Ep. 3: Robin Harford - Ethnobotanist - Part 1

Hello, I'm Harriet Mansell and welcome back to Iffertree Fools. This week I am joined by Robin Harford, Plant Forager, Ethnobotanical Food Researcher, Author and Wild Food Educator. Robin established his company Eat Weeds and his Wild Food Foraging School in 2008. Since then, BBC CountryFile has listed his foraging course as one of the best foraging courses in the UK. He has released numerous bestselling foraging guidebooks and has an incredibly successful podcast that Eat Weeds podcast. Robin has a diverse and incredibly well-informed approach to wild foods. His knowledge is extensive and Robin is a fascinating and warm presence to be around. His approach to wild foods and their benefits forms part of a belief that runs through him and comes from his heart. Join us as we explore learning from indigenous knowledge, monocultures, hybridisation, sustainability, fully wild diets and more this week on Iffertree Fools. So I'm Robin Harford from Eat Weeds.co.uk and you are? Harriet Mansell from Harriet Mansell and Robin Wild and Lyelook in Lyme Regers. Great. Which are restaurants, yes? Robin Wild and Lyelook are my two restaurants in Lyme Regers and I have travelled all the way across to Exeter the entire 50-minute drive to come for a walk in a urban setting. Urban, a little bit urban. No, it's urban. Yeah. I mean, Exeter is a very green city. This is one of the routes that I do when I'm kind of wake up in the morning and go thinking time, you know, just well, kind of let it all go and then things rise in your head. So as you can hear, birds, very lush, very green and food. The question is whether or not you want to pick this food. You can go ask some kind of dubious elements to picking all of it here, aren't there? But you've probably got some unstered patches. You could add a few nettles here. Yeah, if you can tolerate going into the forest. The Nettel Forest. Into down there. This is where you really do not go in flip-flops. You head off into the into the hedge because you're not in an urban setting. Are you? You're in countryside. Yeah, I think that is fair to say. Obviously Lyme Regers and you know, it's a town and upline where I live as a little village just on the outskirts of Lyme Regers. But it's quite rural, a little bit agricultural. If it's agriculture, is that like spray agriculture? So what's the diversity like? Just, I mean, there's some farms. There's a dairy farm. You know, there's a couple of those nearby. Okay. And I'm not sure what the crops are. I really have no ideas to be honest with you. You know, I've got my little kind of farm radar on for things that we buy for the restaurant. Sure. We buy a lot from one in Musbury and then there's one in just a side-accessory, so it's a children farm. Children garden and they grow. Yeah, ash is it? Kate Nash. Kate Nash. Yeah. Yeah. Is it big now? I mean, they've got this massive field that they have really dominated and they've got lots of lots of people working for them now because yeah, they increased their supply. Over the pandemic, they definitely started doing a bit more for the domestic side of things. So they were supplying to more than just restaurants because restaurants weren't exactly. They were much trade, were they? They were much trade. Unless you're a savvy chef, having London. Yeah, they're going to. There's a guy here, Rob Dott. He's got really savvy and fortunately, suddenly figured that people didn't mind takeaways. I think if you could hit that takeaway thing and you got your right market, there are places and chefs that have never let that go and that's probably enabled them to, you know, that's a solid revenue stream, isn't it? Absolutely. So if you're in a city and you can offer that, then you're you're winning. Yeah. There's not much demand for, or there's not enough demand, sorry, where I live for. For that kind of thing? To sustain it. Yeah. It'll be effort that would go into it. We're quite seasonal. I like that ash over at Trilland and Kate have come because I initially, when when Romy Fraser who set up Niels Yard, sold Niels Yard, she then bought Trill and set up Trill as an educational establishment and farm and all the usual stuff. You know, I was one of the first people to teach there, teaching foraging with people like Fraser Christian and Ipsos Fito. One of the other ones was a guy called Ian Barrow's who must have been 20. 