A treat on the wild side for lovers of rough cooking

Duncan describes his hands-on guide as rough cooking – the antidote to fine dining. It offers experiences that are hard for your taste-buds to imagine; foods that you simply can't buy in a shop, and tastes that you can only rarely savour in some of the world's most expensive restaurants. Wild eating is fun, culturally fruitful and, in these economically austere times, free.

"I created this book for people living increasingly urban lifestyles but still yearning to reconnect with the wilderness of their ancestors," says Duncan.

"It is a halfway point between nibbling at the edges of the wild and shopping at Waitrose. It is a book about feral food, food with a proper sense of inconvenience; it is slow food not fast, but one sure step in a journey to greater personal satisfaction and contentment."

Although he was born in South Yorkshire, Duncan went to Romanby Primary School and Northallerton Grammar School in North Yorkshire with international mountaineering legend Alan Hinkes. He later attended the University of Newcastle upon Tyne where he studied geology and geography. His parents and most of his family still live in Northallerton. The book is dedicated to his mother and father who encouraged early explorations of the wild places of the North and foraging for blackberries, bilberries and rosehips.

Northern experiences are seen in the selection of recipes for rosehip syrup and Brimham Rocks bilberry tart.

Duncan was director of the Countryside Agency in South East England and has a lifelong fascination for the outdoors and nature. In 1996, he was awarded the Henry Ford European Conservation Award and in the same year published Apples, Berkshire, Cider to celebrate Berkshire's amazing 31 apple varieties.

In 2004, he cycled the longest straight line in Britain from the Isle of Wight to Cape Wrath in north-west Scotland, to celebrate slow food, local distinctiveness and sustainable transport. He lives in Twyford, Berks.

"All food comes from 'somewhere' and the food in Eat Wild comes from somewhere near you," continues Duncan. "It celebrates food inches not food miles. It encourages you to learn the hard way, as if your life depended upon it, (which sometimes it does) but the sweetness of the discovery is so much the greater. Eat Wild is a liberation movement that wants you to explore your local edible landscape, to experiment with your cooking, to play with your food and to learn what you like rather than be terrorised by lists, kitchen scales and cooking clocks. Life is a joy; food is fun; enjoy it; get out there; and eat wild!"

Eat Wild is published on May 1, by Two Rivers Press at 8.95. To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www.yorkshire postbookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing is 2.75.