The Wild Biome Project

Hi, my name is Ilse Donker and I’m a forager, community builder and history nerd. 


I'm one of those hopelessly romantic people that is inspired by the hunter gatherers of the Stone Age. For me, it has been a pathway that has led me to discover how I can live my life in a way that hopefully leaves a good impact on the earth. 
This urge to dive into ‘ancestral skills’ and to share them with my community is part of my vision as an artist/activist. Through crafts that come from nature, with the discoveries that the archaeologists have made, I can experiment with other ways of living. 
Everything that I need comes from nature, I forage for food and material to craft with. Using the stone age as the window for my practice, the footprint of my crafts stay low. I like it this way and it keeps me humble. 


The project that I’m attending is the Wild Biome Project which has been created by Monica Wilde. 
For one year, she lived only on wild-foraged food in the UK. She wrote an excellent book about it, which is called "The Wilderness Cure". She ran some tests on her gut biome both before and after this diet and there were some surprising outcomes. 
However, a test on one person doesn’t make good scientific research, so the next year she worked with several people in the UK who did a one to three month diet of only wild food.Their gut health was tested in the same manner she did before. 
To give the project more body, she organized another year of study and I’m one of the lucky people that got a chance to participate. 


As my interest is in experimental archaeology, nature connection, foraging etc., I asked EXARC if it could be interesting for this community to take a peak in the process. On the first of April I start my (hopefully) 3 months wild food diet. Of course, the flora and fauna are different now than we had in the Mesolithic period, which is the period I love to work with. However, the ‘hunt and gather’ mindset of a Mesolithic person could be the same. Or, to say it better, I can most likely approach their mindset better by doing this. I started to prepare some food for a little while and got in contact with hunters to provide some game (nowadays we have hunting seasons, in the middle stone age there probably weren’t rules like this). 


I don’t have a fridge so I'm drying mushrooms, geese breasts, berries etc, and I store them in pots. I also processed a lot of acorns and chestnuts into flour. We eat eggs from our own chickens (because robbing robins isn’t the way we should go nowadays!) or find geese eggs. I didn't ferment a lot outside of some sloeberries and crabapples, but that’s it. I gathered hazelnuts, but also seeds from evening primrose, nettle and dock. 
I made ‘coffee’ from chagga (a type of black tea) and dandelion root. 
As you can see, there is a lot of work in it, and at the same time it doesn’t take a lot of space - I don’t have a lot of space, I live very minimally. For the rest, I need to trust on my foraging knowledge, my kind, sharing community and everything that nature provides.

So now I'm still in the process of prepping, but also gathering money to buy the gut biome, hormone and blood tests. I stopped drinking coffee 2 months ago, sugar one month ago, because I didn’t want to have all these layers of discomfort at the same time. I’m still looking for people that are interested in combining this project with my nerdy meso practice, to see in wich way we could bring this into a living history project. I’m not a researches, more an experimentalist. 

So who is up to gather with me, who knows more about catching fish, shellfish etc. But also about cooking pre historically, who wants to join me for some experiments? 


I would also love to trade foraged goods; this brings me to the point of playing with the idea of life in tribes, sharing, trading etc. If your ‘goods’ are not defined by money, how to you provide with a team to survive in nature? These skills are difficult to define, because what can you find? You can only speculate. The fact is that there weren’t any stores to buy food, so people relied on nature and on each other. 


When the results on Monica Wilde her gut went public, it was shown that your gut changes by the diet that you eat. The biodiversity we have in our supermarket biomes aren’t very diverse if you put them next to a wild foraging biome. This is interesting for me in a historical context. What if your gut is way more resilient? What does that do to you?

Well, this is my ‘before’. Hopefully I survive and can tell you about the after as well. It would be fun. 
If people want to learn more about the project I highly recommend Monica Wilde's book. 


If you want to help me or stay in touch you can find me at ilse.aarde.donker on Instagram. 


I really love interaction and conversations about the whole process, so don’t be a stranger!

Written by Ilse Donker