The Woodland Harvest, with Elspeth Hay
In this conversation with Elspeth Hay, we discuss some of the richest threads found in her book, Feed Us With Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food. We explore how humans fed themselves before industrial agriculture, why humans are "the Fire animal," and some ways that you can reconnect to the woodland harvest this Fall.
About Elspeth:
Elspeth Hay is the creator and host of the Local Food Report, a weekly feature that has aired on the Cape and Islands NPR station since 2008, and the author of Feed Us with Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food. Deeply immersed in her own local-food system, she writes and reports for print, radio, and online media with a focus on food, the environment, and the people, places, and ideas that feed us. You can learn more about her work at elspethhay.com and on Instagram @elspethhay.
Click here to listen to this episode on Spotify
Click here to listen to this episode on Apple
You can also play the episode via SoundCloud below, or by searching for “A Wild New Work” wherever you stream!
A written transcript can be found below the embedded player.
If you enjoyed this episode, please help get it to others by subscribing, rating the show, or sharing it with a friend! This podcast is nourished and made possible by the support of Eagle Creek members.
Resources mentioned:
*Class on November 11th: Discerning What Needs to Die: https://awildnewwork.com/events/2025/autumn-discernment
*Needing More: a 4-week Pilgrimage into Darkness: https://mailchi.mp/awildnewwork/gd63pkceqy
Megan: Welcome to a Wild New Work, a podcast about how to divest from capitalism and the norms of modern work, and step into the soulful calling of these times we live in, which includes the call to rekindle our relationship with the earth. I'm Megan Leatherman, a mother to two small kids, writer, amateur ecologist and vocational guide.
I live in the Pacific Northwest and I'm your host today. Hi, friend, and welcome. I'm so honored that you're here and that we can spend this time together today. We're really in the swing of the autumn season now, and I hope you are feeling it and enjoying it however it looks in the landscape where you are.
This season is so rich in color, textures, smells, experiences. The light is changing. But I fear that we miss out on a lot of what is actually on offer because of the way that we live and how out of touch with the seasons we can be at times. And part of living the Autumn, which is our theme for the show right now, is turning toward the wealth and hardiness that this time on the Earth offers to us all.
And it turns out. That a source of hardiness that many of our ancestors were sure not to miss out on was the nut harvest. Acorns, chestnuts, hazelnuts, these incredible food sources that the trees make for us and for the other animals. And my guest today has written a really wonderful book that helps us see that agriculture is not the only or even the best option for us.
And she explores why humans are quote the fire animal. And she even touches on capitalism and the commons, which is something that we have talked about recently here. It was really a joy to read this book and I am delighted to share this conversation with Elspeth Hay with you.
Elspeth Hay is the creator and host of the Local Food Report, a weekly feature that has aired on the Cape and Islands NPR station since 2008, and is the author of Feed Us With Trees, nuts, and The Future of Food Deeply Immersed in her own local food system. She writes and reports for print, radio, and online media with a focus on food. The environment and the people, places, and ideas that feed us. You can learn more about her work@elspethhey.com. So I hope you really enjoy this episode and that it inspires you to look at the nuts on the ground and the nut trees that make them differently.
I wanna share a couple of announcements before we dive in. The first is that I'm teaching a class on November 11th to support you in understanding. In your life and work may be ready to fall away or even be slaughtered in some folk traditions. November was known as blood month when the animals that had been fattened up over the summer are slaughtered in order to feed people through the winter.
And I think there's some learning here about how to discern what in our life needs to be. Cut out or fall away gracefully. So I'll be teaching a class about that on November 11th, and you can learn more about that at a wild new work.com/events. I'm also really excited to share that our darkness practice will be back this year.
This is, I think the sixth or seventh year that I've offered this. It's called needing more a four week pilgrimage into darkness, and it's essentially. Four Sundays in a row starting November 30th, where we let go of electrical lighting at dusk, and we live by candlelight for a few hours. And it sounds really simple and maybe even kind of silly, but it's actually quite profound and I love doing this as a community.
So to be in that ca container is free, and you can sign up to receive the emails and start with us in late November. But this year I'm creating a couple of extra resources for members of Eagle Creek. If you want to go deeper into this practice and take advantage of this time. I'll say more about this in coming episodes, but if you're just really craving darkness like I am, I thought I would mention it today.
I wanna say thank you to the members of Eagle Creek who are helping to make this show possible. For me to offer it is a different kind of reciprocity where folks pitch in. And essentially help to unlock the commons of this work and make it available to all. And if you would like to join or learn more about that, you can visit a wild new work.com/eagle-creek.
If you're not up for a monthly commitment right now, but you do wanna show some love, I still welcome your financial support at buy me a coffee.com/megan leatherman, and all of those links will be in the show notes for you as well. Well with that, why don't we shift into our opening invocation, and I encourage you to just take a deep breath right now.
Maybe let out a sigh
and maybe you could notice what the light is like where you are right now, the quality of the light and where you are in the cycle of the day or night.
