Digging up ingredients for top UK restaurants

Miles Irving counts Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck and TV show Masterchef among his clients. Jack Dyson met the man who forages weird and wonderful weeds and plants for a living...

In a house at the end of a winding road nestled among rolling green fields, Miles Irving serves up lunch. On the menu: stinging nettles, sheep’s sorrel and chick weed the dad-offour has picked from nearby grassland or roadsides. “There are things out there that would kill you,” he says casually. “If you don’t take the time to know plants, it’s positively dangerous.

“But it’s very safe if you know what you’re doing.” Since 2003, the 52-yearold has carved out a career providing an assortment of Michelin-star restaurants and high-end chefs with ingredients through his firm Forager Ltd. The Charthambased company stocks a range of freshly-picked wild plants and even wood ants. We’re sat across from each other at Miles’s kitchen table. His cluttered work surface bears a platter containing unpeeled chestnuts and roasted acorns. Several piles of dark red coriaceous strips lie on a shelf underneath. After tearing off a couple of pieces, he hands one to me – it’s hawthorn fruit leather, made using cornelian cherry from a tree in Elham. “I’ve been foraging since I was six,” he says in between mouthfuls. “My grandfather took me out picking wild mushrooms, and I got the bug. I skipped getting the bus home from school and walked back past the fields and the woods because I thought, ‘I wanna do more of that’. “I just thought it was like a treasure hunt and it was also like a secret; there’s all this stuff that you can eat and nobody else knows about it. It was very magical.” Miles moved to Canterbury to study psychology at the University of Kent in 1997, and then earned a living through busking, gardening and self-employed building work. He started off by supplying foraged foods to the Goods Shed in Station Road West. Now his list of clients includes the likes of Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck, The Ivy, Rocksalt in Folkestone, The Red Lion in Stodmarsh and television shows Masterchef and Great British Menu. “It used to be considered dodgy stuff and some people thought it was something to be ashamed of, thinking that’s what you eat when you’re poor,” he says. “But we’ve given edible wild plants a value they didn’t have previously and Heston Blumenthal and others have shown how to cook with it.”

Before we met, Miles had secured permission to go picking on the farmland behind his home in Garlinge Green, near Petham. Realising I’d arrived in unsuitable footwear, he hands me a wrinkled pair of black leather shoes. But as soon as I make contact with the damp turf, water starts to seeps through into my socks.

Miles, holding a silver bucket in one hand and a small knife in the other, scours the shimmering field for salad ingredients. Bearded and with dark straggly hair falling below his shoulders, he sits on his haunches to cut off plants. After no more than five minutes, the bucket is brimming with sow thistle, common vetch, sheep’s sorrel, chickweed and stinging nettles – which he describes as being “tastier than spinach”. “I just try to put as many things in as I can,” he says keenly. “I come here every day at the moment. The farmer still thinks it’s a bit weird. What’s here is hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds of high-end salads. “I have no trouble getting my kids to engage with it. I’ll put a pile of nettles on my daughter’s plate alongside whatever else we’ve cooked and they’ll be wolfed down. When I have nettles in my garden I think ‘fantastic’.” Keen to peel off the tattered shoes and dry my sopping socks, I begin to say goodbye. But before I leave, he tells me of his latest venture: foraging workshops. He hopes to teach children and adults how to identify and pick wild plants. “I think people’s pallets have been seriously impoverished by the development of more industrial foods,” he opines. “The land is all around us telling us, ‘hello, I’m edible and I’m really good for you’ and we’re not listening.

“If I’m out and about, I’d pick up a grasshopper and eat it. They taste somewhere between a shrimp and peanut butter. My dinners are far from being totally foraged, but I’m trying to close the gap. “I’m trying to work out how you replace the different components of your diet with something wild.”

‘If I’m out and about, I’d pick up a grasshopper and eat it’

Miles Irving out foraging in a field near his home in Garlinge Green, near Petham

A platter of unpeeled chestnuts and roasted acorns; foraged mushrooms; and Miles holding one of the plants he picked in the field behind his house