Lucky Dip: Plucking food from a sea of plenty

Hunting for mushrooms and other fungi in the pine forests of the Cape is gaining popularity.

Why? In part, people are increasingly dissatisfied with the unsustainable nature of plastic-wrapped supermarket produce flown in from all over the globe. But there's also a yen to grow, pick and find our own.

Yet while mushrooms and other land-based bounty may be hotly contested game, along our coastlines we're learning to identify what is not only edible, but tasty. The coastal kitchen is where our heritage and wealth lies in terms of ancestral development and health.

Award-winning documentary filmmaker Craig Foster and Ross Frylinck, co-founder of surf culture website and festival Wavescape, have been working on a multi-media project called Sea Change that dives deep into the origins of humanity and our ancient connections with the sea.

Part of their focus is on the highly nutrient-rich content of the Cape coastline that helped early man ''fuel his brain and upgrade the architecture of his mind".

Bearing in mind that the best way to mankind's heart, and hopefully its environmental awareness, is through the stomach, we embark on an explorative culinary tour of the coast. In short, lunch.

By swimming and diving in the kelp forests for years, Foster, Frylinck and their collaborators have been relearning how to forage like the people who lived on this coastline more than 200000 years ago.

Foraging with us today are Foster's 12-year-old son Tom, Roushanna Gray, who runs sustainable foraging tours in Cape Town, and Pierre Morton, a nutritionist who focuses on the way our ancestors ate.

While foraging, we deliberately left out a lot of the obvious seafoods that can, but should not, be gathered along the coast. Crayfish and perlemoen are the obvious endangered species under heavy pressure, but alikreukel and limpets grow slowly and are vulnerable, so they are best left alone.

Armed with keen eyes, the necessary licences, snorkels and fins, in no time we've collected several kinds of edible seaweed - from the sea bamboo kelp that forms the massive kelp forests to sea lettuce, the gooey Deadman's Fingers and something else that looks like hairy sandpaper. We also dive down to cut red bait off rocks and pluck mussels off a bank.

There are five kinds of mussel in South Africa. The Mediterranean varietal are the tasty alien invaders Fraser and company advocate eating, both for flavour and sustainability.

We fire up the potjie at a braai place at Miller's Point near Simon's Town and begin prepping and cooking.

Cold yet teeming with life from pipe fish and klipvis to octopus, sea hair and anenomes, diving in the kelp forest is otherwordly. The cornerstone of life for most of the organisms along our coast, the kelp forest provides a conveyor belt of nutrients that sustains myriad life forms.

Gray prepares an excellent mixed salad of different seaweeds in a soya dressing while Foster ladles up bowls of mussels - steamed then fried up with red bait and dune spinach in a butter and sun-dried tomato sauce.

I have only ever used red bait (washed up after a storm) to fish with. Fresh from the rocks, the results are delicious and pong-free. Steaming noodley bowls of seaweed soup cooked in an aromatic miso follow.

It's an outing that opens up a range of "new" delicious, healthy foods from a coastline I thought I knew. And there is the satisfaction at having harvested the ingredients ourselves in a way as ancient as man.

Shore things

Coastal foraging courses

Roushanna Gray runs courses for R400 a person (minimum of eight). After collecting food and learning about identifying and harvesting (for example, to harvest the best bits of kelp, take the new growth leaves and leave the trunk to regenerate), retire to a beach cottage to create dishes and feast together. www.goodhopegardensnursery.co.za

The Sea Change Project

The exhibition of photographs spread along Sea Point promenade celebrates and re-creates our ancestral hunter-gatherer heritage. Visit seachangeproject.com

Fine (foraging) chefs

Top chefs are tapping into the abundant selection of sustainable seafood along our coastline. Three that focus on foraging include:

• West Coast Wunderkind Kobus van der Merwe's Oep ve Koep restaurant in Paternoster. 022-752-2105
• The Food Barn in Noordhoek, where chef Franck Dangereux often features seaweed and other goodies. 021-789-1390
• Springfontein Eats in Stanford, where Jurgen Schneider, a German who held a Michelin star for 18 years before relocating, features foraged herbs and other plants from the estuarine flood plain on his doorstep. 028-341-0651