Grey notes that foraging is a seasonal activity, and that a bountiful intertidal zone that is perfect for gathering is routinely revealed by the lower water levels during the spring tide. But nutrients vary with the lunar cycle, even within the same substance. Certain foods, such sea lettuce, have high vitamin C content in the summer and high vitamin D content in the winter.
After starting a small wild flavoured tea garden in 2007, Gray’s passion to learn more about the edible landscape grew, and in 2013, inspired by her own children’s journey and adventures with foraged food she started teaching kids to forage and harvest workshops and then developed foraging workshops for adults.
In 2017 Veld and Sea was officially launched as a full-time business.
Gray’s workshps have become so popular that it featured in a recent Conde Nast Traveller piece, which will hopefully draw more attention to this sustainable way of foraging for food.
Sustainability is naturally an crucial aspect of the workshops, and Gray teaches visitors how encourage regrowth after their harvests. “It’s important to stress sustainable, responsible, and legal foraging practices,” she notes. “The magical intertidal zone is full of wonder and beauty, but also a very fragile ecosystem.”
Her classes incorporate elements of the region’s many cultures, such as the customs of the Indigenous people who formerly subsisted on the land and the sea. The Khoekhoe and San, collectively referred to as the Khoisan, were nomadic pastoralists and hunter-gatherers. The latter group’s name is actually an exonym meaning “foragers.”
One such group was called Strandlopers, which is Afrikaans for “beach walkers,” and they used to subsist on seafood collected from southern African beaches before European colonisation destroyed their way of life. They observed the moon and tides, gathered and collected responsibly, and adjusted to the changing of the seasons.
“So much of what they valued, we’d now discard,” Gray tells me morosely. “A lot of that knowledge has been lost along the way.”
Fortunately, people like Gray is there to remind people of this more sustainable way of enjoying the ocean’s bounty.
With the September holidays around the corner, this would be a great activity to get the whole family involved in – and teach your kids that there are adventurous ocean-sourced alternatives to fish fingers.
[source:condenasttraveller]
