71. “Did You Know We Can Eat Acorns?” With Elspeth Hay, Feed Us With Trees: Nuts and the Future Of Food
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Welcome to episode 71 of the Nurtured by Nature podcast, today I’m delighted to be joined in conversation by Elspeth Hay author of the recently published book, Feed Us With Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food.
Did you know you can eat acorns? This was the revelation that inspired Elspeth’s book and also got me hooked on her incredible work. I absolutely love trees and regularly share conversations about their incredible ecological importance, but Elspeth helps take our relationship to trees, in particular Nut trees to a whole different level, a place where we don’t just preserve them because it’s the right thing to do for biodiversity and other species but where we can once again benefit directly from our relationship with them and they can literally facilitate our own survival.
Our Food Systems are making us and our planet sick, both physically and emotionally, our farmers are at the forefront of this rupture and sadly experience a higher rate of suicide than the general population. In this nuanced conversation we explore how reconsidering our relationship with these keystone trees isn’t just about addressing a single problem, it leads us to question and reconsider everything we have been taught about our current food systems, from yields to inputs and food waste, to the wisdom from Indigenous people and the food systems they employed. We also look back at the journey and trauma that ruptured our relationship with the lands and our essential place within it, the economic rather than ecological reasons that laid the path we have been taught to follow to preserve the interests of the few.
Perhaps most importantly Elspeth also offers us a tangible solution to multiple crisis within our world. Feed us with Trees offers us a viable alternative way to farm, that isn’t just a theory but is already being successfully implemented today.
Learn more about Elspeth
Elspeth Hay is a writer and the creator and host of the Local Food Report, a weekly feature that has aired on Cape Cod’s NPR station since 2008. Deeply immersed in her own local-food system, she writes and reports for print, radio, and online media with a focus on food and the environment. Through her conversations with growers, harvesters, processors, cooks, policy makers, Indigenous knowledge-keepers, scientists, researchers, and visionaries, she aims to rebuild our cultural store of culinary knowledge and to reconnect us with the people, places, and ideas that feed us.
Feed Us With Trees:
A new and ancient story about perennial nut trees, our ecological role as humans, and the future of food.
The day Elspeth Hay learned that we can eat acorns, stories she’d believed her whole life began to unravel. Until then she’d always believed we must grow our staple foods in farmed fields―the same fields wreaking havoc on our land, air, and water. But all over the Northern Hemisphere, Hay learned, humans once grew our staple foods in forest gardens centered on perennial nut trees: oaks, chestnuts, and hazelnuts. In Feed Us with Trees, Hay brings us along as she gets to know dozens of nut growers, scientists, Indigenous knowledge-keepers, researchers, and food professionals―and discovers that in tending these staple trees, we once played a vital environmental role as one of Earth’s keystone species.
Feed Us with Trees is Hay’s hopeful manifesto about a brighter, more abundant future―and a critical look at the long-held stories we’ll need to rewrite to build it. It will appeal to environmentalists, regenerative farmers, permaculture enthusiasts, agroforesters, locavores, and anyone hungry for a more holistic, nutrient-dense diet rooted in wild foods and ancient knowledge.
Website: https://elspethhay.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elspethhay/
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