Cover Image: The Wilderness Cure

The Wilderness Cure

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Member Reviews

I thought this book was excellent and has really made me think about the food that is just growing around me. I was a bit concerned at the start that a book written as a year journal might get a bit repetitive and boring, however this really wasn't the case. The author kept me engaged with her interesting journey of a year without supermarket shopping. I learnt so much and it has made me think about what I'm eating much more. I would definitely recommend this book

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Oh my goodness what a joy this book is. Mo Wilde, a herbalist living in Scotland, decided to try to live for a year solely on wild foraged foods.
I found her account of this absolutely fascinating and it was so beautifully written as well. What a gorgeous book, I have been recommending it widely.
With grateful thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster UK for my copy in exchange for an honest review.

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This was such an interesting book. I have long been fascinated by food and our relationship with it and foraging was somthing I knew little about. Written in a very readble style it has given me so much food for thought (excuse the pun!) and has definitely changed how I approach seasonal eating. Highly recommend.

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This is an absolutely beautiful, magical read! So engaging and uplifting and a wonderful way to lose oneself for a few hours. Gorgeous stuff.

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Having been fascinated by wild food and foraging for as long as I can remember, I was drawn to this title as soon as I saw the synopsis. The author took the brave step to practice what she preached and try to live for a year without buying food. I found it interesting to learn about how she decided on her guidelines and rues that would allow her to undertake this experiment whilst still living in a modern world. The writing and considerations about how our food is produced today are very thought provoking. This will hopefully help people to buy food and eat more ethically and sustainably but I fear that the main audience appeal lies with those who already try to travel that path, even if on a less radical scale than Mo Wilde.

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Although I’ve enjoyed some chapters of this book, the contents were not what I expected. Overall it’s a book about food and our relationship with nature and our place in this world. There are some interesting and funny parts, but in my opinion it’s not very objective .

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An amazing experience for all those who love nature, the stillnes and the importance of the present moment.
The jurnal style offered an intimate and passionate feel.
The author managed to connect me with her suroundings and visualise the wonderful nature surrounding her.
An intresting concept that with a bit more preparation would have been even more succesful.
I apreciated the atmosphere and the love for nature.

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I enjoyed this book very much. It charts the course of living solely on foraged wild food for a full year.

As well as covering the daily menu of what is consumed, it describes the changes to what’s on offer through the seasons and how our bodies react to that (compared to the constant conformity of modern supermarket supply).

Through the reflections of foraging, it travels through pollution, climate change, sustainability, digestion and ecology. It also intersperses the human day-to-day life of walking around each day to get enough calories to survive.

I’d say that it would make a big difference to us all if we all lived like this (from health, obesity, mental health, climate change and sustainable farming reason), but not sure there’s enough mushrooms in the country to feed us all. It does prompt nudges to make changes to lifestyle that would make a difference.

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This was an absolutely fascinating book that really made me think and review my food choices and the world around me. That the author achieved a whole year, especially within lockdown times is an incredible feat and while there is no way I have the willpower to attempt this, I will definitely be referring back to this at different points in the year to make more considered choices. Highly recommend.

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My great grand mother made me learn what herbs are useful and what mushroom are edible. I was something I learn as a child and I learned something more reading and listen to the older people.
I'm always a bit wary when read books about people living in the wild foraging and blah blah.
This one is well written but some parts, like giving birth, are bit too extreme for me.
I love the message about changing our way of living.
It's well written but not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

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I admire anyone with the dedication and willpower to conduct an experiment which lasts a year never mind it being to only forage for food! It was a fascinating book which really made me think differently about how we live in the current era. Educational and entertaining, it gave great insight into a simpler yet more challenging food lifestyle. Fascinating stuff.

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A fascinating book that documents how to live off the land by someone who is willing to put their interests and convictions into practice. I have found myself telling friends and long suffering husband of the well researched facts behind how our ancestors lived and many other wonderful facts. There is nothing more to say than read this and try not to run off into the wild, Thank you Netgalley for the opportunity to read this in exchange for an honest review.

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I loved this book. Mo decides to live for an entire year on wild food. In the process, she connects deeply with nature, the seasons and her own body whilst shunning consumerism.

She writes with honesty and great beauty. I was fascinated and inspired.

I highlighted many pages, so that I could remember how to make gremolata (a mix of fresh green herbs and wild garlic immersed in oil with lemon zest) and how ground up dock seed can be added to a flan base. I loved discovering the many uses of Dandelion root, how to make cleavers seed coffee and that alexanders are a fabulous spinach substitute.

By the end of the book, I wanted to go and live with Mo and beg her to teach me more. Given that she’d probably refuse that request, a recipe book would be wonderful!

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At the end of November 2020, Mo Wilde decided to embark on a year of eating wild. She's led foraging courses for many years, and frequently encountered the query 'but could you actually live on only foraged food?' - here was a chance to prove it. So on Black Friday when the rest of the world seemed overwhelmed by buying frenzy, she resolved to stop - or at least to stop buying food. In The Wilderness Cure Wilde takes us on an incredible year of only living on what she gather - nuts, shoots, leaves, mushrooms (so many mushrooms!) and occasional gifts of a culled deer or surplus salmon; all foods which would have been familiar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

I grew up in the country, so foraging is always something I've done a little of. As a child I went out to gather blackberries and elderberries in autumn, as an adult I've collected elderflowers in spring, sloes, crab apples, and the occasional chestnut in autumn - but the important difference is that to me they're additions to what I grow or buy. I knew that it was feasible to harvest more from wild sources - mushrooms being the obvious thing but I never had any one to teach me their secrets when young, and fresh spring leaves of hawthorn or beech which I'd rather looked on as extraordinary things for when harvests had failed. This book came as a revelation of the many, many things which can be gathered from the wild; the roots and shoots, seeds and flowers, which can be used as part of our daily food.

