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Ray Mears — Wild Food
Ray Mears
Do our ancestors’ diets give us accurate information as to what we should eat now for best health?
Does an “eat anything that doesn’t eat you first” plan give the best health or is it just the best survival plan?
Ray Mears’ Wild Food series gives us some tantalizing clues…
Stone age hunting
Wednesday night’s episode on BBC2 was a real eye opener. Ray and a university expert on hunter-gatherers and edible wild food, camped in the woods and lived like Mesolithic people.
They used the tools and food preparation methods that are known about from that era. The Mesolithic by the way is the “Middle Stone Age” when the bow was developed as a hunting tool…
Previous episodes focused on wild plants for foods but this show was mainly about hunting and the importance of animal foods. Ray showed us how only a few thousand years ago arrows were made out of wood and flint and using Birch sap I think it was, to stick the flint arrow heads onto the wood.
The Birch sap looks like tar and it goes gooey when it’s heated. When it sets, it goes rock hard. The hand made bows, probably made by Ray himself looked like something out of Robin Hood and he tried it out on a leg of lamb hanging from a tree to prove how deadly it was.
But what’s been the most surprising about the series so far is how much processing a lot of these wild foods need before they’re edible. “Processing” meaning cooking, bashing, grinding, soaking, drying or a mixture of techniques to either extract the “starch,” stop it being poisonous or make it last longer. You need to go a long long way back in time before human ancestors lived on a largely raw vegetarian diet.
Adapt and survive
Nobody knows for sure exactly how long humans have had fire. Anyway, the discovery or mastery of fire most likely happened at different times in different parts of the world — just like farming began at different times.
We generally say 10,000 years for farming to simplify it but in England for example I think the figure is 5,000. In other parts 12,000. The use of fire is likely to be around 350,000 years old.
One of the theories of why we survived and similar man-like apes didn’t was that we would eat anything going. Apparently when “whatever it was” happened that forced our ape ancestors out of the tropical forests and onto the savannahs, there was a vegetarian man-like ape that became extinct because it wouldn’t or couldn’t adapt.
This is a well known concept — that “exclusive” feeders will sometimes die if their food source disappears rather than try another food. Actually I think this would happen to my son if ketchup disappeared :-)
Who knows exactly what happened all those millions of years ago for sure, but I reckon that as our ape ancestors expanded into new areas with different food to those they were used to in the tropical forests, they had to adapt to those new foods — “adapt and survive,” like the SAS :-)
I’m not talking “adapt” as in genetically, that takes a lot longer, but adapt as in lifestyle. No longer did they have the joy of year-round tropical fruits and vegetation, with a few tasty termites or eggs for treats.
Our ability to use whatever means to survive has meant we have survived. Once we knew how to make spears and bows and hunting gear, it gave us a massive advantage in the survival game. Once we had fire we could eat stuff that would normally have been poisonous.
In terms of survival, these things were undoubtedly good. In terms of the balance of nature as a whole, that’s another story.
Our willingness to eat anything that didn’t eat us first gave us the edge over animals who had very specialized diets. But we have to be very careful about making conclusions about what is “optimal” for humans, from what we did in the past.
How much of our original genes remain from 6 or 7 million years ago is still being researched. In the modern world with more and more people to feed, and the horrors of big business corporate farming, a move to a largely vegetarian diet would no doubt be a good thing to do for the planet and perhaps even for us.
In terms of the actual food groups we’re adapted to, there’s little question — mainly fruits, vegetation, nuts, seeds, animal foods. But there’s still questions over what quantity of each group is optimal and to what extent processing such as cooking makes a difference. We have other clues though, but I’ll get to that in other articles.
Mesolithic hob-nobs
Another interesting thing about this episode was Ray collecting and making “biscuits” from the seeds of wild grass-like plants called “sedge” I think it was. So it seems that Mesolithic people at least, did collect small seeds and used them quite a lot when they were in season, certainly in certain areas.
This makes sense if you think that when homosapiens settled into farming, they must have had quite extensive knowledge of wild grasses to decide to plant and cultivate them. We know so much more about the damage grains can do now though. And they’re still not widely used in hunter-gatherer tribes of today.
Still, the behavior doesn’t make it optimal in terms of health, even if it is a good survival strategy. These people didn’t live very long lives anyway so the imperative was that they survived and lived long enough to have children.
The “biscuits” that Ray made, he said could have been used as “travel food” on hunting expeditions. Another travel food was dried meat — like jerky. The program actually showed them making it by slicing the meat very thinly and skewering it on long sticks like kebabs.
These were then hung up for a few days in a wigwam type structure with leaf covering. Underneath was a smoking fire used to dry the meat and get the temperature just right. Once dry, the meat would last a long time.
The hunt
Ray tracked and shot the deer himself. He took out the liver, cooked it “rare” and they ate it there and then. Apparently this is really common hunting behavior by hunters, to restore energy levels.
For anyone really grossed-out by the thought, the whole idea of eating “rare”, or even raw meat, is becoming more acceptable nowadays.
It’s mainly a cultural thing, this “urgh” reaction to the thought of raw meat… after all, we have smoked fish, sushi, raw oysters and steak tartare.
On a recent holiday I ordered a tuna steak “rare.” Hmmm… the thing was RAW! It must have been in the pan for about oh… one second! :-). There are contamination issues though with raw or rare meat. But these issues aren’t only confined to meat. Outbreaks of E Coli have occurred with raw vegetables like lettuce.
It was very moving when he got the deer back to camp. As he was doing his piece to camera, he was actually stroking the dead animal unconsciously. What a strange paradox. It really reminded me of The Last of the Mohicans movie.
But what does it all mean?
Looking at what our ancestors ate can give us important clues about what the overall make-up of human diets should be –- especially in terms of actual food groups.
It gives a framework within which we can put other sources of information into context. But it doesn’t necessarily mean what they ate is optimal because it just might be that those were the only available foods.
As a survival strategy, the most important thing is to pass on your genes and so eating anything is better than being too specialized in the diet.
What now?
Processing and cooking certainly gave us even more advantage in the survival stakes because it meant more types of foods could be eaten, but how much have we adapted to cooked foods, if at all?
What genetic adaptations have there been to larger amounts of animal foods in the diet over the last 6 million years and do we actually need to eat animal foods now?
And for those who have the luxury to actually choose what they eat — what are the optimal amounts of each food group?
Go wild
Wild foods have been shown to be far superior nutritionally than commercially grown stuff. There are wild food experts, TV shows and guided tours popping up all the time now it seems.
I even have a book myself called Food for Free by Richard Mabey although so far, I’ve not ventured any further than the yearly blackberry picking with the kids. Saying that though, I nearly went on a mushroom hunt last autumn with a friend who knows how to find these really expensive ones you can sell to Italian restaurants! … maybe next year. :-)
Ray used wild sorrel in the program to make sorrel “tarts.” I remember getting a ready-prepared salad with sorrel in it once… was yummy… very lemony flavor.
It would be great to be able to accurately identify these free wild foods. I’m out walking a lot and I reckon with a bit more knowledge I could come back with a bag full of free, nutritionally-dense wild goodies.
I don’t know about you, but I find blackberry picking very satisfying. There are loads of elderberries near here as well. Nettles as well, which apparently are like spinach.
The last program in the series in on next Wednesday, so if there’s any mind-blowing facts you need to know, you can be sure I’ll let you know. If not, well… I won’t :-) In the meantime…
If you follow the Habit Guide diet, you'll automatically check all the nutrition boxes and avoid the harmful stuff.
All the best,
Mike Kinnaird
Habit Guide: How to be Happy & Healthy
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