After a hiatus of years… six busy years….. doing lots of wild food stuff…. I need to keep this website alive.
A new autumn resolution….to do an update at least once a month.
So here goes.
The last six years since May 2018 have many wild food highlights…
Eat Wild Tasmanian was Fuller’s bookshop’s best non-fiction seller in 2017, and sold out in 220 after having been re-printed once already. There was a huge amount of new information out there in the public domain especially on the chemical and nutritional properties of native edible plants, and the interest in wild foods was really taking off.
So, I re-wrote Eat Wild Tasmanian…as Eat MORE Wild Tasmanian…. took out some information; added six more native edible plants, and a whole new weed section. One of the big issues the popularity of eating wild food had brought up was the assumption by many people that eating wild food equals foraging. Nothing could be further from my intention which was to value, protect, conserve the bush. My mantra is “Treat the bush as a library, not a supermarket”.
However, there are weeds, edible, delicious, productive weeds everywhere… from the ubiquitous blackberry through to the humble chickweed. So I wrote a whole new weeds section, so people could forage guilt-free (and do environmental good while they’re at it!).
I had the huge privilege of working with the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre’s language worker June Sculthorpe on researching palawa kani for a new book too. Many enjoyable and educational hours spent with June consolidated my support for palawa kani being made much more available to all Tasmanians. To have original words for many items in our environment is also a way of valueing it. I also see it as another way of us bridging the past and the future.
I also included about 50 more recipes and loads more photographs of both plants and cooked food, and some scientific and medical information . In the end the new book was 300 pages long. The fabulous graphic designer Julie Hawkins and Fuller’s publishing did the rest
Eat MORE Wild Tasmanian was launched in both Hobart and Wynyard with wonderful parties as a celebration of the wild with contributing artists.
…. see you again next time (in less than 6 years)
Feisty Tasmanian - the home of Tasmanian edible native plants 