‘Smell this! It tastes alive...’ A day on the streets with the urban forager

Nurdin Topham is on a mission to tap the flavours of the plants and herbs we walk past in our cities. We joined him in east London

'Smell this!" Chef and wild food enthusiast Nurdin Topham is inhaling a lungful of shrub called pineappleweed, picked fresh from a stretch of east London formerly known as Murder Mile. He hands me a couple of yellow buds with an instruction to sniff; sweet fruitiness floats under my nose. Topham takes a chew. I gamely follow suit. The clue, it seems, is in the name: we're eating what vaguely tastes like pineapple and feels a lot like chewing grass. "This is food," he explains, as we ramble on, to forage for a lunch he will be cooking later.

The future of food and our relationship with nature is at the core of Topham's philosophy for what he calls "nourishing gastronomy", a subject he will deliver a lecture on this week at FutureFest in London. He has two decades of experience in the field, first as a qualified nutritionist and personal development chef for Raymond Blanc, and later as head of NUR, his own Michelin-starred restaurant in Hong Kong.