May each of us be blessed and emboldened to do the work we're meant to do on this planet. May our work honor our ancestors known and unknown, and may it be in harmony with all creatures that we share this earth with. I express gratitude for all of the technologies and gifts that have made this possible, and I'm grateful to the molten Noma Cowlitz spans of Chinook and Clackamas tribes among many others who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on.
May this episode be one small stitch in the great reweaving of right relationship that so many indigenous teachers are calling us into. Alright. Well Elba, thank you so much for being here today. I am really looking forward to this conversation.
Elspeth: Me too. Thank you for having me.
Megan: I wanna start with a little bit of context and read an excerpt from your book and then ask you about it.
So you wrote that quote, no farms, no food, wasn't just my people's founding story, or some awful rhetoric we'd used to colonize North America. I saw now it was also the founding story of capitalism, the basis for the entire global economy. The same economy currently wreaking havoc on our precious, beautiful planet.
If there was ever a story we needed to stop telling and to expose as a myth, I knew in that moment no farms, no food, was it. And to me, this is one of the most exciting parts of your book. Learning how that myth of no farms, no food is connected to capitalism, which is something we talk a lot about on this show.
So could you tell us. What the No farms, no Food Myth is and why it's connected to capitalism.
Elspeth: Yeah. Uh, so no farms, no food. I hope the people at the American Farmland Trust will forgive me for borrowing their very catchy bumper sticker slogan, which I used to see as a kid, uh, at the farmer's markets in Maine.
And I. I learned now, you know, it's a, it's a slogan to protect farmland from development. But at the time, as a kid, I always just thought like, what an obvious bumper sticker. Why would you need to have a bumper sticker about that? Because. It seemed like a fact to me. Um, my parents were, they're bird watchers, so I spent a lot of time as a kid getting carted around the state of Maine, uh, learning about different birds and all the ways that they were perfectly adapted to their habitats.
You know, like the sap suckers drilled these neat little rows of holes into birches and maples and apple trees and, um. Every bird seemed to get all the food they needed, everything they needed to build their home or their nest from the habitats where they lived. And then we would go home and on the way home we would stop at the grocery store and buy food that was coming from industrial farms that I knew were destroying these wild ecosystems in order to exist and feed us.
And that was my understanding of. Our human relationship to the natural world was that we are separate from it and it doesn't really have much for us. We're not part of it the way that other species are. And so in order to meet our needs, we have to destroy it. Uh, and that. Is a story that I think most American kids grow up with, especially Euro-American kids.
Um, and one that I believed my whole life until pretty recently. And you know, once you stop believing a story, there's all these glaring inconsistencies where you're like, how did I ever believe that story? But in broad strokes, uh, that always seemed true to me. And it turns out. Um, that's not an accident.
That story was written really intentionally as a way of justifying dispossessing people from land all over the world, starting in England and Northern Europe, and then just rippling out across the globe as. The original, you know, class of dispossessed people from those countries then went on to other places and did in other places what had been done to them.
So it's kind of been like this rock that was dropped, you know, hundreds of years ago and has just been creating these waves across the globe ever since. Um, but at the time the story was written. Nobody really believed it, even the people telling it. So it's pretty amazing to look back and see how ingrained it's become in our psyches now, when it was complete fiction at the time that it was created.
Megan: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And can you talk a little bit about how it connects to capitalism? Specifically? How does this. Idea that we have to destroy the earth to feed ourselves, translate to the way we are in economy now.
Elspeth: Yeah. Well, in our current system we sort of do have to do that, um, because that is the system we've designed and, um, I'm trying to think about where to start, but there's, there was a book that I read a few years ago by Charles Eisenstein called Sacred Economics, and he.
In order to explain the way that our current money system and economy works. He told this parable about a banker that came into a town that, you know, hadn't had banking before. And he created this system where he put, gave people these tokens and he was like, okay, so you're gonna get 10 tokens and then when I come back later, you're gonna have to pay back 11 tokens as like a payment to me for creating these tokens and.
You know, the people's economy was based on chickens. And so every time the man came back, they would have to, you know, it basically creates a game of musical chairs, right? Anytime that money is created and more money needs to be paid back than what was given, you have to keep producing more and more. And that's how our economy works right now.
And the result of that on the land is that. In order to just stay out of debt and not lose what we have beyond, uh, you know, if you wanna not go to debtor's prison or, um, hold onto your land or hold onto your house or pay rent, you have to keep making more money, which means we have to keep producing more off of the same.
Land base. So land has to become ever more productive. And as we're all realizing that's actually not possible. So we have an economic system that is asking something completely impossible. And when that economic system was first coming into being, this whole practice of. Lending money at interest. So saying, okay, I'm gonna give you a hundred dollars and you're gonna pay me back 110.
That was considered this terrible moral sin like on par with robbery or murder. It was not okay. And now of course, that's the basis for our entire global economy. Right? Um, and I think that the reason for that is that that. Economic law does not function at all with natural law, right? That's not how ecosystems work.
