A Midland forager has explained how he saves £50 every week on groceries by hunting and killing wild animals for his dinner. Richard Mawby's money-saving tip is to live a "caveman-inspired diet" in which he even eats his prey of rabbits, pigeons and squirrels raw.
The 33-year-old hunts with an air rifle near his East Midland village of Gayton and even made the “extreme” decision to eat their hearts “while still warm”. Richard said no part of the animals he killed was wasted and his dishes included nettle tempura to pigeon sashimi. He even used old preservation methods to keep his meat from going off.
About 70 per cent of the food he eats is foraged and he doesn't eat sugar. But it means he spends less than £50-a-week in shops on a few extras like rice and dark chocolate. Richard said he saved £30 to £40 a week alone on greens due to his hunter-gatherer way of life.
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He started off by eating wild plants of garlic, nettles, dandelions and sticky willy in bone broths in 2012 after he said a “silent voice” encouraged him to eat nettles while walking through a field.
Then in his early 20s, Richard said he became obsessed with foraging his own ingredients. Richard later bought goats so he could live on two to three litres of their raw milk a day through the cold winter months “just to see” if he could survive on it.
His new 'paleo or caveman diet' even led to him shedding three stone in three months, from 15.7st to 12.5st.
“I kind of had a midlife crisis in my 20s,” Richard told PA Real Life. “That’s how it started for me. I started being more inquisitive and reconnecting with our ancestral roots.”
“I was just staring at a nettle one day and this silent voice, not in some kind of loopy way, saying 'You can eat me’," added Richard. "There’s this psychological barrier in the modern world where we look at wild plants and think ‘this is poisonous, we can’t eat it or touch it’.
“I had a very stressful year and didn’t eat very well, lots of processed stuff from the supermarket, and put on weight. I basically rebalanced my whole body just by eating naturally."
“People will probably think this is a bit extreme, but even the things that I hunted, I would sometimes eat raw," explained Richard. "I harvested everything, the blood, and ate the heart straightaway while it was still warm.
“Our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have eaten the organs straightaway for their nutrition, so I was just following that.”
“I have introduced some normal things like rice and a small amount of dark chocolate – 100 per cent cacao, no sugar, into my diet” he added. “I have an air riffle and access to a shooting ground so I can still get my rabbits and squirrels."
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Richard said the Earth’s natural habitats were being destroyed by human intervention and he believed wild foods were a great way to reconnect people with nature. “I think if more of us were in tune with wild food, people would be more passionate about trying to save these landscapes,” he said.
Richard's wild food diet is detailed on his Instagram account Forage Frolics or on his website www.richardmawby.com.
