Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3740 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-09-24
• Rating: Exempt
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 345 minutes

Synopsis
Ray Mears presents this informative guide to cookery, travelling to Australia to discover traditional Aboriginal cuisine.

Customer Reviews

Intelligent TV; educational and informative
If you missed any parts of this series when it was shown then I can recommend it. Ray Mears' earlier TV series were all about survival skills and battling nature's worst, which is a role that has been developed by people like Bruce Parry and Bear Grylls.
So now Ray Mears has concentrated on how nature can sustain us -- and how our ancestors, living in the UK in mesolithic times, might have managed to keep themselves alive given that they didn't farm animals or manage crops as we do.

Ray Mears uses examples from hunter-gatherers across the world today to see which foods in the UK might have been useful to ancient people. And of course he demonstrates all the skills they would have needed to employ to stay alive; hunting, fishing, preparing weapons and utensils, identifying the right plants, trying different leaves, searching for starch-rich roots. All that was important back when the potato was a foreign food!

This is quite a gentle, humourous series. It's carefully filmed in some stunning locations, and the pace is much less strident and forced than some rapid-fire, rush-rush-rush documentaries. Ray Mears is accompanied by an expert in archeological nutrition, and between them they attempt some bizarre meals and methods of food preparation. Some of them work well... and some of them are awful! And the series is brave enough to show us when things go wrong, too. This is the real world, so when it rains all day we get to see it. It's refreshing that not everything is 100% stage-managed.

My only criticism is that I would have liked to see more detailed information, more of the nuts and bolts of nutrition (especially when some food samples were analysed in a lab). But I guess that might have made it just too heavy going for some viewers.

Overall, thoroughly enjoyable. Informative without lecturing. Certainly worth renting, might be worth buying if you enjoyed Ray's other tv programmes. And would make an excellent gift, too.

Super
The series Ray Mears - Wild Food is a great insight into a lost craft, that of looking after yourself without all the modern foods we see now.

It is hard to believe that for most of the time humans have been around our food has been gathered and hunted - and was really wild!

A great series well worth buying.

Excellent introduction to Mesolithic Europe
This video is an excellent introduction to Mesolithic Europe, and its "Mesoliths" Hunter-Gatherers, including their Habitat, Mindset, Technologies, & Cuisines. Parallels w/ modern Hunter-Gatherers help reconstruct a Lost Chapter in Europe's History -- one that is especially important, given that ~80% of Europeans' Genes stem from these early, pre-Agricultural, Ice Age Hunter-Gatherers, whose Cultural Identity was completely swamped out, by the incoming Farmers, who colonized the continent from roughly 6000 to 4000 BC.

The Companion Book is also highly recommended, providing valuable additional details, especially about early European pre-History. These products help reconnect w/ "The Ancestors" (as it were).