DNF at 54%
It was interesting but once I realised she was not going to stave it became a dull list of unrecognizable foods. She would have been malnourished had she not had generous friends who hunt and fish. It gave no advice on how to forage yourself instead she inserted a probably very good further reading list. Not sure the subject quite warranted a whole book.

I was drawn to this book because I have an interest in foraging, wild food and sustainability. I was really interested in the idea of living on only foraged food for a whole year. I was quite surprised to find that the author had started her journey in November with no pre planning - this seemed to be an odd decision! I then discovered that she was going to using previously foraged food and preserved food and was allowing herself to eat gifted food, which made me wonder if this was cheating a little. I enjoyed the style of writing which was very evocative and the descriptions of her surroundings were beautiful. As a vegan I struggled with some of the descriptions of animal use and felt that meat was quite heavily used. I love mushrooms and was interested in the variety of mushrooms found and used. I felt the author was very creative in coming up with her meals! This is a book I have dipped in and out of rather than reading in one go but I wonder if it would be better read through in one go. it has to be remembered that this was an experiment and not something that most people could achieve, although it has spurred me on to think more about what I eat ad when and to do more foraging. The author clearly had to devote a lot of time to foraging and preparing food which is not realistic for most people. There were some really interesting sections about nutrition and seasonal eating relating back to our ancestral ways of consuming food. I would recommend this book to people who are interested in foraging, wild food, and the history and anthropology of food and eating. many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the gifted e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

This is a nice addition to the growing nature writing genre as it follows Wilde for a year as she only eats food that she forages or would have been available to our earliest ancestors.

Starting the book at the leanest part of the year adds peril to the tale at the very beginning but it is also a reminder to us all to stay in better touch with our surroundings and the natural season for food stuffs.

Wilde is an experienced forager and knows which plants and mushrooms are edible and it is important to highlight that this isn't a book to use as a guide if you are looking to start foraging.

At times I found the book to be a little 'new age' for me but overall an enjoyable read.

Lovely book
Really made me think and stop in my tracks.
Very incisive.
Thank you for writing a book that’s made me want to make a change.

This book charts the experiences and thoughts of the author, Mo Wilde, over a year that she lived solely on food foraged from the wild. She not only describes the food in mouth-watering detail but also gives interesting comments and food for thought on current events and the current state of the world, being written from late 2020 to 2021.
As a new forager myself, it was very interesting to learn about the many and varied sources of food and that meat had to be part of her diet in order to survive. As Mo herself says on several occasions, while there is much we can eat from the wild, it would be very quickly depleted if everyone took to this way of life. It made me very grateful to our farmers who make life so much easier and also more determined to create a much more edible garden where I easily 'forage' for food.
I found reading this book a very meditative experience and will be recommending it to friends and family.

The Wilderness Cure is not my typical choice when it comes to reading material, but as a fervent amateur gardener with aspirations of becoming fractionally self-sufficient, I had to give in to my curiosity.

Mo writes in diary-style about her year-long experiment in which she only ate food she (or others) could gather or hunt in her local area so as to experience the seasonally changing diet once lived by early humans. The book is not an instruction manual, or a guide to what native plants and mushrooms are safe for human consumption, but rather is an honest account of a fairly extreme way of eating. Mo backs up her story with anecdotes, interesting morsels of information about ancient eating habits, and brief descriptions of the meals she put together.

I will admit, I don't understand why this experiment had to start in winter, or why she couldn't do some preparation work to build a small cache of supplies before starting to better represent the lifestyle, but the strong contrast between seasonal food availability did make for a more engaging read, and really highlighted the scarcity of plant-based foods in the Scottish winter.

A fascinating read, but I did struggle a little with the pacing at times.

I found this absolutely fascinating - no idea how much we can eat! Still not sure I'd risk eating anything I wasn't absolutely sure of though, so maybe I'll look for a wild food course or something. Also very interesting that her foraging diet was so much healthier.

This was interesting, some of the things I enjoyed and other things I flicked through, overall an enjoyable read.

A great book with thought provoking views and lots of hints and tips and I didn’t know what to expect from it but I really enjoyed it

I have been reading more non fiction and nature books this year and was really pleased to get the opportunity to read an early copy of this.

The idea of living only on foraged food for a year fascinated me, but this book was so much more than that. I loved how it explored Mo's relationship with others around her and the land and area she lives in. Her local knowledge was brilliant and I learned so much about nature and foraging from reading this.

Mo's writing is accessible and really drew me in, even as someone who had no idea about foraging and wild food. I adored this book and didn't want to put it down.

Interesting book where Mo Wilde spends a year living off the land. She only eats food that she has foraged, or been given off by her friends and neighbours which they have foraged, she started the process during lock down during Covid and was a size 18-20, a year later she is size 10-12. Whilst reading the book it made you appreciate the food we have and also makes you think differently about food and what I was wasting. It gave me an insight on what things you can eat which I had never thought about.

This book was fascinating - I have been getting more interested in foraging but aside from fresh fish/shellfish I have not had much experience and wouldn't have known what to do with items I foraged if I managed to find anything edible. This book provided so much insight into different items that can be foraged and uses for those ingredients, along with so much information about health and how humans have lived in the past.

The Wilderness Cure by Mo Wilde

By the end of the first chapter I had ordered a copy of this book for a friend. And now I’ve reached the end I am planning to go back to the beginning and start again.

Yes, I loved it! There is so much information in there and Mo Wilde’s writing style takes us along on the year long adventure into surviving on only foraged food.

