‘It’s rare to find a Scottish restaurant without anything foraged on the menu these days,’ says chef Paul Wedgwood, of Edinburgh’s eponymous Wedgwood The Restaurant. Wedgwood runs foraging experiences into the ancient woodland, salt marshes and rockpools of East Lothian’s coast every other weekend, and he certainly doesn’t think wild food is overdone. ‘It’s definitely a good thing,’ he says. ‘Why import truffles from Italy when there’s an abundance of sea truffle growing just a few miles down the road?’

Many of Scotland’s wild foods mirror the flavours of sought-after produce from thousands of miles away; for example, dulse (seaweed) provides the same salty hit as bacon lardons while, as the name suggests, sea truffle adds the same earthy tones as truffles foraged by pigs in Italy. ‘Nettles are my favourite,’ Wedgwood says dreamily. ‘Nettles pair perfectly with lamb.’ There’s certainly no shortage of them around, and he teaches would-be foragers how to harvest the small, sweet leaves at the top without getting stung. His eager students also gather pineapple chamomile, which springs up along the dirt paths to East Lothian’s beaches and fields, and can be turned into a sweet syrup to pair with sorbet. 

The experience culminates in a lunch of freshly foraged food back at the restaurant on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, where the likes of venison carpaccio may be presented with wood sorrel picked earlier. ‘They served venison carpaccio with green ants at Noma when I went,’ recalls Wedgwood. ‘I thought the sharp citrusy taste of sorrel would work just as well.’ Indeed the citrus zap from the sorrel cuts through the venison’s iron tang without the need to import green ants from their sub-tropical habitats. 

Using native wild ingredients, local produce and letting landscape dictate menus is a big part of the New Nordic food movement for which Noma was famous and there are obvious parallels with Scotland’s wild food landscape. We even have our own festival devoted to wild food: in mid-May, the Scottish Wild Food Festival takes place as the hedgerows and bracken of the Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park burst with berries, herbs and edible flowers. Inspired by similar events in Finland and Latvia, the festival features guided foraging walks, workshops and a long-table lunch of wild food and drink. They also encourage responsible foraging: not taking too much and letting the plants and shrubs regrow. Wedgwood confirms this vital point: ‘Foraging should be about taking only what you need and leaving enough for nature to rewild itself and enough for everyone else. We don’t want to strip this landscape.’ 

Some chefs across the UK are taking wild food sustainability further, focusing on invasive flora and fauna which pose a threat to our endemic plant life. In London, Crate Brewery uses Japanese knotweed to brew a sour beer. In Edinburgh, Paul Wedgwood has had grey squirrel on and off the menu for years, often using it in homemade haggis or a squirrel trappers’ pie. ‘It’s actually delicious,’ he says. He also uses the non-native three-cornered wild leek, which he chops up and adds to salads, like he would a spring onion. He urges caution with invasive species though. ‘The three-cornered leek is taking over our wild garlic patches, so you have to be careful when you harvest it to not spread the seeds.’

With so-called conscious cuisine on the rise, more and more chefs are considering the impact of their choices on the environment. In Scotland, we’re blessed with an abundance of wild foods speckled across our meadows, forests and seashore, so there are many ways to stock our kitchens and pantries, while getting a little bit closer to nature at the same time. 

The Scottish Wild Food Festival, Tir na nOg, Balfunning, Balfron Station, Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 May; for more information on foraging days, visit Wedgewood’s site.