Key

J: = Interviewer, Julia
JM: = Interviewee, Jordan McKeating
[time e.g. 5:22] = inaudible word at this time
[5:22 IA] = inaudible section at this time
[word] = best guess at word
… = interruption in sentence, trailing off or short pause

JM:I became a wild food forager from an age of around about 14-15 when me and a mate were running around the house causing a riot. And his dad used to watch a lot of things like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and River Cottage and all that sort of stuff and he got really annoyed at us and kicked us out of the house and said, ‘Go to the woods and look for some mushrooms.’ So we did, quite reluctantly, and we suddenly decided that the mushrooms we were seeing, there were purple ones, big ones, round ones, smelly ones, yellow ones, black ones, all sorts of different colours and rays, and we got really interested. And then we came back to the house, couldn’t ID a single thing, but every single year after that we went to the same forest and looked for mushrooms and over the years it got better and better.

J:Can you tell me the sorts of things that you found around Acorn Bank?

JM:Yes, we found a lot of common things, things that you’d expect to find everywhere. So common sorrel, wood sorrel, so these are plants that you would expect to find in most areas. A lot of things like hogweed, common hogweed, chervil, pignuts. These are things that you should expect to find in lots of areas.

J:What particularly do you find down on the riverbank near the river?

JM:Yeah, we find a lot of meadowsweet, definitely wild garlic. You could probably supply all of Penrith with wild garlic. So, yeah, wild garlic, meadowsweet, bistort, hedge woundwort, which is like a member of the mint family. It absolutely stinks, it’s not like a nice mint, like your spearmint or anything like that, it is horrendous but apparently will heal broken bones.

J:What’s the best time of year, do you think, around Acorn Bank to go … ?

JM:Absolutely May time. Yeah, May. May and June. So March and April is when things are just on the up and they’re starting to come up and you’re starting to see them come through but it’s really when everything goes boom in May and June and all the flowers start to come out and the wild garlic’s in the air. Just before the heat puts things away. Things, after they’ve flowered they tend to go a little bit wooden and tough and fibrous but there’s a period between the end of April and mid-June where everything’s just perfect.

J:And you mentioned about the importance of fungi and mushrooms, can you tell me about that?

JM:It’s vitally important. So the mushrooms, they grow in different ways. What we see above the ground or out of the tree isn’t really the living organism. The real living organism is what we call mycelium, it’s a network, a thread network, and it’s always in the soil or in the tree. So if it’s a mushroom that grows out of a tree like an oyster mushroom, where it grows out of the side of wood. Mycorrhizal fungi are fungi that are attached to the roots of the tree and they can’t survive without that tree and they have this really friendly symbiotic relationship where the tree is pulling carbon out of the air and giving it to the fungus and because it can photosynthesise it can also supply the fungus, the real living organism, this mycelium under the soil, sugar so it can survive. And in return this mycelial network, which we know… the largest one we know of is around about 400 football fields big, it’s this mushroom called the humungous fungus in Oregon, we know that that is around about a thousand years old, give or take. So this mycelial network can go much further. So mushrooms have been observed taking minerals out of the rocks to give these minerals to the tree and supply the tree with extra nutrients and minerals. They’ll give them nitrogen and phosphorus. So they really do help each other out.

J:What sort of things in the environment damage that network and that…?

JM:Chemicals. Chemicals, glyphosates, nitrates. Damaging the area, so killing the trees or logging or felling them or logging them or heavy equipment ripping up the soil, ploughing, anything like that will just ruin them completely. Because it’s not just how important it is for the trees but it’s everything else around the tree. So it’s the red squirrels, squirrels eat mushrooms just as much as we do; slugs, certain slugs, well most slugs to be honest. It’s a food source not just for us but for everything else. So funguses prop up a lot of nature, more than I think we tend to know.

J:Are there any species that indicate a really healthy environment?

JM:There certainly is, yeah. And the opposite is to be said as well – there are certain species which indicate a not very healthy environment as well. So the appearance of honey fungus, if you were to see honey fungus at the base of a tree, or even near a tree, to be honest, then you know that that fungus is slowly choking that tree to death and it will kill it over a certain period of time. So that’s the opposite can be said. In terms of mushrooms indicating whether or not an area can be good, particularly for grassland which Acorn Bank has quite a bit of, if you were to find things like waxcaps, they’re definitely an indicator of healthy grassland, grass that hasn’t been ploughed for a very long time or hasn’t had nitrates or glyphosates sprayed on it. There’s a thing used by ecologists called the CHEG scale which is an acronym for C-H-E-G, so Clavaria or Clavarioids, Hygrocybes, which are your waxcaps, Entolomas and Geoglossums or Geoglossoids. These are… basically if an ecologist was to find all four members or genus of mushrooms on a piece of grassland they can guarantee that that grassland has not been touched or disturbed by humans for a minimum of 50 years, which is something you don’t see at all. So if you do find an area like that it’s worth protecting, essentially.

