The Wild Minds Podcast

Episode 93:
The Wilderness Cure: What Happens When We Eat the Wild

Guest: Mo Wilde

Hosted by: Marina Robb

Mo Wilde

Mo Wilde is an ethnobotanist and research herbalist who lives in Scotland in a self-built wooden house where she has created a wild, teaching garden on 4 organic acres, encouraging edible and medicinal species to make their home.
She holds a Masters degree in Herbal Medicine, is a Fellow of the Linnean Society, a Member of the British Mycological Society and a Member of the Association of Foragers, which she helped to found in 2015.
She has been teaching foraging and herbal medicine for several decades now, with the aim of “Restoring Vital Connection” – the mantra of the Association of Foragers.

As a research herbalist she works with the Claid Clinic to further our knowledge of treating people with long bacterial and post-viral illnesses such as Lyme disease, and is a Member of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS).

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In this episode ...

In this episode, I’m speaking with Mo Wilde - forager, research herbalist, ethnobotanist, author of The Wilderness Cure, and founder of the Wild Biome Project.

Mo has spent decades learning from plants, fungi, seaweeds, medicine, soil and the seasons. Her relationship with the wild began in childhood, and has grown into a life’s work exploring not only what plants can offer us, but what happens when we remember ourselves as part of the living world.

In 2020, Mo began an extraordinary experiment: for a whole year, she ate only wild food. No supermarket food, no farmed food, no quick stops for coffee and cake - just what could be foraged, gathered, hunted, exchanged, preserved, fermented or found within the landscape around her.

But this conversation is not really about survivalism. It is not about going “backwards” or romanticising the past. It is about relationship.

What happens when we begin to notice the green world in detail again? What happens when the body is nourished by wild plants, fungi and microbes? What happens to our gut, our sense of belonging, our imagination, our resilience - when food stops being just a product and becomes a relationship with place?

Together, Mo and I explore foraging, wild food, food security, children’s ecological literacy, the intelligence of plants, the Wildbiome Project, and the deep shift from scarcity into abundance.

This is a conversation about the wilderness cure - and the question at the heart of it is: what happens when we eat the wild?

In this conversation with Mo Wilde, we explore wild food not simply as foraging, but as a way of remembering our place inside the living world.

Mo begins with gratitude for plants, reminding us that through photosynthesis they transform sunlight into the energy that makes all life on Earth possible.
She describes a wild plant as one that is not directly tended or controlled by humans, inviting us to think about wildness as relationship rather than separation.
During her year of eating only wild food, Mo found far more abundance than she expected, with most of her food coming from within 15 miles of her home.
Her wild diet included hundreds of plant species, seaweed, mushrooms, shellfish, game, and even wasp larvae, revealing the astonishing range of foods still present in the landscape.
The experiment was not about survivalism or proving toughness, but about asking whether the land around her could truly feed her.
Mo speaks beautifully about the practical intelligence of preservation, celebrating the jam jar as one of humanity’s great inventions for fermenting, storing, and carrying abundance forward.
She challenges the idea that foraging requires some rare talent, suggesting that humans already can notice detail - we have simply trained that attention on brands, logos, and consumer culture instead of plants.
The conversation touches on how children can naturally learn plants when they are shown them, and how much ecological literacy could return if this knowledge was woven through childhood.
Mo reflects on food insecurity, Brexit, Covid, and her own teenage experience of feeding younger siblings in Malawi, all of which shaped her interest in resilience and local food.
What begins as a question about food becomes something deeper: Mo describes moving from a mindset of scarcity to an experience of abundance, gratitude, fragility, and being held by the living world.
As a herbalist, she reminds us that healing is not only something we seek when we are ill, but something that happens daily through nourishment, relationship, and the complex intelligence of plants.
Through the Wild Biome Project, Mo is exploring how eating wild food changes the gut microbiome, opening up questions about whether health can be understood not by isolating one molecule, but by seeing the larger patterns between bodies, bacteria, plants, soil, and place.