Rewilding the Microbiome with Mo Wilde
Researching natures cure through foraging, experiential learning and the right to roam.
Forager, research herbalist, and ethnobotanist, Mo (Monica) Wilde is the founder of The Wildbiome Project and author of The Wilderness Cure, where she details her experience of living solely on wild foods for a year. She is a Fellow of the Linnean Society, a Member of the British Mycological Society and a Member of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS). Dedicated to sharing her expertise, she teaches foraging and herbal medicine with a focus on “Restoring Vital Connection,” a guiding principle of the Association of Foragers.
Through The Wildbiome Project, Mo underscores the critical importance of biodiversity in both ecosystems and diets. By pioneering this citizen science initiative, she is inspiring others to embrace traditional ecological knowledge and actively participate in the restoration and preservation of our natural environment.
This interview has been transcribed from audio, with some revised sections.
INL: In the beginning of your book, The Wilderness Cure, you said “eating only wild food for a year might sound like a completely crazy idea, but we are living in unprecedented times.” Can you explain what you meant by this?
Mo: I felt we were living in unprecedented times because in that year or two leading up to COVID, which was when I did my first year of wild food only, so much seemed to be happening one after the other. You had “Beast from the East”, which in the UK was this winter storm that hit in April and created a snowfall in parts of the country, which are not used to having snowfall. A lot of the village shops were cut off from supplies, and very quickly people ran out of bread, toilet rolls, milk, and all the basics. Soon after that, we were faced with the Brexit vote. And what that meant was, in the newspapers we were seeing huge lines of lorries (trucks) queuing back from the port at Dover, unable to get across the channel. There was a lot of discussion around the fact that so much of our food is imported, and what would we do if we were really cut off from the continents and other countries?
Then, of course, the triple whammy hit with COVID. As soon as COVID started and people were confined to their homes, people started panic-buying and stocking up at home. Very quickly also, the shops were out of food again. It really made me think a lot about the times that we're living in, because we are facing uncertainties about what's going to happen given climate change. Although it's been progressing quite slowly, we are warned by scientists that you can reach these tipping points at which events can escalate very quickly.
At the same time, commercial systems for just-in-time sourcing and supply means that supermarkets put in food orders on a just-in-time basis. Apparently there's only three days of food in the system at any one time. When I looked at it, I was thinking, well, this is a point in time where it would be really helpful to know what the effects of eating only wild food are — if we had to fall back on what were called “famine foods”.
In the West, certainly in Britain, we've got a slightly glamorized view of foraging. We tend to think it's sort of a bit yuppy or middle class or only the high-end chefs are serving it. But, in actual fact, a lot of people all around the world depend on wild food for their basic daily needs — between 40 to 50% of the world's people. And certainly in areas hit by war. In Ukraine, when villages were surrounded by tanks, people went back into the woods because no food was coming in during the sieges. I think there was an 84% increase in foraging after earthquakes hit in Syria and wiped out a lot of the infrastructure there.
Scientists have been studying things like the gut microbiome of indigenous hunter-gatherer populations like the Hadza1. But, we don't live in the equatorial or the southern hemisphere, we live up here. There's a lot about the plants, which is reversed. Here in Scotland, we have very few large underground tubers and wild carrot (which is the ancestor of the domestic carrot) and they are really thin, whereas conversely, on the other side of the equator, once you get down to places like the Kalahari, the leafy growth is very small, but the tubers are huge.
So, we are not living on the same diet as other hunter-gatherers that have been studied. We are in the North here, and we've evolved to be in the North since we came out of Africa some 200-300,000 years ago. For me, it was an unanswered question: What did a Western Mesolithic diet really consist of, and what would be the effect on our bodies if we chose to live that way, or if we were required to do so in the future?
INL: Alongside many years of foraging and understanding your local environment, you’re also an ethnobotanist and a herbalist. What are the steps to begin incorporating wild foods into your diet? How big is the learning curve?
