9 Food Foraging Tours: Finding Your Dinner Tastes so Delicious
Does your food taste better when you’ve found it yourself? Of course it does. Food foraging adventures are a hot new travel trend, and tours are popping up in cities and forests all across the globe. Whether you want to hunt for tasty mushrooms, find medicinal plants or enjoy an early-evening dumpster dive in pursuit of a free dessert, you’ll find a food foraging tour with just the right flavor for your travel taste.
1. Learn Urban Outdoor Skills in So Cal: Foraging Hikes
Find a large and creative collection of hikes and classes on wild food gastronomy, all designed for the city dweller. Head to the mountains and search a riverbank for aromatics and cattails, identify plants you can make sodas from and prepare for a barbecue with grass and leaves.
2. Hunt for Edibles in the East Bay and San Francisco: Wild Food Walks
There’s plenty to eat in the parks and green spaces of the Bay Area, and these two-hour walking tours search for wild edibles in the morning and afternoons. Don’t let the release form scare you.
3. Explore the East Coast with “The Wildman” Steve Brill: Foraging Tours
Discover a wide selection of foraging tours up and down the East Coast at parks and reserves in New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and even the Appalachian Trail. Search for medicinal wild plants, mushrooms and other edibles.
4. Delicious Dumpster Diving in NYC: Freegan Trash Tours
Embrace freeganism and explore the back alleys and trash piles of the Big Apple to find free apples. They may be slightly bruised or rotten, but this thrown-away food is free for the taking to anyone who doesn’t mind getting down and dirty in the dumpster. Tours take place regularly and focus on vegan cuisine.
5. No Taste Like Home: Asheville Wild Food Adventures
Sign up for a three-hour tour “off the eaten path” and find extreme woodland cuisine with expert guides. Look for edible plants and mushrooms on these popular tours, which have been featured in The New Yorker and the Travel Channel.
6. Annual North Carolina Wild Foods Weekend: Tasty Trails in Reidsville
Attend a springtime summit of wild plants and foraging on the fourth weekend in April every year. Stay in simple cottages and enjoy a full roster of foraging field trips, early bird edible plant walks, night hikes, wild food cooking, feasts and more.
7. Search for Fungus in Spain: Mushroom Hunting Getaway Tour
Take your affection for foraging to the international level with this four-day tour in Catalonia. Look for wild mushrooms with a specialist guide and dine at restaurants with mushroom-centric cuisine.
8. Cook & Forage for Wild Food: Fat Hen School
Located on the western edge of England on the Cornwall peninsula, this wild food cookery school offers numerous courses on seafood foraging, food tasting walks, foraging by bicycle and foraging for children. You’ll also find cooking courses on Italian pasta, shellfish and game.
9. Woodland Harvest Tours in Ontario: Dogs Welcome at Pucks Plenty
Bring your dog on these foraging trips, which canvas the forested trails of Ontario, Canada near Stratford. Depending on the season, you may find wild leeks, nettles, fiddleheads, trout lilies, ginger and cattail shoots. As seen on the Oprah Network!
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Image: Chrissy Eliza
