Online Foraging and Wild Food Resources

Recommended Wild Food and Foraging Websites

Related pages: 

• General guidance on foraging guidebooks and online resources
• General foraging guidebooks
• Plant foraging guidebooks
• Fungi foraging guidebooks
• Wild Food Guide
• Further reading – coming soon

There is an awful lot of online foraging information out there, some excellent, a lot not. As a rule, you’ll learn a hundred times more quickly, and better, by being outside with some good books than you will ogling other people’s finds online.

It is impossible to cover all the wild food websites and social media out there, so here are some of my favourites. I am naturally drawn to sites that are content heavy (ie. more than just a shop window), informative and well written by people who are clearly passionate about their subject. Apologies to the several thousand I have missed!

Please don’t all run off to theses wonderful sites and abandon Galloway Wild Foods! Have you seen my free wild food guide yet? It now has more information and pictures than any foraging book I know, yet is still work in progress…probably for the rest of my life!

Edible Leeds – Great recipes, encouragement and inspiration from passionate forager Craig Worral, who also guides forays around Leeds.

The Botanist Gin – There is a vast amount of inspiration and information on making drinks using wild plants on this website, although a recent revamp has hidden some of its content. But if you use the search box, you’ll find a lot of my own thoughts on booze foraging and wild cocktail recipes on this site, as well as inspiring concoctions from other boozy foragers and many of the world’s best mixologists.

EatWeeds – Master-forager Robin Harford’s superb site, full of passion and lots of great, simple, original recipes. Lots of excellent information on his facebook page too.

Wild Man Wild Food – Experimental and inspiring wild food genius Fergus Drennan’s fantastic site is full of great pictures, innovative uses of wild food and thoughtful musings on foraging as away of life.

Wilde in the Woods – Herbalist and all-round forager Monica Wilde’s thoughts, recipes and remedies, with some great insight into nutritional and medicinal uses of wild plants and fungi.

First Nature – Fungi –  An excellent resource for learning about a wide range of edible and inedible fungi

The Mushroom Diary – A really nice, personalised blog by keen amateur mycologist John Harris on mushrooms edible and otherwise. The fact that John is not scientist makes for a very engaging, accessible style.

The Other Andy Hamilton Excellent writing on wild food with a definite slant towards brewing from the author of Booze For Free (also writes with his brother for SelfSufficientish.com, also very good)

Forage London – Forager John Rensten’s lovely website has lots of advice on plant ID and great recipes, with a slant towards urban foraging.

Miles Irving’s Blog – Miles (the author of The Forager’s Handbook) and his team at Forager Ltd, have written some excellent blogs on the wider context of foraging. You will also find their excellent foraging podcast The World Wild Podcast, with some deep discussions around the politics and philosophy of foraging and wild food from around the world.

Scottish Fungi Website of the Association of Scottish Fungi Groups, providing excellent information for those that wish to take their interest in fungi beyond “Can I eat this?”

Plants For A Future A superb database of edible and useful plants aimed at permaculture but with huge overlap with foraging. A good, if not infallible, place to start researching the edibility of species you have already identified.

Nordic Food Lab This is essentially the not-for-profit research wing of Noma and the Nordic forage cuisine movement, researching wild food and new ways of eating. Their tagline is “Delineating the edible and inedible”. Cutting edge stuff. Be sure to check out their videos from the MAD Symposium too.

Hunter: Gather: Cook Treehouse-dweller Nick Weston’s excellent site covers meat, plants, fungi, hunting, fishing and  bushcraft. Lots of great in-depth articles and recipes

Hunter-Angler-Gardener-Cook – I can’t resist sending you over the pond to Hank Shaw’s wonderful, recipe-focussed site. It can be quite protein-heavy, but with loads of information and inspiration for foragers too.

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Wild Food and Foraging Twitter and Instagram Accounts

As in other walks of life, treat online foraging information – especially on social media – with suspicion, or at best as a starting point for your own deeper enquiry. Even thoughtful posts tend to be short and incomplete, often omitting key information. Try to find the feeds that link back to a good website, and which credit their sources and inspiration.

Social media can be a great way of keeping abreast of what people are finding around the country. It has often inspired me to go out and look for something new, or reminded me that something is coming into season. I also find tweeting foragers and wild food chefs/preservers very friendly and supportive. We are all on a journey of discovery. It is also really noticeable how no two people forage in the same way or for the same reasons or for the same types of things.

I have specifically focussed on accounts that sharea lot about wild food – I follow many others who entertain and inspire me, but are less foraging-focussed. Please add your own recommendations in the comments section. All the websites listed above run Twitter/Instagram feeds, so I haven’t replicated them here.

Oh yeah…and I tweet and instagram (a lot) as @markwildfood! I’m always happy to chat, and post regular updates of what’s appearing in my bit of the world, and what i’m doing with it.

@WildPickings Lovely atmospheric tweets and some inspiring wild cookery by Jade Mellor who sells foraged treats around Wales.

@AbsolutelyWild Great pictures and information on wild food throughout the year by a professional forager based in Hampshire.

@ForageFineFoods Great chat and craic from Liz Knight who makes little jars of stunning wild preserves with a child on either hip!

@WhiteCatHerbal Forager/herbalist based in Glasgow sharing ideas and inspiration on wild food processing and cookery.

@johnmushroom The author of the River Cottage foraging guides is as much fun on Twitter as he is in his books.

@BUCK_AND_BIRCH My friend Rupert Waites makes fantastic wild food and drink for his pop-up wild dining experience in Edinburgh, and shares some great information about it.

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