In 2015, we won an Appetite for Change Award through Unltd, the leading provider of support to social entrepreneurs in the UK. The award was to enable The Family Foraging Kitchen to begin our social enterprise programme, Free Food Forever.

This programme enables us to provide free, funded spaces on each of our wild food and cookery walks to low- and no-income households, offering them the opportunity to learn to forage for free. We teach individuals and groups how to indentify, collect, and both sustainably and safely begin introducing wild foods into their diets, enabling them to reduce their food bills and improve their well-being.

Then, in 2017, we were awarded further investment from The Shackleton Foundation, allowing us not only the tools to provide a greater number of free wild food sessions within schools and colleges, but to allow us more investment towards our Free Food Forever programme.

Free Food Forever places are also supported by a small portion of our course ticket costs and, with each wild food walk ticket sold, customers are helping households in our community to participate and reduce the risks of food poverty. Additionally, course places are allocated with total anonymity, making Free Food Forever attendees indiscernible from paying customers.

Now, nearly a decade after the project’s initial inception, Free Food Forever is becoming a focussed study, one that seeks to understand the potential impact that foraging can have on individuals and their quality of life.

Inspired by the increasingly pertinent discussion regarding the limitations of nature within our society, we produced a short, environmental documentary called The Wild Edges.

Within our own Cornish community of Millbrook, where this film was produced and filmed, there are a number of debates occurring, from grass length to mowing practices, with some wanting to see ecology thrive while others see this growth as an insulting neglect to village aesthetics.

Talking to local children, those who will be inheriting the landscape we create, this film meets with those involved in the environment to seek their perspective on why our wild edges are more important than we may realise.

This film was written and directed by forager and Family Foraging Kitchen founder, Vix Hill-Ryder, and filmed by Tom Kirkman and Lucien Harris, with an original score by Jon Tye (Seahawks, Ocean Moon Group). Featured in the documentary are twitcher and performance poet, Mike McCan, wildlife photographer Lucien Harris, field mycologist Leon Frey, and David Curry, from Living Churchyards the Environmental Advisor for the Diocese of Exeter, as well as our rising star child presenters, Bluebell, Sage, and Rubus!

In 2022, we launched our Community Food Map. Seeing the rising cost of living and growing levels of food insecurity, we sought to make it as easy as possible for residents to access the information, and food, that they needed to get by or to eat more sustainably.

The Community Food Map signposts the food support services across the Rame Peninsula, from food banks to gleaning organisations, as well as our own Community Food Support Hub where low- and no-income residents can sign up to join foraging walks for free. Additionally, readers of the map will also find listed areas of abundant wild foods, enabling and encouraging them to get into nature and begin collecting free foraged ingredients.

Our map can be seen and downloaded below, with hard copies being available across the Rame Peninsula.

If you’d like to discuss your needs directly or would be interested in signing up to free foraging courses, then please contact our team.

With support from the National Lottery Good Causes, we began to expand the initiative, offering twenty free Wild Food boxes, full of freshly foraged ingredients and delicious recipes, to low and no-income households within our community. Each box contained a variety of seasonal and local wild foods that can easily and safely be sourced in the area, as well as information and guidance on both how to incorporate them into a diet and to begin foraging for them.

We believe that wild foods and foraging knowledge can have an amazing effect, not only on the reduction of food poverty but also in the building of communities and the relationships our society has with nature. With this initiative, we aimed to raise greater awareness of the nutritious and abundant wild foods will be supported, enabling people to feel confident picking and cooking their own foraged meals.

Thanks to the National Lottery Community Fund in 2021, our Free Food Forever initiative was able to continue. If you are part of a low or no-income household (defined as a household income of £17k and below) and would like to join our Free Food Forever, enabling you to join our wild food walks and for the opportunity to receive a Wild Food box, both for free, then please apply below.

This project has now concluded.