The Difference Between Foraging & Living Off The Land | Bushcraft Show 2013

Description

Bushcraft Show 2013 Main Stage Presentation entitled "The Difference Between Foraging And Living Off The Land".

This was the first main stage presentation at the Bushcraft Show.

My other presentations from 2014 and 2016 are also here on this channel.

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Video Transcription

hey that's me so I'm Paul currently some of you I know know me very well and some of you know me a little bit some of you maybe don't know me from Batman I'll write a blog and it's become very popular if you take your strap login to Google is the one that comes up top we want some awards apparently oh I used to work with that guy he needs to work with Lars as well great guy to work with and also speculate time working with weave Gordon and brought an element just a little bit but I learned a lot from him in that time and also been lucky enough to travel a bit and learn some bushcraft firsthand from various indigenous peoples some of that will come into my talk today and also that's the kind of holiday lights go on I like to get out there into wild places and as I said the other day when I got the awards it feels a little bit strange standing under the Fielding's no 2 diabetes and doing bush practice for me a lot of it was about taking skills and using them but it's fantastic to see so many people enthusiastic and getting together and interested in these skills mrs. a pleasure to be able to stand here and talk to you today the title of my talk the difference between foraging and living off the land and it's meant to be slightly controversial and also just make a thief about the definitions and foraging has become very popular TV shows click like Hugh fearnley-whittingstall touch on it lots of other hedge row type things right through to a roadkill chef lots of people are interested in free food wild food foraging and even restaurants now lots of wild foods appearing whether it's you know pub menus right through to posh restaurants and in London Hicks for example you've probably never heard of it but as a restaurant in London he sauces a lot of wild foods it's become a fashionable thing but because of that to me as my perception foraging has become a slightly more narrow narrow definition and for a lot of people it seems to be going on picking things from the hedgerow and maybe taking them home putting them in a salad and you know finding a few berries of what have you look at the definition of foraging even on Wikipedia and you look at foraging in terms of say bears it's all it's about all the food that they get it's not just about picking a few greens at the hedgerow and scrubbing a few roots it's about all the food and collecting the food and that's why I just wanted to talk about these different definitions and also give you a few insights and also leave you with some questions to think about in terms of what these things mean and what it means to actually live off the land you know we're all interested in bushcraft we're all interested in foraging obviously you're here but what does it mean to actually live off the land so first off let's have a little quiz some some hedgerow greens what's this garlic world garlic Rams ins yeah that one wood sorrel yeah fantastic next one some violence and then all tasty green great stitch words anybody know that one common sorrel chickweed redshanks brookline that one thank ya yeah there's rib work plantain yeah so there's lots of stuff out there that a lot of is recognized and we can go out and we can pick it but most of it's sort of salad stuff and if you were to come on a bushcraft course with me and you're doing a hard morning a bow drilling and I gave you a plate full of that stuff you probably wouldn't be very impressed anything always wears the energy he's not going to keep me going for very long and that's the kind of incongruity that I see is that a lot of foraging teaching goes towards picking all the green stuff and yet what we actually need is something else in terms of keeping us going and actually being able to live obviously we can go for fruits there's more energy in there this because you know there's berries and there's nuts and but they're quite seasonal a lot of them so we need to know a range of foods but also some of them are not available all the year round you know some of these things are very very tight windows of opportunity for you to collect them and obviously we can then start looking at deserving things but that's then another step on beyond just picking things living off the land as we go here's another one is a test so what we've looked a lots of British stuff so for anybody know what that is no that's bunch Barry so that's one you'd see quite a lot in Canada in Ontario where we do canoe trips and is edible yeah but it's again you need to know the specifics of the environment to know what you can eat you know when there's a lot there that I've shown you that we're familiar with but then once you get out of that zone there's a whole range of other things that were not familiar with and so you need that local knowledge as well so we need energy yeah if i gave you a plate for the greens if I fed your natural week you get pretty hungry know some wood sorrel those slips were too violet leaves you're going to get pretty hungry and pretty ratty black quickly so we need energy these days where do we go energy from well pastor plant-based products bread again now potatoes right that's where we get most of our carbohydrates from these days but none of it is native to to where we live here some of it is native in parts of northern hemisphere some of its self its native in North America so its native in Asia and some of its cultivated and has been cultivated for a long time so in terms of was actually living off the land here and now we're not going to find any of that stuff and also if we think about our ancestors they also have had a hard time finding anything like that it might have been some grasses that are similar to wheat but it's not potatoes and it's not pasta and so a lot of where we get our energy from and we take for granted is not available to us if we're just out foraging living off trying to live off the land we also need protein obviously we can get protein from nuts you have to talk about plant foods and some foods like nettles they're quite high in protein for green plan for eight percent by dry weight we can't get protein from plant foods but we really do need apart from some very specific environments we need to start looking at meats and fish small game is obviously easier to catch so things like squirrel and rabbits and what have you but grace rules are not native here but the squirrels are rabbits are not native here introduced

