About us

good food, good ale, all things nature, and hitting things with sticks.

From an early age he was a lover of the great outdoors and anything wild; from mushroom hunting with his Nan to building a wildlife pond in his garden. After spending his early years living in South London, Marlow moved to Scotland to attend secondary school. There he started to learn about wild food. Largely through walks around the local countryside that the teachers at his school used to enhance their lessons. Having now left an internet career behind, Marlow is delighted to be out foraging rather than sorting out HTML issues; even in the rain and wind!

(not in the Buddhist way) Eric is decidedly more happy in the woods than the city.

Living off the land and sustainable foraging are part of his family tradition and he himself has many years’ experience of farming, foraging and eating from the wild. He grew up near the South Downs and has lived and worked in France and Spain, as well as the UK. Along the way, he has built up a wealth of knowledge about wild food. One of his particular specialities is mushrooms which he has a great passion for. In his free time, Eric enjoys walking, exploring prehistoric sites and camping; his favourite places in the UK are the rugged spaces of Dartmoor and the Scottish Highlands.

might get in trouble for that! She would far rather be outside learning about the plants and mushrooms, or with her rescue horse John. She also loves cooking and experiments a lot with the things that we pick so you might taste some of her creations while on a course with one of the team.
She is certainly not so keen on fax machines and even has a morbid fear of the telephone, but we’ve stuck a mane and toy horse to it, which seems to be curing her, so she’ll be happy to hear from you.

Better late than never is a phrase used very often in Rachels company, and never in a truer sense. Her designs are worth waiting for, as are her roast dinners, though eating at 11pm on a Sunday does leave Marlow occasionally falling asleep with his head on his plate! In the her office role she is much more timely and efficient, mainly because she’s scared to death of Poppy!

Equally as impressive as his looks and charm are his patient teaching skills, his wild mushroom knowledge, and his cooking skills, which even include the ability to make Vegan food taste good! Fabio loves all things nature except the wind as it messes with his hair!

sky surfer, dipsy diver – sorry, deep sea diver/snorkeler and one of the country’s leading/only EXTREME foragers, Phil Leng, can!
For health and safety reasons and to ensure that everyone who embarks on a foraging expedition whilst in the company of our most intrepid instructor, lives to reap the benefits, we have insisted that all courses remain strictly on a terra firma basis.
Based in the Solihull area our man in the Midlands will happily recount dazzling tales of his extraordinary exploits traversing land, sea & air along with details of what might be foraged in the most inhospitable environments across the country. Aldi on park street in Solihull not being one of them…
Phil spends most of his life exploring the great outdoors and his insatiable inquisitiveness has allowed him to garner an extensive knowledge of the fungi, fruits & fauna available throughout the year in our green and pleasant land.

Years later, his review of the planking photo he’d taken revealed that he had been beside some delicious Chanterelles.. This made him determined never to miss such an opportunity again! He is now a fully qualified foraging instructor with us here at Wild Food UK, which he fits around his day job as a GP. Marlow and Eric were very pleased to discover that because of his day job, they didn’t need to pay for his first aid courses!
Robin is a great communicator and flew through our instructor training programme. He’s also a talented musician, so we might get him to write some foragy songs and perform them on our youtube channel 🙂

Our latest team member has taken over our accounts and marketing and she’s such a good fit it already feels like she’s been here for years.With her audacious sense of humour she’s added a new dimension to the office dynamic which we’re all enjoying 🙂
One major issue is that she doesn’t like mushrooms but Marlow has been forcing her to taste them for the videos on our Youtube channel! She’s even managed to fake liking them for the camera once..

is being able to recite the whole of ‘Snail and the Whale’ to Marlow’s daughter Bonnie from memory!

He’ll be writing for us and appearing in the occasional video (we have to hide the camera though :)) among other courses and fungi based collaborations soon to be announced.

Attila is already well known online as an authority on mushrooms. You can often catch him on the mushroom Facebook groups where he spends a lot of his time when he’s not out finding and studying the real thing. Strangely his biggest fungal fascination is with the polypores.. we’ll try to get him to study the Boletes on our behalf too though! ;).

With an encyclopedic knowledge of plants, mushrooms, cooking and folklore, on her courses you might see her timing herself through her talks as we’ve had to set limits on how long she can talk about any one species!

On Kerry’s courses you’ll also often find some more unusual foraged dishes in the meal at the end as her training as a chef means she is probably our most adventurous cook, and we all look forward to trying her recipes 🙂

Kerry’s other passion is running her worldwide poisoning emergency group on Facebook which is used by vets, doctors, and often worried parents from all over the world! This is no small achievement and has saved lives!!!

ever trainee, but his enthusiasm for foraging means he is learning fast.

Having done numerous jobs in his short life so far Jordan has finally settled on Foraging being his passion.

His ambition with Wild Food UK is to find more chanterelle spots each year than the rest of us, which considering his younger legs and the fact that he’ll be our most northern based instructor is a distinct possibility!

As part of his training he’ll be writing some articles on different mushroom families for you all to read in the site, and pretty soon you’ll be seeing him on courses too.

Like all of us she does prefer being outdoors, but we tie her and Lindsey to their desks during work hours, so they’ll be there to help you with any booking queries you might have.

Having helped Eric to a win in the first ever Wild Food UK Christmas Quiz we now know her plant foraging knowledge is good already… but we’re going to be teaching her a bit more about mushrooms over the coming months. We expect that just being in the office with Attila means that is inevitable anyway!

He has a keen interest in nature and (almost) all things alternative. He once went on a silent camp where no-one was allowed to talk for 2 weeks… Luckily enough he didn’t decide to go for the silent life as we prefer our instructors to be quite chatty!

Karl has a fantastic analytical mind, but Kerry did sort of carry him through the Christmas quiz! That might have been due to too much mead though… Nonetheless he has a broad knowledge of many things and a relaxed teaching style that mean we think he is going to be an outstanding instructor for Wild Food UK and we cant wait to get him running courses of his own :). 

Having worked with some of the best chefs in the country, Ben has always had a passion for food and nature and from there his interest in foraging grew. His two favourite places are the woods and the kitchen which is a perfect fit for us 🙂
We’re very happy to welcome him to the team and his extensive seashore knowledge is a bit of a new addition to the company too. Ben will be running most of our courses in the South West.

David is a very experienced forager and foraging instructor, having written books on the topic in the past, he has also published books on Archaeology and a number of other interests. With a wealth of experience belying his ‘Hairy Harry Potter’ youthful looks David is another great addition to the team. Based in Somerset he’ll be running our courses near there plus other venues around the South West.

We like our trainees to be put through the mill a bit to make sure they’re ready for anything. Ready for anything Dave is proving to be though as he’s currently flying through his training. He came to us with an extensive knowledge of Trees through his job helping plant the planting for Brighton Council. He also has a good grasp of the plants and mushrooms that we love too, mainly through watching our Youtube channel 🙂 Once ready he’ll be running courses for us around the South East where he is based. We might have to improve his taste in chefs first though and why does everyone called Dave prefer being on the left in their photos?