Wild Organics: A Frontier Shift from Agriculture to Wildculture

“Wild honey smells of freedom ” wrote Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1943). But to provide a stable and regular supply of food, most cultures and peoples at some time in the distant past forsook a hunting and gathering lifestyle, a wildculture, and shifted to agriculture. Not all peoples converted to agriculture; Australian and Tasmanian aborigines traditionally relied on wildculture. The concept of organics evolved in the first half of the twentieth century as a response to chemical agricultural practices. This idea of “organic ” flowed through from farming practice to farming produce, and hence we have Certified Organic food, including Certified Biodynamic produce. There are now 30.4 million hectares of organically managed agricultural land worldwide (Willer, Yussefi-Menzler & Sorensen, 2008, p.235). There is currently a twenty-first century “backflow ” of the “organic ” concept, from its agricultural heritage to wildculture. By wildculture, I mean all aspects and styles of hunting and gathering food harvesting. Wild harvested organic land now totals 33.8 million hectares worldwide (Willer, et al., 2008) and already exceeds the global total of agricultural organic land. This is a new phenomenon and, from 2006 onwards, limited statistics have been reported by the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM)(Willer & Yussefi