That's not how, um, cycles of life and death and decay and rebirth work at all. And so when, uh, this system was first coming into being, and this practice of lending money at interest was first being legalized across Europe. Land started getting consolidated into fewer and fewer hands, and as that happened, people were upset.
It was this mass, uh, movement called the Enclosures, where formerly common lands that were shared by the community and worked by the community, whether they were crop fields or forests, or meadows, wastelands, as they were often called. Were being privatized by, um, lords. So there used to be an agreement between the Lords and the Peasantry where the peasantry was allowed access to the land, and in return they had to give a share of the food that they produced and other resources back to the Lord and that system.
Broke down during this time, and instead, land was enclosed. And as land was enclosed, those, those lands that the peasantry had previously had free reign to, um, in exchange for these, you know, payments back now. They could work there for a wage. Um, and so the whole system of land ownership changed and people were dispossessed of lands that they had previously had access to.
And as that began to happen and people kind of complained about it. The culture needed a story to justify what was happening. People were starving, people were rioting. There was tons of violence. The witch trials that we hear about, a lot of that was related to the enclosure of these common lands. And so the story that the people in power started telling was that actually this was gonna make everything better for everyone because in those forests and those waste meadows and all those un enclosed lands.
You couldn't really produce much food. And so it would be better if we just enclosed them all and everywhere was farmland and we could produce more food and everyone would be happier. And the peasantry who heard that story at the time were like, what are you talking about? Like, that's insane and not true at all.
Uh, but over the generations as we've lost access to lands, you know, land has been land consolidation all over the world is at this. Crazy state where, you know, so much of the world's land is owned by a few people, and as most people have lost access to land, the story has become more and more believable.
So as the generations have gone on this No Farms, no food idea has become really ingrained in dominant Western culture to the point where. Most of us don't really question it anymore, and I think that it's only really recently that we're starting to see a little fraying of that story and a lot more questions popping up.
Megan: Mm-hmm.
Elspeth: It's a long answer,
Megan: but hopefully Wonderful. Thank you. Yeah. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about what you uncovered about. The sort of original, the true story that got covered up by this big myth, how were people before the advent of capitalism relating to the land, feeding themselves without destroying it?
You've talked about the commons a little bit, um, but I know you've also did a lot of research with Native American peoples here. What is, how have people fed themselves for millennia without big agriculture?
Elspeth: Well, the answer is it depends where they were and where they are. But most people in most places have used a hybrid of ecosystems, like a mosaic of ecosystems and a lot of different forms of relationship to produce food.
So we often don't think of forests as a food producing landscape, at least. I really didn't until recently, but Woodlands and crop Fields and fisheries have often worked together as food producing ecosystems. So I've, I've had a couple responses to the book of people saying, I don't think we should give up on row crop agriculture altogether.
I say me either. There's so much that we can get from that and from annual plants and people have been eating annual crops for millennia, and there's a lot of cool relationships that come out of that. But in most communities, in most places, at least, where forests are supported, you know, by climate and the land, people have also attended wooded systems to produce.
Sort of staple foods. Um, and staple foods can also come from farm fields. Obviously as we know, rice and wheat and corn, those can be staple foods, but so can these keystone nut trees. And so most people in most places had a relationship with their woodlands that looked very different from what most American communities have today.
You know, most woodlands are sort of just nature, right? Queen quotes, they're. We don't really use them. They're either like preservation land or just unmanaged often. Um, but historically most woodlands were intensively managed by people in a variety of different ways. In North America, managing with fire was very common across a number of different cultures.
Um. Has been a way of checking, um, sort of this ecological succession on the land, which is that process where you go from bare earth to a more mature ecosystem and keeping it in an intermediate stage where it's at its most productive, it's producing food for wildlife and for game animals, it's producing food for humans.
Um, in Europe, methods like Copus and Pollard were really common in a lot of communities. So cutting back. Trees without killing them as a way of regenerating new growth and keeping them young and productive. Um. And in most places for the past 12,000 years, all of this has been really common knowledge and just a, a part of the fabric of human life, um, involving a variety of ecosystems.
And what we've done with the No Farms No Food story is we've kind of narrowed down the options and we're just hyperfocused on monoculture row crops. Which is about the least productive system that we could come up with.
Megan: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a good segue. 'cause I bet, listen, some listeners are wondering about this yield question that you talk about in the book.
Like, well, you know, that's nice that people hundreds of years ago could feed themselves with chestnuts and acorns, but now there's too many people, you just can't. Can you talk a little bit about why that's also not true? This myth around yield and yield ratios.
Elspeth: Yeah, I was obsessed with the yield question for several years, I think because stories are so powerful and I had understood my whole life that American farms are feeding the world and.
I thought, well, okay, it's cool that we can eat acorns, but like surely there are not enough of these nut trees and they don't produce enough to feed us. Uh, and it turns out that that is sort of part and parcel of the no farms, no food story and is, is not true. We, we talked a little at the beginning about our economic system and how different it is from sort of ecological law or something like physics or gravity, which has these.
