It is not only food going begging in our cities, towns and countryside, it is GOOD food going begging. I'm referring to the fruit, mushrooms and vegetables that are to be had by anyone on public land, and as I write in my column in The Herald today the practice of gathering these goodies is known as scrumping. But scrumping seems to be dying out with the modern generation.
I can remember the thrill of mushrooming, of cracking and eating walnuts under a huge tree by the roadside, of stopping to eat apples, plums, guavas, blackberries and pears at roadside trees in my cycling tours over the past few years, yet in the suburbs around my homes juicy black mulberries on public land and hanging over fences are eaten only by birds and bats, locquats grow fat and succulent then fall to the ground, passionfruit vines are ruffled only by passing old codgers, and I've seen even bunches of bananas next to stormwater drains rot on the ground.
The most enduring scrumpers seem to be new Australians, people from Asia and the Mediterranean. I've seen Asian people cutting bamboo shoots from the ground around bamboo clumps and elderly Italians collecting wild fennel from the wasteland along railway lines. Recently my wife cooked Asian food with fresh bamboo shoots, which are bigger than you may imagine, and I can see that the trouble of scrumping for the fresh version is well worth it.
There is a thrill in scrumping, in gathering food from the fields and the wilds, a thrill that is more than simply getting something for nothing. Maybe scrumping takes us way back to the same place a loungeroom fire takes us.
Are you a scrumper? Reignite our interest, please, by telling us what you collect, and how, and, if you're willing to share, where.
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