This post is an extension of the two posts THE MISSING LINK and PART 1, where I talk about how to reconnect with nature and rewilding your modern family.

I like to look at our ancestors’ way of living for guidance to solve many of my problems and modern world problems and diseases. I also see an ever increasing interest like in me in other people. Our ancestors and the few tribes left in our modern world know how to live a slow-life without stress and high accomplishment where they look after each other and the natural environment which is their number one foundation to thrive and without our many modern diseases. Chris Kresser expresses here what to me is essential for humans to rewild in a modern world.

Many of us think that our modern and high-tech society can solve all problems. We know best! We’re so highly educated! However, many of us are not thriving in our modern world, struggling with stress, depression, cancer and degenerative diseases. On the contrary, hunter-gatherer people laugh more, experience little to no suicide, no degenerative diseases and their teeth rarely cavitate. They consume a more nutrient-rich diet with fewer calories and they expend more calories but work less.

The 21st-century man is fully domesticated. Few of us have ever killed our own dinner or foraged for wild foods. Most of us subsist primarily upon domesticated foods, we usually purchase them having been harvested elsewhere and by someone else and we eat processed and packaged meals. We’ve separated ourselves from sourcing, picking and preparing our food, and we rarely engage our sense of taste when connecting with our landscape.

Eat more organic and heirloom local produce.

In a “perfect world”, you would be foraging and hunting your own wild foods, as wild foods are very nutrition dense and it’ll bring you closer to your landscape by also tasting it. However, correct identification is a crucial component of good foraging, both for safety and for sustainability. So start looking out for plants that you know is edible. Here in Perth, my family loves walking down the many lane ways picking fruits hanging into the lane way. Urban lane way foraging as we like to call it 🙂 When we’re in Denmark (where I come from) we look for cherries, apples, elderflowers etc. that grown along the roads or paths.

I also suggest that you start growing or buying organic heirloom vegetables and fruits, a traditional variety of plant, which is not associated with large-scale commercial agriculture. The closer the foods you eat are to its wild predecessor the more nutritious and it’s often more robust and less labour intensive to grow. Take for example dandelion that seems to put pop up everywhere compared to iceberg lettuce that needs the soil fluffed, a lot of watering and is an easy target for pests.

How to establish a deeper connection with your food.

Despite the moral challenges of the notion, we humans, like most animals eat the tissues of living or dead organisms from the botanical to the zoological and the fungal to the bacteriological kingdoms of life. We can’t, after all, subsist on sand or stones and we can’t live alone on a regimen of air, water, and sunlight.

• What species are on your plate and in your garden?
• Investigate which wild plants or animals, your food were bred from (its wild predecessor).
• Meet the food that your eat by growing/raising them yourself or visit the species in nature or on the farm.
• Prepare and eat your food with gratitude and make it a social element in your day.
• Eat less processed foods
• Eat more local foods
• Pick food with no or less packing