2007, 2008. He was in Norfolk. He wrote this wonderful book, not known about now, but that book is like a really, really good book to get the kind of the more traditional food. So there's got to be satiric wild plants, aren't there? I mean, there's, you know, because you're on the kind of the high end level of chefy culture in your world from from me being an outsider looking in. You know, everyone's trying to find that extra little cool thing that very few people are experimenting with and that's great from an artist and an artistic point of view. But when I go into Europe, like I came back from Italy from a bruiseau and there it's like, it seems to be this thing of like, just boils greens. So Ian's book was like the top 50 plants that we would have eaten. So it's interesting for me as an ethnobotanical researcher to see where, where you folks are taking the wild ingredients versus to how peasant culture, for one of a better word, a graarian culture would have worked with wild ingredients. It's completely different. How do you feel about that? Me saying that. Yeah, I think that you have actually highlighted like, you know, quite almost like an opening divide in the two, in the two lines of inquiry because. That's a good way of describing it. Lines of inquiry. I like that. When I came to work with wild ingredients like, or maybe like a lot of chefs who have chosen to pursue wild ingredients, it was to pursue the flavour. Yeah. And you weren't quite able to satisfy the flavour requirements with what you could find in the supermarket and you knew that there was more out there. And I've, you know, I've heard lots of other chefs say that, you know, you're on a quest to find that extra something for your palette that's going to excite the customer. And also you. So that was why I started out. Whereas I suppose people who are fascinated in herbs or the medicinal qualities or just to understand what grows around you and to connect with nature, you come maybe initially from a different angle but then meet in the middle. That's my understanding. I think that over time, and I'm very much on the journey now, at one point I started to try to understand nutritional aspects, you know. That's a very obvious thing to suddenly start to try to understand as a chef. You incorporate that into your culinary training. What do you mean by that? Well, I think when you're in cookery school they say, "Oh, this has vitamin C." Oh, okay, okay. This has. This is high in B vitamins. This is for your digestion. So very interesting. Simple, nutritional things that I don't know if they taught chefs who were training 50 years ago in that area. I'm sure they must have done a little bit, but I suppose with. I mean, I'm sure they're learning something different in cookery school today. I don't know. But when I went to cookery school, they gave us a little bit of information on kind of diet and nutrition. Yeah. Yeah. I might all work, but nothing too extreme. And then there was this starting to work with foragers and hearing their insights into why they might use plants in a certain way and what might be good to help a stomach problem or to soothe something or to help a burn or just basically remedial medicinal aspects of the. Folk medicines, what I call it. Folk medicine, yeah. So I became interested in that, but not overly interesting. Sure. Because I thought, well, I want to know, but actually I kind of wanted to understand as much as I could from a. Yeah, you know, you want to learn stories about plants and things like that and just. Sure. And that's part of the story. Yeah. Because when you're giving people customers food, part of their journey and experience is saying, well, I'm presenting you with a story today. Yeah. And I'm going to take you from the people who grew it or where I picked it. Yeah. And give you some information and then you will eat it and you will engage more with it if you know more about it. Yes. Perfect. Yes. It's an interesting one that about nutrition because I mean I've written books on wild edible plants and one of the things that positions my book, all my primary book, edible and medicinal wild plants have written Ireland away from the other books is that I've gone quite heavily where possible to find the nutritional value of the wild edible plants. But in reality for me as a forager with again having been into traditional cultures, indigenous cultures, deliberately to learn from them not so much about their particular ingredients, but their relationship with the plant foods around them, the cultivated and the uncultivated plants. And I'm in a place where now it's like again a bit like that Tim Specter talking about them, Tim Specter set up the Zerry project with a few other people and that's the reason we all know about the word the microbiome or gut health everyone's because of his work and he's very clear you know we need to get people eating 30 species of plants so we're talking diversity so we're foraging we're talking big diversity because you know as a chef you know suddenly your pallet of ingredients has doubled tripled I mean we could go even higher than that if you're really noting out on the ingredients so when it comes to nutrition my thinking now my way of working with food plants is providing I'm getting that massive diversity I don't need to go down the western I mean Specter's reductionist but he's not totally reductionist so the usual western thing is to fragment things break it apart and look for that isolate oh a bit of mincee yeah instead of the holistic approach which is whole food has yes vitamin C most likely along with the load of other things but if you're eating a huge diversity we don't actually need to worry