These real rules, right? Our economic system is something that we made up, and I think that when we talk about yield, we are often having what's actually an economic conversation, but we're pretending it's an ecological conversation. So when we look at yield through the lens of ecology, which is. The only lens that makes sense if you're talking about land as a limiting factor and how much land can produce, that is an ecological question, right?
It's not actually an economic question. We can talk about the economics of it, but that is a separate issue from yield. Yield has to do with how much energy are we getting off of a piece of land? For how much we're putting in. It's a ratio. And a lot of our yield measurements, uh, as this really amazing agronomist Ricardo Salvador pointed out to me, we're counting what we're getting out from a given piece of land, but we're not counting what we're putting in.
So when we're talking about these monocultures of corn or soy or wheat or whatever, they are as super high yielding. We're actually only counting. The, the energy yield that's coming off the land. We're not counting the land that it took to produce the seed, the land that it took to produce the fertilizer, the land that it took to produce the pesticides, the land that had to be mined to create the machinery, the land that had to be mined to get the fuel to feed the machinery, uh, the land, you know, that is used or wasted or degraded in order to transport these, like we're not actually.
Looking at the full equation. And there have been some really interesting studies done where people have looked at the full equation. What energy are you getting out for the energy that you're putting in? And the high yielding illusion completely disappears. Mm-hmm. When you do that, uh, monocultures of a grain crop cannot yield nearly as much on a per acre basis when you measure all the land required to a fully functioning ecosystem.
So. More diversity on the landscape will always yield more
Megan: lovely.
Elspeth: And when you think about it, one farmer, you know, I was like, I kept asking people this question in different ways. 'cause I just could sort of couldn't believe it. Like, could these, could this really be true that these forests are more productive than these fields?
And one farmer finally was like, okay. Energy comes from photosynthesis. Like look at the energy producing capacity, the photosynthetic capacity of this forest versus a monoculture field. Mm-hmm. It, there is no comparison. Mm-hmm. Um, and there are actually some really interesting studies that have been done comparing oak woodland to oak Savannah to corn ecosystems.
Um, and they're fascinating. He sent them to me and I was like, right, of course. Okay. Energy, photosynthesis. I'm, I've, I'm being reminded. Um, and now when I look at the forest, I'm like, right, yeah. Look at all those leaves, all those needles, all that 3D ness, the height, uh, there's, there's really no comparison.
Megan: Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to hear more about how. Like a smaller part of this myth is this like delineation people have made between like so-called hunter gatherer communities. This idea that like people would've just gone out and just wake up and you're like, oh, is there any food available? You know, and people are just wandering, trying to gather food versus like the quote unquote farmer who's, you know.
Cultivating a crop. Can you talk a little bit about what you learned in terms of how people, it may have looked like a forest to the untrained eye, but that it was actually quite intentionally worked with to produce food for people.
Elspeth: Yeah, I think so. The words hunter gatherer are really recent in our language.
Um. When we talk about the agricultural revolution and we say that people shifted from hunting and gathering to agriculture 10,000 years ago in different places all over the world, um, that's not something that anyone would've been talking about a few hundred years ago. That's a really recent description of agricultural history that we toss around.
Like it's a fact, but it's also just a story. Um, the. The differences between hunting and gathering and farming are. Sort of presented as, um, one is historical, right, and one is modern farming is modern hunting and gathering is historical. And I don't know if you had any of the American girl dolls as a kid, but.
I had Kirsten Larson, I was just loved her. Spent all this time reading the books and um, her whole story was that she was an immigrant. And this is all fictional, right? But it's books that are marketed to kids through the American Girl Doll Company and, um. She was an immigrant who came from Sweden to the present day, uh, United States.
She was in, um, the Midwest in the 1840s, 1850s, I think. And it basically said that as more and more people arrived, more and more Euro-American settlers, um, the previous way that people had fed themselves in the land hunting and gathering became not productive enough and they had to farm. And this was this completely different way of producing food.
Um. I've reread the books now as an adult and the indigenous people who are fictional but are mentioned in the book are eating corn. So, um, that right there is a pretty big red flag. It's not that different to go grow corn from wheat, um, but. Additionally, the jobs involved in so-called hunting and gathering societies and farming societies are all the same jobs.
Um, when I spent some time in Northern California, um, with a Kirk man named Ron Reed, his people have eaten acorns as a staple food for millennia, and they have. A really intricate system of prescribed fire to take care of these oak groves and. To take care of the oak groves by putting regular fire on the land.
Fire is controlling weeds, so there's other species that are undesirable in these oak groves that are controlled with regular fire. Uh, it's controlling the water cycle by. Not letting too many trees grow on the land, which then creates more, you know, water need than what the land can handle. So it's controlling the amount of water needed by the oak woodlands there.
