I'm so excited about my foraging expedition with the Roadkill chef Fergus Drennan tomorrow. We're going to be out for 12-13 hours in the Herne Bay area of Kent and will be foraging for wild food in woodland, field, river and seashore. Sure to be exhausted by the time I arrive back in London.
To convey my excitement and awe at his skills, I'm posting an article that appeared a few years ago in the Sunday Times Magazine, detailing a typical 24 hours in his rather unusual (but delightful!) life:
A Life in the Day: Fergus Drennan
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| Fergus Drennan with his foraged feasts |
The 36-year-old broadcaster and writer, best known for the BBC programme The Roadkill Chef, plans to spend a year living entirely off wild food. He lives next to the Blean, Canterbury’s ancient woodlands
"I wake at 5am thinking: “Which woods am I going to today?” I love the idea of working from dawn till dusk. I have an incredible map in my head of where everything is — river banks, woodland, arable lands, salt marshes — but the best days are when I forget about everywhere I know and strike off somewhere new.
I’m Fergus by name, fungus by nature — I spread everywhere and my bedroom is horrific. I love the idea of making random connections between things, so I can never read just one book, I have to have 10 or 20 on the go. I’ve also got a muslin cloth full of roasted acorn shells on the floor and the cat has decided to make a bed in the middle of it. I’ve had to move into the spare room because I can’t bear it any more.
My entire day is spent searching for and preparing food. Nearly everything I do is experimental and incredibly time-consuming. I’m in the process of juicing two baskets of apples to make vinegar, and then there’s the disastrous residue of yesterday’s calamity. When foraging for your own food, you’re motivated not to waste anything. I spent four days collecting rosehips and I’ve made a lovely syrup, but I’m left with four kilos of bullet-like seeds that won’t grind. I’m hoping to use them as a base for coffee. The best blend I’ve come up with is a handful of butcher’s broom, hawberry and goosegrass seeds, a couple of green walnuts and four or five aromatic alexander seeds, all roasted and ground.
I’ve never been able to establish regular patterns. I eat when I’m hungry — breakfast might be soup and unleavened wild-grain bread or, from September, conker porridge with apple syrup. And I wash when I think I’m smelly — maybe once a week or every two weeks.
I might clean my teeth every other day or I might not do it for six months. It’s a superficial thing for me. After four or five days, I’ve got a nice coating of dental plaque which is full of vitamin B12. Insects are another good source, so I turn a blind eye to termites on leaves.
I use my tandem with a trolley at the back to get around. It’s quite hard work and I’m trying to calculate the amount of energy expended versus calorific return. When I’m looking for food, I’m totally absorbed. All my attention is focused on what I’m doing, which helps me make important discoveries. I’m very in touch with myself physically — the urgent need to eat something in particular boils up from my core. Recently I wanted eggs and fish – it was an insatiable thought. Difficult if you’re trying to be vegan. I love meat, I just don’t want to be part of the suffering. Fresh roadkill is fine and inside a female pheasant you’ll find eggs at every stage of production. As I see it, I’m turning tragedy into a lovely meal.
I’ve always felt slightly on the outside of things. When I read the papers, I cry at the way the world is, and I think foraging is a balm against that. It’s also about wanting to live fully. I belong in nature, and when I’m out there I feel I’m putting down roots. It’s partly physical, my hands covered in bloody scratches, the sun on my back in summer, and the wind and rain in winter. I just love the impact of nature on my body.
The only time in my life I’ve been really unhappy is when I’ve been seduced by cash. I used to supply wild food to London restaurants, but there was a big problem with sustainability and I couldn’t live with that. My income comes from running foraging courses. When you don’t need anything, money goes a long way. I hate supermarkets, because there’s no connection with the food. My acorn flour, which I made after soaking pillowcasesful of acorns in the river to leach out the tannins, has meaning because of the story locked into it. Recently I removed about a kilo of fat from the back and rump of a roadkill badger. Naively I thought that if I simply boiled this in water it would melt. Not so. The secret is to liquidise the fat cells in hot water and strain it. Repeated boiling and whisking, followed by setting and straining, results in a pure, fairly odourless lard I can use for wild-flour pastry. I’ll make the skin into shoes.
I always have two or three different soups on the go for lunch and dinner: seaweed, nettle or chickweed and wintergreen. I gather the raw materials from different habitats and make it up in batches at the weekend. My downfall is that I’ve got the most disgustingly sweet tooth. It’s hellish. My main source of sugar is concentrated wild-apple juice, I’ve laid down 24 litres of apple and 12 of pure sea buckthorn juice. When I’m out, I graze on hairy bittercress which is cressy and very nourishing, and I take chestnuts with me which are wonderfully chewy and sweet to snack on. There’s nothing better than mushrooms fried in fresh garlic oil, eaten in the woods with the sun sinking behind the trees.
I have island tendencies which I don’t think are entirely healthy, so I’m deliberately making an effort to be more sociable in the evenings. Twice a day I try to practise Taijiwuxigong, part of the Buqi system that works with tai chi forces. It’s a healing system that helps release blocked energy and toxic by‑products from the body. I check my emails then read or meditate before I go to sleep. I don’t know what else there is to do when you don’t have a girlfriend but wish you did."
Fergus’s blog is at www.wildmanwildfood.com
Interview by Caroline Scott - it appeared in the magazine on April 27, 2008
