I see in this morning’s Irish Times that John MacKenna is telling us that the cure for our dietary ills is that we should start to eat more raw foods.
I am quite sure he is right, it is on record that the health of the (non-fighting) Englishman improved immensely during the second world war when they had to revert to non imported, traditional native foods to survive and children were scouring the ditches for Rose Hips to compensate for the lack of vitamins normally provided by oranges.
I am just reading Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France and he makes the point that there always was a mystery as to why the French peasant always managed to grow so tall and strong.
He quotes an example on peasants in the Franche-Comté whose diet is on record as consisting of gaudes (roasted cornmeal) potatoes and vegetable soup who seemed to thrive on such poor fare. On examination he discovered that these people spent a lot of their lives grazing on the raw fruits, nuts and roots which were available free from nature.
I am just back from a week in France in early winter and can confirm that in the Languedoc an untutored eye and palate could have still have had their fill from nature’s supply of Quinces, Pomegranates,Crab Apples, Chestnuts, Almonds, Mushrooms and loads of other fruit and nuts which I was far too timorous to try.
In summer the French bounty is even more benign, we have seen carloads of canny French people gathering basketfuls of ripe figs in August just outside our village in Languedoc and gathering, and selling wild Hazelnuts by the roadside.

I still possess a very battered copy of Richard Mabey’s Food for free which I have since the early seventies. This makes it clear that, with a little homework, the same bounty is available here.
We still have the tradition, if not the reality of gathering Blackberries for jam and Crab Apples for jelly and, more recently, Sloes for Sloe Gin (that latter mind you probably won’t do much for our health)

In France all chemists are obliged by law to vet one’s cache of wild mushrooms and tell which are edible, maybe we should provide a similar service here and have the government print up lists and descriptions of the food which are available from the countryside.
It must be cheaper than providing hospital beds.