This book is more than a foraging diary. It digresses naturally into the author's philosophy, her belief in the Gaia world-system and how this challenge re-affirmed her connection with the Earth, into the disconnection between humans and the natural world, into the bodily changes brought on by this unusual diet, and even into archaeological research which provides historical context for 'foraging' (or 'collecting dinner' as I assume our pre-historic ancestors considered it).

It's a fascinating read, even if you've only the slightest interest in foraging but in a world based round consumption and consumerism, doing anything for yourself is an act of rebellion - and nothing more so than deciding to live on only the food you can gather for free

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Beautifully written and full of positive ideas. I feel much more in touch with nature and the value of spending time with trees.

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This wasn’t what I expected, but was very interesting and innovative in her methods of educating others. It’s a beautiful book and a perfect read for anyone with even the slightest interest in foraging.

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The Wilderness Cure.

How we can learn to forage from the land in the natural nature environment around us.

How we need to recognise the bountiful produce about us and how we are damaging this environment.

Open your eyes and see the beauty around us. Appreciate it and protect it.

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I thought this book would be purely about foraging but it is so much more. I read this, for free, from NetGalley but will be buying my own copy as I want to read this again and I know it is one of those books that I will go back to often. It is a diary of Mo Wilde’s experiment to live off only foraged food, as well as a commentary on the state of the world, a history of people’s eating habits over time and how we need to reconnect with nature. All of this is told seamlessly, Mo Wilde has an engaging writing style and she shares a wealth of information which has the power to help people reconnect with not just the earth but with each other too.

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I should start this review by saying I don’t really understand what the big fuss is about food. Yes it keeps us alive and is required for fuel but beyond that I have very little interest. If I could take one pill a day that gave me everything I needed rather than have to eat meals I would. It maybe seems very odd therefore that I would choose to read something about food, however the blurb of this did make me curious to know how this experiment of sorts would change the author and their own view of food, fuel and things relating to this.

Mo Wilde decides on a Black Friday sales day that she is going to see if it is possible to live off the land (foraging, gathering, not purchasing in a shop food) for a year. This book records her year, the highs and lows, what was learnt along the way and the benefits of what she does manage to accomplish. While Wilde does state her diet before starting mainly consisted of a vegetable stir-fry for breakfast, snack for lunch and cheese and crackers for dinners so not your typical diet of processed food today (this experiment would probably have had a lot more withdrawal problems and been harder for someone who didn’t eat like Wilde before), it nevertheless is a challenge. We follow the author as she visits various places in Scotland, goes to stay in Poland and also has to juggle lockdown with one walk only a day, not easy when you need to find your food!

Wilde did not make me any more interested in food. However she did make me a lot more interested in humans connection to earth and it’s resources, often right underneath our noses. I absolutely loved her writing and when she ventured off on tangents on folklore, history, place names and also the science behind plants and what they can offer us I was enthralled! I found it especially interesting to learn how her year of wild food impacted her medically and her daily life.

While this experiment or lifestyle would not be possible for everyone (commuters with office jobs will not be able to spend daily hours hunting for nutrients from plants) many very important points are made. We are losing our connection with the Earth which is not a good thing. The way we eat and what we eat is not, in the long run, really doing anyone any favours. So while I don’t think we should all embrace a 24/7 diet of foraging I am convinced having read this we need to start leaning far more towards a natural lifestyle where we recognise what we can get from the land and world around us and not just as a thing to be consumed or purchased but as something that is a larger ecosystem. That may all sound idealistic but actually as Wilde does show it is possible for it to become reality.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

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Sometimes, a book comes along that shifts your entire perspective and changes your approach to how you live life; for me, The Wilderness Cure was such a book. I went into it with curiosity about foraging and wild foods, but no real knowledge of it and its history, and I came out of it with my world-view changed. Mo Wilde – forager, research herbalist, author, and ethnobotanist – decides, prompted in part by the consumerist excess of Black Friday, to live only on a wild food diet for an entire year, starting on 27th November. What follows is an account of that year, in which Wilde documents the foods available, the places and ways in which she forages, and the ways her body is affected during her seasonal diet.

The Wilderness Cure is so much more than just diary entires about eating habits; it is a history lesson, an invitation to reconnect with nature, an introduction to even the most unassuming of plants, and an ode to our planet. The planet that has nurtured us and driven our development for so much of our history, and which we are tearing down in thanks. This book made me both joyful and sad, as most nature books do these days. It’s like looking at old photographs, knowing that those times are gone and cannot come back, but it also nurtures a hope for the future and an encouragement for all of us to appreciate the natural world just a little more.

I know that not many people will be able to do what Wilde does during this wild year, because not many people have the access to countryside, the time, or the knowledge, but Wilde is not writing to suggest everyone adopt this lifestyle, but to show how much more vast the world of food is. Now, whenever I go on walks, even in my relatively urban neighbourhood, I find myself looking at all the vegetation I see, from flowers to trees to grasses, and wondering what they are and what properties they may have. It’s given me the desire to learn the art of foraging and wild cooking, and I think it would be very hard for anyone to read this book and not want to do so. As a writer and reader of fantasy, I must admit that it has also opened up more possibilities in my mind of how food can function in a society, and has given me a greater desire to research ways in which our ancestors lived and ate.

I would recommend The Wilderness Cure to anyone, because it’s such an easy one to pick up and put down, with it’s clearly divided sections, and I think – especially for people living in the British Isles – it provides a connection back into the murky depths of history to a time when our ancestors were much closer with the land, and that made me feel incredibly grounded. I have a feeling this is a book I will reread and reference frequently, and will definitely be a favourite for this year.

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