journeys— I’d definitely tune in to Mo Wilde’s Desert Island Plants.

The Wilderness Cure will be available in hardback from 23rd June.

Reference: Albrecht, G. (2019) Earth Emotions: new words for a new world. Cornell University Press