Harvesting "wild food", the seasonal salad leaves, nuts, fruit and fungi that grow abundantly across the UK, has led to a new industry in professional foraging for restaurants and a sharp surge in public interest.
They are harvesting - for free - nearly 200 ingredients throughout the year: from common crops such as hazelnuts, brambles and wild strawberries, to dozens of different fungi, through to specialist crops such as elm and lime leaves, or sweet cicely. Chefs are now paying up to £50 a kilo for wood sorrel, with its sharp lemony tang, and £40 a kilo for elusive morel mushrooms, handpicked from the forest floor.
In Scotland alone, where the wild food movement is thought to be strongest, the Forestry Commission estimates that wild harvesting, including harvesting lichens and mosses for natural remedies and horticulture, is worth as much as £21m a year. Its rapid growth - by as much as 38% since 2001 - has led the commission to launch a campaign this month to promote wild foods with a code of good practice, to ensure the increasing number of foragers harvest carefully and, where needed, with the landowner's permission.
They are harvesting - for free - nearly 200 ingredients throughout the year: from common crops such as hazelnuts, brambles and wild strawberries, to dozens of different fungi, through to specialist crops such as elm and lime leaves, or sweet cicely. Chefs are now paying up to £50 a kilo for wood sorrel, with its sharp lemony tang, and £40 a kilo for elusive morel mushrooms, handpicked from the forest floor.
In Scotland alone, where the wild food movement is thought to be strongest, the Forestry Commission estimates that wild harvesting, including harvesting lichens and mosses for natural remedies and horticulture, is worth as much as £21m a year. Its rapid growth - by as much as 38% since 2001 - has led the commission to launch a campaign this month to promote wild foods with a code of good practice, to ensure the increasing number of foragers harvest carefully and, where needed, with the landowner's permission.
It is no longer a niche, cottage industry. The fruit and vegetables wholesaler Fresh Direct, which supplies Harrods, high street cafes, and Michelin-starred chefs, has begun extending its wild harvesting operations from Scotland into England.
The search for wild food mirrors the surge in popularity for home-grown produce, allotments and "guerrilla gardening" - where patches of vacant and under-used inner-city land are converted into al fresco fruit and vegetable patches - championed by chefs such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.
To cope with the surge in demand, the charity Reforesting Scotland has set up a "wild harvesting" trade association supported by the commission and the Scottish government. "We've had a huge response from the general public on foraging," said Emma Chapman, the charity's project coordinator. "It ties into environmental concerns: you're getting a little bit of your food in a low-impact way. A lot of the salads you get at this time of year have a huge amount of energy associated with them, with refrigeration, transport, being grown abroad and under artificial conditions, and they just don't taste so good."
Roger Coppock, the Forestry Commission's head of business policy development, said one recent survey suggested that well over a million people in Scotland alone had foraged at least once in the past two years.
"That started to reveal that it wasn't just a case of cranks and back-to-the-earth type people collecting. It went right across the spectrum from the unemployed to lords," he said.
Coppock believes that much more could be taken sustainably from the commission's land. "It is nowhere near being over-harvested," he said. "There's an awful lot of potential there." .
Please see the Scottish code of conduct for Foraging in the main page. If you fancy doing some foraging then the Highlands is a great place to start, why not stay at www.Highlandholidaycottages.com and I (Cameron) would be happy to give you some tips on Fungi Forgaging.
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