Uh, it's acting as, uh, sort of like a. Pest and pathogen control. There's little bugs called weevils that can get into acorns. They look kind of like maggots. They're not harmful to people, but they're sometimes kind of unappealing and, um, the smoke can control those weevils. It, uh, the fire acts as a fertilizer, so it recycles nutrients from fallen leaves and branches back into the soil, and it prepares the land for the conditions that acorns like to sprout new oak trees.
So. As I got to know him and he was describing all these jobs to me, I was thinking, okay, watering, weeding, fertilizing, pest, and pathogen control, preparing the land for seeds, those are all the same jobs that people do on farms. And as I started looking at some of the history, this idea that there are people who are hunter gatherers who are really different and less modern than farmers was.
Started, you know, in the cultural dialogue in the 1920s at the same time as a lot of scientific racism. So. It was this myth that was sort of written to differentiate different groups of people and to use food production as this kind of way to discern who's modern and advanced and who's not. When in reality everyone across cultures is thinking about how they're gonna feed their families tomorrow, next week, next year.
That's what humans do. It's not specific to one culture. And I have a friend who, you know, we were talking about and he was like, I just don't think that hunter-gatherer is a term that anyone who takes themselves seriously as an anthropologist is gonna be using in a few decades. Because it, it's creating these lines where they don't necessarily exist.
Megan: That was really helpful for me 'cause I've totally used that term and thought in those ways and I really appreciate that you've made it more complicated or highlighted the complexity and um, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'd love to hear. You mentioned fire and Fire is, has a central place in your book and you call humans the fire animal.
Can you talk about fire's place in healthy ecosystems and food production and why humans have a special relationship with fire?
Elspeth: Yeah, I can. Um, so fire. I was really surprised to learn when I was first learning more about the relationship between humans and plants and fire. The equation for combustion is the reverse of the equation for photosynthesis.
So fire's job in the world is to take apart these molecules that photosynthesis puts together. It's a form of recycling and a lot of us in Western culture think of fire as you know, something to be afraid of something that we need to stop. But for most of. For all of plant history, um, fire has been present wherever there are plants because fire is a plant recycler, and since humans came around.
We have had control over fire for as long as we've been a species. Some evolutionary biologists actually believe that fire is what makes us human. And when you start looking at cultural stories and creation stories around the world, there is often a story about how humans were given fire as a gift or stole fire.
Um, and I. I had always thought of fire as destructive. I had never thought of fire as part of my home landscape, and especially not as part of forests. Um, my main association with fire was the wildfires happening out west and friends tend texting pictures and talking about the destruction that was going on.
Um, but when I did spend some time getting to know Ron Reed in California and learning more about, uh, his karu view on fire. I started to get more curious about the history of fire in my own place. He kept telling me that fire is medicine and that fire is really important for the land and is a way of regenerating the land and continuing life.
And so I started looking at the fire history where I live on the Cape. Was surprised to learn that actually throughout most of the Northeast Fire has been a really important presence on the landscape for thousands of years. Um, indigenous people all over North America have managed a variety of landscapes and especially wooded landscapes with fire.
That's also true here. White oak has been a dominant species in Northeastern, uh, north America for 9,000 years, despite some really dramatic changes in climate. And most fire ecologists believe that that's because of human burning. Um, oaks like fire, they're fire adapted. They have this thick bark and some other traits that help them withstand, uh, you know, low intensity cultural burns and.
They like to, uh, you know, they like the seed bed that fire creates. So. It's a technology that they rely on to stay dominant the way that succession works. Oaks are kind of in the middle, so they don't like that early bare earth stage, but they also don't like a super shady closed canopy forest. They have trouble regenerating and what's happened over the past several hundred years, um, and especially over the last a hundred years as fire suppression has become more common and, and really, you know.
It's become law in a lot of places is that oaks have started having trouble regenerating. So I started learning all this and it was like, wow, this relationship between humans and these nut trees and fire is really old in a lot of places and. I started thinking back to some environmental science courses that I had taken in college where we were learning about keystone species.
And I knew that oaks and some of these other nut trees are keystone species because they just produce so much food for such a variety of species, so much habitat. So there's kind of like these plants that keep the food web humming. And then I remembered that there were predators, right? Like sharks that keep prey, populations under control.
They're important prey species like fish, like herring that are just critical to the whole food web, um, mutualists, which are like bees and other insects that, you know, provide pollination but also take nectar to make honey. And then I had forgotten about this other category of keystone species called ecosystem engineers.
So beavers are an example of an ecosystem engineer and they, you know, they cut down trees and they create dams, and these dams create wetlands and that creates really important habitat for a variety of other species. Elephants fall into that same category. They do a lot of uprooting and trampling and replanting actually through their movements and.
Some fiery ecologists were referring to humans as the keystone species for fire on earth, and that really resonated with what Ron had been telling me about car beliefs, about the importance of human burning in creating habitat for other species. Um, he lives in the kla. River area and he told me that 75% of cultural youth species need fire to stay present on the landscape.
