Foraging is something we do lots of at Wild Pepper Isle. For us there is something alluring about owning the whole process from finding, to picking, to making and selling. I don’t think that we are alone in that. This is the paddock to plate vision. Or as we prefer to say – bush to bowl.
In part it is about quality control – we select only the best and most flavoursome fruit. We learn about different varieties and enjoy bringing those qualities to the forefront in our products. It is also about being outdoors and connecting with our environment. When we forage we feel that we are developing a relationship with the land and place.
But more than that foraging and our bush to bowl approach stands apart from the usual way that foods come to us – which is through a more industrial and specialized approach. Broken into its constituent parts we see that there is much involved in producing food from growing, to harvesting, processing, manufacturing, marketing, distributing and selling. Through this specialization our society has achieved tremendous efficiency in making food. Yet foraging and bush to bowl production are not about efficiency.
At Wild Pepper Isle we enjoy a closer relationship with the food we produce. We know about food quality, we know the place where it came from and the people that helped us get it to you. Call me nostalgic but I like the old ways. It may be less productive but I prefer our bush to bowl approach.
In something of a celebration of our “Forager’s life” we have released a new product which is a compilation of our best sweet preserves. Naturally we have called it Forager’s Four – check it out!