about are we getting enough because we are by default which I always find interesting I mean I listen to a thing with Specter the other day talking about Dairy I think he was talking about and they weren't talking isolates he was very clear or that his colleague is on the show where she was very clear about you know it's not that granular so the science which I'm really into is there's there's holistic take it's not to reductionist which has always been the criticism of science that it's it's so reductionist that you exclude other things that can be quite helpful does that any of that make sense yeah well I mean I think that the holistic is that the emergent side of things isn't it the the opposite of the reductionist yes well actually when you're to is it like I evader it's like Eastern medicine a bit a bit like people going well actually we understand that taking a holistic viewpoint or accepting that things can be more than the sum of their parts which is effectively life itself yeah or at least our experience of it then that yes pulls you away from the kind of minutiae of going okay well we need to understand what exactly is what exactly is the composition of that leaf and then and then kind of maybe taking away from the overall sense of direction that a person needs to go in which is effectively what you said diversity I think that I've always I've never worried too much about nutrition in terms of personally sure I've just always had a thirst for well maybe an appetite is more of an appropriate word yeah yeah for flavor and for a range of foods and I love small quantities of lots of different foods and that makes me happy and that makes all defines my style of food in the restaurant as well that's I find that okay so there's a number of things that are come arising so for the listeners who are hearing this we are riffing aren't we this is completely unstructured and and I'm finding immediately some curious things so before I lose the thinking what you just said about how you like producing small but lots of okay okay so let's hold that idea before I lose it and then the other one was you talking about nutrition the folk medicine side of the plants now my friend who lives in Vietnam in Hanh an he spends a lot of time in the mountains with the tribal folk and he said a couple of days ago when I saw him he said that one of the things that he was fascinated was that in Vietnam when he first arrived every single dish was medicine intentionally yes so he was very clear that the Vietnamese their influences historically and culinary wise have come from China whereas places like Thailand etc are India based all right now you could say well there's that so India's I Vader the potentially the oldest herbal medicine tradition in the world I'm sure the Chinese are going to knock against that this me saying that so then you have the Chinese but in the Chinese one there's the old thing of like you know the doctor would get fine if the patient got ill so that's fed into the culinary tradition of Vietnam now I don't know whether that's a general one or he's talking just his specific region or he's talking just the tribal I mean we were just riffing in a cafe so I didn't go that granular but I found that fascinating and how that feeds into you having an interest in the folk medicine of food because that's what they do in Vietnam every single dish I mean he said we I was sitting down and and they were pointing out each dish I was told well that's for the lungs to help you breathe clearly that's to warm you up in winter you know these medicine basically food as medicine I mean forget your pocket is he was behind the times when he said let food be your medicine and medicine be your food you know the Asians and the Indians well way ahead by five thousand you know like I mean I've ate as five thousand years Chinese medicine three and a half then must probably say ten thousand well I think it's interesting because again it highlights primarily when I wanted to cook for people what I've always enjoyed is this idea of giving someone a complete experience they've had a meal they've tasted lots of things so they're excited their palate's been taken on a little journey of what's available at the time of year in the place that they're in and on top of that the food isn't designed to make them feel bad in fact it's the opposite the food is designed to hopefully make them feel like they haven't had too much of a heavy meal uplift them uplift them and you know my knowledge of food you know it has run in a complementary way to me trying to learn about how food makes me feel like you know engaged in more holistic practices over the years myself sure the yoga teacher and yeah that jazz yeah yeah so you you started to understand how how food works on your specific body type you can't design food for every person's body type and that's a crazy idea yeah when you align with that thought process and you think well actually I want to make food that makes people feel really interested engaged I also want it to be arguably delicious