Nature is the Master Teacher - a Foragers Way of Life
Sami Tallberg — Prize-winning Wild Food Chef
Sami Tallberg shares his two-decade journey into foraging, an
"It's really cool to discuss foraging because I personally think that foraging is the ultimate biohack, life hack. It connects us to nature, boosts creativity, mindfulness, and health, and gives perspective to everything in life."
Summary
- Foraging is a powerful biohack and life hack connecting humans with nature's cycles and nutritious wild foods. - The journey began 20 years ago with discovering sea kale in London, leading to a passion for wild ingredients. - Foraging requires respect, permission from nature, and fosters mindfulness, gratitude, and creativity. - Different seasons offer diverse edible plants, mushrooms, and berries, rich in nutrients and health compounds. - Beginner foragers should seek guidance, start with simple plants, and preserve harvests through drying, fermenting, or pickling.
Article
Nature is the master teacher: a forager's way of life
Finnish chef's journey from London restaurant to wild food philosophy reveals how foraging connects humans to nature's rhythms and transforms health and consciousness
At the Hololife Summit in Tokyo, Sami Tallberg stood before an audience largely unfamiliar with foraging and made a bold claim: it represents the ultimate biohack and life hack. Over the next hour, the Finnish chef and foraging educator wove together personal narrative, ecological wisdom and practical guidance, painting a picture of foraging as far more than simply gathering wild food.
Tallberg's journey began two decades ago in an unlikely setting: a frantic Thursday lunch service at his Shoreditch restaurant in East London. In that moment, as his kitchen brigade prepared to serve 120 covers in two hours, an encounter with a stranger carrying a bag of sea kale would fundamentally redirect his life's path.
A chance encounter with wild abundance
The stranger, Miles Irving, arrived uninvited with his 1970s Volkswagen van parked illegally outside. "Who the hell are you? What are you doing here at this time of day? And what is sea kale?" Tallberg recalled asking, bemused by this unconventional delivery at the worst possible moment.
Irving waited ninety minutes whilst service continued. When things quieted, he introduced Tallberg to the vegetable that would change everything: a plant resembling broccoli, with colours ranging from blueish to green with purple tones and a white base where it had grown beneath the soil, away from sunlight.
Tallberg prepared it simply, boiling it for minutes and serving it with hollandaise sauce, the way he might serve asparagus. "Immediately after the first bite, I realized it was the most noble vegetable on planet earth that I had ever come across at that stage of my life," he said. "I still think so, twenty years later."
He bought the entire bag for two hundred euros and that evening served it alongside grilled brill fish. All sixty portions sold within the first hour.
From chef to student of nature
The following day, Tallberg's day off, he joined Irving on a foraging expedition to the Kent coast. After breakfast of a dozen oysters at low tide, they filled boxes with sea kale in half an hour. Then Irving encouraged him to simply look around.
Tallberg saw two-metre-high plants with bright yellow flowers, their fennel-like aroma carried on the wind. They collected some, then went searching for Saint George's mushroom at a spot that typically yielded ten to twenty kilos annually. They found nothing.
"A major teaching," Tallberg reflected. "We don't go to nature and grab what we want, but we enter with respect and interact with nature."
They settled beside a stream surrounded by wild watercress in quantities beyond anything Tallberg had imagined finding in nature. As sunlight reflected off the water creating a prism effect, he experienced what he described as a moment of surrender to nature's guidance.
Within a year of that first foraging trip, Tallberg had specialized in cooking with wild food and begun taking people foraging. Two decades later, his repertoire includes over 120 edible plants and 80 different mushroom species.
Mutual respect between humans and ecosystems
At the heart of Tallberg's foraging philosophy lies a principle of mutual respect. "We always enter nature with permission," he explained. "If we don't get permission, we don't enter."
In over twenty years of practice, he has been denied permission only once. "Nature is open-minded when we interact respectfully," he said, emphasizing that this represents mutual respect between humans and nature because "we are part of nature, not above it."
This approach extends to gratitude. When foraging something, practitioners thank nature for the ingredients and live with gratitude. The practice connects foragers to cosmic cycles: the four seasons, seventy-two micro seasons and beyond.
"By foraging, we inevitably connect with our higher selves," Tallberg said. "Walking around searching for ingredients, it's impossible not to feel mindful. It takes about 15 to 20 minutes to settle at the energy level that nature provides."
The annual cycle of wild abundance
Tallberg detailed how the foraging year unfolds in Finland, with parallels applicable to Japan and other regions. The season begins in April after winter, when tree buds open and sap begins to flow. A small ceremony involves asking the tree for permission before drilling a hole to collect sap.