And so the more I learned about this relationship, the more I started to realize that in using fire to keep these other keystone species dominant on the landscape. That was our job as a keystone species in a lot of places. Um, as diverse as Australia and the Amazon and Northern Europe and North America.
Burning to create habitat for other species has been our ecological job in many cultures for a very long time, and it completely shifted the way that I see humans. I had never seen us as having potentially. An ecologically good role, right? I'd always assumed, well, maybe we could be less bad. I think that was sort of the best I thought we could do.
Uh, but seeing this relationship with fire opened up a new way of seeing our job and a way to do something on the land besides just shrink to, to actually have a positive impact.
Megan: Yeah, I really appreciated that in the book, that you're inviting people to get even more involved with the land than less.
And of course it takes care and consciousness to do that in a good way. But yeah, I can see the. The damage that's done through the other story that we're just so bad and we should just stay in our cities and never go to the wild. And it's meant to be this pristine, untouched place, which just is not natural.
Um,
Elspeth: well, and the lines really start to break down once you start thinking this way. Right? Because I had always thought of oak trees as this natural wild species. Hmm. Natural and wild. If you look those words up in the dictionary, by definition, humans cannot be involved. And so what does it mean if these trees that we call natural and wild actually need human fire to stay dominant on the land?
How is that different from corn needing us to stay dominant on a landscape? Where is that line between humans and the natural world? And I think for me, learning all this has really dissolved that line. I don't, I don't really believe in nature or the natural world anymore. I think there's a living world and we can choose to be part of it in a conscious way, or we can be part of it in a, you know, really unintentional, unconscious way.
Megan: Yeah, I love that. I wanna make sure we get some time to highlight the magic of these nut trees. And I loved hearing about the foods that people would make from the chestnut and acorns, and it just sort of blew my mind that people were eating, you know, acorn meal every day and just how nutritious it is.
And hearing about what you Europeans would do with Chestnut. And could you tell us a little bit some of the things that you really loved about. Like what people are doing with nuts and how healthy they are and Yeah.
Elspeth: Yeah. Nuts are amazing. Not just because they in and of themselves can make so many different foods.
I mean, nuts can be pressed for oil. They can be used as flour. Some can be made into milks. Um, we can get starch from them and so many of them make amazing animal feed, so. When we're thinking about an agricultural ecosystem, they're the plants that we eat directly. And then there's also the animals that many of us eat that have been eating plants and nuts can play a really central role in both of those aspects of food systems.
Um. And you know, I read this stunning statistic when I was first starting to think about chestnuts in particular, which have a really long history in Europe as a staple food and a really vital human food and food for livestock that during sort of the height of chestnut consumption in um. I wanna say it was the 16 or 17 hundreds in Europe people were eating in some regions an average of 330 pounds of chestnuts per year, which like the average American eats about 150 pounds of grains per year.
So. That is a stunning amount of chestnuts to be eating. And I thought, okay, well they must have come up with some pretty exciting and creative ways to do that because otherwise you would just be like, oh my God, I can't eat another chest. Mm-hmm. Um. And so there are, for chestnuts in particular, just so many recipes.
Chestnut, crepes, chestnut breads, chestnut cakes, um, chestnut pastas, chestnut gnocchi. One of my favorite recipes that I've been making you make, um, this chestnut creep. I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right, but I think. In Italian, you would say it. Netchi. It's like N-E-C-C-I. So it's this thin, chestnut, crepe.
And then, uh, chestnuts often grow in relationship with mushrooms and a lot of the savory recipes that I've found for chestnuts also involve mushrooms. And it's a pairing that I've come to really love. And so for these CREs for the filling, you saute some cut up. Chestnuts and mushrooms with garlic and thyme and some other herbs.
And, uh, then you put like a little dollop of ricotta and you fold the whole thing up and it's so delicious. Thinking about it from an ecosystem perspective, in a traditional chestnut economy, in a lot of these European countries, there would be milk producing animals beneath the trees, producing the milk for that ricotta.
The mushrooms would be growing in relationship with the trees, and it's sort of this full system. Meal and I found a lot of different examples of that in terms of nut culture and nut eating. Um, acorns, it turns out, are really diverse. When I first started talking to people about Acorns, I was talking to people in Greece and England and California, and we'd have these really confusing conversations.
My acorns were, it turned out nothing like their acorns. Um, like some acorns are really high in fats and are better to be pressed into oil. Some are really starchy and make a great flour. Some all acorns have tannins, which need to be leached out in order to use them just like olives. So olives are also very high in tannins, and if you try to eat them straight off the tree, you'll immediately spit the olive out.
It's disgusting before it's been processed. Um. But some tannins, some acorn species. It's really easy to get the tannins out some. It's very challenging. Uh, and it started to make all these different traditions make sense. Um, like I started collecting some acorns from English oaks that are present on the cape and trying to leach those.
And it was just incredibly challenging. And when I looked at the histories in a lot of, um, English. You know, areas of present to England, people were feeding the acorns to pigs. And that started to make more sense as I started to work with these English acorns. I was like, right, well you could use this staple crop to feed to pigs to then consume in a different form.