Mo: It's very interesting, this whole question of qualifications and learning, because I think particularly with this generation, a lot of people who've grown up with lots of health and safety laws feel that you have to go and study and get a qualification to do something. When it comes to foraging, most people actually start as children. When I have groups of people that I'm teaching foraging to, I'll say to people, 'Who’s had foraging experience from before?' And nobody will put their hand up. And I'll say, 'Who’s ever picked blackberries?' And everybody puts their hands up. So, this is something which people have started to do since they were small children. And children are very, very good at noticing small detail. So good that in a hunter-gatherer society, a child of six will be able to identify all of the same plants as an adult. This is partly because children spend a lot of time looking at very small detail — is this round red thing a tomato or is it an apple?
When I get people to come out and they say, 'Oh gosh, how am I going to learn? It all looks green, it all looks the same,' I’ll say to them, 'Can you tell the difference between a cabbage and lettuce? Because they’re both around the size of a football, with leaves of curly edges and a stem halfway through the middle that fans out in this way. I bet you can instantly tell the difference between a cabbage and lettuce because you’re used to it.' Humans are geared to notice these little differences.
Even a child who has never seen a vegetable in their entire life — if you take them to a big sport shop and you show them the back wall where there's 100 pairs of white trainers, they can unerringly spot the most fashionable or the most expensive pair just by some tiny little detail or flashmark or change in the stitching or something. We're geared to do that. Obviously, you have to learn and there are various ways of learning. You can do formal study, go to university and study botany or mycology in order to learn how to identify things. But most people start by just doing a weekend course or reading good books and build on things one at a time.
Foraging is truly wonderful because it's one of the few activities left in the world for which you can't get a degree. There is no degree in foraging, no 'foragologists' or 'foragology.' It still belongs to the people. It is something that everyone can do, regardless of color, race, creed, sexual orientation, or gender. It’s our birthright in some ways. However, that doesn’t mean you can simply wake up one morning after seeing something on television the night before and decide, 'Right, I’m going to be a forager' and start putting things in your mouth.
You do have to learn because there are some things out there that could make you feel quite sick and a few that could kill you, particularly with mushrooms. But in actual fact there are some far more dangerous plants; it's just that people seem to be more enthralled with the mushrooms. So you start learning and very often there are things that you probably already know. Most people can identify a nettle and a dandelion, and it doesn't take much more to learn how to identify sorrel and cleavers.
When I teach people, I suggest that they add one a day or one a week, and just gradually build it up. Though the process might be slow and it might take a whole week to learn the first one, the second one, and the third one, once your brain knows that this is what you want to know, it'll start to sink in very fast.
So you do need to pay attention to the learning, but it's not a massive learning curve, everybody can do it. I've seen two-year-olds catalog a lawn, believe me!
INL: What constitutes foraging? Is it just about wild-grown plants, and are there specific rules for it?
Mo: Foraging really means the wild things that you find that haven't been deliberately planted, harvested, farmed, or cultivated for human consumption. Now, this can be a bit of a stretchy term. If you're in the countryside, it's very clear — once you're out of your house and your garden, you're in lanes, picking from hedgerows, or going into the woods and picking things that grow there. But for some people living in cities, urban foraging might also mean picking berries from a hedge that someone might have planted around their house, from the street side of it, like our open grape root berries. Or in a public park, there might be a display of fuchsias in the summer, and then behind them in the autumn come these edible berries that taste like a cross between a fig and a grape. So although those plants have been planted by a park garden for the public to enjoy the flowers, the berries do provide a type of wild food. It can be a little bit stretchy, particularly in the towns, but basically, foraging means wild or feral foods that are not being cultivated, fertilized, and so on. And the act of foraging is the act of taking meat. There are going to be different rules in different countries.
