The 5 worst tasting foods you can forage

There are some real treats out there in the wild that you can use to make everything from wine to jam, and nothing beats foraging the freshest berries during summer or a load of hazelnuts in the fall. But not everything that’s out there is good to eat, and some “edible” plants can leave you feeling quite ill if you eat too many, there are others where you won’t get the chance to eat enough to feel ill because they taste so bad. Here are the 5 of worst-tasting wild foods you could possibly eat.

1) Meadow sweet

This fluffy-looking wildflower grows close to the sea as it likes the salt content in the air. It’s very common and can be found in huge patches all around the coast of the UK, but it’s more common in the south of Wales and England. The flowers smell lovely, with a very sweet smell that would make a very nice fragrance, and the flowers are perfectly edible. The problem is the taste which can only be described as putting the smell of a dentist’s waiting room into a flavor, with a very sharp and distinctive “medical” taste which is very difficult to mask with other flavors if mixed into a dish.

2) Sloes

These berries grow all over the UK and are especially common around the south and west coasts of Wales. They often grow in huge amounts and could provide enough fruit to make hundreds of jars of jam, if only they tasted nice. These berries are very dry, in a sort of cranberry type of dry but much more extreme. This dryness mixed with the sour and slightly bitter taste makes them useless to make anything with other than adding to gin to make it even dryer. Unless you like gin or you’re prepared to make jam that’s 90% sugar and 10% sloes, this is one berry to avoid.

3) Rowan berries (Mountain ash)

These berries are a staple for birds all around the UK as they stay on the trees well into the winter and provide a source of fruit long after all the other berries have dropped. They contain parasorbic acid in their raw form which is poisonous to humans and can cause intense nausea and diarrhea, but won’t kill unless someone eats a tremendous amount. Upon heating, the parasorbic acid turns into harmless sorbic acid and the berries are then safe to eat. They aren’t very sweet and are usually quite bitter, but because they need to be heated first they also turn mushy, and eating bitterberry slop isn’t the nicest thing you could find out there.

4) Seaweed

One of the easiest to gather and most abundant plants is also one of the worst-tasting foods you can forage. The most famous dish in the UK that’s seaweed-based is a Welsh national dish called Laverbread, a type of paste used to flavor other dishes that is made from a type of seaweed called Laver. It’s supposed to be used the same way you’d use mustard, as a flavoring to other dishes or a light spread on something as it has a very powerful flavor, but that flavor is an acquired taste. If you took several cabbages and condensed them down into a paste and added some salt, that’s similar to the taste of laverbread. As for seaweed on its own, it has a very strange and slippery texture and the tastes vary greatly across the different types, but I have yet to find one that’s even worth picking up off the beach, never mind bothering to cook.

5) Hawthorn berries

One of the most common shrubs in the UK, the hawthorn can be found in the vast majority of parks, canal paths, woodlands, and country hedgerows. They produce a large amount of small red berries that I haven’t seen a single other person bother to forage, probably because of their taste. They are very soft and mushy when ripe and taste a bit like overly ripe apples. If you took a sweet-eating apple and peeled the skin off it and left it for a day so the whole thing turned brown, and then ate it, that’s the taste I mean by overly ripe apple. If you mix them into something like a pie with some apples and sugar they work quite well, but on their own, they aren’t great, and you get the sense that they may have gone off while chewing them.