Living Off The Land: Mother Nature's Larder

I've been revisiting my Australian gastronomy menu over the past few days and doing some more research into the various ingredients I chose. The next part of my project will be to create an extensive rationale to explain my selection of dishes, so I thought I would get a head start by writing a small practice piece in the My Down Under Menu article. Doing so has helped me to better understand and justify the decisions I made in drawing up the menu, and I will be able to use the notes as a base when I come to write the full version. Finding inspiration for my rationale wasn't much of a challenge with the information super-highway at my fingertips. While surfing the net I realised that I should be focusing on the root of my subject. By this point I'd read the websites of my (now) favourite bush tucker promoters Benjamin Christie and Vic Cherikoff back to front. I knew I'd need to go way back (before the professional chefs got their hands on the produce), to where it all started...

After an hour or two surfing, I came across a piece originally printed in "The Guardian" newspaper entitled "Living Off The Land" about Ray Mears, a presenter well-known for his TV series on the subject of bushcraft. Despite the fact that he writes extensively on survival and bush tucker, Ray is not an Australian but surprisingly is an Englishman, who trains his students in survival techniques in the wild and dangerous tropical rain forests of East Sussex. In a recent UK television series, Ray explored the techniques employed by my ancient ancestors on these islands - demonstrating how to make string from bamboo shoots and how to catch fish with hawthorns. Ray Mears is a very keen promoter of indigenous wild food sources.

Ray Mears - bush tucker expert

I noticed that in one video Ray cooks an item from my Australian menu - witchetty grub - which he claims tastes like scrambled eggs! Like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall - another food hunter and gatherer I very much admire - Ray Mears is adamant about the need to use every part of an animal killed for food. In one video scene, after stumbling across the carcass of a deer, he shows how the antlers can be used for harpoons, the skin and fur for bedding and rope and, rather gruesomely, the eyeball juices for glue. I find Ray's programmes intriguing. He's a fountain of knowledge and always has something interesting to say. It's so inspiring to see him use all manner of weird and wonderful wildlife to create practical and functional tools. Ray never ceases to amaze and entertain me with his enthusiasm and appetite for life, as well as with his outlandish survival techniques. Before I encountered Ray Mears I thought, like many of my fellow food bloggers and a good few movie buffs, that the two most important requisites for survival were those two interrelated human survival urges - food and sex. I've been set straight on this by Ray, who points out on his website and in his videos that the two imperatives are actually shelter and water. It has been proven that a human can survive for up to 50 days without food, but can only last a matter of a few days without water. And although copulation may be vital in the animal kingdom (especially for those animals with acutely declining numbers such as the panda bear), it is no longer needed for human survival - especially in the age of artificial insemination and of women "doing it for themselves". But I digress.

Photographing a visiting hunter-gatherer

Ray's view of the world changed when he paid a visit to Australia and realised for the first time that "aboriginal" was not just a term that applied to native Australians - as if they were some kind of anomaly in the development of homo sapiens - but applied equally to the hunter gatherers who lived in the British Isles thousands of years ago. This realisation led to Ray's TV series "Aboriginal Britain" and a whole new way of looking at traditional peoples and their culture in relation to modern life.

In one of Ray's programmes he showed how to cook food wrapped in banana leaf, but despite my best efforts I couldn't find it on the web. I did find another clip of Ray cooking in the ashes and post it here, but I've been forced to remove it due to copyright objections. So here's a clip of the same process from another source. It shows how to cook the Aboriginal staple damper bread in hot ashes.

Am I fascinated by all this? You bet I am. I used to really enjoy camping out when I was a young child, although in recent years I've become more used to my home comforts. But I quite fancy the idea of trekking throught the Sussex woods with Ray Mears in search of wild beasts. So watch out Ray - I might be knocking on your door one of these days.

Since I drafted this piece over the weekend, there has been a serious fire in Ray Mears' home county of East Sussex as a result of which two firefighters have lost their lives and others have been seriously injured. My thoughts are with them and their families.