All images copyright Forbes Wild Foods. Used with permission.

protecting and preserving our natural environment—one portion at a time

As a child, Jonathan Forbes would pick and eat wild berries, stuff his pockets with black walnuts and be the first in line to test the cold waters of Lake Ontario when the smelts ran in the spring. 

Then, Toronto was a small city and there were many opportunities to play in the ravines, along the bluffs, in the wetlands by the lake, along the rivers and in the meadows. His mother was a keen forager, so he took every chance he could get to go off with her into the forest to look for wild mushrooms, wild ginger, wild leeks and other foods. Every year they would freeze some of this and preserve some of that. It wasn’t wild food back then, it was just food. 

About twenty years ago, a friend asked Jonathan what he was doing that weekend. “Going to pick wild chokecherries and look for butternuts!” His friend’s puzzled expression revealed that many people did not have a clue what our native foods were. This realization combined with a deep concern over the rapid hyper-development of huge parts of Southern Ontario led him to believe that perhaps people would pay more attention to the environment if they had a relationship with it through food. 

And so began Forbes Wild Foods, with a mission to engage people and their imaginations to value, cherish, and protect the natural world. 

Today, the company is operated by Jonathan’s son, Dyson, and provides Canada’s largest selection of wild foods and herbs for chefs, food lovers and more recently, alcoholic beverage companies. While they make no claims about the many recognized nutritional or medicinal benefits of wild foods, one thing is for certain… they taste good.