Finding and eating wild food
6 Minute English
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 18 December 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Where do you get your fruit and vegetables – a supermarket, a greengrocer... or the wild? For our distant ancestors, foraging for wild food was vital for survival, while these days we tend to rely on farmed food, bought in shops. Pippa and Beth discuss foraging and teach you some new vocabulary.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.5 | Have you practised your listening with the listing room yet? |
| 0:09.6 | Listen to real BBC news reports and answer the questions to practice your listening skills. |
| 0:16.0 | From Lionel Messi to guerrilla friendships, you'll find lots to interest you. |
| 0:20.6 | Go to the skills section of our website now, BBClearningEnglish.com, and improve your listening today. |
| 0:28.6 | Six Minute English from BBClearningEnglish.com. |
| 0:35.3 | Hello, this is Six Minute English from BBC Learning English. I'm Pippa and I'm Beth. Foraging is the activity of walking in the countryside, looking for plants you can eat that grow in the wild. That's anything from blackberries and chestnuts to mushrooms and wild garlic. |
| 0:56.4 | It's something humans have always done. |
| 0:59.3 | And recently, it's become fashionable among groups of young people. |
| 1:03.5 | Pippa, have you ever been foraging? |
| 1:05.9 | Yes, we used to go and pick blackberries when I was younger, |
| 1:09.9 | but I haven't really done it as an adult |
| 1:12.5 | and I would be a bit nervous to look for mushrooms or things like that. What about you? |
| 1:18.1 | I'm exactly the same. If I see a blackberry on a bush I will eat it but mushrooms, no, |
| 1:24.5 | too scary. So in this episode we'll meet two young women from different countries |
| 1:29.7 | who are passionate about foraging wild food. They're both self-taught, having learned to forage |
| 1:35.7 | by studying the natural world around them. And it's important to say that they only eat what |
| 1:40.8 | they can identify with 100% certainty, sticking to the rule, if in doubt, |
| 1:46.5 | leave it out. We'll also be learning some useful new words and phrases, all of which you'll find |
| 1:52.7 | on our website, BBClearningEnglish.com. But before that, I have a question for you, Pippa. As mentioned, |
| 2:03.9 | when foraging, you must know for certain what is safe to eat. Something definitely not safe to eat is the mushroom death cap. As the name |
| 2:11.3 | suggests, it's one of the world's deadliest mushrooms, and it's common across the British Isles. But what colour is it? Are |
... |
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