WILD FOOD WALKS at the Sustainability Institute 2022

ABOUT

Join Loubie Rusch in discovering the local indigenous and wild foods that grow at the Sustainability Institute in Lynedoch.

A plant display and list of indigenous and wild and weedy edibles will be on hand to help with recognising what we come across on our walk.

We will explore the food and ornamental gardens, the woodland thicket, or find them just popping up around and about, depending on time of year.. 

You will be offered a light lunch taster plate and an aromatic tea as a part of the Walk experience.

Ticket Costs and Duration:

• R 465 per person
• Walks last from 10.30 am to13.00 pm
• Includes a light taster lunch and aromatic tea

Where: 

• Sustainability Institute, Lynedoch Rd, Lynedoch.

What to bring:

• Comfortable shoes, water, sun hat and sunscreen in summer, warm jacket in winter, a pen and notepad, your camera, a shopping bag.

Optional Extras available to purchase from the SI's Green Cafe:

• Additioanl snacks and drinks
• Cape Wild Foods: A Growers Guide by Loubie Rusch
• the SI's Wild Harvest bottled products  
• Making KOS's seasonal bottled products when available

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About Making KOS and Local WILD 

• Your guide, Loubie Rusch, has been exploring the forgotten and neglected wild foods of the Cape since 2010. She has foraged and observed them in nature, has grown, cooked and bottled them and has shared about them, all under the name Making KOS. As time passed, it became important to her to find ways for local indigenous foods to contribute to recalibrating the social, economic and ecological imbalances we are surrounded by in our country.
• She founded Local WILD in 2017 to consolidate the various research and project collaborations she was engaging in with organisations and individuals. Its vision is to see our forgotten and neglected local indigenous foods reintegrated into local foodways* to the benefit of people and local ecologies. Projects range from those that increase our knowledge base and share it, to others that encourage growing and making use of them on local small scale farms and home and professional kitchens. Their benefit varies, from adding to people's livelihoods or wellness, to regenerating local biodiverse ecologies and to enriching local food culture and practices among the many for whom local food plants are not at all familiar any more.

* the cultural, social, ecological and economic practices of the production and consumption of food

 About the Sustainability Institute

• The SI engages its students in transformative learning, from preschool right through to postgraduate level. Their reflective research and education programmes call on participants to actively contribute towards just and generative futures. They aim to deepen connection to place, to self and to community.
• Their school children and teachers training programmes are Montessori based, their academic programmes are affiliated to the University of Stellenbosch, and their range of short courses are completely independently formulated.
• Their Living Soils programmes offer practical learning to their participating students, local households, and farmers in training.
• Their Nourish programme feeds the campus' school learners daily, caters to staff and learners through their Green Cafe, and caters to the various events they offer.

More About Local Wild’s Collaboration with the SI

They are working together on initiatives such as: 

• evolving the SI’s indigenous plantings that innovate and showcase propagation and cultivation to support practical learning for their students and visitors
• bringing their cultivated indigenous ingredients to market through the Philippi Agrihub
• offering opportunities for the SI's own community and for visitors to get a taste of local indigenous foods through events such as Wild Food Walks, school feeding, dishes offered at the Green Cafe and the SI’s Wild Harvest product range
• promoting learning through joint publishing like Cape Wild Foods:A Growers Guide and its upcoming sequel, the Cooks Guide

More About their Publishing

• Cape Wild Foods: A Growers Guide is the first book that Loubie Rusch and the SI have collaborated on. It shares practical plant and cultivation information about 22 plants with edible components, to help small farmers and gardeners with how to include them in their home or food gardens.
• Its sequel, A Cooks Guide, is currently being written. It is aimed at home cooks, chefs and culinary students and brings recipes and recipe ideas about the same 22 plants. Local WILD is undertaking a nutritional study, also for publication, to establish which of the 22 still need to be analysed.
• This body of work is filling some of the gaps in accessible knowledge about the forgotten and underutilised winter rainfall edibles of the Cape Floristic Region. It is supporting their reintegration into contemporary foodways, and is bringing their knowledge base closer to that of the more widely known and used indigenous foods of the summer rainfall Southern Africa.

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