Zoe Williams is sadly not alone in being unable to identify 30 plants a week to eat (We should all be eating 30 different plants a week. I can’t even name that many, 19 August). Nowadays 50% of the world’s daily calorie intake comes from just three species: wheat, corn and rice.
In 2020, I decided to live off “foraging for nettles” – as Zoe puts it – for a year in Scotland, eating only free, wild food. During that period I ate 300 plant species, 21 seaweed species and 87 types of mushroom. This is not untypical of hunter-gatherer intake, and most Indigenous six-year-olds can identify the same number of plants as an adult. While commercially produced and processed foods provide calories, it is plants that produce the incredible variety of micronutrients, antioxidants, flavonoids etc that our bodies need to stay healthy and free of the inflammation that causes pain and so many “modern diseases”.
The Wildbiome Project measured the health metrics of 120 people who ate only wild foods for periods of one or three months in 2023 and 2025. The results are fascinating, with many unexpected improvements across a range of health issues. These will soon be published in an open-source, peer-reviewed journal.
The inability to name fruit and vegetable species is a reflection of a wider general decline in familiarity with the natural world. It goes along with the growing inability to identify trees, birds, butterflies and insects. The loss of names translates to a loss of awareness, which blinds us to species decline and extinction. Sadly, we don’t miss unnamed, vanished species until it’s too late – whether in the outside world or inside our guts.
Mo Wilde
Principal researcher, The Wildbiome Project
Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