J:And can you tell me about the sorts of people that come on your courses?

JM:We get all sorts of people. Usually it’s people that are just interested in foraging but also just enjoy being outside. Being outside, being able to reconnect with nature and to open their eyes or take their blinkers off that they have when people go for a walk. You go for a walk, a walk’s nice, don’t get me wrong, but if you’re coming back with a walk and you’re also noticing certain flowers or certain mushrooms and you’re able to see what they are, you can read the environment a bit more as well. And being able to read the environment can let you know if it’s healthy or not or if it’s unhealthy. And if you’re coming back home with your tea then it’s saving you money in the long run as well. It’s good for your health, it’s good for the mind, it’s good for the body and the soul because you’re outside, you’re getting your vitamin D most of the time, when it’s not raining. So the people that come on the courses tend to be just lovely outdoorsy people that are interested in nature, like eating. Most people like eating. So they’re a bit foodie as well, and generally just like being outdoors and reconnecting themselves to nature. We’ve done a really good job of putting ourselves in concrete blocks and sitting in front of a very flashy colourful thing that is very entertaining but after a while we all get that little itch in the back of the head that says, ‘We should probably go outside.’ So, yeah, all sorts of people really.

J:How do you notice that people are reconnecting with nature?

JM:Enthusiasm. So people who start off very, very quiet, maybe a little bit timid or shy, by the end of it are chatting my head off and asking me all sorts of questions. We sell books at the end of the courses and they buy a book and you can see them flicking through the pages and you can see the cogs going in their head thinking, oh, I know a good area, I might go find this. And it just… hopefully what it’s doing is there’s a little spark or a little flame inside somebody now just prompted it to burn brighter, essentially. And hopefully they get outdoors a bit more and reconnect. Yeah, definitely. And I can see it quite a lot in a lot of different people.

J:And how do you feel when you go out, particularly in that springtime when you said everything’s just blooming.

JM:Lighter. I feel much lighter. When spring comes along, in that period around about May time, kind of that time just after the daffodils have been and gone and the wild garlic, you can smell the wild garlic in the air, and there’s St George’s mushrooms around and there’s life and the days are getting brighter. You just feel lighter, there’s not much that can bring me down on them sort of days.

J:Can people of any age enjoy…?

JM:Kids are inherently really good at foraging because they haven’t been taught any different. As people grow up they become a bit disconnected in life and society. Somebody at some point has drew these blinds, these guidelines – you must do this and you must do that. But as a child you’re completely innocent so kids are just already really good at foraging, not only because they enjoy it and they’re already looking at acorns… how many adults pick up an acorn and go, ‘Ooh, look at this, it’s an acorn. Do you want to see this acorn?’ Whereas kids will do it all the time. So not only are they just looking at weird things, bugs, acorns, flowers, mushrooms, but they’re also very low to the ground so they can see a lot more than you. So they make really good little foragers. Most of the time when we’re looking for mushrooms and we can’t find anything a kid will point something out, pick it up and go, ‘What’s this?’ and it’ll be a porcini or a chanterelle. So they’re really good.
One of the best things I ever found as a forager was probably a ballerina waxcap which is an indicator species for unimproved grassland. And even on a good day where there’s porcinis and hedgehog mushrooms and chanterelles around, getting to see a ballerina waxcap outshines all of them because of… It’s not technically a rare mushroom but it’s definitely uncommon, very uncommon. Like I said, it’s a good indicator that the grassland around hasn’t been disturbed by humans which is something that we’re running out of because of things like nitrates and glyphosates and things like that. So definitely a ballerina waxcap, although I have had days where I’ve been uncontrollably laughing hysterically because there have been kilos and kilos of porcinis and chanterelles and things like that. So, yeah. Not every day you go out foraging you get to fill your basket up but on the odd occasion you do.

J:And mushrooms have been in the news recently, they’re trying to get them protected.

JM:Absolutely.

J:Can you tell me a bit about that and your views on that?

JM:The British government and the Chilean government are together trying to go to the UN so that mushrooms and fungi, well the fungal kingdom, can have the same protective rights as certain plants and flowers and trees and animals do as well. Mycology is a frontier science, it’s something only maybe in the last 50 years that we’ve started to even understand it properly. There’s still a massive amount of work to do but we’ve slowly realised that mushrooms around the world globally, the mycorrhizal mushrooms, because the trees are feeding them carbon, that carbon gets locked in the fungus so that when the tree dies it will release its carbon back into the atmosphere. But because it’s been putting carbon into these mycelial networks in the soil, that it stores and locks and we’re not too sure for how long but they’ve done a calculation and it’s calculated that globally mycorrhizal mushrooms, they take in around about 13 gigatonnes of carbon each year which is more than China’s yearly output. So very important stuff.