Day 2 of 90 eating 100% wild, hand foraged food as part of the Wildbiome Project

A couple of days in and I’m feeling so much respect to our hunter-gatherer forbears, to @monicawilde for eating wild for a full year and to all the Wildbiome 1 participants who thrived enough in 2023 to do it again this year.

I (Emily) woke up with the hell migraine (not unusual for me), but this one was a shocker despite having slowly weaned myself off tea and chocolate last month. After trying to shake it with a cold shower and an acorn pancake I had to spend the whole (beautiful) day in a darkened room.

Meanwhile Charlie headed off with paleo snacks to meet Jessie @rekindledhearth and Lucy @wildawakeireland at the beach for a forage and feast. Talk about FOMO!

I lay there imagining them sunbathing on the hot sand between lazy bouts of foraging for copious amounts of sea spaghetti and seabeet, later on giggling madly as razor clams thrust themselves skyward to be plucked from their sandy hideyholes and feasted on, chargrilled and wrapped in toasted kelp fronds.

Maybe I’ve bought into Marshall Sahlin’s Original Affluent Society a little too much? The one where hunter-gatherers spend a small fraction of their time ‘working’ and the rest relaxing.

The reality on the beach was a little different:45 mile hour winds tore at the three hungry friends while they braved the waves at the lowest part of the rocky shelf where the sea spaghetti resides. The sea spaghetti was still very young for April, and with this particular seaweed you should only harvest one of the two long thin fronds from each holdfast so that it can regrow. It took several hours to gather a bagful each.

The razor clam hunt was abandoned and the ‘feast’ was just a handful of boiled winkles.

Charlie returned home ragged and very hungry just as my migraine was abating and wolfed down a good helping of venison stew.

I’m really hoping Thomas Hobbes wasn’t right after all back in 1651 when he said hunter-gatherer lives were nasty, brutish and short. I really want to believe Sahlins. The next three months will tell…