Here in Scotland, we are very lucky to have something called the right to roam, which is enshrined in law. This means that as long as you're not within someone's curtilage—essentially, within their private garden immediately around their house—you have the freedom to cross farmland, parkland, state land, hills, moors, and valleys. We have responsibilities, such as not leaving gates open, not letting sheep out, and not allowing dogs to chase sheep. Within these freedoms, we also have the right to pick wild foods for our own consumption. This right does not extend to foraging for commercial use; you can't supply restaurants, and you are certainly not allowed to pick anything rare, on the red list, or in certain protected sites. Additionally, you cannot uproot anything without the landowner's permission, as this can kill the plant. There isn't a finite set of rules for foraging, and there are no UN or EU regulations specifically for it. Various organizations have put together guidelines, such as your local forestry commission or woodland trust. I belong to the Association of Foragers2, established in 2015, which supports those teaching in this area. One of our first actions was to examine and develop a set of principles and practices.
The basic rules are: first of all, think about the environment and the environmental impact of what you're doing. If there's only a few species, don't take them. If there's more than that, don't take all of them. Just take what you need. One of the big laws is don't be greedy. Don't take more than you can use and then take it back and waste it and let it rot.
And remember that you're part of a community—a community of other people who might also want to pick sloes, raspberries, or chanterelles, but also a community of animals, birds, and insects who may use the same resources. Additionally, we're part of the community of the earth. The fungi and plants deserve our respect. In the case of fungi, how do we show our respect? By not trampling or compressing the soil, especially around the drip line and root lines of the trees they’re attached to. Don't use rakes to disturb the mosses and uproot everything in your search.
These are basic, basic rules that I think all indigenous tribes know because some of them are self-serving. If you want to go back to a place year after year and find the same things growing year after year, you need to respect that environment; otherwise, it just won't be there for you. You'll be cutting off your nose to spite your face. The most golden rule that’s unrelated to the environment but very much related to you and your health is never, ever put anything in your mouth unless you're 100% sure that you know what it is and how to prepare it. That's very fundamental.
INL: Why did you start The Wildbiome Project?
Mo: When I finished my year of eating only wild food, which I persuaded my friend Matt to do with me as well, we had all these test results from our gut microbiome. However, we were finding it difficult to get people to help us analyze the data because it wasn’t a formal study. It could have just been two people doing something rather peculiar. It became very clear that we needed to approach this from a much more scientific point of view, which gave rise to The Wildbiome Project.
The Wildbiome Project aimed to create a scientific study—albeit a citizen science project—that was self-funded by us, with no organization or university backing it. I managed to persuade 24 other foragers, who were teaching foraging at the time, to join me in this journey. We divided into two groups: 12 people eating only wild food for one month and 12 people doing it for three months. We collaborated with the ZOE Health Project, run by Sir Tim Spector, to measure our gut microbiome against a control group. By taking a scientific approach, we hoped that people in academia and scientific communities would take us more seriously, especially when we began to observe some of the health outcomes.
INL: For this second challenge with the 24 participants who were already knowledgeable foragers, what were the most surprising health outcomes or changes observed among them?
Mo: What was interesting about the various outcomes of The Wildbiome Project was the health results because they address a lot of the modern concerns that we have in the Western world, such as the epidemic of obesity, an epidemic of diabetes, and an epidemic of poor heart health. We saw that everybody who was overweight or obese at the start lost weight. Even in just four weeks, it could make a huge difference. In the three-month project, anybody who was overweight or obese lost about 15-16% of their body weight. That puts it on the same level as something like Ozempic, but at the same time, these participants were also learning about what to eat, and understanding their bodies and relationship to food without side effects. This knowledge will help them in the future, as opposed to what happens when the injections stop.
There was also a really interesting impact on blood sugar. One of the participants was diagnosed as diabetic and saw his levels return to normal. He achieved this during the one-year project; it was Matt who did it alongside me. When he went back to a normal diet the second time, his blood sugar went up again. It returned to normal within two weeks of starting the wild food diet. At the end of the project, it remained stable. He was wearing a blood sugar monitor on his arm. Even though he was careful about returning to a normal diet — not eating ultra-processed food or “junk food” — his blood sugar still began to rise and entered the diabetic range again.
