I often joke about ‘trying very hard to avoid having a real job’, but looking back at things – I really have done some daft things in return for money. I once took some Russian James Bond fans on a tour of filming locations in the mountains of Eryri, and later that same year I got involved in the hunt for the fabled Welsh bigfoot – standing outside a remote bothy at midnight with a loudspeaker, playing the sounds of mating tortoises to some bemused ponies.
While the truly oddball jobs were one-off affairs, my strangest recurring gig has been helping with the sourcing, harvesting and use of wild plants as ingredients – everything from luxury skincare products to Michelin-starred tasting menus.
Fancy Foraging for the Few
Sometime in the mid-2000s, there were murmurs of a micro-industry blooming on the rural fringes of the M25. Strange characters appeared at the back doors of London restaurants bearing boxes of wild garlic, wood sorrel and sea aster. These were hand-picked in the woodlands and hedgerows of Surrey, Suffolk and Sussex – the lush hinterlands just outside the ring of tarmac where everything is greener, purer, and better marketed.
The 1970s had ushered in a revival of wild food, partly as a backlash against increasingly industrialised farming. Anything that could be labelled ‘wild’ acquired a kind of cultural and culinary premium – much like a packet of ham that costs 30% more when prefixed with the name of a Home County.
The natural end point was an informal economy of cash-for-forage. Enterprising amateurs, hobby mycologists and the occasional greengrocer turned their countryside rambles into side hustles. Wild mushrooms, sea vegetables and tender young herbs made their way from verge to plate, earning a decent markup en route. A new breed emerged: the Professional Forager.
Formal Problems of Informality
These wild additions gave chefs a story to sell. ‘Foraged’ lent an air of exclusivity and natural purity that easily justified the price tag. A tiny salad could command the cost of a budget flight to Spain when each leaf was presented as having been lovingly hand-picked from a remote Welsh valley or windswept Solway spit.
For the most part, these ingredients sold themselves. The real complications were hidden in the quieter corners of the walk-in fridge. Environmental Health Officers began asking questions: Where did this come from? Who picked it? Under what conditions?
Modern kitchens run on paperwork and predictability. Wild ingredients, with their muddy roots and opaque provenance, didn’t fit neatly into HACCP spreadsheets. Some chefs quietly stopped using them. Others just made sure the bundle of leaves never hung around long enough for scrutiny.
A workaround emerged: push the liability onto a “bona fide” supplier. If the same leaves turned up in a labelled punnet, with a headed invoice and a delivery docket, the questions mostly stopped. Several early foragers formalised in this way, assembling networks of freelancers under a single trading name. Few were getting rich, but it was a remarkable shift from bartering and back-of-the-kitchen-door deals.
Nicked from the Hedgerow and Foreshore
As wild food rose in status, it began to attract media curiosity. Someone, somewhere, was making a living selling nettles to Michelin kitchens. The man with the basket in the woods might be moonlighting as a supplier. Cue the inevitable question: is it legal?
As is so often the case in Britain, the answer is a polite and confusing ‘it depends’. The Theft Act 1968 is quite clear: picking wild plants for personal use is permitted. Pick them to sell, however, and it becomes theft.
While many foragers operated with landowner permission (or picked on their own patch), I’d wager that in the mid-2010s, a significant proportion of ‘foraged’ produce on London menus had technically been stolen – even when delivered by legitimate-looking suppliers.
Not that anyone seemed overly concerned. Sergeant Colin Norden of Cambridgeshire Police once quipped that the Women’s Institute was ‘the largest organised crime group’ on his beat – their blackberry jam stalls technically falling foul of the same law.
A Wildlife Crime?
Where the Theft Act faltered, the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 stepped in with sharper teeth. The most well-known example was Miles Irving of Forager Ltd, arguably the best-known name in the commercial foraging world. In 2015, he received a Stop Notice from Natural England for harvesting sea kale from the shingle banks at Dungeness – a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) where removal of plant material requires explicit permission.
Irving chose to challenge the decision, publishing lengthy blog posts about his legal wranglings and Natural England’s interpretation of ecological risk. He painted it as a battle for access and tradition; the agency saw it as a precautionary move to protect a delicate habitat.
Similar scenes played out across the UK, albeit more quietly. SSSIs and semi-wild margins became favoured picking grounds: rarely managed, often remote, and rich in interesting species. But enforcement always came from the conservation side, not the criminal side. Nobody was charged with theft; instead, bylaws and environmental protection measures were used to rein in commercial harvesting.
Perhaps it’s because theft is harder to prove, or because the ecological value of a few wild leaves is near-impossible to quantify. Either way, it was always easier to issue a Stop Notice than mount a prosecution.
Harvesting the Zeitgeist
From 2015 through until the Covid lockdowns, British commercial foraging hit its peak. Public interest was high, chefs had menus to fill, and anything that sounded vaguely wilder-than-wild was worth a look.
Businesses worked out how far they could push things. As long as you didn’t pick from somewhere too sensitive, and you avoided social media posts that gave away your spots, you could meet demand and delight a certain stripe of diner.
My own involvement in the sector lasted from 2011 until fairly recently. I was good at logistics and sourcing, less so at turning a profit. The legal and ethical way to do things was often the slow and expensive route. It was always tempting to cut corners – skip the permissions, forget the monitoring – but we didn’t.
I once sat in a draughty estate office while a landowner explained their vision for the most exclusive wild skincare range on the market. They wanted me to identify the rarest flower on their land for inclusion. Scarcity as luxury. I declined, on ethical and legal grounds. Someone else took the job.
The Post-Wild Phase
The names are still on menus, but the sourcing has changed. Wild-sounding ingredients are often now cultivated – grown in polytunnels, no-dig beds and hydroponic racks.
You can order sorrel from the same wholesaler who brings your microgreens. Samphire is farmed, not picked. Seaweed is dried and bagged. The photos may still show a woolly-hatted forager beside a loch, but the actual ingredient probably came in a chilled van.
Foraging itself remains popular, but the public face has moved online. TikTok and Instagram are the new hedgerows, with writers and chefs like Gill Meller and Rosie Birkett showcasing wild ingredients with more honesty and restraint than the boom years.
A Binary Future of Foraging
A split now seems inevitable. On one side, regulated wild food: traceable, seasonal, vetted. On the other, the lingering subculture of freelance foragers, selling to friends or quietly slipping things onto menus.
What was once a thriving micro-industry is now something else entirely. The appetite remains, but the margins are tight, the risks higher, and the loopholes fewer.
It was a strange moment in British food history – a little lawless, occasionally ludicrous, and perhaps now quietly behind us.