but even where there are there is small games such as rabbits and squirrels it's all lean meat has anybody ever heard of rabbit starvation that you've probably heard of it if you're reading about trappers particularly in the north our body can only do so much in terms of translating converting protein into energy it's limited by what I liver can do so and that in turn is limited by the blood supply to the liver so if we're catching squirrels and rabbits which are all pretty lean we could have a full belly we could eat you know 10 rabbits a day be absolutely stuffed but there's only a certain amount our body can do to process that protein into the energy that we need and it translates to about 400 grams of carbohydrate which if you know the calorie value of carbohydrates about 1,600 calories it's about four calories per gram so you can only maximum from lean meat get about 1,600 calories per day however much you eat and that's why those trappers who were spending a lot of time and energy to get out in the cold may be expending five six thousand calories a day they're only getting a limited amount back as a result of that so they had full bellies but they were losing weight and they were starving because they couldn't convert the protein into into energy so we can look at larger animals and hear some this is off a fallow deer we've got kidneys and heart and also the liver is very good and that's the sort of stuff you want to eat first it might seem a bit gruesome but you can take that and eat it first and the livers good because the liver is one of the places in our body that will store carbohydrate glycogen is stored in our liver and we can access that from other animals liver so that's why it's one of the hunters meats but also it goes off quite quickly so you want to eat the liver fairly soon you know you take a heart and the kidneys and liver and fry them up put them over fire whatever that's a good source of protein and energy to start off with but even so we want to be able to preserve that energy perhaps and maybe we want to add to it so does anybody know what that Barry is that so it's like a road looks like a row so it doesn't but that Saskatoon berry that's the common name for it and that was one of the things that natively off Mary be used to make anything so they added dry pounded to meet with fat and fruit and they used of the fruits as well but Saskatoon berry was one of the ones that were used and that then allowed that food preserved and it also was a highly colorific food that they could store a news over the winter and avoided that issue of you know ten lean meat and small game and not having the color is that they needed also fish yeah fish we often think about fish has not been a very reliable or viable source because we look at it from the perspective of modern angling I've been fly-fishing and it's extremely pleasurable to spend the day on the bank maybe have a beer as well you know you might catch a salmon or a trout to something depending on where you are but you don't tend to catch a huge number of fish it's a fairly labor-intensive past time for the result that you get at the end of it now all of these fish will call with a net yeah and that's not sporting but it's catching and it's killing so if you look at indigenous people who rely on fish a lot the time they were using next and they're very good at making cordage and very good making next and these are all caught this is in Ontario up on a native reserve and there's pike in there there's there's white mouse fast the sucker fish and some walleye now as well as lots of good stuff in there and that's all just with a net out overnight and it's a passive technique you've got and do something else while the next room of work and that's norm those of you that we're here for Ray's talk to your knighthood he meant on bikies that's norm again just looking at how to prepare some of those things and taking the different parts of the fish and using them for different things some for smoking for preserving some for eating straight away and other bits you know the ROE off some of them lots of valuable food resource there in terms of finding out how we might live off the land we can think we need to look at a couple