Ray Mears - Wild Food [DVD]

If you missed any parts of this series when it was shown then I can recommend it. Ray Mears' earlier TV series were all about survival skills and battling nature's worst, which is a role that has been developed by people like Bruce Parry and Bear Grylls.
So now Ray Mears has concentrated on how nature can sustain us -- and how our ancestors, living in the UK in mesolithic times, might have managed to keep themselves alive given that they didn't farm animals or manage crops as we do.

Ray Mears uses examples from hunter-gatherers across the world today to see which foods in the UK might have been useful to ancient people. And of course he demonstrates all the skills they would have needed to employ to stay alive; hunting, fishing, preparing weapons and utensils, identifying the right plants, trying different leaves, searching for starch-rich roots. All that was important back when the potato was a foreign food!

This is quite a gentle, humourous series. It's carefully filmed in some stunning locations, and the pace is much less strident and forced than some rapid-fire, rush-rush-rush documentaries. Ray Mears is accompanied by an expert in archeological nutrition, and between them they attempt some bizarre meals and methods of food preparation. Some of them work well... and some of them are awful! And the series is brave enough to show us when things go wrong, too. This is the real world, so when it rains all day we get to see it. It's refreshing that not everything is 100% stage-managed.

My only criticism is that I would have liked to see more detailed information, more of the nuts and bolts of nutrition (especially when some food samples were analysed in a lab). But I guess that might have made it just too heavy going for some viewers.

Overall, thoroughly enjoyable. Informative without lecturing. Certainly worth renting, might be worth buying if you enjoyed Ray's other tv programmes. And would make an excellent gift, too.

This video is an excellent introduction to Mesolithic Europe, and its "Mesoliths" Hunter-Gatherers, including their Habitat, Mindset, Technologies, & Cuisines. Parallels w/ modern Hunter-Gatherers help reconstruct a Lost Chapter in Europe's History -- one that is especially important, given that ~80% of Europeans' Genes stem from these early, pre-Agricultural, Ice Age Hunter-Gatherers, whose Cultural Identity was completely swamped out, by the incoming Farmers, who colonized the continent from roughly 6000 to 4000 BC.

The Companion Book is also highly recommended, providing valuable additional details, especially about early European pre-History. These products help reconnect w/ "The Ancestors" (as it were).

Firstly, I don't really go in for the whole 'I am a survivalist' attitude.
I do think that Ray Mears is an excellent ambassador for primitive living skills/bushcraft or whatever you want to call the type of knowledge that has been around since the very early dawn of man (the stuff that we daft modern folk seem to have forgotten all about!).
I think this is one of my favourite of Ray Mears series.
It's not too difficult, with some practice, to get a fire going and make a shelter in the woodland. What this series shows is, for me, one of the most important and basic necessities of life. Eating.
There is food all around us that is not only very tasty but is also free, aside from the time it takes to pick/pluck it!
We all know that Ray Mears makes it look easy but this series is relaxed, highly informative and having tried quite a bit myself it really is pretty simple to find/do/make the same stuff.
His friend who accompanies him is yet another person who is a walking fountain of knowledge and it would be great to see more like this in the future.
Don't just watch it, get out there and see what's about for yourself!