Whereas in California, um, where people were using Tan Oaks. In just a few filters of water, the tannins are gone and the acorns taste sweet and there they're really commonly used for flour. So people in different places have made. Their crop makes sense and, and you know, optimized it for what it's good for.
And so I think it's important when we talk about these nuts, you know, we've lost so much acorn knowledge that we just say acorn. But if you look at languages like the RIC language in present day, Northern California, they have more than 90 words for the English. Acorn, like if you just search the English word acorn in their dictionary, and there's different words for all the different oak species.
There's a word for rising up with a pack basket of acorns on your back for pounding acorns into flour for like licking the acorn soup, making spoon this incredibly beautiful nuance. And so I do like to remind people that when we say acorn. That's like saying weather, you know, like there's so many different things that can happen under the umbrella of the word weather, and the same is true of acorns.
Megan: Yeah, yeah. Gosh, it's such a rich, just you painting the picture of like eating these crepes under, you know, the mushrooms that grew under the chestnut tree and then the chestnut and the animal, and it's so much more interesting and beautiful than, you know, just a row of soy or corn alone in a landscape, you know, killing other beings.
It's just so rich and I imagine. So much more nutritious because of the web that it's a part of. I'm wondering, I know you just said like there's so many different kinds of nuts and we can't, there's not, you can't give people like one acorn recipe because people are listening from all over and there's different nuts.
But where would you recommend people started? Like it's Autumn. It's such a beautiful time for nuts and gathering and. Like where is there one? Is there one or two places where total beginners could start?
Elspeth: Well. One thing you could do is, so most, um, ecosystems in the northern hemisphere, oaks are really important species and a keystone species in most places where they occur.
So you could get to know the oaks on your landscape, um, and other nut trees that are present if they're there also. Start doing some research about what humans in your area have done with them historically. Because those traditions will be the ones that make the most sense for the oak trees where you're living.
Um, and pay attention to whether people are making them into flower, pressing them into oil, feeding them to livestock. Those are hints and clues to that are telling you something. You know, if they're feeding them to livestock, they may be, uh. Have very stubborn tannins that are hard to get out, um, and make less sense for human consumption.
There are also traditions of people, um, boiling acorns with lie or processing acorns in cold water with lie. So lie is traditionally used in corn processing for externalization, and it's also traditionally used in olive and acorn processing because it's a very effective way to remove tannins. So, um.
Look for that in the history, and then I would say collect a bunch of acorns. There are a few general rules that you can follow. In most places, not all, but most healthy acorns don't have a cap, so. There are some species that are exceptions, but most species and so, you know, do a little research. But most species of oak, um, when the acorn is healthy, it will pop off from the cap.
Um, often when it still has the cap on, that's a sign that it has bugs in it and that, um, the bugs have kind of glued the cap onto the acorn. So it's usually a sign of an unsound acorn. Um. One with bugs in it. So you wanna avoid those. You can also look at acorns for if they have a little perfectly round hole that's an exit hole from an acorn Weil that left.
So that's another sign that it's not gonna be the best acorn. So you're looking for no caps, no holes, and then very soon after you collect the acorns, there's. Two families of Oaks. There's the Red Oak family and the White Oak family. Um, there's also Tan Oaks, which are in their own family. They're the exception to that rule.
But, um, in general, white Oaks have curved lobes on the leaves, so they're all curves. And Red Oak Family has points and Red Oak family acorns. Um, I think in most places, although I'm really only speaking with a lot of knowledge about. Northeastern America, um, they don't sprout and germinate until the spring.
So when you collect from trees in the Red Oak family. They can be dried and you sort of have a long time before you have to worry about them germinating or getting to the next stage of their life cycle. Because once they start germinating, they're using the sugars to germinate and they become less tasty.
The white Oak family where I am starts germinating in the fall very soon after they drop. So the window for collecting acorns from white Oak family. Species is shorter, and once you collect them, you need to either dry them or freeze them quickly to interrupt that germination process. Um, so those are sort of some universal rules, but you do want to, whatever acorns you're collecting, you wanna dry them, uh, because they're a lot easier to get outta their shells once they're dry.
Uh, you know, you think about a sort of. Wet acorn, it's often stuck to the shell and you're prying the shell off any nut and any nut that's been dried is like rattling around inside its shell and then it's gonna pop right out when you crack it open. So I think those are rules that would apply anywhere.
And then I. The processing I have really found is talking to other people in your area, learning what they're doing, learning what people have done historically, and then a lot of trial and error.
Megan: Yeah, that's all super helpful. We're going to be gathering white oak organ, white oak, acorns, um, this fall. So thank you.
Those tips will be coming in handy. I guess, um, I have one more question and then I wanna make sure we've covered everything that you hope to do today. Hearing you talk about processing these foods and reading about them in the book, one of the things coming up for me is like, this sounds like it takes a lot of time, you know, and just the, I'm sort of feeling that tension between really wanting to.
