For Day 9 of Paul Brookes’ 30DaysWild challenge.

Food for thought

I watched a video recently of an urban forager, an expert, an example, showing how it was done. He spent his lunch hour in the local park ransacking the bushes for all he would need for a foraged meal. In the end he had about forty grammes of leaves in a little Tupperware box. He ate them with pride. I assumed he was not going back to work on a building site.

Millennia of back-breaking work to coax nourishment from the earth, short, harsh lives devoted to the task of survival, growing and harvesting, threshing, winnowing, plucking and preserving, keeping the great god hunger at bay, was all a misunderstanding then? If only we had invented municipal parks before the plough.

Woodland
glades of hair grass
berry-bushed
and beneath the trees
lush green leaf-spears

but I stand hungry