 So I must say I'm slightly out of my comfort zone, I'm kind of used to introducing people to this subject of plants and wild places and the things you can eat by wandering through those places and just pointing things out. The thing is I mentioned this over breakfast and somebody just said to me what you need to remember in this place is that you're just dealing with it with an awful lot of goodwill and I really think that's true. So I'm just going to introduce my story to you to just give some background on how I came to be foraging for a living and gathering wild plants as a job, which is I have to say it's my dream job and I'm very satisfied to be doing that. It all started when I was about six years old. My grandfather took me out one morning. It was quite a cold winter morning and he knew something about the wild mushrooms that grew in the land surrounding his house. So I remember stepping outside the door. I can't remember if I saw it first or if he pointed it out, but we're looking across the field and there's this strange object that's a different color to the grass sort of about 150 yards away and either way we started looking and walking towards it. He knew what it was and I didn't and we got closer and closer and gradually this shape became clear. What it was was a huge parasol mushroom about this size and it really was shaped like an all night beautiful ladies parasol and he said, you know, you can eat that. We're going to get that on the way back and we'll eat it. And then we went right into the woods and, you know, you might think it staged managed it to make sort of the maximum impression on a small child, but he wasn't that kind of person. I know he didn't do it. But the next two mushrooms that we found, one was a deep purple mushroom with a really sweet kind of mealy smell. So it looked amazing. It smelled amazing. And a couple of minutes later, we found that was called a wood bluet, by the way. A couple of minutes later, we found something called an ivory clitocybe. It's sort of an aqua blue on the top and it smells very, very strongly of aniseed. And when we took it back to the house later, I found out it tastes strongly of aniseed, too. So that was my kind of initiation into foraging. And the thought that really got implanted in my mind during that experience was something which has pretty much stayed with me ever since. And it sort of guided the interest that I've had and the sort of quest to discover wild foods. And it is, there is treasure in the woods and fields. I think that thought just stuck that day. And a few days later, we just moved to Suffolk, which is where I was doing that in the south of Indon, doing that outing with my grandfather. And the next few days, I started a new school and we're supposed to catch the bus home from school, but I didn't do that. I skipped the bus and wandered across the fields home and found some one of these parasol mushrooms and some horse mushrooms and just turned up at the door carrying this great edible bounty. Everybody's fretting, where have you been, where have you been? I said, never mind about that, look at this. And my mum was slightly nervous, but had enough confidence that we cooked the stuff and ate it. And it's that sense that there is stuff out there to be discovered. I must say, I learnt some other plants. I learnt about the wild watercress near there. I learnt about the elderberries that my grandfather made into wine and the blackberries that my grandmother made into jam and there were nuts in the woods. But I was a bit of a mushroom guy mostly for the foraging I did for the next few years. But this constant thought irritated me for years that there were more of these kinds of treasures to be found. And I think the really poignant thing is how my grandfather had arrested my attention while he hadn't really taken me out. And these things had arrested my attention. We're talking about treasure. The fact that we're not all using that stuff and we don't know about that stuff suggests it's kind of hidden in some sense. And yet it's not. There was that mushroom on the field, it was perfectly visible, all of these mushrooms were very visible in the woods. And most of the stuff that I gather now is blatantly visible. A lot of it, people just walk on top of it. So what is it that's hiding it? I think it's that attention grabbing thing that sort of sums up what happened to me. My attention was focused on that. So the things are hidden just because we don't attend to them. We can see them, we can probably even smell them. So that's one thing. But then again, the other thing that hides them is just the value that's put on them. Because we think it's just weeds, it's just plants, and so on and so on. And the value that's put on the ingredients that we do eat, it's interesting sometimes to ask why do we value that? Oysters used to be peasant food years ago. Then it became scarce. Suddenly now oysters are seen as a gastronomic delicacy and so on. And the process that we've gone through in discovering some of these plants and taking them to restaurants, that has been the sort of most poignant thing. Because there's been wild foodies and foragers for years, sometimes though that's had a bit of a