About

Edinburgh Forage and Eat aims to educate, inspire, and delight through guided foraging walks/courses and wild food preparation events.

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Among the most fundamentally satisfying moments in a person’s life is finding oneself in a job that is the culmination of all previous decades of passions, jobs, trainings, loves, studies, interests, talents, and life experiences.

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Becoming a foraging instructor was for me one of these times, when everything just fell into the right place.

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A degree in art education and a decade of training and experience as a public school teacher, an upbringing in the old foraging tradition of the black forest, the influences of a creative, cooking teacher mother and a natural scientist father, the wonder of a childhood spent outdoors, picking and gorging myself on greens and fungi and nuts and berries and  fruit (occasionally from the neighbours’ trees), a life of collecting wild foods and using them to feed family and friends, an obsessive interest in mushrooms and in all of nature’s small miracles, and another decade of building a successful baking business, all shape my foraging courses and wild food events.

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From my beginnings in the black forest region of south west Germany, I have connected to my surroundings through food.  This is probably not surprising for someone growing up surrounded by so much natural beauty and so many delicious wild foods amid an ancient and continuous foraging tradition.  My parents, an environmentalist and zoology professor with a passion for nature and a cooking teacher with an amazing palate and facility in the kitchen, both forage, as did their parents and grandparents before them, so, naturally, from the time we were born, my siblings and I became part of this long line of woodland foragers. 

These passions for food, foraging, and nature never left me and as I moved to different countries and environments were expanded and refined.  After a few decades as a high school art teacher and then as an artisan baker, I have returned to my childhood rambles of crawling through dense conifers plantations in search of small miracles to delight the eyes and ideally the palate.   At other times I rove the shoreline picking seaweeds, splashing in the cool firth, and making fires, or am in my kitchen or garden,  cooking and feeding my wild food experiments to my three reluctant children and to my rather more enthusiastic, supportive friends, or am learning or teaching online or in life about mushrooms and other exciting forageables.   All of this I love to share, so come along and join me on one of  my foraging walks or wild food events.  Celebrate the wild!

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"Edinburgh Forage and Eat knows their mushrooms and other wild edibles like the backs of their hands. Combined with stellar personality and fantastic cooking skills they really are the best in this business."