Eat homemade acorn meal and like do all these things. And also knowing I have to work and the kids are in school and like the structure of our lives. It feels hard. And I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts about how to reconcile those, how this could become, um, not so I guess. Not just a luxury that people have time for.
Yeah. Any thoughts you have about how this could be more integrated into just everyday life?
Elspeth: I think the number one thing is that this is work that's meant to be communal and meant to involve many people, so. Often we're trying, you know, because of the way our modern culture is, we're trying to do these things on our own that are meant to involve, you know, dozens if not hundreds of people.
And it is really hard to do a lot of this work on your own. And there are so many of us kind of tugging on different threads of this work that's required to feed ourselves and community. And I think that one of the most powerful things I've learned. Is that it's communal work and it's, it's gonna take time to build structures to make it communal work, right?
It's not like we are gonna wake up tomorrow and all of our systems will be rebuilt, and it'll all be really easy. But anything that each one of us is doing in the direction of shifting our systems and shifting the way our communities come together around food, around local currencies around. You know, all these everyday issues that are a result of this capitalist system based on the no farms, no food story.
Um, the reason it feels hard is because the system is intentionally designed to make it hard. Mm-hmm. Um, so it's not, it's not an accident that it's hard, it's not an accident that it feels like a luxury. And don't beat yourself up if you cannot, um, single handedly. Rework it overnight and fix the whole system.
But what I find exciting is, uh, all the different avenues that people are taking to kind of make inroads in terms of change. And so I think whatever portion of it feels joyful and useful to you and that you can get other people excited about doing with you. Is that is the right road. Mm-hmm. Um, and that will look different for everyone in their, in their different places.
But I do think, um, to tie it to sort of a more practical. Vision. One thing that's really cool in my town where I live on Cape Cod is that we have one of the few remaining wild oyster harvest industries, um, in New England. So people here can get a license, they can go out on the flats and they can harvest wild shellfish and then sell it to wholesalers and.
Um, one thing that I have been seeing pop up with nuts in some places is a similar model where there is a place like in Asheville, um. I visited called the Nuttery, where they were buying nuts from farmers, from wild harvesters, and it was very young when I visited it. Um, but it was a similar model and I have seen how successful that model can be with foods like oysters, which, you know, get a high price.
People have, they've had sort of a renaissance where people are excited about them. And people are making a living, harvesting this wild food and then selling it to a wholesaler. And we are a long way from having systems like that set up for Acorns. But I think. Seeing how successful it's been with shellfish makes me believe that it's definitely possible.
Megan: Hmm. Mm-hmm. Thank you. I really appreciate those thoughts. I feel like we just barely scratched the surface, but is there anything that we haven't covered today that's really on your heart or that you wanna close with?
Elspeth: Um, I don't think so. It's. It's exciting to see so many people excited about the idea of eating nuts.
Um, and you know, I think I mentioned earlier, but I've been getting all these texts recently from friends who are saying, I picked up an acorn. Like, okay, what do I do now? And I think that the more people we have excited about these foods and talking about these foods, the more that sort of unravels the no farms, no food story.
And I really do believe that. The fewer of us believe that story, the more possibility there is for change. Uh, and I hope that it spreads like wildfire and we become more and more ready for change. 'cause I think we're at this cultural moment where change is kind of inevitable and what's being decided is what direction that change will take.
And I see these trees and getting back into relationship with 'em as a really hopeful direction. Mm-hmm. And. I hope that others will join me in moving that way.
Megan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, thank you so much. Can you tell people where they can find your book and find out about what you're up to?
Elspeth: My book is available, um, online where wherever you got books.
And, um, I have a website, el smith hay.com, where people can connect with some of my storytelling work and find my Instagram page. Um, and yeah, those are, those are probably the best ways to connect with me online.
Megan: Okay, I'll put those in the show notes for people. Thank you so much, Alsbeth. This has been so, so wonderful, and I'm so grateful for your book and the work that you did here.
Elspeth: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
Megan: Okay, my friend. I hope you got a lot out of this conversation with Elle's Path and I hope you go find some nuts to enjoy. If it's not too late, I encourage you to check out her book, feed Us with Trees, and I'll put the link to that in the show notes. Thank you to all of you who are supporting the show, whether it.
Through sharing this episode with a friend or leaving a review, reviews on Apple and Spotify really help because when I go to ask a prospective guest to come on or share the podcast with someone who hasn't tuned in before, seeing reviews and ratings just helps show that. People are listening and so I really appreciate those.
At any time, if you want to go deeper and be in a different kind of relationship and reciprocity, I welcome your support through Eagle Creek. And of course, if you just wanna send a little love my way, you can do that at buy me a coffee.com/megan Leather. I will be back with you in two weeks to talk about divination accessing the mysterious wisdom in this dark and magical time, and I'm gonna talk about why it is a part of your heritage and some ways to do it, no matter your experience level with it.
So I'm excited to share that with you in a few weeks. I hope you take such good care and I'll see you on the other side.