Flavours of Resilience

How Wild Foods Nourish Our Bodies and the Land

On a fundamental level, foraging reconnects us with an ancient pact between species – the exchange of nutrients, medicines, and evolutionary support services that has been going on for millions of years. By ingesting wild plants, we integrate the landscape into our bodies and participate in the elemental alchemy of one form of life becoming another.

At first glance, this may seem like a purely physical process – the breaking down of plant matter into chemical constituents that our cells absorb and use for energy and bodily functions. But this act of interspecies communion has a deeper layer of significance.

In his book Nourishment, Fred Provenza, a professor emeritus of Behavioural Ecology in the Department of Wildland Resources at Utah State University, lays out a fascinating framework for understanding the multilayered impacts of the food we eat. He proposes that "palates link soils and plants with herbivores and humans through flavour feedback associations." In other words, the flavour profiles of the foods we ingest are not just incidental sensory data but an intricate communication system that our bodies use to gauge and respond to our environment.

Every bite contains information about the specific soil, water, and air conditions in which that food was grown and the stressors and relationships surrounding it. On a chemical level, plants are master alchemists, orchestrating complex metabolic processes to transform sunlight, water, and soil nutrients into an astonishing array of compounds.