Student Solin Wanders lives in the wild for days: “There is more than you can eat”
Biology student Solin Wanders is a wild-picker and knows how to survive in nature. This is part one of the three-part series about UvA’ers in nature: “This mushroom will eat your liver in a few days.”
“Mushrooms are like people,” grins wildpicker and master student at the UvA Solin Wanders (27), as he squeezes a fly agaric on the edge of the Utrechtse Heuvelrug. “We are actually genetically closer to the fungus than to an average plant. But just like plants, you can’t eat every mushroom. And that certainly applies to this one!” Wanders picks his food in the wild at least once a week, sometimes taking days-long trips through the woods. Ultimately with the idea that you can feed yourself enough from nature.
Even today, he sees valuable wares right away. “People have been trading the fly agaric since forever.” Indeed, a particular version of the famous mushroom, red with white dots, is used for very different purposes. “If you have a good one, you can trip hard on it.” However, knowledge of nature is crucial to Wanders’ wild-picking hobby. “If you eat the wrong fly agaric, you get extremely sick.”
Surviving on acorns
Armed with two large cameras, a hose with water to test the slime for mushrooms and a bottle of cola in case he tastes something poisonous, Wanders trudges into the forest edge. As he wanders, he further addresses the ignorance of the average survival expert. “Although its exciting to see on National Geographic, you hardly need to hunt to survive in the wild. One piece of meat a year is enough for your vitamin B12 levels.”
He points to a large oak tree, which he says you can also make a good living from. “If you put acorns in a basket in the river, the toxic tannin - the stuff also found in red wine - runs out after a week. “ The oak was often honoured in ancient religions. The dependence on the trees yield makes this logical, according to Wanders. “You can easily gather enough acorns to get through an entire winter fed.”
Next to the thick oak tree, Wanders points to the native birch, often small with a whitish bark. “You can tap water from those quite simply. I so imagine that the hunters and gatherers all had their own tree to drink from.” Even the bark can be eaten. “But that’s too much work for me. Then you’d have to remove the whole bark.”
Eating snails
The wild-picker’s life does not always consist of opulence, Wanders says, as he occasionally stuffs a few mushrooms (“but do mind the amount tolerated by the forester”) into his backpack. At 14, the young survival expert and his friends had been trekking into the forest for weeks without any tools (such as a phone or compass) except a pan and an occasional container of peanuts. “In the Netherlands this is not allowed just like that, but in most other European countries survivalism in the wild is allowed.” In such remote areas, you just have to see what is available. “We walked at least twenty kilometres a day, slept on soaking wet ground, with some bad luck sometimes also on a termite hole, and ate nothing for three consecutive days.”
Wanders coincidentally points to some snails on a tree stump. “In the end, we decided to eat slugs.” The boys placed the slimy victims next to healthy plants. That way, the slugs would replace potentially ingested venom with non-toxic substances. After waiting a day, they boiled the snails until they were completely tough. “They were by no means escargots. You do think: do I put the slimy side on my tongue or on my palate?” Wanders concludes: “On such trips you really do encounter yourself and you start to re-evaluate everything you have at home for years. That’s actually the beauty of it.”
Extinct species
After walking deeper into the forest for about two hours, the wild picker finally finds a mushroom-rich area. “Look, this is the lurid bolete. Take a picture quickly because when I cut it, the inside changes from white to blue in three seconds.” The mushroom is a favourite of Wanders’ to fry in a generous layer of butter. “There is one big but: this bolete does become extremely toxic if you drink alcohol with it in the days that follow. When I forgot to do that once, I had a very nasty house party the following night.”
In this area, however, there are too many species of mushrooms for Wanders’ taste. “Many trees also tend to produce many mushrooms” And so many different tree species are not healthy for nature in the long run. “People focus too often on biodiversity in the Netherlands. That’s why you have all these chaotic forests with planted species.” He picks up some sweet chestnuts from the ground. “The chestnut tree does not originally occur at all in the Netherlands, for example, and here the species has simply been placed alongside all kinds of other trees.”
Death cap
So the biology student likes to move on to an older piece of forest with big trees and lots of moss. “This is what a forest should look like: little vegetation on the ground, but high forestation you can see far through.” Because a healthy forest, that is already increasingly rare due to climate change and high levels of nitrogen, warns Wanders. “Species here are dying out completely or moving up further and further north. What I found ten years ago in Burgundy, I now find here. What you could pick here a few years ago is now only found in Scandinavia.”
More knowledge of vegetation is therefore required in everyone’s mind to interact well with nature. Once he reaches the edge of the forest near Austerlitz, Wanders finds the greater burdock plant on the side of the road, for example. “You can cook the stems wonderfully and you can even do that in the leaves of the burdock plant. After all, the leaves are moist, then you don’t even need a pan.” In the same village, however, the UvA student also picks what is perhaps the world’s deadliest mushroom, the Amanita phalloides, from a flowerbed at the side of the pavement. “If you eat this one, the poison eats up your liver within a few days,” he says. The mushroom, nicknamed “death cap”, closely resembles a cultivated mushroom. “As a result, people really do still die from it in the Netherlands. You really should always know what you are eating.”
At the end of the lane leading out of the forest area, the biology student quickly kneels one last time. “Hey, beechnuts!” You don’t need kilos of chicken, salmon fillets or game hunting to stay alive, Wanders stresses again, as he gathers the nuts. “Carrots, berries, nuts, that’s what our bodies are still evolutionarily geared for. And look, there’s more lying around than you can eat.”