It doesn’t take long to realise that most of us – including me – wouldn’t last a week. Where has all that knowledge gone? Our ancestors lived from the land and the sea, they passed on this vital information from generation to generation but yet we find ourselves here in the 21st century without a clue what to eat or where to find it.

In the book Mo steers a careful path between giving us facts – the plants eaten, the animals respectfully taken as part of the diet – and her own process. I’d have liked to know more about her feelings and struggles but if she’d gone down that route the book would have been even longer.

I had to stop regularly to look up plants – even common ones like plantain or alexanders. It felt like I was being invited to explore a whole new world.

I made notes on – or as I read it on Kindle, I highlighted - all the information on what is edible and what it is for. I didn’t know for example that you could eat hawthorn flowers and leaves. And it is helpful for high blood pressure which I am struggling with at the moment. It made me go out and look at my hawthorn trees and see them anew.

There’s so much in this book which is inspiring and exciting and daunting (will we all be relying on these foods in the near future? I also think the answer is yes) . All I can say is go out and buy it, read it and keep it close to your heart. I’ve also bought a foraging book now and am planning to do a course in my local area as soon as possible.

Thank you Mo Wilde for sharing this wonderful journey.
And thank you Netgalley for letting me read it for review

#thewildernesscure#foraging#mowilde#netgalley

It's an intriguing idea living off only what you can forage and in Scotland too where there's little to gather in the winter. The author shares what she's gathered and eaten (sometimes from her freezer) and introduces information on a wider range of topics

Unfortunately, I did not find it a compelling read.

I was very intrigued by this book. I often enjoy reading about people taking on a challenge that spans a long period of time, so was interested in reading about the author living off of the fat of the land for a year. Plus this took place in Scotland and I love a home grown tale.
I really enjoyed the first 20% of this book. I found it to be fascinating and really interesting. The next 80%, I found to be quite repetitive and, at times, condescending.
I enjoyed the format of a journal but some days were literally just good diaries.
I feel like this book didn’t know what angle it wanted to take, so tried to go in multiple directions.
I can say for certain that I never want to read about somebody giving birth. Never. I wasn’t expecting it in this book and I really didn’t enjoy that part. Why did nobody call the midwife before the point where they were desperately needed?
I did find a giant chicken of the woods on a walk recently and thought of this book.

I found The Wilderness Cure to give a fascinating insight into the world or wild food and foraging throughout the seasons. I would love to be able to ditch supermarket shopping and live off the land which is exactly what the author of this book did for a whole year.

The Wilderness Cure is written in diary format and Mo journals about what can be foraged in that month/season. I found what Mo was finding to eat quite interesting at first but found it became repetitive as the book went on. I would have liked some illustrations and recipes to go alongside the diary entries.

The wild diet seemed to be very mushroom and meat heavy which would be problematic for a complete novice vegetarian such as myself. I certainly wouldn't have a clue which mushrooms were not poisonous and wouldn't want to go back to eating meat. I couldn't see myself giving up my little vegetable patch either.

However the message in the book is very clear. If we don't make significant changes in the way we eat and mass produce food it will have an irreversible effect on the planet and our health.

I have an academic interest in foraging and survival. I think we all should be doing a lot more of it. I haven't turned my academic interest into reality because I'm aware that you should always start out with someone who knows what they're doing. I thought this would be a half step in the right direction.

However, it's not what I expected at all. There are no recipes or identifying pictures here. (That's probably in an effort to avoid being sued, which I can understand and whole heartedly endorse.) This is more of a stream of consciousness, spread over a year, as Mo connects the food she's gathering now with the way our ancestors would have lived. There are plenty of entries that have nothing to do with food, but are Mo musing on a sunset or a hill or murmuration.

(Note: There is a table at the back that lists every plant she gathers over the year and talks about each a bit, but the formatting on my ebook proof was so badly messed up that it's illegible - I can't tell which bits of information go with which. In a printed copy that won't be an issue, of course.)

It's all very interesting musing - picturing our ancestor's hunting grounds as a daisy really helped me grasp it - and I'm fascinated that she did manage to forage enough to keep alive and healthy. It's not as instructional as I had hoped, but that's probably on me for misunderstanding the blurb.

I think this would make a fascinating TV series - perhaps four episodes, one for each season? - and I did enjoy the read. I recommend it to others. Just be aware of what you're getting.

This book was not for me. I could not get into it at all it is not what I was expecting. I can only give it 1 star bur but that is my opinion don't let this review put you off.

I really wanted to like this book. I loved its premise - the idea of not buying anything from a shop/supermarket for a year, of moving away from our overly materialistic existence, and of living off foraged and wild food. I have read and enjoyed other books talking about people living off the wild. I didn't like this book as much as I'd hoped though. It didn't take me long to get bored of being told what the author had eaten ... it seemed to me at the beginning to be a lot of venison, mushrooms and wild greens (and I have to admit that I haven't managed to make it to the end of the book to see how this improves). I was also a bit disappointed that in a book on foraging and wild food the author seemed to eat a lot of food that whilst from the wild at some point had either been in her freezer or was given by friends - this seemed to be cheating to me (although I appreciate the author may totally disagree). The author tells you at the start that she begins her project in late Autumn and that she should perhaps have waited because she had not prepared as well as she could ... and I really did feel that this book might have been better if she' had waited a bit longer and perhaps had prepared more so that she would be foraging for every meal herself . Some pictures - some actual recipes - something like that would also have made this a bit more interesting.

I found this book to be interesting and quite informative.
Makes you think about how nature really does provide, if you know how and where to look for it.
A good memoir, but I think I would have liked pictures included to show the plants
Thank you netgalley