Foraging Wild Plants
Ben Greenfield Interviews Miles Irving
Miles Irving (UK)
Miles Irving is one of Europe’s most respected professional foragers. A psychology graduate and carpenter by trade, Miles has been foraging for almost ten years. He now runs a small, but energetic rural enterprise called Forager and is the author of The Forager Handbook.
Ben Greenfield (USA)
BenGreenFieldFitness.com, Human Performance Author & Consultant, Top 100 Most Influential People in Health & Fitness
Ben Greenfield is an ex-bodybuilder, Ironman triathlete, Spartan racer, coach, speaker and author of the New York Times Bestseller “Beyond Training: Mastering Endurance, Health and Life” (http://www.BeyondTrainingBook.com). In 2008, Ben was voted as NSCA’s Personal Trainer of the year and in 2013 and 2014 was named by Greatist as one of the top 100 Most Influential People In Health And Fitness. Ben blogs and podcasts at BenGreenfieldFitness.com, and resides in Spokane, WA with his wife and twin boys.
Miles Irving, author of The Forager Handbook, unveils the fascinating world of
It’s fascinating that there’s something out there in the wild, not even hidden, it’s just because we didn’t notice it. It’s like a marvelous treasure hunt. I felt like a little kid when I was exploring this.
Summary
- Modern agricultural breeding has prioritized sweetness and water content over nutrient density, resulting in produce that lacks the intense flavors and health benefits found in wild plants.
- Wild plants contain essential bitter compounds and astringent flavors that often serve as natural antioxidants, providing superior nutrition compared to common supermarket produce.
- High levels of sugar in modern diets have conditioned palates to reject the complex, bitter flavors found in nature, leading to a reliance on heavy dressings to make tasteless produce palatable.
- Many plants labeled as weeds, such as dandelions and stinging nettles, are resilient and nutritious food sources that grow abundantly in urban and rural environments without human intervention.
- Beginners can safely transition to wild foods by learning to identify common species like plantain and nettle, then gradually adding them to familiar dishes to acclimate to their unique flavors.
Article
Foraging Wild Plants: Nutrient Density And Identification With Miles Irving
At Biohacker Summit 2016 London, A Walk Through The Weeds Became A Rebuke To Modern Food
On 21 May 2016, at Biohacker Summit 2016 London, Ben Greenfield interviewed British forager Miles Irving in a presentation that felt less like a wellness trend briefing and more like a quiet indictment of the modern food chain. Titled *Foraging Wild Plants*, the conversation ranged from the English countryside to the supermarket aisle, asking a disarmingly simple question: what if the plants we dismiss as weeds are more nourishing, more flavorful and more sensible than the produce we prize?
Irving, one of Europe’s best-known professional foragers and author of *The Forager Handbook*, did not frame the subject as rustic nostalgia. Nor did Greenfield, the American performance coach and author, treat it as a romantic escape from urban life. Instead, the pair presented foraging as a practical correction to a food culture that had, in Irving’s words, “accidentally selectively bred the nutrition and flavor out of our food.”
The Bitter Truth About Sweetness
The central argument was stark. Modern agriculture, Irving said, had spent decades selecting for sweetness, water content and bland accessibility, often at the expense of fiber, bitterness and nutritional density. The result was produce that looked wholesome enough under supermarket lighting but carried little of the vigor that wild plants still possess.
“We have accidentally selectively bred the nutrition and flavor out of our food,” Irving said. “We ought to be embracing bitter flavors and intensity because those are often supplied by things that are super nutritious and good for us.”
That bitterness, far from being a culinary defect, emerged in the discussion as a sign of value. Irving pointed to industrial food processing that strips bitter compounds from products such as orange juice to make sweetness more dominant, even when those compounds may have anti-carcinogenic properties. In the pursuit of instant appeal, he suggested, food culture had narrowed the palate and impoverished the plate.
Greenfield pushed the point with the kind of line that lingered: perhaps, he suggested, people now drowned salads in heavy dressings because the leaves themselves “don’t taste of anything.” Irving’s reply was withering and memorable. Supermarket lettuce, he said, was “a clever way to market water.”
The Lost Education Of The Palate
If modern farming had altered crops, modern eating had altered the eater. Irving argued that high-sugar diets had conditioned people to distrust the very flavors that once signaled nourishment: bitterness, astringency, sharp aromatics, the clean edge of a wild leaf.
