Online Foraging Resources – Some Websites & Social Media Worth Following

Recommended Wild Food and Foraging Websites

Related pages: 

• General guidance on foraging guidebooks and online resources
• Foraging and Social Media
• Wild Food Guide

There is a lot of online foraging information out there, some excellent, a lot not so good.

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. Looking at the social media or blog feed of an experienced forager showing off all their finds can be inspiring, but also quite daunting to novice foragers, and can give the wrong impression of foraging. Keep in mind that you are often seeing the fruits of many years of research, exploration, hard work, deep nature connection, and fruitless forays!

It is impossible to cover all the wild food websites and social media out there, so below are some of my personal recommendations – mostly UK focussed. I am naturally drawn to sites that are content heavy (ie. more than just a shop window for products or events), informative and well written by people who are clearly passionate about their subject. I also place more emphasis on original content than slick presentation – so many websites and social media accounts I see nowadays are just rehashing of other people’s ideas. You can tell when someone is truly knowledgeable – and comfortable in their knowledge – by how much they warmly credit and reference their sources and inspiration.

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!

Use the drop-down menus to view hundreds of pages of foraging information – or click this image to browse

I should also say that many of the people listed below have – over the years – become good friends with whom i’ve spent great times in the forest and on my gin deck! But I admired their work, and compiled much of this list, before we made friends! So, in no particular order:

(* = Denotes Association of Foragers member – learn more about the AoF here)

Wild Feast – Sarah Watson* has lots of great info on her blog, and with a particular slant towards wild cocktails

Edible Leeds – Creative wild food recipes, encouragement and inspiration from passionate forager Craig Worral*, who also guides forays around Leeds and serves wild food tasting menus through his other brand @4WildSeasons.

Rachel Lambert * – Has made a wonderful website crammed with recipes and inspiration based on her foraging and guided walks down in Cornwall.

EatWeeds – Robin Harford’s* superb site is full of well referenced, simply presented information, and lots of great, simple,  recipes that are a great starting point for exploring wild foods. Robin also runs a slick foraging newsletter and self publishes foraging guides in his clear, minimalist format as well as making occasional podcasts.

Fergus the Forager – Experimental and inspiring wild food genius Fergus Drennan’s* fantastic site is full of great pictures, truly innovative uses of wild food, and thoughtful musings on foraging as away of life. Lots to read, all of it wonderful.

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. As a research herbalist as well as a foraging teacher, Monica is great at clearly articulating some of the more technical aspects of wild food chemistry.

Learn Your Land – Forager Adam Haritan presents excellent and informative videos on many aspects of foraging, particularly fungi foraging. He is based in the US but the information he shares is interesting – and probably useful – anywhere.

First Nature – Fungi –  An excellent resource for learning about a wide range of edible and inedible fungi. This site is not foraging focussed, but is excellent on ID features, and does give basic information around edibility of some 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.

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

Miles Irving’s Blog – Miles* (the author of The Forager 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?” This site will also give you details of regional fungi group meet-ups, which welcome anyone with an interest in fungi.

Plants For A Future – A superb database of edible and useful plants aimed at permaculture growers, but with huge overlap with foraging. A good place to start researching the edibility of plants you have already identified, but not infallible as it tends to reference every possible hazard that has ever been mentioned without much critical interpretation.

Forager / Chef  – Alan Bergio has built a rich and beautiful resource based on his use of wild ingredients in high end dining. With humility and expertise he explores and records his successes and failures with a wide range of plants, fauna and (especially) fungi. A must for anyone interested in the more refined end of wild gastronomy.

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-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.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Wild Food and Foraging X/Twitter and Instagram Accounts

Social media can be a great way of keeping abreast of what people are foraging and how they use wild ingredients. 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 noticeable how no two people forage in the same way or for the same reasons or for the same types of things.

Nevertheless, I recommend you treat all foraging information on social media as no more than a starting point for your own deeper enquiry through books and quality websites. Even thoughtful social media posts tend to be short and incomplete, often omitting key information – it’s really not possible to give all the important information on most wild foods in one short post. Try to find the feeds that link back to a good website, and which credit their sources and inspiration.

I’m afraid that there are some awful plagiarists out there – I once found an instagram account that consisted of nothing but other people’s posts, entirely unaccredited! Please call them out if you see them.

Try to avoid too, the (sadly spiralling) number of accounts that appropriate ideas and information more subtly by repackaging it as if it has come to the author magically. You’ll know the truly knowledgeable and original people because they share warmly and give credit for others ideas and where they get their inspiration.

I have specifically focussed on accounts that share a lot about wild food – I follow many others who entertain and inspire me, but are less foraging-focussed. I can’t bear celebrity culture in any guise, so I don’t follow or recommend any accounts that feature the author more than the wild foods!

All the websites listed above run Twitter/Instagram feeds, so I haven’t replicated them here.

I know there are some great Facebook foraging accounts out there too, but it is one platform too many for me to follow, and most of them are fed from Instagram accounts anyway. Sorry, I don’t do any open access FB Groups either – I know there are some nice ones out there, just not my thing! I don’t spend much time on You Tube either.

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.

(* = Denotes Association of Foragers member – learn more about the AoF here)

@TheWildKitchen (Insta) Where lovely Lucia Stuart* share ideas and inspiration from her highly creative foraging in S England.

@AbsolutelyWild (Twitter & Insta) Great pictures and information on wild food throughout the year by a professional forager Peter Studinski* based in Hampshire. Peter is half Polish, so adds an Eastern European perspective to foraging in the UK.

@ForageFineFoods (Twitter & Insta) Great chat and craic from Liz Knight who makes little jars of stunning wild preserves in the Welsh hills, with a child on either hip! Liz is hugely creative and has one of the finest palates for wild flavours I have ever encountered.

@PascalBaudar (Insta) Pascal’s two seminal books on wild fermentation translate beautifully onto Instagram, where he generously shares recipes and inspiration.

@EdulisWildFood (Insta & FB) Lisa Cutcliffe puts a lot into her beautifully photographed posts, including foraging adventures with her cats!

@johnmushroom (Twitter only) John Wright*, the author of the River Cottage foraging guides is as much fun on Twitter as he is in his books – but you should definitely buy his books.

@BUCK_AND_BIRCH (Insta) My friend Rupert Waites* and Tom Chisholm started off making fantastic wild drinks for their pop-up wild dining experiences in Edinburgh. The dining experiences are on a back burner now as their foraged drinks range has really taken off. They share fun ideas and inspiration, and provide a great insight into the creative and process of scaling up production of wild concoctions.

@charlotteflowerchocolates (Instagram) Charlotte makes exquisite wild flavoured chocolates up in Perthshire. Also check out her flavour blog.

@steven_hanton_bushcraft (Instagram) Steven shares lots of great, thoughtful stuff about foraging and the wider world of bushcraft/survival

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..