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[title]I recently had the great pleasure to chat to Roushanna Gray, the woman behind Veld and Sea, about her work and its roots in sustainability. Roushanna describes Veld and Sea as “an immersive education space offering wild food foraging workshops and unique nature based events and experiences”.
She takes people into nature and shows them the wild delicacies, nature’s treats. She teaches people how to find these treats, how to harvest them sustainably, and how to craft them into nourishing and beautiful meals.
As I listened to Roushanna describing how foraging for natural food feels like “returning to home’, I had an uncanny sense of deja vu.
Forgotten foods and wild ingredients
Her philosophy resonates very closely with the lovely traditions described in the bestselling book ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’, written by Potawatomi professor Robin Kimmerer. Braiding Sweetgrass explores reciprocal relationships between humans and nature, with a focus on the role of plants in Native American traditions.
Roushanna’s joy in teaching others to find the nurturing elements in nature, and her credo of reciprocity for nature (a form of mutual giving, where each gives the other equal benefits/or gifts), makes her the South African version of Robin Kimmerer. Her excursions are lessons in treating nature with reverence and appreciation, and creating connection through the culinary arts (or through the relationship of food).
Food, she says, is a way to connect us to each other and to nature. That is why the culmination of all of her workshops always ends in a meal that's shared together from the ingredients that they forage. The final lesson, she says, is “tasting your adventure.”
At heart Roshaunna is a conservationist. The secret about protecting nature, she says, is in the learning. The more we learn something, the more we experience something, the more we understand it. And the better we understand it, the more likely we going to want to protect our special blue and green spaces.
“While we are teaching about foraging and wild foods, it's also really another beautiful way of looking at nature and understanding how amazing it is and how joyful it can make us and if we protect it, it will protect us.”
Roushanna runs foraging excursions from her base in Cape Point to teach people the secrets of wild foraging. She runs different foraging trips in different seasons, finding each seasons’ gastric notes and colours and imbuing the dishes with these seasonal flavours.
Spring delights with a focus on flowers
In Spring she focuses on flowers, from using flowers to weave into your hair, like a forest dryad, to nibbling on their succulent petals. I asked her to give me an example of an indigenous edible plant and she tells me about Dipogon lignosis, which is known as the Wild Cape Sweetpea and tastes like sugar snap peas.
My mouth waters thinking about her big greenhouse (called the Hoop Building) which is covered by trailing plants of the Wild Cape Sweetpea, just waiting for their bright purple flowers to be plucked and enjoyed.
She intentionally grows this plant and other flowering shrubs in her greenhouse and wild herb gardens, to ensure there is enough for everyone. As I talk to her about flowers, I think how much her place reminds me of a beehive, with the background murmuring of her team at work developing new menus for the season and with the sweet smell of the flowers drifting in the breezes of the Cape.
I notice that one of her menus include alikreukel as an ingredient. How does she find these crinkly molluscs (periwinkles) of the ocean and what on earth does she do with them to make them into a sumptuous repast? Roushanna explained that in summertime, she runs foraging excursions in the intertidal and underwater zones of the seashore.
She works in collaboration with a collective called Khoi Scouts, who teach the participants all the necessary information, from water safety to free diving instruction. Wet suits are provided, and everyone does breath work and stretching before going into the water.
In the water, participants learn about all of the different edible species and then take a big gulp of air and enter the kelp forest. Roushanna smiles, “We swim through our food. It's a beautiful experience.”
Veld and Sea is deeply rooted in the ethics of sustainability. Everybody has to have a mollusc permit and adhere strictly to the conditions of the permit, harvesting only those alikreukel that are the correct size and sticking to the permit’s allocation.
In addition, very little goes to waste – when you have braved the cold ocean and worked hard to glean your edibles, you tend to really savour your food and appreciate everything much more.
As for alikreukel in food, apparently they are delicious cooked as fritters on a braai, or in a potjie, or even in a linguine
A wildly delicious landscape
I ask Roushanna how she got into wild foraging and she describes herself as “a curious foodie”. She comes from a big family of foodies and artists, but twenty years ago she moved out to Cape Point and took the time to slow down enough to study and learn about the edible landscape that we're living in.
She calls it “the wildly delicious landscape” and says that a lot of these foods are forgotten foods and that it's important to remember them and to bring them back into our pantries. How did she find these forgotten foods? Roushanna laughs and says “I don't think I found them. I think they found me”.
When she moved to Cape Point her mother-in-law, who owned an indigenous plant nursery, mentored her on indigenous plants and taught her a lot about the horticulture and medicinal uses of the Cape’s treasure trove of plant species.
However, Roushanna’s foodie lens made her wonder, can you eat this?
So she started a tiny little tea garden to service the nursery guests and clients and created things like rooibos cupcakes and honey bush cake. Her curiosity grew as she learnt more about plants that she found during her walks on the mountain side. There were no courses or classes that she could take to learn more about the edible flavours, so a lot of her knowledge came from self-study, reading lots of books, and speaking to lots of people, from elders to chefs.
Sampling the fruits of the wild might take a mindset shift. Take seaweed, for example. Roushanna refers to these as “sea veggies” and something small shifts in me. Hm, I never thought of calling seaweed a vegetable! It’s these little shifts in perception that can open our curiosity to the wonders of the natural world.
For more information about Veld and Sea, have a look at their website and the different excursions they have for the different seasons.
NB: Before rushing out to collect sea veggies, it is worth doing your homework first. Find out what is edible, what is not.
Check with authorities to see if there is a red tide and don’t harvest shellfish during the red tides (red tides can make molluscs toxic). Never collect in a marine protected area and also avoid coastal stretches with high E.coli counts.