of things one is are we talking about survival situation are we looking at surviving a few days are we looking at surviving a few weeks and there's plenty of evidence to suggest that you can get by in a very limited calorie diet as long as you're eating the right things if you're eating about 500 pairs of carbohydrate a day that will keep your system going or keep your stomach enzymes working and then when you do get food when you do get meat you can get that fat on board and get the protein on board which if you eat nothing there's its myth that you can go for three weeks without food yes you can but you have to be rescued in week four and you have to be put on a drip in a hospital because your stomach doesn't work properly if you catch some food in week four and you've not eaten anything for three weeks you can have a hard time digesting it so you need to keep eating stuff and that's where the plant foods of the small stuff that you can collect get some few carbs in a few berries a few tuberous roots and we'll look at those you can get into your system and then as of when you catch your fish or catch a rabbit or a squirrel or something you can take that on board also we can look at how indigenous people that still go off the land how they live off the land what do they do to survive because they're surviving for longer and that's part the question is a short-term survival situation or is it actually living off the land and maintaining growing stronger maintaining your body and staying healthy and fit and that's an entirely different question it's removed again once removed again from just collecting a few greens to put in your salad on a Sunday afternoon survival situation you can have a bit of plank knowledge and get by and a bit of trapping and fishing but then when it actually comes to living off the land for your life your entire life we can look at people who do that and we can also look at history and we can look at archaeology now I've been lucky enough spend a bit of time with the Hadza in tanzania and one of the things first things you notice about hunter-gatherers in my experience is that they're entirely opportunistic they will eat just about anything that they can get their hands on their this guy they've just shot at the boon of bows and arrows they've got to it might seem a bit brutal and apologize for some of the pictures that are coming up but it just shows the reality of the life of these people have there is very much a romantic idea about just going off and living off the land it's extremely difficult you need detailed knowledge of an environment whatever that environment is and you need to be skilled and you can't just wander in even in a relatively uncomplicated material society like the handset they don't they're not as complex in their hunting or their equipment and say the Inuit but even there they still have basic equipment and have bows and arrows they have fire sticks they have a knife that has a cooking pot which they're traded more laterally but they have some basic equipment that they can use the lost land if you land as a survivor in a situation not only do you not know the environment you don't have those tools at your disposal maybe you don't even have the skills to make them so even in a relatively simple material culture like the handset they still have great skill and they have the tools that he needs to the job so these guys just killed prob'ly ins to get fire go they get the baboon's on the fire like you would with a pig burn the hairs off and then they draw them take them off the fire and butcher them it's a close-up it looks a bit grey sunders neck so there they put leaves down on the ground keep the me dirt free then the butchering it up into sections some of it to eat straight away some of it to take home there's all the different bits of meat on the embers cooking and they don't cook it for very long I tried various different bits and it was yeah what they're doing is making sure there's no bacteria on the outside really and you're softening up the meat as much as possible and then consuming it needs everything I watched with interest as a guy cries dopin the top of this baboons head and ate the brain if they don't waste anything

