Born to be wild

occasional frozen pizza when I’ve been working till nine or ten in the evening, but yes I’ll often pick up a few wild bits and bobs when I’m out in the van and throw them in a stew or use them to supplement what I’m eating. Do you have a favourite ingredient? Yes dulse, it’s a red seaweed with a slightly unusual but well-balanced flavour, not too salty. It’s traditionally put into bread in Ireland. And a favourite meal with that? I do a really nice three-seaweed risotto with red seaweed, green seaweed and brown seaweed. I’ll use something like sea lettuce as the green one, dulse as the red one and then kelp as the brown. You get a great balance and between all of them they’re a complete super food with every single nutrient the body needs except vitamin D. Sounds lovely! Foraging is going through a boom in popularity in professional kitchens at the moment, why do you think that is? A chef can get 20, 30 maybe 50 different kinds of vegetable from a greengrocer but you can get more than a hundred different kinds of wild plants that nobody’s used before. So it’s exciting for chefs because a chef is like a painter, there are only so many different combinations of colours you can come up with so using wild food is like having a larger palette of colours to paint with. What’s the future of foraging both for chefs and the public at large? In terms of restaurants hopefully, when the cost comes down, it will filter down from just the high-end places and everyone will start using it. At the moment I sell wild spinach at between £30-£60 per kilo, which only top-end restaurants can afford. In the end it will filter down and get cheaper but it might take time. In terms of the public I’d like to see more and more people getting into it just as a nice healthy activity. It’s all about getting outdoors and reconnecting with lost knowledge and for me it’s part of the cure of our modern health problems. We’ve got an obesity problem. There’s on average two and half grams of salt and two and a half grams of sugar in every ready meal plus all the chemicals. Modern food is poisoning us. Anything that we can offer that provides an alternative has to be worth it. If you go and buy a ready meal you won’t digest hardly any of it because there’s no connection with it. If you want to get the most from your food, you need to go out and touch your food, pick you food, prepare and cook your food; you build up a connection with it and it builds up your digestive juices. By doing that plus the fresh air and exercise that comes with foraging, you only need a tenth of the food and you’ll get a hundred times more nutrition than something that’s mass produced from the shop.