ABSTRACT
Even though wild product foraging is a widespread activity across Europe, the practice is poorly understood. The engagement with nature this practice presupposes can facilitate nature connectedness that may help to reintroduce environment and food-related issues into the fields of social reality, increase the meaningfulness in interaction with food, and, consequently, facilitate and support the emergence of regenerative food systems. The chapter uses the notion of nature connectedness to illustrate how foraging creates new linkages between categories that are often perceived as contradictory – the environment and person, the local and the global, the past and the present, and the traditional and the modern. The chapter suggests that wild products can link these categories because they are rooted, unpredictable, common, and permanent. The chapter is based on 35 in-depth interviews conducted in Latvia, Estonia, the UK, and the Netherlands in 2018.