“I like to look at foraging as making your palate grow up a little bit,” he said. “There are whole nuances of bitterness and intense aromatic flavors in wild plants that we should be reclaiming.”
It was one of the most resonant ideas of the session. Foraging, in Irving’s telling, was not merely about sourcing food differently. It was about recovering sensory adulthood in a culture that relentlessly courted childish cravings. The wild leaf, the nettle, the dandelion, the sour tang of sorrel: these were not fringe ingredients but reminders of what food once asked of us, and what it offered in return.
Weeds, Misjudged And Misunderstood
Again and again, the presentation returned to the same inversion. The plants people struggled to eliminate from gardens often turned out to be the very ones most capable of feeding them. Dandelions, nettles and plantain were cast not as invaders but as resilient, nutrient-dense companions, growing vigorously without chemicals, irrigation schedules or elaborate human management.
“The plants we fight against are not only beneficial, but are so full of vigor that they grow without any help,” Irving said. “We have a backwards value system where we despise wild plants as weeds while struggling to grow food that has no flavor or nutrition.”
It was a devastating summary of a wider ecological absurdity. Much of modern gardening, Irving implied, amounted to working against the intelligence of natural systems, expending labor to cultivate fragile, diluted foods while uprooting robust edible species already adapted to the land.
“We are often trying to work against the natural system to our own detriment,” he said, “whereas if we worked with this natural system, we would be benefited and it would be less work.”
Foraging Beyond The Countryside
One of the most democratic aspects of the talk was Irving’s insistence that foraging was not the preserve of rural romantics. Though the interview unfolded against a pastoral backdrop, he was clear that wild edible plants could also be found in cities, in gardens, in parks and even pushing through pavement cracks.
That mattered. It moved foraging away from fantasy and toward accessibility. The point was not that every urban resident should roam indiscriminately through polluted verges, but that many edible wild species remained astonishingly common, even in heavily built environments. The nutritional commons, Irving suggested, had been underfoot all along.
A Treasure Hunt That Feeds Itself
Irving’s own route into foraging began simply, with a small book and a handful of plants. He described the process not as a disciplinary regime but as a self-reinforcing delight.
“The satisfaction we had from bringing wild plants home and turning them into something delicious and satisfying made the whole experience self-reinforcing,” he said.
That phrase captured something essential. Foraging was presented not just as knowledge acquisition, but as enchantment. It offered the thrill of recognition, the intimacy of place and the pleasure of making a meal from something once overlooked. In an age of abstraction, barcode nutrition and hyper-processed convenience, that directness carried unusual force.
How To Begin Without Getting Lost
For all its philosophical breadth, the session was also practical. Irving urged beginners to start with a very small number of easily identifiable plants and to confirm every identification carefully within their local region.
His suggested gateway species were notably humble. Stinging nettle, familiar to almost anyone who has brushed against it, was one of the easiest starting points and could be cooked much like spinach. Dandelion, common and distinct, offered a more bitter introduction. Plantain, recognizable by the strong parallel veins in its leaves, brought a fibrous texture and, Irving noted, an unexpectedly mushroom-like flavor when sliced finely into salads or slaws.
His advice was not to force a complete dietary conversion overnight, but to acclimatize the palate gradually. Add a little chopped dandelion to grated carrot and beetroot, he suggested, then a little more next time. Learn the taste. Let the bitterness become familiar. What begins as challenge can become craving.
A Quiet Revolt Against Flavorless Abundance
By the close of the presentation, *Foraging Wild Plants* had become about far more than fieldcraft. At Biohacker Summit 2016 London, Ben Greenfield and Miles Irving used the language of weeds and wild greens to interrogate a deeper cultural failure: the substitution of sweetness for complexity, convenience for vitality and abundance for nourishment.
Their message was not puritanical. It was sensuous. Wild plants, Irving argued, were delicious precisely because they were intense, structured by bitterness, aroma and life. They demanded attention and rewarded it. In reclaiming them, people might recover not only lost nutrients, but lost standards.
The backyard weed, the neglected verge, the nettle no one planted and the dandelion no one wanted all stood, by the end, as symbols of a more honest food system. Not engineered for shelf life or stripped for mass appeal, but vigorous, local and alive.
In that sense, Irving’s appeal was both ancient and quietly radical: stop fighting the edible world at your feet. Taste it. Learn it. Let it change you.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2016 London