Foraging: The Essential Guide to Free Wild Food

by John Lewis-Stempel

A practical guide to finding and preparing food from hedgerows, parks, fields, woods, rivers and seashore. Aimed at the beginner, it also has a wealth of tips for the enthusiast, and, unlike other books on wild food, covers foraging in the urban environment as well as the countryside.

Genres: Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2012

Reviews

[Anna Nicamhlaigh · Rating 1 out of 5]

It is not a practical guide to finding anything has it has no illustrations to help identify the plants. Only what areas to look and some recipes. In fact the only illustration is on the front of the book.
So no help for the beginner. It recommends you buy another book to identify the plants or attend a foraging course. The whole point of buying this book was to find, identify and be able to make use of wild food. Waste of money.

[LJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

The bizarre thing about this book is that it is completely useless.

Lewis-Stempel is clearly an expert in the field of foraging, filling the book with tonnes of details about all the edible wild plants in Britain. You will find descriptions of the look, smell and taste of the plants, where and when to find them, how to harvest them, what they may be mistaken for (particularly if they could be mistaken for poisonous look-a-likes), how to prepare and eat them, including recipes, what health benefits they contain,and a dose of historical backstory too. But there are no pictures. Not a single line drawing or photo. So despite this deluge of intricate detail, it would be completely impossible to actually use this book to help you forage in real life. It would have to be used as a companion to another guide that contained pictures. Lewis-Stempel even says as much. And... if you had another guide, then why would you use this one? Perhaps the guides with pictures don't contain half the detail this one does, in which case, budding herbalists - there is a gap in the market for you to fill!

Personally I could have done without the historical interludes, which might be of anecdotal interest, but have no practical use. I could also have done without the author's 'sense of humour' which is decidedly bawdy, like a lewd old man. One joke that springs to mind is when he says something is a 'wetland dream'. Added to this slightly gross sense of humour, is a disturbing bloodlust. Despite claiming that he believes living creatures are sentient and should therefore be treated humanely, he sure goes into some gory detail on how to go about killing them and also makes more jokes about this subject, which hardly suggests a humane temperament.

For my use as a research tool for a story, it definitely had its uses, but I wouldn't dare put any of this knowledge into practise without a better (pictorial) guide.

[Grace Tierney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useful addition to my growing collection of books about foraging. Some new recipes here and it's well written and I like that it is grouped by area - wood / shore / urban etc and well indexed, which really helps. A couple of things to note - no illustrations and no info on identifying the plants. It's more of a cookbook but cookbooks are better with illustrations. Also it is very UK focused. In fact even Scotland is barely mentioned. Living in Ireland this meant that certain plants just aren't common here - hops for example and the laws are different too. If you want one for Ireland I'd recommend " wild and free" instead although they cover fewer plants in greater depth and no fungi.

But hey, now I have a recipe for squirrel burger.

[Patrick · Rating 1 out of 5]

what a fucking useless guide since it has no pictures? not even enough of a description to know what you're foraging.

[Inna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book if you are already familiar with all the plants, however, useless without pictures.