there's some meat to take home and they often save some of the best bits to take home for the for the family for the wives and the kids and even though and that was breakfast by the way this was sort of nine o'clock in the morning that this was going on yeah boon for breakfast but as I say they're opportunistic and they didn't deliver as I said and it was I tried some tunes very good very tasty they take advantage of the energy that's there does the nutrients that are then but on the way back they spot some bush babies up in there acacia's and the way they go again yeah but even though they've got full stomachs they're opportunistic yet we're going to get those so away they go and eventually is a young lad who who got it headshot he's very happy that he was a very good hunter that lad he was very good he was only about 12 or 13 he was an exceptionally good shot this is one of their camps very very simple just simple wickiups you can see where they've had fires and if you look closely around the camp you also start spotting things like this grinding stones where they've been grinding up nuts and seeds to get the energy from those oils and the carbohydrate content so they're not just hunting and this is one of the things you know people characterize our ancestors in the Paleolithic so before we start to move towards farming as punters because largely that's what the archaeological evidence says you know that you find mammoth kill sites or mammoth butchery sites with luxury marks in the bones and there is a logical evidence of as eating meat and animals and so therefore were characterized so our European ancestors as being meat-eaters as being hunters there's less evidence of plant foods being used and less evidence of other many small game we might have eaten so there's a very patchy patchy list of evidence and so the happier villages have to work with what they've got but when you start looking at people who live off the land today you see that these are very very broad range of foods here some of the heads up heads are be women digging for roots digging for tubers and they spotted vine growing in a monster shrubs and you can see bottom left of the picture there there's some tubers that they've collected and that's their sort of fullback food and they're packed with starch their patch with complex carbohydrate and even if the men come home empty-handed from their hunt there is carbohydrate there that they need for energy remember we talked about as needing that energy and me giving you a plate full of leaves you want me very impressed we need something now we all go and get a baked potato or something for lunch perhaps that's that's the stuff we naturally head toward and it's cooked there's this I'm sorry if I offend anybody here there's plenty of evidence suggests that you can't live off raw food this is fab from raw foodism and most people who are raw food is a very thin they're very weak they look malnourished and plenty of evidence to suggest that you need to cook your food and there's a very interesting book by a guy called Richard Ram who has this hypothesis that one of the reasons we've got such a big brain is that we've cooked our food for a very long time that allows us to have a smaller digestive system that means that we've got more energy available for our brain and that's why we've we've moved on in terms of the capacity of our brain compared to some of our some of our hominid ancestors so it's interesting to note that when you look at indigenous people and they're getting these complex carbohydrate rich foods they're cooking them they're not eating them raw they're cooking them so that you can get more energy out of them it's the same with us we cook our baked potatoes you also can look at other cultures you know with there's loads of burn up all over here all over the country here in Asia it's valued as a as a food it's a tasty thing that you'll get in Japan and Korea and places and they cut it up and they fight with sesame seeds and various other things nice if you ever get any burn up for each slice them up into little batons stir fry them with a bit of sesame oil with a soy sauce on very very tasty it's all the countryside but it requires you to dig it up and it can be a bit of effort that's the rosette of leaves that's the flower is in the Thistle family and you can see that from the flower very clearly there's some effects and the guys in one of my courses digging it up requires a digging stick very similar to what they had two women a day leading up the roots and there's one of the roots some of them can be a bit woody but they are tasty but once it's cooked so as I said we can look at history and after la geology as well so history can look at written history can look at more recent history what did people eat so times of potato famine potato blight some native foods here that people went back to silver weed against in the rose family very common it's a small route they've got small underground storage organs with starch but they're easy to collect and there's lots of them and what you what you'll notice is that in terms of collecting starch you either go for big things that might be a bit difficult to they got but are worth the effort or small things that are numerous close together and easy to collect and silver weed is one of them another one pig nuts those are the leaves and the carrot family looks similar to parsley perhaps if you recognize the leaves and there's one of the peak notes not not a huge one with the outer skin take it off and very tasty you can eat it raw but again you get more nutrition from it if you cook it but a good source of carbohydrate and those diminutive roots might seem well are they worth collecting but people lift off those yeah both in Scotland and in Ireland during times of potato blight people lift off silver weed and and picnic here we have a few other small underground storage organs and you do need to be careful these all these are all growing pretty much in the same square inch or cubic inch of soil you've got picked up on the left you've got celandine in the middle and you've got blue bell on the right now blue bells are poisonous selling dines you can eat the roots if you cook them but there's toxins there in the Buttercup family there's toxins in all of the two cups and then you've got pignut which is edible raw or cooked so you do need to make sure you recognize the right one another one that's very interesting both from a short-term survival perspective but also a longer term survival perspective is cattail now this is a very common plant around the northern hemisphere you find it in wet places on the edges of ponds gardeners with ponds probably find it a bit of a pain sometimes it does tend to take over whole areas and it spreads both by the seeds you can see the brown seed heads there cigar-shaped seed heads but also Reiki rhizomes which go out under the water and then you get new shoots coming up and the energy for that those new shoots coming up you get stops surrounded fibers in the rhizomes and that starch is very very good now if you're in a survival