or at least my version of what I think delicious is to them at this point of the year and I want them to not walk away feeling like sluggish yeah or unwell I want them to have had food that is uplifting so there's lots of fermentation there's lots of creating all of those those things that contribute to our microbiome sure and and it's very fresh yeah fundamentally there's a lot of raw or uncooked ingredients okay interesting there are a lot of cooking really it's as well yeah yeah I'm fascinated by this when I look at other cultures salad isn't really that big yes salad I serve a lot of this is a modern thing because if you go to the medieval record you know they took out salads but they're often warm salads they were cooked salads but our heads are like oh no it's raw I think that a cooked salad in in older times would have been people understood fire as being more sanitary or cooking to them exactly yes whereas we've gained a bit of confidence in yeah in our times and then you've got the the modern health movements as well it probably influenced people like the raw thing yeah maybe the actually I don't know what paleo tells people to do paleos of complete fancy because if you know if you if you really are doing paleo then the food you would find in say Iceland compared to southern Africa during paleo times will be completely different foods so this generic oh one size fits all paleo diet everyone needs for an indigenous diet well they do need their own indigenous and I suppose when I'm immediately thinking of like that cooked thing of the past and like you say it's a hygiene thing it was part of the health practice because pathogens you know people people ask me in the city oh do I what what do you do about when you want salad it's like you know what I live in a city now I cook I don't eat raw salads very very occasionally I will and if I go to Asia where you get those beautiful bowls of like soups full of stuff you do get the fresh herbs and they are medicinal herbs but they they're just they're on the top that you warm within the sat the soup so yeah I think I'm trying to think of whether we forage things and use the minors salad-y capacity because obviously we use a lot of the cultivated salads from mashing case sure and herbs obviously and you think something like her brother my really really really I had a German girlfriend and she said that in her culture they use her brother as a little sprinkling on sale because it's quite bitter but it's medicinal it's quite bitter but with with with a small quantity of it the fragrance I think is amazing because it's all like coriander to me yeah yeah linked perception there and other people think it's like dog pee yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah shakshani she's like oh I know it's got such an agreeable fragrance yeah which I learned from your book but for a with a agreeable fragrance was I think it was GM Abanum what events yes yes and I was thinking I was reading the ah the from Gina I don't know all of these things yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah the kind of the etymology is it yeah and just word transmutation yeah the word for that but yeah I found that fascinating but yeah I find it has a very agreeable fragrance but the flavour doesn't come through and yeah it's a bitter leafy thing and actually sometimes you want bitter I say sometimes we work primarily with bitterness as a flavour profile bitter bitter bitter is really good it's my it's the problem with the Western classic diet over 50 years I would say we've hybridized out the bitterness and made them more sweet so chikri when I was growing up was really harsh. Chiquiri now is mild. It's not a bitter, bitter plus. No, it's not. It's very mild. It's almost got a sweetness to it. Yeah, it has. If first, if you get the very like the on-deaf, you know, the green, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, the English green. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very sweet. Yeah. I mean, Ash and Kate are obsessed with Chiquiri. They do Chiquiri week every year and they're always, yeah, they love the bitter. You know, they like it. Great, excellent. Most of their cultivated, salad leads are extraordinarily bitter or mustadie. Really? It survived well through the wind and the soil. It seems like the purple frills have got such an intense. Okay, I don't know this one, purple frills. It's beautiful, actually. Okay. So, serves as a garnish, but only if the dish needs. Yeah, yeah. Because it's punchy, isn't? It's punchy, yeah. Brilliant. But I find, I mean, that's what I found with with foraging and the wild ingredients when I first came into them was that I talk about, I, to me, nature's a metaphor. Okay, so as much as we're talking food, you're getting a life lesson from it. So come. They were my pork ass. If a tree falls in the forest and no one was around to hear it, did it make a sound? And going into the forest to get food and then coming out with some information about yourself or life or something