Hunt, gather, cook in Ashdown Forest

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Will Allen goes on a food adventure in the Sussex countryside.

We’ve not done so badly, us humans. We can have food, drinks, clothes and furniture, all sent right to our front door. We can have what we want, when we want and we don’t even need to leave the house.

But for many, this lifestyle of convenience and ease is becoming a burden. So it is not surprising that so many of us are looking to nature for solace.

With this in mind I embarked on a day of wild foraging courtesy of Hunt, Gather, Cook; the Sussex company dedicated to ‘re-wilding’ our lives.

HGC was created in 2011 by Nick Weston, a man on a mission to give us a mixture of ‘foraging, animal butchery, cooking and bushcraft with an emphasis in living comfortably in the great outdoors’.

After deciding that he no longer wanted to be living in London with no money he decided to try living self-sufficiently.

In 2009 Nick lived ‘off-grid’ for the best part of a year in a two-storey treehouse he built. It is the same treehouse that now provides the hub of Hunt, Gather, Cook.

Born in Ashdown Forest, Nick, 36, graduated from Newcastle University where he specialised in archaeology and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.

A published author and journalist, he was recruited as survival advisor to desert-island reality show Shipwrecked, living in the South Pacific Cook Islands for three months.

On his return he worked in the events industry in London.

Disillusioned, he began to yearn for the outdoor lifestyle of his youth: “If I wanted a fruit pie my mother would send me out to pick berries and salads were filled with dandelion leaves from the garden.