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For Levi Harrison and Annika Korsten, “living wild” is not just about surviving in the wild, but about thriving.
The Golden Bay couple don’t buy their next meal at a grocery store. Every day their food is gathered from undergrowth, fields, mountains, and the sea.
They sleep in a tent on the edge of a forest, bathe in a stream and cook over an open fire all year round.
They eat just one or two meals a day and spend $ 20 a week each on staples such as olive oil, spices, and some raw milk and cheese, preferring to forage and hunt plants and animals for the rest of their food.
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Edible weeds, berries, mushrooms, shellfish, algae, goat, possum, and the occasional hare are part of the couple’s daily menu.
Harrison and Korsten have grown to love their off-the-grid lifestyle so much that they are running workshops to teach others how to identify edible plants and mushrooms and incorporate them into a modern diet.
A one-day dive, starting this weekend, uses Harrison’s knowledge to live the wild, with Korsten’s culinary skills as a professional cook.
Harrison said that our natural environment was “full of delicious food and material” that we could use for our daily lives; we just had to learn how to do it.
He said medicinal plants, which were packed with more phytonutrients than those in the supermarket, were consumed as a “staple and preventative food.”
Nina Hindmarsh / Things
The Golden Bay couple, Annika Korsten and Levi Harrison, are conducting a workshop together to teach people how to identify the edible parts of wild plants, fungi, and seaweed.
“There is this experience that nature gives us, we don’t have to do anything,” Harrison said.
“Of course, in a city if we are too crowded, it doesn’t work. But for me, it does. I can go out and live in nature and support myself, and provide well. “
It was also about “establishing a connection with the cycles, the seasons and the earth”, and living more sustainably without the use of fertilizers, pesticides and packaging.
Harrison began living in the wild in 2018 and joined Korsten shortly after meeting a year later.
Before that, he dabbled in various diets to help with chronic stomach pains that he had for 20 years.
He tried the Paleolithic diet, a way of eating meant to mirror cavemen. But Harrison was uncomfortable cooking with all the imported exotic ingredients that he promotes.
“I was cooking with coconut flour and we don’t even grow coconuts here, and I thought ‘this can’t be paleo.’
Nina Hindmarsh / Things
Levi Harrison holds a wild comfrey plant, from which he eats both the leaves and the flowers, as part of his modern hunter-gatherer diet.
Harrison abandoned the fad diet and began looking for food that he could eat in the natural environment around him, just as traditional hunter-gatherers would have done.
The lifestyle was a gradual transition at first, he said.
Harrison began by introducing more wild plants and fungi into his diet, bathing in streams, learning to hunt with a crossbow, and creating friction fire with a bow drill made from sticks and rawhide.
Her stomach pain disappeared and she felt stronger and more energetic.
Kortsen, originally from Germany, suffered for many years from candida infections. He said that his body also healed itself.
Although the couple spend most of their time in nature, they still “live between two worlds.”
They have laptops and cell phones, and Korsten sells her organic gluten-free bread at the Saturday market, which she bakes nearby.
Harrison works as a freelance voice actor, so he can still support his community and his children, who stay with him part-time.
Korsten said that for most people, living wild full-time “is not an option.”
“Our workshops aim to help people learn how to transition and incorporate this way of eating into their modern diet and lifestyle, using more of the free and natural medicinal plants found all around us.”
The first workshop, “Deliciously Wild”, takes place this Sunday in Golden Bay. For more information, visit here.