kind of quaint image attached to it, a bit wacky, a bit eccentric. But the point about what's happening now is these ingredients are being placed in the top restaurants in the world. Ali, my wife and I, we started inviting friends around to have supper with us. And I think it was like that first experience again that I'd had as a child, this sense of discovery. Only this time it wasn't just the plants, but it was like people eating together. And we'd bring wild sorrel in. We looked for weeks for wild sorrel. I had this book by Carl Ucho. And it was just like 15 plants in that book. And we were just going through them and going, let's find all of these. We had our wildflower book and lots of countryside. But it took us ages to find a wild sorrel. So when we finally did, we've cracked this and we said, come round and we just cooked this simple recipe from the Carl Ucho book. I think it was wild sorrel soup. I think we had eight or nine guests. And just the sense of awe and wonder that everybody had. They said, so seriously, you went out today and you just found this stuff and you cooked it, it was like a celebration. It felt like a kind of secret garden that we'd all wandered into. And you just felt like you were tapping into something that everybody should know about and that people used to know about. So we kept holding these sort of wild food dinner parties. Every time we discovered something new and we had some great journeys to different places to try and find things. Only to come home and find out that we're growing in the next door neighbor's garden. That was funny. There's definitely a parable in that one, I think. But then one day, we just wandered into a restaurant in Canterbury and we fancied a bowl of soup. It was the wild garlic season, so we've been eating wild garlic nonstop for weeks. And it's just soup of the day. We said, what's the soup of the day? They said it's wild garlic. And we went, and this guy was obviously deeply offended. He said, what's the matter? It's really nice. You should try it. We said, we know it's really nice. We have tried it every day for the last two weeks. We fancied something else. He said, stay there. Disappeared in the kitchen, went and got the chef. What had happened to somebody who brought a bag of wild garlic in? And they had made this batch of soup and they weren't going to be able to make any more because they didn't know who this fellow was. And he said, look, can you get us some of these ingredients? And we said, if you like. So I turned up sluggishly a couple of days later with a bag of wild garlic. There you go. And he said, crazy, grabbed it out of my hand. I said, what else can you get? I said, well, maybe this, maybe that. So, and then I wouldn't come in for a few weeks and he said, where have you been? We've got to, you know, I mean, I normally do think about ideas to try to make money, but for somehow, it's just a little while later, I said, as the penny was beginning to drop, I said, do you have any like-minded chef friends? He said, yes, I do. So he gave me four phone numbers. One of them was Steve Harris at the Sporesman. You might have heard of. And suddenly I had five customers. A little while later, we're up into our first restaurant in London. It's all gone from there. We have probably about 50 customers in London now. This is called Black Nightshade, right? Everybody goes, ugh, Nightshade, because, well, at least a few, English-speaking, we have a plant called Deadly Nightshade. And everybody's very, very nervous about that. But I discovered this just because I was waiting through books in an ethnobotanical library at Kew Gardens. And I got this whole book on it. And it was called Undiscovered Crops or something like that. It turns out this thing's been grown for greens in Australia, Africa, and the United States. But anyway, yeah, cheers. Like this. I found this outside, if you want to take a look at this. So when it's just given me this, this is a wild pea. And you can eat these flowers. They taste like peas. They're amazing. They're very beautiful. And it's funny because the sweet pea that grows in your garden tastes of nothing. But these taste fantastic. But the thing about it is, it's a plant that has a berry. It's in the same family. If you're nervous about nightshades, can I point out you eat red nightshade all the time, although maybe not here. It's a tomato, right? And potatoes and nightshades too. So it's a very good family for food. But this little berry here tastes something like between a tomato and a melon. It's completely overlooked. And one of the thoughts I often have is, why have we just cow-towred to what has been introduced in the way of plants for us? Why, for example, do we have a tomato that is bred from a tiny little South American red berry? Why didn't we look at this and think we'll turn that into something else? And one of the key things that I've really tapped into in the last few years is just how many flavors there are in the wild. But certainly in Great Britain, and actually there's a lot of the same flavors here in Denmark, which are so rich, which are so versatile. And some of these flavors overlap into things that you would actually expect to be exotic, things