greater. Well, yeah, metaphors. This is just nature and I'm like little words, words, words. Sorry, can you carry on? And what I was saying is that I'm at a point in my journey, plant journey, where I no longer want to be defined as a foraging. Foraging is something I do as a human. It is not what defines me. So, okay, so having lived as a foraging for 15 years, what am I defining myself as? I'm not sure, but what I'm seeing is that I no longer. When I lived in the countryside, I was quite prejudice against lawns, an urban space, incultivated, neatness. Now I've lived in the city since 2040s, and nearly 10 years, I've shifted my taking, so I don't. I no longer want to separate. And this is what I like about European culinary traditions. And I mean agrarian peasant culture, peasant in a good way. Peasant culture. Peasant culture. I refer to it as noble peasant culture because peasant has a derogatory term. And I don't mean it in that. In any way, I mean it in a particular context of how we lived with the land in the past, if you want a king, basically, or a queen. And so we have this interplay between cultivated and uncultivated. And I'm in a place where I don't want to exclude one or another. It's not an either or, it's a both-hand. But there's some interesting lessons that we learn with cultivated plants. Traditional cultivated plants, excluding things like permaculture, means that we do monoculture. We get rid of all the plants that that specific plant by growing might compete against, which gives us gentler flavours because it hasn't had to struggle. Right? So this is really, I think, this bits fascinating, we're talking medicine food. Yeah. So if it hasn't had to struggle, there's not much medicine in it. There is nutrition in it, but not as much as say an uncultivated plant, wild edible plant, it's had to struggle. I mean, look at all this. Yeah, these plants are having to really struggle. So their flavours, and if they're medicine, is going to be considerably stronger than if you were just growing that hogweed monoculture wise. Yeah. So there's this, again, this thing of like, if we go to Vietnam, you know, where all those dishes were medicine foods, a lot of that includes wild, as well as cultivated. And in Europe, whenever I've been recently, there's this interface of like, it's not all we just forage. It's like, no, we've got a little garden where we're growing our vegetables and making our pasta. And oh, by the way up the hedges I walk into village to go to the to post a letter, I'm picking up wild plants as well. So there's no separation. It's not about separating. It feels for me with the foraging community that there's this kind of drive to be, you know, 100% wild. And I mean, it's great as a scientific experiment, but completely impractical for everybody else. You live on planet Earth. Not an appropriate message in times we live in. I don't think so. No. I mean, it's certainly interesting from from lots of different angles. Totally. So this is an incorporation of a reintroducing of our traditional foods that we've kind of forgotten. And often those foods were wild plants, which interestingly in some of the monastic guns like Alexander's was grown. Yes. Yeah, but it's a fairy. It was a it was feral. It was grown and it's gone back to feral. But now we could grow it. And and but again, I suppose that's why I like things like permaculture and forest gardening because we're maintaining the food medicine coordinates of a plant. Yeah. Which monoculture does do. We don't get me wrong. I you know, we couldn't feed anybody if we didn't have monoculture. So there's so much to there's so much to know and to learn and to share that when you open up these conversations or the kind of lines of inquiry that perhaps yourself as a non-labelled forager or plant person. Plant person. Plant worker. Yeah. That's my self as you know, in the first commas. Don't know what I am. High in chef. Well, but these are the last I'm going to come back to that. Okay. But you suddenly experience it's a lens through which you're viewing the world effectively. And to kind of share that lens or at least say, hey, like get an idea of looking at the world through this lens. You you don't say to a person, oh, you need to go into five of these things for this amount of time. You have to go for it is or blah, blah, blah. I've got these practical. But what you are saying is take a little look around and and and place of value on nature and place of value on the on the world that we live in. So I've come to you think a few times about what's the sustain, you know, people say to you what is sustainable. How do you work in a sustainable way? Yeah. Anyway, other guys. Yeah. I have to say I've held back. I haven't exerted an opinion in the past actually about it. I've said I play a lot. It's a fluffy word. It's very tricky and it's this, oh, yeah. I place a value on appreciating the world around me and of doing my best to understand and engage with and learn, but also trying to be respectful in the way that we're going about things. But then I've