personal consumption. Only unregulat-
ed foraging for commercial use is banned.
Despite the law, the campaign against
foraging is becoming more animated. Last
year, the police issued 35 warnings to peo-
ple foraging for mushrooms, chestnuts and
other wild produce, a sevenfold increase on- Environmentalists explain that our
woods are being devastated by naked greed
and that animals are going hungry. Gangs of
eastern European commercial pickers are
supposedly stripping the forests bare to sup-
ply hip London restaurants, while threaten-
ing our fungal heritage.
Ignorance of mushrooms is, if anything,
even more rife among our eco-quangos than
the general public. A mushroom is actually
no more than a fruiting body. It is like an
apple or a blackberry. It springs up from a
hidden structure, a mycelium, which lurks
unseen throughout the year beneath soil
or bark. When conditions are optimal, this
pushes out mushrooms, each of which pro-
duces millions of spores. So picking a mush-
room is no more damaging than harvesting
any other fruit. By the time it’s big enough
to be picked, a mushroom will have already
dropped most of its spores. Carrying mush-
rooms around a wood only aids dispersal.
The stories about the gangs of Poles are
also deliberately misleading. Just as we Brits
like to bask on Spanish beaches till we go
pink, so our immigrant plumbers and care
workers like to snuffle in the woods. WhenPoles have a day off, they go mushroom
hunting, because it is a cheap, traditional
hobby. On their weekends, they forage and
leave the woods with brimming baskets.
They go home to drink vodka and feast on
some of their mushrooms, as they preserve
the rest for winter.
What they aren’t doing is picking mush-
rooms for commercial reasons. I have never
seen any evidence of this — and nor do
the figures stack up. Commercial picking is
against the law, under the Theft Act 1968.
But you need only look at the economics
of mushroom picking to see that it wouldn’t
really make much sense as a business idea.
Tesco is currently buying in tonnes of wild
mushrooms from Russia at £6 per kilo (they
are sold in the aisles at £20). Now, it takes a
while to find a kilo of wild mushrooms, par-
ticularly the small expensive ones. Many,
if not most, will be of poor quality. They
need grading, packaging, paperwork, insur-
ance and transport to a wholesaler. A tran-
sit van full of prime mushrooms gathered
in the New Forest might conceivably hold
100kg, but this would have taken at least 100
man hours to gather and process. Travel to
and from a London wholesaler would take
another day. Wild mushroom picking is sim-
ply not commercially viable in the UK.
This isn’t to say ‘commercial’ foraging
doesn’t exist. It’s rife, and has been going
on for years. The miscreants are members of
the Women’s Institute. They’ve been strip-
ping our hedgerows bare of blackberries,
crab apples and rowan berries to sell in jam,
jelly or tart form for almost a century. While
no one would seriously suggest the WI are
infringing any laws or are indulging in ‘eco-
vandalism’ when they go blackberry picking,
the same applies to mushroom pickers. The
impact of mushroom foraging is minuscule,
especially when compared to the devasta-
tion reaped by birds, voles and slugs, who
eat far more wild mushrooms than humans.
While the people who are trying to stop
foraging have the best of intentions, they
don’t have any legal backing. They put
up signs, and generally get away with this
because they are never challenged. A Pole
enjoying his Sunday afternoon forage is
perhaps unaware that he has the backing of
ancient legislation. He has every right to be
in the woods, rummaging through the under-
growth for whatever delicacies he can find.
Once you know what you are doing —
and it is, of course, worth starting out with
someone who knows what’s what — mush-
room picking is a wonderful activity. Our
woods are full of delightful species, many
of which can’t be cultivated commercially.
Children like foraging, and tend to be bet-
ter fungi hunters than their parents because
they are lower to the ground and have sharp-
er eyesight. We should follow the example
set by the Poles. So ignore the warning signs:
Britain’s annual mushroom bounty deserves
to be celebrated — and picked.A
utumn’s wild bounty is a cause for
celebration across the Continent. In
France and Germany, people rush
into the woods, motivated largely by greed.
Families drink, eat and forage, while the
elderly show their grandchildren what is —
and isn’t — safe to eat.
In Britain, attitudes are different. Even
conkers now seem suspect. We are particu-
larly nervous about fungi, because we are
told that picking mushrooms is both dan-
gerous and bad for the environment. This is
a shame. Britain has the perfect climate for
some of the most flavoursome wild mush-
rooms known to man. They grow in our
woods, pastures and hedges, yet almost all
of us ignore them.
I am a keen mushroom forager and regu-
larly lead fungi forays, so keep a close eye
on foraging developments. In the New For-
est, for instance, the current eruption of deli-
cious ceps, chanterelles and horn of plenty
is eclipsed by the number of notices sternly
telling the public that they aren’t allowed to
pick them. The same is true in the car parks
of the National Trust and the Royal Parks.
The advice seems to be: ‘Look, but don’t
touch, let alone taste!’
What’s more, foragers have started hav-
ing to defend their pastime from local vig-
ilantes. One elderly woman I know was
recently accosted by a man who wanted to
stop her ‘plundering’. He tried to seize her
basket, because the nearby posters suggest-
ed she was up to no good.
But she wasn’t. The right to forage is
ingrained in British law. It is rooted in the
Charter of the Forest, the much overlooked
— but arguably more important — cousin
of Magna Carta. It was enacted in 1217,
to allow everyone (as opposed to just the
barons) basic rights to pick foliage, fruit and
flowers. Over the past eight centuries there
have been modifications, but if you are in a
place you are entitled to be — regardless of
this being a site of special scientific interest,
a National Trust property or a Wildlife Trust
reserve — you can pick (provided the plant
or mushroom is not specifically protect-
ed). There are some exceptions, but for the
most part, you are free to pick for your own
Picky eaters
The right to forage is rooted in ancient British law
DANIEL BUTLER
‘You’re stuck in a rut.’One elderly woman I know was
accosted by a man who wanted to
stop her ‘plundering’ mushrooms