All I gave the forest was space, and it came.
For eight years, I lived right by a reserve forest teeming with wildlife in the Shola forests surrounding Kodaikanal. When I first moved near the village of Pallangi, I was keen on growing a farm that had no boundary with the forest. People in the village thought I was crazy. The frequent visits by wild elephants and boar, who would rip out months of planting in a single night, or the birds, bats and insects who would devour my fruits and vegetables often left me doubting myself.
But today, the once barren chemically cultivated bean farm I had bought is a lush food forest full of trees and shrubs that I did not plant myself, with birds I never knew existed, insects that surprise me every day and a rich soil that astonishes me with its ability to incubate growth.
The workings of nature are too discreet, too slow, and too large and all at once for me to take credit for this transformation. Sure, I planted fruiting trees and created wind and rain barriers for my ‘orchard’, but in the end, the wisdom of the forest is much larger than me and my small permaculture designs. Forests will grow where they can; they are encoded to keep spreading—a bird within a ‘restricted forest area’ does not care about flying across a boundary, onto a ‘private tree’, leaving droppings full of not just any healthy seed but the original germplasm of a plant from deep inside the forest.
I started this article wanting to write about the immense wealth of wild foods in our forests, particularly in the Western Ghats, but as I began learning of the tremendous nutritional wealth in our wild spaces, I felt uneasy about laying bare the secrets of forests that unfurl only in the dark, moist cover of trees far away from human intervention.
While I firmly believe that it is the innate birthright of all humans to have equal access to nature’s resources, we are all unfortunately implicit in the destruction of these resources. The dilemma then is: will information on the malnourished state of our global food system result in the leeching of our forests? Not for oil or timber or development, but this time, for food.
Wild, rich foods
From lion’s mane to maca root and ‘superfoods’ to ‘nutriceuticals’, wild food and medicine is the new ‘in’ food. Packed with minerals and vitamins, a plant growing naturally in the wild is nutritionally richer than anything cultivated, organically or otherwise. A New York Times article says studies over the past fifteen years indicate relatively low phytonutrients (plant compounds that provide health benefits) in our produce, which we have ‘unwittingly been stripping from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000 years ago and became farmers’.
Our farming ancestors chose the least bitter, most high-yielding plants to grow in their gardens, but it is now known that many of the highly beneficial phytonutrients taste bitter, sour or astringent.
Of the many forms of whole carbohydrates that used to be a part of our diet—such as sweet potato, taro, millets, buckwheat and tiger nuts—only five staples are now grown extensively. So much so that about 70% of agricultural land in the world is used to grow only rice, wheat, corn, potatoes and soya. These selected foods were favoured for their low processing needs and ease in transportation, rather than the wide diversity available in the wild, further exacerbating our current ‘food desert’.
Essentially, the more palatable our fruits and vegetables have become, the less nutritious they have turned out to be.
Among indigenous communities and non-indigenous rural communities living in rural and semi-urban settings, however, the culture of consuming wild edible plants is still widespread. A 2020 study found that across the country, about 1,403 wild plant species were being used for both food and medicine.
Over the past few years, urban populations too are increasingly interested in foraging and wild foods, even in bustling metropolises like Bengaluru.
To bring more awareness on wild foods and benefits, in the past year alone, nearly 25 wild food festivals have come up in India.
‘The focus of this Wild Food Festival is not just to eat lunch or showcase a market for wild produce from jungles, but also to throw light on food security and the nutritional security of our country. It is a step to avoid [prevent] India from becoming nutrition deficient,’ reads a brochure for the Wild Food Festival (WFF) in Mumbai, held in August 2023.
The festival, now in its sixth edition, was founded based on extensive research done in the Palghar area of Maharashtra’s Western Ghats, the result of a partnership between The Locavore and OOO Farms. Along with a display of 200 wild edibles and a tasting of up to 40 wild foods and snacks, there were also seeds for sale, a session with members of the indigenous community and heated discussions between experts on the causes of global malnutrition.
Shailesh Awate, co-founder of OOO Farms and WFF, Mumbai, believes that the emergence of a festival like this is a direct response to over a century of industrialised farming and unlocalised food systems. ‘Till the 1920s, 40% of India’s population depended solely on wild foods. Only 20% had access to cultivated food. It was a luxury to be able to either buy or barter enough farmed food,’ he says, pointing out that mass cultivated food is now ubiquitous.
‘Our food has become so homogenised; we can’t even digest these wild foods anymore. Meanwhile, for the indigenous people that live in the forest, their gut biome changes with every season!’ says Chef Gresham Fernandes, a researcher for the festival.
Ownership and over-foraging
One thing the WFF organisers are careful not to mention is exactly where the foods on display are found in the wild. ‘The aim of the festival is to pass on the wisdom behind these foods and the way they are used, rather than the details of where to find them,’ Awate emphasises.
These are necessary safety measures to prevent over-foraging. Fiddlehead ferns, for example, believed to now grow only in the Himalayas, once existed throughout India at heights above 4,000 ft. Interestingly, these ferns were once known to grow wild alongside indigenous settlements all over the world, indicating the symbiotic relationship between plants and humans. Plants need humans to propagate them, and humans rely on plants for nutrition.
