Why ‘primal Gift’?

It took me a while to come up with a name for this business. For a long time, I kept thinking up good names but nothing that made me think ‘That’s it!’ Eventually, it struck me what was at the heart of the story I wanted to tell with this business. ‘Abundance’ fit the bill nicely as well but it felt like too long of a word. ‘Gift’ was perfect. In this blog, I’d like to explain what I mean by that and what it’s got to do with wild food.

First I want you to imagine something:

You’re slowly waking up on a clear morning. The others in your dwelling are doing the same. A few friends are chatting quietly next to you and the early risers are tending the fire. You have few possessions other than the clothes you’re wearing, your trusty digging stick, and your bow and arrow. There’s no food in camp, no fridges or freezers or even a larder. You don’t know what money is, let alone have any to buy anything from the shops that don’t exist yet. 

Despite this, everyone is calm, nobody is worried about going hungry. 

You’re not old but you’re not young either, somewhere in your middle age. Of course,you have no idea exactly how old you or anyone else is but it has been like this your whole life. Every day you wake up with little to no food in camp, yet most nights you go to sleep with a full belly. Occasionally you go a little hungry but this keeps you lean and healthy. You’re used to eating at irregular intervals. 

You spend virtually no time thinking about the future beyond where you might be going to hunt or gather that day. You trust completely in the ability of your tribe and the abundance of your local environment to provide for your needs. If you don’t come home with something then someone else will and if your favourite foods aren’t available then you settle for others temporarily but you don’t go hungry. You even have plenty of time to laugh and sing around the fire with loved ones, free as the birds that wake you in each morning.

Maybe this is a bit romantic but maybe it isn’t? Maybe humans are designed to be hunter-gatherers and that is when we are at our happiest and most fulfilled? I don’t think this account is far from what it would have been like most of the time to be a hunter-gatherer living in a thriving ecosystem. Certainly, you would develop a deep sense of trust, both in your tribe and in your environment. You would likely relate to the world through ‘gift’ rather than scarcity or any idea of fixed exchange. In fact, hunter-gatherers are famous for operating what are called ‘gift economies’ where everything is shared. People can ask anyone else for something and they will be expected to give it. If a hunter comes back with an animal it is given to the tribe to share. They have no special domain over the meat. Likewise, when someone brings home a load of nuts they are shared between everyone, given as a gift, not exchanged. Instead of accumulating food or wealth, people accumulate relationships and trust. In the long-run, this is much safer. It is a completely different way of relating to one another than through money and other forms of exchange that dominate our modern world. 

That is not to say it has been extinguished completely, however. Our hunter-gatherer ancestry still burns strong within us and ‘gift’ remains a common but often unacknowledged way that we relate to one another. How many people reading this were charged by their mother for the breast milk she fed them?

Similarly, the Penan people of Borneo talk about the rainforest they live in as their ‘mother’, freely giving them the sustenance they need without demanding anything in return. 

Hopefully, you’re starting to see what I mean by ‘gift’ and how it relates to wild food and hunter-gatherers. If you stick around here then you’ll read about all sorts of things that we can learn from our wild ancestors, however, this ‘abundance mindset’ is probably the most important. What if we lived in a world of ‘gift’ rather than scarcity and exchange?

It is easy to see how this might have changed when people took up agriculture. How could people see their daily bread as a gift when it required toiling to clear the land and plough the fields to grow tiny grains that require enormous amounts of time and energy to process into food. I believe there was a big shift in the human psyche that came with the rise of agriculture and I’m going to explore this a lot in the future. 

We certainly live in a very different world to the one described earlier and it is harder and harder to believe in abundance or to trust that our needs will be met. For many, it is nigh on impossible. However, it’s worth thinking about what steps you could take to cultivate more of an abundance mindset in your life and see if you can implement a little of that ancestral wisdom. Harvesting wild food is a great place to start. It’s free and you’ll struggle not to be grateful for the wonderful nutrition freely given as well as the time spent outside in nature. 

Last year I went on a course called the Old Way (which I can’t recommend enough) where I learned about how our hunter-gatherer ancestors might have lived in Mesolithic Britain. The course was so good in fact, that it brought up a lot of grief. I got a tiny taster of what it might have been like to live as a wild human. The juxtaposition with modernity and normality was jarring. I felt angry that I was born into a time when humans are bombing and enslaving one another while others are turned into zombies, never lifting their gaze from a screen. Meanwhile, we’re barraged with the idea that this is the best time to be alive, that all of human history has been a one-way trip of progress to where we are now. How lucky are we?!? Who needs healthy ecosystems and thriving communities when we can have Netflix and Ultra-processed food?

The question on my mind at the time was how to live a meaningful life given this reality? What would it mean to bring some hunter-gatherer wisdom into the modern world? 

At this point that I spoke to Ric, a graphic designer who was also doing the course. I told him I had been thinking about a wild food business and he encouraged me, urging me to give it a go. He then offered to help design the label and packaging. I couldn’t afford him but he said he’d do it for free. There it was. A massive gift. I had no excuses at this point and it was time to get on with it!

So if you’re wondering why the packaging is so damn cool, it’s because of Ric and his team at Delivered by Post.

And if you’re still wondering why it’s called Primal Gift then it’s because wild food is the primal gift, given by a world that is calling us back to a relationship of reciprocity rather than extraction. It’s a taster of the abundance that awaits us when we decide to return home.

References:

theoldway.info I can’t recommend the Old Way enough if you’re interested in hunter-gatherer lifeways and ancestral living. Charlie and Emily are two of the most experienced and knowledgeable people in the UK when it comes to wild living. The course is centred on wild food and primitive skills but if you’re lucky enough to do it, you’ll realise there is so much more to ‘wildness’ and being a hunter-gatherer than you ever realised.

Tawai: A Voice from the Forest This is a film that I believe, captures beautifully something that I am only scratching the surface of this blog, which is what it is like for people to live with a deep sense of trust in their environment, each other and to embody a gift-based relationship to the world. It also very sadly documents how the people that have managed to maintain this way of life are now losing it due to extractivism and environmental degradation.