Traditionally, a few litres of birch sap cleanse the body from winter and prepare it for summer, offering a way to calibrate with nature's rhythms. Foragers eat buds, then shoots as they emerge.
Edible plants pass through distinct growth stages, each offering different flavours and textures: micro shoots, shoots at 10 centimetres, 20 centimetres, up to 30 centimetres. When plants reach 30 centimetres, they produce flower stems. Before the stem shoots, the flower bud is plentiful and sweet. Later come flowers themselves, then seeds, and in autumn, roots become the focus.
Tallberg organizes edible plants into five categories: salad leaves, herbs, substantial vegetables, aromatic plants, trees and shrubs, and medicinal plants. All represent versatile, healthy ingredients.
Micro seasons and nutritional abundance
Beyond the four seasons, Tallberg observes seventy-two micro seasons in Finland. "Observing these, being present, is beautiful and establishes an annual calendar," he said. "It's impossible to miss the mindfulness that comes with it."
The deeper practitioners go, the more wild foods they eat, the more they sense the energy of those plants and mushrooms, all based on human-nature interaction.
He displayed a plate of salad ingredients gathered during a half-hour walk: thirteen different plants. Such a salad contains concentrated nutrients, micronutrients, quality protein and health-boosting compounds. "Each wild plant you find around Tokyo, in any green area, contains thirty to seventy health-boosting compounds," he noted.
From April onwards, foragers can gather sap and young shoots, continuing through October and November, eight months of active foraging. During winter's rest period from December to March, the focus shifts to wild fish during spawning season, fish roe and game.
An active foraging habit can add 25 to 50 new ingredients to one's annual diet, greatly improving gut health.
Practical guidance and safety imperatives
Foragers need minimal equipment: a tote bag or basket, scissors, a knife with a brush for mushrooms. Tallberg sometimes picks plants or mushrooms on the spot without a container, eating them raw and fresh on site.
Preservation methods include drying, fermenting, pickling, salting, brining, and extracting into water, alcohol or glycerine, enabling year-round use of foraged ingredients.
However, Tallberg stressed a crucial safety warning: "Never eat something just because it looks good or seems okay. Many plants are deadly poisonous. Safety first—find a local forager, or join one of my courses."
A skill that awakens ancient wisdom
Tallberg believes the foraging skill lies dormant within everyone, waiting to be activated. In his courses, within four hours participants can open their minds to the topic, witness great abundance, pick edible and medicinal plants, prepare a simple meal, and eat it.
"After these five steps in four hours, your life can change," he said. "It's a big promise, but I've witnessed it for years."
The beauty lies in how natural the skill becomes once activated. Tallberg provides guidelines and support, but the ability itself is innate. Different parts of the world offer different species—Finland, Japan, Australia, Switzerland, the UK—but the principle remains: eat what's around you and connect to your immediate nature, joining the annual life cycle.
"Foraging means to feed, protect, guard," Tallberg concluded. "It packs ancient wisdom and traditional knowledge that we can activate for modern life."
He shared examples from different contexts: early spring in Central Park, Helsinki; a hot walk near Bangkok focused on flowers; his own yard in Finland's southwest archipelago; an early morning walk in Bern, Switzerland in early June. Each location offered abundance once one learned to see it.
The practice extends beyond vegetables to include edible mushrooms in vast quantities, including medicinal polypores like maitake, reishi, lion's mane, coral mushrooms and cordyceps. All were originally wild and can be transformed into delicious preparations, including unconventional creations like chaga and reishi ice cream.
Beyond nutrition to transformation
Throughout his presentation, Tallberg returned repeatedly to themes beyond mere nutrition. Foraging offers perspective on everything in life—relationship issues, traumas, unresolved matters—which "always find their place while foraging."
It provides a unique observation post and boosts creativity, surrounding practitioners with absolute beauty and natural harmonious order, all governed by mycelium beneath the soil.
This broader vision of foraging as a practice that transforms consciousness and health, not simply a method of food gathering, underpinned Tallberg's message to the Tokyo audience. In a modern urban context, the practice offers a pathway back to rhythms and wisdom that sustained human life for millennia.
As the session concluded, Tallberg expressed his delight at exploring the topic of foraging with the summit audience, offering those interested the opportunity to explore further through his books and website, which now exists primarily in Japanese.
For a room of people largely unfamiliar with foraging at the session's start, Tallberg had opened a doorway to seeing their immediate environment differently: not as backdrop to urban life, but as a living teacher offering abundance, wisdom and connection to those willing to approach with respect and attention.
Part of Hololife Summit 2025 Tokyo