More recently, the unavailability of consistent local fresh food during Covid-19 (especially within Goa, where I now live) created a lot of demand for wild foods in Goa. Ilka Muller, a wild food enthusiast, tells me of the ‘small, white mushroom that grows on termite mounds and is sold for up to Rs. 1,000 per vati [two handfuls], all but disappeared from Mollem, where they were once very common’.
In Palghar, too, Awate heard of merchants bartering onions and potatoes—then worth no more than Rs 2 per kg—with indigenous communities for the famous Gond tree, from which a highly prized natural gum is extracted. Now almost none of these trees remain in Maharashtra’s Western Ghats.
The rising number of wild food festivals across the country are all aimed at preventing, if not solving, this concern of over-foraging. Ramya Reddy, co-organiser of the Nilgiri Earth Festival in Ooty, celebrating its second year this December, says, ‘We take only that [produce] which is abundantly available to indigenous communities. The festival celebrates all manner of local produce, not just wild foods, and highlights that there is enough to forage within urban environments.’
For WFF, Mumbai, Chef Fernandes says, ‘We had a two-pronged approach. One, to market tribal farm produce, and two, for the demand not to overtake the supply. The point of the festival is to educate consumers that food cannot be standardised. Indigenous people should be the only harvesters and sellers of wild foods.’ This emphasis of indigenous ownership is increasingly important the more valuable wild produce becomes.
At the Wild Foods Festival (now the Wild Earth Festival), an exhibition of wild foods showcased key foods of the Western Ghats (top). This pioneering festival, launched in 2022, featured indigenous meals: millet rice was served with chicken gravy and papad, as is seen here (bottom). Photos: Ramya Reddy.
In Palghar, the forest community observes many seasons, Awate explains. Every kind of rain and warmth is its own season, marked by different germination and flowering times. Each wadi (localised regional area) meets at the end of each season to discuss their observations and assess what should be eaten that year. If a particular plant has not flowered or germinated in time, every community agrees not to forage it and leave it to heal. Even widely abundant foods are sometimes avoided so they can repopulate the forest. Akargoda, for example, is a prolific fern that they choose to consume only twice a year (its Sanskrit name means ‘a running horse’, hinting to its now scientifically verified use to heal joints).
These festivals seem to have benefitted the indigenous people in other ways too. Seeing their traditional wild food being celebrated in big cities has instilled a sense of pride within them. ‘They understand that their identity is tied in with the jungle. In the city, one would be just another daily wage labourer,’ says Awate. ‘But the influence of technology has changed the younger generations’ concept of time. They don’t understand seasonality anymore. Now they would rather take the money.’
Diminishing lands
In addition to over-foraging concerns and vanishing traditional knowledge, biodiversity loss driven by other factors is another rising concern for wild foods.
The Living Planet Report 2020 has identified two key drivers for the decline of our planet’s biodiversity: overexploitation of resources and land use change. In Goa, where Vishal Rawlley, an ecologist and outdoor educator, leads children’s walks to show the abundance of wild foods, he observes that sadas, or rock plateaus, are being converted into industrial zones. ‘They look like scrubland but are treasure troves of food, from berries in the summer, like the local gooseberry, to greens in the monsoon,’ says Rawlley. Unfortunately, because these areas are not officially protected as forests or by the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ), they are vulnerable to land grabbing.
But ‘land use change’ does not refer only to construction. Cristina Silva Toledo, who along with Alex Carpenter lives in and works on a rewilding project within the Mhadei forest reserve, says, ‘Among the biggest causes of forest destruction we see is mass burning to convert forest land into cashew plantations, in addition to development. Worse, this introduces invasive plants that spread through the forest, affecting an area larger than just the plantations.’
Industrial monocrop agriculture is usurping forest cover, and wild plant foods along with it. At present, there are no government policies in India to specifically protect wild foods. The legal framework for conservation policies focuses on wildlife in general, and tree cover specifically.
Can farming and wild foods coexist?
Contrary to popular belief, and akin to what I learnt from my time farming with the wild, farming and wild areas need not be mutually exclusive.
A study in 2010 that researched the roles and values of wild species in agricultural systems showed that ‘many of the wild foods are actively managed, suggesting there is a false dichotomy around ideas of the agricultural and the wild: hunter–gatherers and foragers farm and manage their environments, and cultivators use many wild plants’.
Perhaps this is something we can inculcate within our more ‘modern’ setting too. As in permaculture, every farm could have a little ‘wild zone’, untouched by human intervention. Let the ‘weeds’ grow as they may. They are necessary for the survival of our cultivated foods. As Awate reminds me, ‘There is no word in any Indian language for “weed”. There is no such thing in a forest. Everything has a function.’ Growing organic produce with seeds of hybrid varieties is of no use; organic food today is nutritionally low as the seeds get weaker over generations without cross-pollinating with their wild counterparts for resilience.
Furthermore, perhaps nourishing the wilder parts within us is the answer to true nutrition. Maybe it is time to move away from an ‘extractive’ mindset that still looks at the wild as a resource and instead see these spaces as holding an intrinsic value of their own.
The images in this story were curated by guest photo editor Menty Jamir, a photographer and creative director based in New Delhi.
Correction: On 15th May, the quote from Cristina Silva Toledo was amended: earlier, invasive plants were referred to as parasitic. Also, mass burning was listed as the biggest cause; this has been updated to clarify that it is among the biggest, development being the major cause.
