@ossobuco,
I've been a forager since childhood. The whole family would descend on a patch of coastal reef at low tide for a feast of oysters.
A popular tourism venture in Australia is the bush-tucker walk, where local indigenous people take tourists on bushwalks, pointing out local food sources.
Recently spent a year in the west Kimberley, where a native fruit called Gubinge is widely harvested for various reasons. Said to have 100 times the vitamin C content of oranges, gubinge, or kakadu plum, is very common in the region where I spent a year.
We harvested buckets of the small cherry-sized fruit, and made wine, chutney, jams, and just ate it. Very ordinary taste, but very good for you.
The wine fermented without the addition of yeast, but was far more potent with yeast, of course. More experimentation required.
Much more foraging in that part of Australia. There were native banana, passionfruit, an old orchard at Beagle Bay was raided regularly for pawpaw, breadfruit, mango, cumquats, bush lemons and mandarins.
The local reefs on low tides were sourced for drift oysters, lee shells, pearl shells (pinctada maximus), conch shells, and bailer shells.
You'd never go hungry up that way. I got sick of eating mud crab and barramundi.
