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Łukasz Łuczaj (pronounce it: wookash woochuy) is a Polish forager and a wild food enthusiast. For years he has travelled the world making scientific documentation of the traditions of collecting wild foods. He likes doing things – he runs a large forest farm, wild food workshops and he is also a professor of biology at his university. He lives in the Carpathian Mountains in South-Eastern Poland.
Although he has published a lot of papers in English (https://scholar.google.pl/citations?user=ELVUgD0AAAAJ&hl=en), his books are mainly in Polish, but he is in the process of translating them into English.
On the Wild Side: From the Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers to Postmodern Foraging, Bushcraft and New-Age Nature Seekers
This book is a story about a personal search for the ‘natural’ and for living ‘in nature’. The author is an ethnobotanist who has studied foraging practices in many parts of the world, including Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, China and Laos, as well as experimented with living as a primitive hunter-gatherer in his land in the Polish Carpathians. He describes his own experiences, the lives of various hunter-gatherer groups reported by scientific literature, and stories of friends who are also in search of closer contact with nature.
This book is probably the most comprehensive attempt to capture the journey to being ‘natural’ performed by so many members of rich Western societies. The best way to do this subject justice is neither to resort to a completely informal or to a completely formal scientific form. The book thus is reminiscent of a pile of scattered notes, a silva rerum, a diary. Some chapters are strictly scientific, even with citations and footnotes, some are the kind of stories you would hear an elder tells round a bonfire. Primitive hunter-gatherers mix with survivalists, hippies, naturists, lovers of psychedelia, suburban hunters, mushroom pickers, beggars, post-modern foragers, scientists, health-food freaks and people walking around shopping malls.
Other books:
- Wild edible plants of Poland. The Survival Guide (2002)
- Handbook of worm-eaters or edible invertebrates of Central Europe (2005)
- Into the Wild (2010)
- Wild Kitchen (2013)
“Wild Kitchen” by Łukasz Łuczaj combines the function of a herbarium and a cookbook. It is a practical guide to over sixty wild edible plants in Poland, such as: elderberry, birch, hops, wild garlic, bird cherry, maple, burdock, nettle, coltsfoot, calamus and many, many more. Each chapter explains where to look for a species and how to recognise it, which parts of the plant are edible, provides information on the harvest period, active substances and pharmacological properties of the plant, as well as its traditional and modern use in different cultures.
The book contains several dozen recipes for a variety of dishes, including: barley soup made of plantain seeds, borscht fruit tincture, dumplings with beech leaves, Japanese wormwood cookies, Russian cherry jam, marsh purgatory, burdock beer, cabbage rolls wrapped in funkia leaves and Swedish rose soup.
The book, richly illustrated with photos and drawings, has been enriched with fascinating notes and reflections by the author about the place of man in nature and the search for nature and escape from civilization.
How is this book different from the author’s earlier publication (“Wild Edible Plants of Poland”) ?:
- focuses on the most important genres for the average reader, but discusses them very thoroughly
- very richly illustrated (photos of plants and dishes) and contains many recipes
- contains the latest discoveries of Łukasz However, we encourage you to purchase both items, because “Wild Plants”, although poorly illustrated, contain almost a set of edible species of Poland.
The book has 320 B5 pages and hundreds of photos.
- Sex in the Big Forest (2020)
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Full details about his life:
During his high school years he was a scholarship holder of the National Children’s Fund. He attended the 1st High School for them. Nicholas Copernicus in Krosno. In 1994, he graduated in environmental biology at the University of Warsaw (MA thesis on the spread of new species of shrubs in the Białowieża Forest ). In 1999, he obtained a doctoral degree on the basis of the work entitled Vegetation structure and shore effects in the contact zone of forest and meadow , written under the supervision of Janusz Faliński. During his doctoral studies, he worked in The Botanical Garden in Warsaw.
He lived in Pietrusza Wola in the Podkarpacie region. On his farm of several hectares, he established a wild garden focused on the maximum level of biodiversity (there are, among others, over four hundred tree species), in which he conducts ecological experiments; maintains hay meadows and a field with endangered species of weeds, and also tries to restore the natural undergrowth in young stands on post-agricultural land. Łukasz Łuczaj is a promoter of the idea of a wild garden , as well as a pioneer of the wild garden movement in Poland. Several times a year he runs wild cooking workshops in Rzepnik.
In 2011, he started working as a lecturer at the University of Rzeszów, first at the Department of Biotechnology in Werynia of the University of Rzeszów, and then at the Institute of Biology and Biotechnology. In 2012, he obtained a postdoctoral degree at the Institute of Botany of the Polish Academy of Sciences , presenting the monograph Wild growing edible plants used in Poland from the mid-nineteenth century to modern times. In the same year, he took the position of associate professor at the University of Rzeszów, where he is the head of the Department of Botany.
His research interests mainly include plant ecology and ethnobotany , which is also related to the interest in folk taxonomy and wild edible plants.
He is a member of the editorial board of the scientific journals “Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine” and “Acta Societatis Botanicorum Poloniae” and the creator of the new Polish journal “Etnobiologia Polska”. Scientifically, he deals with the organisation of archival ethnobotanical data from Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine and Belarus, and conducts field research on the use of plants, e.g. in China, Laos, the Caucasus and the Balkans.
He is involved in activities for the protection of nature in Podkarpacie – incl. defending rivers against regulation. He also created mixtures of meadow seeds that allow you to create flower beds from native, often endangered species. They were the first domestic mixtures of this type in Poland (since 1999). In addition, he is interested in techniques of survival in wild nature (he also organises workshops on this subject) and recreating the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers.
He was included in the ranking prepared by researchers from Stanford University, published in October 2020 in the pages of ” PLOS Biology “, including almost 160 thousand of the best scientists in the world (including 726 scientists from Poland). The ranking assessed the scientific achievements on the basis of a bibliometric index, taking into account such criteria as: Hirsch index, number of citations, Impact Factor, place and role on the list of authors.
For many years he was a collaborator of the monthly magazines “Wróżka” and “Kuchnia”, where he wrote about wild edible plants. He is currently writing for the Przekrój quarterly . He also runs blogs in Polish (www.lukaszluczaj.pl), English (www.thewildfood.org) and videoblogs in Polish Lukasz Luczaj and English The Wild Food.
His sister, Justyna Łuczaj-Salej, is a film director, together they created the TV series Dziki Lunch by Łukasz Łuczaj (Kuchnia + 2011) .
In 2016, a documentary was made about Łukasz Łuczaj The World According to Łukasz , directed by Piotr Socha, awarded at the “Happy End” Festival of Optimistic Films in Rzeszów.
Videos
Episodes from Dziki obiad/Wild Lunch (in Polish)
