Foraging for Food and Familiarity

film
Written By Hannah De Bruyn

A short film

This video is a small part of an project that I recently undertook which explored how foraging can help you to become familiar with a new place and begin to cultivate a sense of home in this place.

I moved from South Africa to the South of England three months ago, and have been finding ways to adjust to and settle into this new landscape. I did a foraging course a couple of weeks ago since then I have been continuing to learn about the plants around me and typically eat something from the land everyday.

Through this endeavour I have also become aware of how powerful foraging can be - how it can bring about an attentiveness to your natural surrounds, how it can help us cultivate care for the environments around us, how plants can feel like familiar friends the more you get to know them, how familiarity of your landscape really can make you feel more at home in a new place, how wonderfully beautiful this world is and how much it has to offer, and how we as humans have created such a large system between ourselves and the food that we eat on a daily basis and how this system really needs some rethinking and redesigning.

This video shows some of the plants that I pick and some scenes from two of the recipes that I made, one being a sweet violet honey and the other a gorse & seed wholewheat bread.

Hannah De Bruyn

Hannah has recently completed her masters in Ecological Design Thinking at Schumacher College. She has a background in Mechanical and Mechatronic engineering, with experience in the renewable energy industry. She is from South Africa, and before coming to the UK spent a year and a half living on a regenerative sheep farm while setting up and running a cafe and bakery in the local town. She values creativity, resourcefulness, and is a general optimist with an enthusiasm for connecting to the natural world and community around her through cooking, crafts and music.

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