Having been one of the participants myself who experienced weight loss, which was really good for me because I had a condition called lipedema, which means that it is very difficult to lose weight because there's a fibrous element to fat when you’re overweight.
Subsequently, I had been looking for a way to emulate the wild food diet. Is it the fact that sometimes it's keto? That there's a lot more fiber? In trying to emulate it, there has been nothing so far that gives you the same results. And what's so interesting is that they can happen so quickly. Three-fifths of our participants lowered their cholesterol, and blood pressure normalized (people with high blood pressure saw their blood pressure come down).
These are all things that affect us in the modern world. Given that this was probably the diet that our ancestors were eating, it really does say this was so much better for us, and that perhaps our forebears would have been much healthier when you rule out things like mortality through childbirth or infectious diseases.
The biggest surprise in reaction was the speed of change, and among my 23 colleagues, there were a variety of other things that happened as well. One person had painful PMS for over 20 or 30 years, and that actually stabilized for the first time in her life. There was somebody else who had really bad insomnia and slept like a baby all the way through the project, but once she finished, she was back to insomnia again.
People's mental health overall did seem to improve. It wasn't bad to start with, but I think getting out in nature every day and connecting with nature is really, really good for you. When you can identify plants, when you can feed yourself, when you have this communion with the land — it’s very, very empowering.
INL: Can you share the range of foods eaten by the participants?
Mo: Yes, it's very interesting because I think 50% of the world's entire daily calorie intake comes from just three species: wheat, corn, and rice. By the time you get to 80%, you're only adding potatoes, soy, and a few other things. What was so interesting about the wild food diet was that we recorded something like 300 species of plants, 87 species of fungi, 20 species of seaweed, and 44 species of living organisms, which included fish, shellfish, insects, birds, and game — things like venison and rabbit. There was an incredible range. Nowadays, modern nutritionists suggest that people eat the rainbow and increase diversity. I think with the ZOE project, who we were working with at the time, recommended that you eat 30 different species of plants every week — but we were regularly clocking up between 45 and 55 different species of plants a week.
So there was incredible variety there. That was just in the particular season from March to June. If we'd gone on into later in the year when other things like fruit, nuts, seeds, and other mushrooms come out, there would have been even greater diversity.
Q7: What’s next for The Wildbiome project?
Mo: What's next for the Wildbiome Project is that we're doing it again! In the spring of 2025. The first one that we did seemed to inspire a lot of people to say, “Oh, I would really like to try that.” We have over 120 applicants to do it next year now. So we've started holding information evenings, and I've put together a guide and a manual. This time we're linking up with the University of Bradford, which has a School of Archaeological and Forensic Sciences. They have been studying our ancestors from the medieval period going back to the Mesolithic, and they use carbon isotopes to try to establish from people's bones and teeth what they have been eating. But of course, they haven’t got a key to those results because nobody in those days ever kept a diet diary.
They’ve been very interested to work with us and so we are scaling up and doing a much larger project this time. At the moment we’ve got two-thirds of those people, so 80-odd people are doing it for one month and 40 people are going to do it for three months. This will help to validate the results that we got from the first time around, but with more people because when you’re doing science, this is what is needed, to show that you’re not just a one-off flash in the pan, but that you can reproduce these results over and over again.
This time it’s interesting because it’s not just people who teach foraging. It’s people from all different walks of life with quite varied skills, although people with low skills will be matched up with mentors, which then opens up the question—if there are health benefits, can anybody do this? How easy is it? How can we make it more accessible for people to do it? It might be as simple as just adding in a wild vegetable every day, adding in nettle, like Gerard said in the Middle Ages, if in doubt, add nettle.
The result of that will be analyzed in July next year, and we’ll know by the summer. In the meantime, although it doesn’t start until the 1st of April, we’re already working with people because, of course, they want to go out and gather acorns and hazelnuts and other things now. Also, we have to raise about £142,000 to cover all of the tests.
INL: Why is foraging important, and do you have any extra tips for new foragers?