got to go for some different directions. There's things that we've spoken about before. I mean, we're supposed to bloody by a hobby plant, you know. And we spoke about that the other day. Yeah, yeah. Really nice, interesting example of of a plant that you wouldn't overly go and recommend to people to go and start eating willy nilly. No, absolutely not. Dangerous look alike. It's the fact that I mean, you used to, I told my chef straight away what you said to me the other day about the seeds when they're green. Yeah. And hybridisation as well. I think we have this, we do feel we have. We share that thing actually on the about the eating the seeds given people reactions. Okay, so, so I just say what I told you the story of hogweed. So loads of chefs are serving up hogweed shoots, Herak Lim's Vondilium. You know, early spring, it's the shoot that everyone goes for. Now I've eaten it for nearly 20 years. So theoretically, I should by now know whether or not my body has a reaction to this plant. However, over the years of teaching, I've been teaching full time since 2008, which is when I set up my wild food school. I started getting reports of people when they started eating hogweed having reactions. Now some of them were really mild, shortness of breath, slight tingling in the mouth, yet. Some of them were really serious, like borderline and a phallactic shock, which is not funny. And you know, you and I have talked about we serve the public and therefore we've got to be really, we have a duty of care to our clients, yes. So I pulled hogweed off my teaching curriculum. I didn't teach it for two years. I wanted to know what was going on. And so far, I've had seven or eight, actually more now, nearly 10 reports of people having reactions enough that my I'm concerned red flag goes up. So I pulled it off and I start telling my other colleagues about the reactions. And to be fair, I'm almost overly cautious when I serve wild plants to people. And I've been accused of being too cautious, but that's just my way. I think if you've nearly died, not necessarily from eating things, but if you face your own death, then being cautious about keeping the rest of your life going is most probably quite sensible. Some people are more gung-ho, I'm not. So I pulled it off and one year, and I've got this recipe for spiced hogweed seed biscuits, which wasn't made by me, it was made by a friend called Marion, but it's on my site. And it's still on my site, but it's on my site with warnings. Now what we did was we would get the hogweed seeds, which smell very orangey. Cardamon immediately comes to mind for me and is used as a cardamon analogue like a mimic as a spice, the hidden spice chest of the hedgerow. And I'm on the Isle of White and I'm being put out by this lovely family and Thrupp is the person who's put me up and she's eating hogweed seed and hogweed for years. And what that year, which must be about 2012, I think, maybe 2011, we gather the green hogweed seeds, which we've done for years. Yeah, take them back to her house, dry them in her arga and make the spice hogweed seed biscuits. She eats half of one of the biscuits and her throat starts closing. And I mean closing to a point where I'm actually really concerned. And it's like this is so now totally off limits until I get some handle on what's going on because the point is, Thrapid Eaton Hogweed for many years wasn't like she was new to it and it suddenly came on. So there is this concept that I've played we call bio-accumulation. Just a soil accumulates toxins, plants can accumulate toxins. Now I'm not saying it's accumulated toxins, but there is something going on. So my friend, Mo Wild, up in Scotland, who's just done this year long, Wild Food Experiment and wrote a book called The Wilderness Care, she's a herba research, so she's a lot more sciencey than I am and she goes straight into Hogweed and analyzes it and comes up with a number of hypotheses as to why people may be having these reactions. One is the biggest allergy in Europe is celery. Well celery is the apiacy family, the carrot family, which is what Hogweed is a member of. So what we've had is we've had people, possibly, possibly, had people who actually have a very low level celery allergy, eating cultivated celery, no problem because of what we just talked about with hybridisation, grown hybridisation, not wild hybridisation, sunny eating something that they've got a reaction to. That could be one reason. The other reason is plants are not static, so because the poles ate this in the 16th century, they fermented it as a base for bush, soup, you know, 500 years on, this plant may well have hybridised with other subspecies. Well, Mo discovered that I think she said the six or seven subspecies that have come into Britain in the last 20, 30 years. This is going to have hybridised. There's that whole thing and again I just don't, you know, okay I've read books on the Mycelium Network and I've read books on what's going on between the under the soil and what's going on between the plants and the trees