The age-old practice of foraging for food has become an escape from the hell of modern life and a source of free ingredients – birch twig biscuit, anyone?
It’s a sun-drenched afternoon in south London, and I’m surrounded by food. No, I’m not in a supermarket or restaurant, and I haven’t just loaded up on picky bits for a park picnic. I’m in the Rookery, a community-run garden on the southern edge of Streatham Common, but if you were to see the abundant nature around me – branches peppered with olives, creeping tomato vines bursting with ripe, juicy fruits and towering cherry trees against a cloudless blue sky – you’d think I was somewhere far more exotic than SW16.
“There’s rosemary here, chard, elderberries, chamomile, liquorice mint,” says Rebekah Williams, a 29-year-old British-Jamaican herbalist and environmental educator who is leading me on a foraging walk around the common. “At this time of year, all the plants are starting to seed, so it’s a great time to gather nettle seeds which help with energy levels and vitality.”
Williams is the founder of Earth Child Remedies, a community-centred wellness initiative that helps to reconnect global majority and queer communities back to the land. She’s been leading foraging walks around the country since 2023, but has seen a noticeable rise in young people taking up the hobby in the last year.
“There seems to be a recent awakening to the fact that modern life – working 9-5 jobs, only getting 20 days’ holiday a year, spending more time indoors staring at a screen than outdoors – really isn’t good for us,” she says. “I think people are turning to foraging because they’re realising how disconnected we’ve become from the land.”
It wasn’t always this way. Around 250,000 years ago, people were predominantly nomadic hunter-gatherers who relied on the land and changing ecological systems for food and medicine. The gradual shift from foraging to farming started with the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, then the Industrial Revolution, which allowed for large-scale food production. The 20th century transformed the global food system through refrigeration, processing and international trade. Today, we mostly rely on supermarket chains and large-scale corporate farming for our food, but the pandemic, various global conflicts and extreme weather have exposed just how fragile the supply chains underpinning that system can be.
For most of us, the idea of snacking on a wild-growing plant or fungus is still a little disconcerting. But this is starting to change. On TikTok, there are over 3,000 posts of UK foragers making everything from linden seed chocolate to wild garlic and oyster mushroom toast. Foraging has become a viral niche for nature content creators, from Sussex-based Fern Freud (@foragedbyfern) who has amassed 185,000 followers sharing wild-food recipes and foraging tips, to Megan Howlett of @theforagerscottage, who has built a following of over 277,000 from posting foraged-ingredient recipes including pineapple weed and water pepper sauerkraut; birch twig biscuits and lavender oat lattes. Searches for ‘foraging’ are also up by a third on Google since last year, and Waitrose has seen a surge in customers searching for recipes for foraged ingredients.
For many young people, foraging has become an indispensable mindfulness practice. “For me, it’s about having a connection with the seasons and the living world,” says 27-year-old Elsa Evelyn. “ When I’m foraging, I can feel my restless mind quieting, and it’s the only time I walk slowly because I’m spying for edible opportunities. I love this time because it feels like a conversation between myself and the earth.”
Originally from Winchester, where she’d scour the hedgerows for rosehips, sloes and hawthorn berries, Evelyn moved to Devon last year and says the foraging opportunities have multiplied. “Bilberries, or wild English blueberries, grow abundantly across Dartmoor, alongside pennywort and horsetail. Last week, I picked cherry plums and early-season blackberries and added them to a pavlova.”
Similarly, for 28-year-old Amy Sarah, foraging in Hampshire is about connecting with the planet – and protecting it. “I started picking wild berries in my local wild park and storing them in the freezer, mainly because I wanted to cut down my plastic consumption from supermarkets. Eating directly from the earth is not only nutrient-dense and delicious, but a powerful way to ground us in gratitude for plants that so many people walk past. It's another layer of connection with the planet, and a practice of presence and mindfulness.”
As my trip to Streatham with Williams confirms, foraging isn’t solely reserved for those in rural communities. In fact, foraging and wild food tours are cropping up across the UK’s urban areas, from seaweed, sorrel and samphire foraging along Kent’s coastal towns, to foliage and fungi in Sheffield, wild pizza workshops in Leeds and even foraged cocktail classes in Mile End.
Divya Hariramani Herrero runs Fruity Walks, fruit-picking and -spotting expeditions for like-minded young people across London. “I set it up in 2020 during the pandemic because I found the most perfect pear tree growing in my local park, St James’ Churchyard in Bermondsey. I come from Madrid, and I just didn’t realise any fruit would grow in London. My mind was completely blown. I thought, ‘Everybody needs to know about this’.” Herrero started an Instagram showcasing the fruit trees she’d spotted around the city, including apple trees, plum trees, grapefruits, pomegranates, lemons, loquats, persimmons, and even a 12-metre avocado tree behind Tate Modern.
Some of these trees are on private land and reflect London’s multicultural heritage. “I started knocking on people’s doors and realised these trees had been planted by people from all over the world, from the Windrush Generation, Grenada, Jamaica, St Lucia, Bangladesh, Cyprus and Turkey who wanted to plant something familiar to them.”
Herrero started running fruit-spotting walks for her followers and telling them the stories behind the people who planted them, but this quickly turned into fruit-picking walks for trees on public land. So far, she’s taken over a thousand people on walks. “I think it’s because we’re so plugged into our laptops, AI, social media – people just want to get out and connect with nature and experience their cities differently.”
I ask Williams if she thinks the rising cost of living has anything to do with increased interest in foraging. “Absolutely, because foraging can really help you in times when you have less money,” she says. “You can forage some nettles, three-cornered leek and garlic, and at least make a meal for yourself. You could also gather medicinal plants like elderberries, freeze them, and make them into a syrup to ward off colds in the winter, saving money on going to the pharmacy.”
But like every keen forager I speak to, Williams is keen to highlight the importance of doing so responsibly. “Never take more than you need,” she advises. “You only need a small amount to make a cup of tea, and if there’s not much, leave it alone. Bees, birds, insects and other living organisms also rely on the plants for shelter, food and medicine. So if we approach foraging from a capitalistic perspective of extraction, then all we’re going to do is deplete it.”
Ben McCarthy, Head of Nature Conservation at the National Trust, adds that while foraging can be good fun and help people connect with nature, “excessive foraging, or foraging on protected sites, can be detrimental” to wildlife and negatively impact delicate ecosystems. He asks that foragers follow the code of conduct and countryside code: “respect, protect and enjoy.”
As my trip with Rebekah comes to an end, I tell her I’m genuinely surprised by how relaxed I feel, like someone’s flicked a switch in my nervous system. “I hear that all the time,” she says, smiling. “For me, foraging is like my meditation. It really helped me after the pandemic when my mental health was really not in a good place. Foraging is really what brought me out of that time. I owe a lot to this practice.”