that you would expect to get from another country. So anyway, in there you have an Alexander seed. I'm gonna talk through them very briefly. Alexander seeds in a little packet. That's a seed that's a bit like pepper. It's like pepper, but without the heat, but it's got some of the aromatic qualities to it. You have a hogweed seed, a little envelope in there. Yeah, that's in the little plastic domes. Hogweed seeds have this kind of cardamom, orangey flavor. A lot of people are using them on dishes that have oranges. In them. You also have mellolo, oh now, yeah. You have mellolo in there, which has the same flavor as Tonka beans if anybody's used that. It's a kind of vanilla, almondy sort of flavor. And then you have one of my favorites, which is Meadowsweet. Again, that's kind of almondy, but with a very distinct flavor all of its own, which is a great plant that comes out in the summertime. And the thing is we've just been sending these flavors out to restaurants and going, what do you think? What have you done with it? We get that fed back to us and then we put it back out there. So these guys have used it for this, these guys have used it for that, and then it comes back again and we just, this kind of loop, feedback loop of information and discoveries. And we just feel like it's one great, big wild food laboratory that's going on. Guys like Noma, the guys in London, the guys all over the UK that are using these products. And this one's Siaster. Now, I don't know how long guys have been using it in Europe. It's like with a lot of these things, we kind of thought we discovered something no one was using and then you find out this guy over here's already discovered it, but that's great. There's nothing new under the sun, but what we're trying to do anyway is just get these back into people's consciousness and their attention. This plant, as far as I'm aware, was not used in the UK up until very, very recently. It's now being sold in a supermarket. Now, I'm slightly ambivalent about that because it's a monoculture how they're producing it, but it's incredible. You're going to the Waitrose supermarket, they've got Samphire, they've got this one. And just to refer to this thing about the wildness of these plants and the land that they come from, someone told me last week that on the Solway Firth up in Scotland, the land is extending dramatically, but it's all salt marsh. So it's not cultivatable land. This is all salt marsh. It's all producing plants like this, like the Samphire, like the Sea Purse land. So there's an incredible productivity to wild land that's there that's completely un-interfered with. And down south, we've got this situation where they're stopping, trying to put sea defenses in, and they're removing the seawalls. So on the other hand now, the land that has been farmed is being accroached upon by a salt marsh. So our productivity of this plant, with really no effort other than removing seawalls, is greatly increasing, which is an amazing thing for a plant that's been overlooked for so long. Just me. I think one of the major points which I just need to say, which is so amazing with these type of forages, is that these are not plants. These are spices. These are flavors. We are here in Denmark. We are Protestants. You are Protestants. We're boring. We eat one plate of food in silence, and spices is exotic. That's from the other part of the world where people are brown and there's lots of sun. And these people are showing us that spices are right below us. There's a whole new world to be discovered, and this is truly one of the major, major wonderful things that these forages are doing. This is the thing that we need to be open. We need to see it as spices. It's not just plants. So the plant is a seed. That seed might be spicy. I've tasted seeds from miles that taste like coriander. Plants that grow on beaches that taste like coriander. Imagine that going there in early spring, it's cold, and you taste coriander on a beach. In Denmark, you're used to it from Mexican cuisine or perhaps in Asia. These people are bringing this wonderful world to us, and we just need to kind of tap into that world that we are a spicy nation. I'll just tell you about this one, and I'm gonna shut up. Yeah, and then time is out. That's it. So this one here, I'd like to show you the root, but I didn't have a picture of it. This is called wood avans, or herb in it. Think about this, it's amazing because the root tastes precisely like cloves. And I've been thinking about this spice subject and the fact that back in England, spices became this big status symbol, so you had to have them because you could afford it and nobody else could. So that meant we went out looking for trade and in foreign lands, we tried to establish these trade routes which became inadvertently the British Empire. So we went out, we basically pillaged people's countries, all kinds of iniquitous behavior, fortunes were lost and made. And I just think that's incredible because one of the first spices people went for was the clove. This flavor was in our hedgerows right under our noses all the time. We didn't need to go anywhere. Shall I hand that round? There's only about 12 berries, so I'll go.