and there's stuff going on. There is. But then I, you know, I think to myself well, my friend Nick, he's a mushroom specialist, mushroom farmer, mushroom forager. He's ed to me one day, I was out in the woods with him and off well. There's also some shunter owls and I said, "Hey Nick, look what I found." And he said, "Yeah, no you're absolutely right Harry, I'm sure I'm sure I was a hoi, but I wouldn't pick those ones if I were you. If you just look at what they're growing next to, I think it was a really dangerous one." He was like, "I actually, they are most slightly absorbing toxins." He goes, "It's not definite, but I would be worried about the situation of those two things." And he goes, "So therefore whilst that's not going to kill you, it might give you a really upset stomach." "Yeah." He definitely wouldn't be serving that in your restaurant. I mean, I would never forage mushrooms and put them in my restaurant because I don't believe I'm qualified. Even if I know a lot. Sure, sure, sure. But that's a good moment. That's a moment of going, "Oh wow, God there's a lot, there's a lot to know." That's an interesting one because when I was 16 I was having a cigarette illegally because I was at school and one of the things we did to cover up the smell was to eat wild garlic in spring. I've seen my sister's not delight. Yeah, well it's not exactly a single thing, I haven't been having a fag, is that? That will mince just red flag to the teachers that you've been up to no good. But what I found interesting was I picked what I thought was a large wild garlic leaf and happened to be lords and ladies, Aramaculata, which is like poisonous. I've had someone ask me if well, it lords and leaves the wild garlic for and I was a gast. It's a really common one to make a mistake because they grow right in the same place. But I chewed on the leaf stalk, tasted a wild garlic. So this uptake of flavours like your chanturelle near Rody Dendrum, uptaking toxins potentially from Rody Dendrum. I do think there is something in it. I don't know whether we need to be that, I don't know. I mean I think yeah, if it's that blatant chanturule by Rody Dendrum, we'll wait until you find something that's in a bit more of a known totally, which I'm completely with. Personally, on a personal level, I would most probably be eating them, but certainly serving to the public know that's off. That is where it wanders the light. Absolutely. So we don't know about hogweed still and I'm still quite nervous when I see people serving it in restaurants because I do say that uncultivated plants are not cultivated plants. You're talking chalk and cheese really and already we talk like the nutritional content because it's had to struggle. They're different worlds but they do interface. The one that I think I mentioned this to you the other day when we were chatting, I've had a couple of reactions recently to woodruff and I obviously know that woodruff contains kuran and that's how you toxic to people. No toxic to some people in really high quantities, which I read that it was very unlikely that you could see. Yeah, it's not dried properly, it causes a problem, didn't it? Yeah, so I also read and I think I said to you so apparently you have to dry it quickly in order to prevent the fungal growth that could convert the kumarine into, is it? It's like dicumrol or something. My question was, well, like how quickly? Because the guidelines weren't really interesting. As we prepared it in line with our quite speedy drying guidelines and infused it into a syrup and into a cream pudding. Wasn't feeling great on the old throat. Interesting, isn't it? So it made me stop and go, okay and and three other people experienced that. So no, that's just one batch of woodruff throwing from here. And three other people from the same batch? Unprompted, experienced the same. That's fascinating. That's fascinating in a good way and fascinating in a slightly uncomfortable way. Because what does this say as we need to be doing when we introduce wild ingredients to the public? It's your world. I don't have that problem. But I'm aware of it and you know, when we had that discussion, you know, I came off that conversation going, smart woman, you know, you've got your charts, your document, your being, your being scientific. Yes. And that's where your friend Felix was telling you, you are actually doing science, even though not in the conventional set. I'm going to show you my spreadsheet when we get back. Yeah, no, that'd be great. Just to see where we're at and the gaps that need filling. Yeah. Just to recap for the purpose of the podcast, I started pulling together some food while Dada Bull's research. And again, I haven't not done every door yet because, well, this part of this process is me figuring out the doors to knock on. And I came to you with a few questions and I said, look, I've actually devoured your book. It's a complete nutter handbook for me. And there are other more verifiable sources of information, you know, all places that I'll go to find things