It may not be difficult to imagine eating only wild food that you’ve collected or gathered yourself for a meal or two… but what about a full year?

That’s exactly what local couple Delphanie Colyer and Jeremy St. Onge are doing.

They started their Big Wild Year on January 1st.

“We’ve been collecting for over a year and what we’re doing is collecting and eating only wild food for all of 2019, so all of our fish and animals, plants, bugs and mushrooms are things that we’ve collected ourselves,” St. Onge says.

They have a few freezers full of food to last until they can collect again.

“We’re basically living off of our freezers until probably May, although we’re still collecting different conifer needles for tea and we’ll be doing a lot of ice fishing,” he says.

So where did the idea come from?

“It came from conversations with friends, basically debating whether it could be done, and we just decided to do it,” St. Onge says.

They’re three weeks in and Colyer says it’s going really well.

“Our joints don’t hurt, our skin is better, we’ve lost weight, already in just the three weeks there has been significant changes,” she says.

They had their blood work and health metrics done, with their doctor following along, as is the Department of Kinesiology at Nipissing University.

“We had strength testing done, we had our fat measured, flexibility, resting metabolic rate, we’ve had all that done and it’ll be interesting to see when we do the follow up how much of an improvement there will be,” Colyer says.

A pleasant surprise has been the interest that the Big Wild Year has attracted.

“I thought people would be curious, but we’ve had a lot of support,” says Colyer, who also says there hasn’t really been any big surprises. “We kind of knew what we were getting into, we’ve eaten wild foods before for shorter periods of time.”

Of note, even the municipal water supply is ‘off the table’.

The couple is only drinking and using spring water sourced from a country well that is spring-fed.

Check out the Big Wild Year on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

 

 

 

 

(Photos submitted)

Filed under: big-wild-year, north bay