The benefits of eating a wild variety of plants | Letters

While processed foods provide calories, it is plants that produce the micronutrients, antioxidants and flavonoids that our bodies need, writes Mo Wilde

Zoe Williams is sadly not alone in being unable to identify 30 plants a week to eat (We should all be eating 30 different plants a week. I can’t even name that many, 19 August). Nowadays 50% of the world’s daily calorie intake comes from just three species: wheat, corn and rice.

In 2020, I decided to live off “foraging for nettles” – as Zoe puts it – for a year in Scotland, eating only free, wild food. During that period I ate 300 plant species, 21 seaweed species and 87 types of mushroom. This is not untypical of hunter-gatherer intake, and most Indigenous six-year-olds can identify the same number of plants as an adult. While commercially produced and processed foods provide calories, it is plants that produce the incredible variety of micronutrients, antioxidants, flavonoids etc that our bodies need to stay healthy and free of the inflammation that causes pain and so many “modern diseases”.