13 Oct 2025

New Zealand's best wild foods, and how to find them

From Nine To Noon, 11:30 am on 13 October 2025

Flowers, fungi, seaweed and rabbits. All bountiful products in New Zealand, and all out there to hunt, harvest, and cook up. That's what photographer and author Sophie Merkens has done - on a wild food road trip around the country. 

She's documented the best harvesting and cooking tips in her book Eat Wild: A Foraging Journey Across Aotearoa. Alongside some of the characters along the way - the chefs, the divers, and the hunters - who love the wild delicacies often bountiful in the New Zealand outdoors, but hard to find on supermarket shelves.

Sophie Merkens is a writer and a photographer who has been on a road trip finding New Zealand's best wild foods, and ways to find and cook them.

Photo: Supplied by Penguin