Mo: I think foraging in modern times is still important, even where people have access to an abundance of food. It's part of our heritage, and we really shouldn't forget it. But there are many different reasons when you look at foraging. There's a physical health perspective — adding wild foods can help to improve the health of our gut microbiome. A lot of the wild foods are very high in vitamins and minerals compared to supermarket foods. Farm foods are traditionally for calories, but it's the wild foods that give this really high nutritional impact. It also gets you out and walking every day. It saves you money. There's a mental and spiritual health aspect to it in that we know that going out and being in nature helps to calm us down, ground us, and help us find our centers. On a spiritual basis as well, that connection with nature, that feeling of really belonging to the earth, is incredibly powerful.
It's also fun. You can take your kids out to do it. It can be a family affair or something you do with friends. And it's very easy to leave your phone in your bag or your pocket and forget to take it out, so it gives you a real break from the intense engagement with the online world.
It's important from an environmental point of view. When you go to your local woods or habitat and really explore them, you come to understand the health of the environment around you and start to care about it as well. Foragers aren't people who just take; they are people who become some of the best environmental stewards out there.
There are so many things that are important about foraging! And it's quite simple to start, really. One of the best things to do is to go on a course with somebody who already teaches or find the funny old lady in your community who still goes out into the woods and befriend her and accompany her. When you're learning from someone else and when you're out there in the field seeing things, it's much easier to understand. If we go back to the proverbial lettuce and cabbage — could you tell the difference? If you'd only ever read about them in a book, you might be quite surprised at the size of them, the firmness of them, the texture of them, the smell of them — these are things that we can see with our hands
In the UK, we have the Association of Foragers, so you can find somebody quite easily. We do have some members in America and Canada as well. A lot of the forestry associations and landowners are also starting to run courses. There are lots and lots of good books, and there are also some useful websites and Facebook groups. I would caveat, though, that with a lot of the online information, Facebook groups, and even some self-published books now, a lot of it is powered by AI or people repeating what they've read or learned on Google, and a lot of that is not always accurate. I've seen mislabeled photographs, and I've also tested AI on its foraging expertise, and it's not that great yet, but that's possibly because AI never gets to go out in a field.
Learn from a reputable source and don't try to overwhelm yourself with learning everything straight away. If you set yourself the goal of one new species a week, in two years you’ll know over a hundred species.
What does “natural law” mean to you?
Mo: It's a very interesting question: what does natural law mean? Because very often, when you watch nature on television, it's nature red in tooth and claw, and it's all about the law of nature as survival of the fittest, and so on. But for me, I find that natural law is about a return to balance. It's about leaving the extremes and balancing everything back in the center.
For this, I learned very much from the plants and the fungi because plants are these wonderful modulators. They react all the time and they bring everything back into balance. They're rooted in the ground, so they can't run off into gated communities when there's a bit of trouble. They can't run anywhere, in fact. They use all the chemistry they emit into the air in the form of scents and smells; these little chemical messengers try to restore harmony.
For me, natural law is a return to balance within community.
When you look at things like mycelial networks that connect trees and plants together, it's about the exchange of information — it's about community. So for me, natural law is a return to balance within community. I think if we did that as humans and brought everything back into balance, we would no longer have the extremes of wealth and the extremes of poverty. And by coming into balance within community, we'd no longer have the disparities in health and education. We would be happier, more harmonious, and there probably wouldn't be the wars that we have, and there probably wouldn’t be this speed train to environmental destruction. So for me, natural law is balance.
You can learn more at The Wildbiome Project and we highly recommend Mo’s book ‘The Wilderness Cure: Ancient Wisdom in a Modern World‘
The Hadza, or Hadzabe, are a nomadic hunter-gatherer tribe of about 1,200–1,300 people who live in northern Tanzania. They are considered one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer tribes in the world, and their way of life has changed little in the last 10,000 years.
The Association of Foragers is an international professional foragers association, promoting considerate foraging, nature connection and ecological stewardship through teaching and harvesting wild plants and fungi for use as food, drink and medicine.
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