situation this is one of the best foods to look for you can find them easily you can identify them easily make sure that you pull up the whole plans because there can be other things growing nearby like iris and hemet water drop work that you don't want to be eating so don't just look at the aerial parts of the plant reach down and pull up this very few fine because there can be other stuff there particularly in winter the aerial parts of this plant will often be present in winter whereas those other things like iris and particularly hemlock water drop work will have died back and they're hot people have died by thinking they were collecting the roots of this plan the collected camera water drop work roots and one case there was a survival course somewhere in Eastern Europe and eight students and the instructor died because they ate the wrong thing so always bring out the aerial part attached to the root and then you've got positive identification of both parts and so from a survival perspective take the robe eurozone's put them on the fire cook them and tell the black on the embers and then open them out suck the starch off the fibers or very good easy to process easy to collect instant energy there's one of the students again he's got the whole plant now and aerial parts and the rhizomes on the bottom they're still connected and here's an Aes in canada that's in ontario and again it's in a depression there's water there they're growing now there's evidence there's a paper published in 2010 various sites around Europe and into Russia of basically grinding vessels that have been found with the starch of cat tailing it and the hypothesis is that they were grinding the roots up to release the starch to make flour and the calorie content of flour is pretty much the same as a good quality wheat flour and the date of these grinding stones in this process goes back thirty thousand years so if we look at the archaeological evidence now there's some little snippets of evidence coming out to suggest that we were processing plant foods for complex carbohydrates long before we previously thought we were and we were eating those things alongside those meats and those other foods that we've been characterized as eating almost predominantly by the other archaeological evidence in a similar way to indigenous people still living off the land today so all the answers about how to live off the land are not in this presentation but hopefully that gives you a few things to think about a few insights into our relationship with living off the land in the past how we might do it in the short term today and how people are still living off the land today managed to do it thank you for your attention that was my presentation it meant to be thought-provoking it's not supposed to provide all the answers because all the answers aren't there you know a lot of people ask me how would you live off the land in the northern temperate wilderness and over the long term like our ancestors did well two things one is we've changed the environment so much through forestry and farming it's difficult to know exactly what it was like we've gone through cycles of ice age and back I went to a very interesting presentation and display at the Natural History Museum so the british museum recently and it was on Ice Age art and there was all these mammoth bones and reindeer antlers and various other artifacts inscribed with art and some of them going back 18 20 to 25,000 years ago and I spent a lot of time in the north of Sweden and up there you get ptarmigan what's your type of grouse you get Wolverine through in the weasel family like a badger but bigger he'll kill a reindeer and reindeers office Lee up there as well and there was art from southern Europe and the Pyrenees that had those animals on them from about 20,000 years ago so once you start looking into it's very interesting now we can a characterize living in the past in the environment where in today it was a very very different environment at certain times in the past in terms of the floor and the fauna that were available and also in terms of what we've done to it since so we can only grasp but little looking through a little keyholes if you like through the evidence that's there but it's also very very interesting and thank you very much if there's any questions I probably take one or two I've run over by five minutes but if you've got any questions I'm happy to take them talking about foraging in this country yes how much damage is actually taking place because I'm outtie squash practice become very very ugly yeah but then you've got your fringe at once that the people with a little knowledge has there been any survey to find out how much damages at you talking to damage the environment of damage to people's health well no damage today I'm not worried about the health it's their choice if you want to either the entirety I'm not aware of any surveys having been done to be honest but anecdotally you know there's definitely been there's definitely being an upsurge in people going out an organized way to collect various things particularly fungi to take them to things like farmer's markets and even places like Borough Market in London and it's often people who know the fungi so we don't have a great history of foraging for fungi in this country you know but the Eastern Europeans they have in some cases a good knowledge so I I know of you know I work on various estates and I know that some of them have problems with say poles who know their fungi very well coming of origin taken away for economic reasons which actually isn't legal and without Lana's permission and an ending up on the market which over time no doubt will cause some damage because there that remember removing the fungi they're not able to score and that's going to diminish the populations I would have thought over time but I'm not aware of any surveys anybody else to webinar surveys yep all right okay good where's farmers and local councils yeah yeah and this is one of the interesting things I spend a bit of time in London and can you walk along this canal one of the canals in London and there's all sorts there there's Alexander's there's wild garlic there's you know white dead nettle there's different mustards there's all sorts there and then the British waterways just come along and streamable which is much more damaging than any forages picking a few leaves and yet you see these sort of old Romanian ladies wandering along its I'm picking stuff it's not the British people it's often you know the the the people who have got that knowledge from every when they were younger living there in a more rural up you know life and there's they're picking the things in town and then you've got people who brought into foraging who are picking this thing but in a small way yeah that that's my anecdotal view and yeah I think we've done much more down at you right we've done much more damage with farming here

yeah i'm just a trapeze yes yeah yeah people don't appreciate it as a result and your the questions good well thank you very much retention appreciate it please