out. And there are things that I've learned and acquired over the years from a knowledge perspective, from forages, from doing it, from education. And they got to a point where I thought, well, actually, all of my chefs are coming to me, saying sometimes asking me questions that I don't know the answers to. I say sometimes all the time. And I thought, well, I've just got over a responsibility here to pull this information together. So I thought to myself, let's get a log going. It's almost more than an allergen index, but primarily it started out going, what are the handling procedures? What are the allergens? What are the things that we know? What are the things we don't know? Names can be. We're assuming that the plant that we have on the sheet has been identified correctly. So that's the starting premise. So that's a whole other world in a completely different way than that. Yeah, exactly. That we're ignoring. We're assuming that we're having the correct plant. Yes. As a starting point. But no, it's definitely highlighting the gaps in the knowledge. And I think we said the other day, it's not about policing people, it's about understanding. I'm not serving all of these plants in the restaurant, but we're working with them because we're interested in flavour. Yes. So we tend to serve the more typical wild plants that people are more familiar with, nettle, by the hedge, all the wild garlics, so three-cornered leak. We use those types of things. We use pine. We use loads, but I mean, you came to eat a couple of weeks ago in the restaurant. You saw that we use a fairly pedestrian set of wild ingredients. And I'm really okay. So you've got me on my beef at the moment. It's not my beef. Is it a beef? No, it's not a beef. It's me trying to find where my place is now. I don't want to be seen as just this forager. I like that word you just use, pedestrian. So we've got a plant right here. Okay, so there's a classic thing. We're doing this walk and there's a there's a retirement complex over there. And in it is a farmer who obviously just can't handle being inside because he's a proper Devon farmer and he's out and he's basically taking it upon himself to manage and sculpt this particular patch of Exeter. People walk by this run, by this psychopath. They don't know who's doing this. This guy is doing this. Yeah. And as you can see, this is food and medicine. This is prolific what this guy's done. Now it's called John and I went and had a chat with him. He's actually really upset that there's all these beautiful food and medicine plants growing. And I said to myself, I said, John, you've got medicine and food here. So this classic one is Chikari, but this is behind me growing next to it or growing up it. So it's over because it's in flour, but this is a classic green that we eat as well as the roots. Yeah. So look at the Chikari. It's all look at its massive amounts of it. He got that beautiful malaine behind which, again, he's is normally a medicine plant and the flowers are like mushroom. If you eat them, they just taste the mushrooms, but they're beautiful. But so that's again immediately the flowers where you're not going to feed yourself. But historically Elizabethan times we had a massive flower tradition, flower salad tradition where you go down to it even with them ashen cake you've got the salad bags that they're going to produce. How many flowers do they put in it? I bet they don't put that many. Nostortion, marigold, bit of burrige, cornflowers, chai flowers? Okay, so they're actually right on the edge. That's way over what you normally get. Yeah, they're good, but they're doing nice little slits. No, I know, and I've chosen them deliberately. When I really like what they're doing, so I'm bigging them up, but they are extending it, but most people don't. 50/60 flowers used in flower salad in Elizabethan times. A whole aspect of our culinary heritage we've forgotten. So, Malaine flowers is that a pedestrian plant? No, it's not. It's Chiquiri pedestrian. So like you say, you use pedestrian, which is what I mean by when I go into Europe and you've got the old people gathering the plants and the hedge, those some of the pedestrian plants, they're the defaults that actually, not just a little garnish or canapé, it's solid food. Proper, a primary ingredient. A portion of their kind of daily plate. Yeah, and that's where I'm moving to with my work. Having taught high-end chefs like yourself in the past, then going into the global kind of exploring to indigenous cultures and how they relate to their local food. I'm now coming to a place in my own life age, most probably as well, and where I am. And I like the idea of, yeah, let's use all the plants for our nourishment. The diversity, massive diversity. And that idea of pedestrian, so we've got the Chiquiri and we've got the mustard. Yeah, we've got the nettles. These are the defaults. Join us again next week on Ifritry Falls. Robin and I continue our discussion on ancestral knowledge, plants and their attributes and using the senses and more. [Music]