November 22, 2025 • 46 mins
In this episode, our guest Elspeth Hay, author of Feed Us with Trees, creator of The Local Food Report, and passionate proponent of place-based living, takes us on a fascinating exploration of acorns as a superfood with profound historical roots.
Our conversation also delves into the wisdom of wooded ecosystems and the vital concept of viewing these landscapes as food-producing allies. These insights invite us to imagine a future where humans and nature thrive together, fostering a reciprocal relationship with our environment that respects historical realities while embracing the beauty of nature’s bounty.
This interview and Elspeth's book are a call to reconnect with the abundance around us, urging a transformation in our approach to food and sustainability, as we embrace the natural world’s generosity.
This week’s episode was recorded and produced in Massachusetts on the native lands of the Wabanaki Confederacy, Pennacook, Massa-adchu-es-et (Massachusett), Nauset, and Pawtucket, and in Wisconsin on the lands of the Ho-chunk, Patawatomi and Menomonee people.
Find us on Instagram @treespeechpodcast or treespeechpodcast.com. This is also where you can find our show notes and learn more about our featured trees.
And thank you for joining tree speech today.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:05):
My name is Dorie Robinson and this is Tree Speech, a podcast
where we examine our ever evolving relationship with
nature and especially trees. And I'm Jonathan Zoutner.
We're living in a moment when our food systems feel
increasingly fragile. Grocery prices keep rising.
(00:27):
Farms are struggling under droughts, floods and fires, and
an agricultural system that is increasingly stacked against
them. And for many people across the
country, the recent sudden cancellation of SNAP benefits
has deepened a sense of food scarcity and inequality.
(00:48):
Today's guest, food writer and researcher Elsbeth Hay, opens
our eyes to some resources that would diversify our options.
In her luminous new book, Feed Us with Trees, she reimagines
how we think about sustenance, revealing that acorns,
chestnuts, and hazelnuts once fed entire civilizations.
(01:12):
Drawing from Indigenous knowledge and her own hands on
experiments in foraging and cooking, Elspeth shows how trees
can nourish both people and the planet, offering resilience,
reciprocity, and hope in a time of uncertainty.
Feed Us With Trees is haze manifesto about a brighter, more
(01:36):
abundant future and a critical look at the long held stories
we'll need to rewrite to build it.
Elsbeth 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
(01:59):
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.
She lives in Wellfleet, MA. Today's episode isn't only about
food. It's a story about memory, about
(02:20):
what we've forgotten and what wecan remember again.
About restoring balance between taking and tending.
About learning to see our forests not just as wilderness,
but as pantries, pharmacies, andplaces of deep connection.
We invite you to sit with us beneath our canopy of old growth
(02:44):
oak trees, to listen, to imagine, and to remember what it
means to be fed by the world around us.
Here's our conversation with Elspeth Hay, author of Feed Us
with Trees. Well, good morning, Alice.
(03:09):
Beth, welcome to Tree Speech. Good morning.
It's so nice to be here. It's nice to see you.
I have to say I'll jump right in.
That your book Feed Us with Trees, Nuts, and the Future of
Food expanded both Dorian and myminds and LED to many
transformative moments for both of us regarding our food systems
(03:31):
and history and the structures and systems in our society that
are in desperate need of being questioned and rethought and
reworked. So your book opens with your own
transformative moment when you realized that acorns are food.
Could you share with us that story and tell us what shifted
(03:52):
in you when you held that kernelof knowledge in your hands, both
literally and figuratively? Yeah, I, I still remember.
I was just, you know, going through emails, a very normal
morning. And a friend had sent an e-mail
with this link to this Ted X talk.
And I thought, like, I don't really have time to watch this
(04:14):
right now, but I'll just click on it.
And it was one of those talks where, like, as soon as the
person started talking, I completely forgot everything
else I had going on because she said that you can eat acorns.
It was this woman, Marcy Mayer, who's an expat living in Greece.
And she said that not only can we eat acorns, but actually
(04:34):
they're a superfood and one of humanity's oldest foods.
And I, at that point, had been reporting on food and the
environment for over a decade. And I thought, wait, what?
I live in an oak forest. No one has ever said anything
about eating an acorn. How is it possible that we're
surrounded by all this food? I mean, acorns literally rain
(04:57):
onto my house in the fall. They're everywhere.
They're in the way. They're considered a nuisance.
And I just it, it just blew my mind that this food would be all
around us that we didn't even recognize as edible.
And so that was sort of the start of a very long and often
times very surprising journey ofdiscovery.
(05:19):
From that moment where you realized that that acorns were
food, you go on to describe oak trees as being a food plant and
that being an act of revolution.What do you think makes these
words so powerful to people who might not consider acorns as
food, or who have been taught that acorns are poisonous or
(05:43):
actually bad for us? I grew up with a story that I
think a lot of people in sort ofdominant Western culture grow up
with, which is this story that Icall No Farms, No Food, which is
also a bumper sticker for a great organization.
So I don't mean to, to knock that bumper sticker, but it's
(06:03):
this idea that we are separate from the natural world, even
that there, you know, is such a thing as the human world and the
natural world. I don't really believe in those
distinctions anymore, but I, I very much did growing up.
And I, I think a lot of that, you know, I trace it back into
the book to the history of colonialism and capitalism.
But I didn't know any of that asa kid.
(06:25):
And I grew up in Maine with two parents who were bird watchers.
And they were writing this birders guide to the coast of
Maine when I was a kid. And my sister and I spent a lot
of time being dragged on these bird watching trips all over
Maine and visiting different habitats.
And I remember, I don't think I could have expressed it at the
(06:45):
time, but this sense of like, what is wrong with our species?
Because all these places we would go, we would learn about
all these plants and animals andbirds.
And, you know, my parents have always been really interested in
ecosystems and, and the way thatthey interact and every other
species was perfectly adapted toits place.
(07:06):
And they had all these really beautiful networks to meet their
needs. You know, I we would learn about
SAP suckers which drilled these little rows of holes in trees
and that was how they fed themselves.
And I remember we banded leeches, storm petrols and they
would skim over the water off the coast of the Atlantic and,
and feed themselves. And then we would go to the
grocery store where we are getting our food from these
(07:29):
industrial farms that I knew were destroying wild places.
And I just couldn't understand why we didn't fit the same way
that other species did. And to me, that didn't that
didn't seem like it was a cultural thing.
As a kid, I thought, like, there's just something
fundamentally wrong with us. We're not part of nature and we
(07:49):
don't fit. And I think that so many of us
have grown up with that story. And so for me, learning that we
can eat acorns was like the first crack into like, wait,
maybe that's just a story. Maybe that's not like a fact.
And thinking about that idea of no farms, no food, in schools
(08:10):
and cultures, farming is often presented as humanity's
inevitable destiny. So as you're exploring all of
these alternative or different ways of feeding our society and
and people in our country and around the world, what
alternative stories of food production most expanded your
(08:30):
imagination? Yeah, I always thought farming
was this thing that came out of the agricultural revolution,
right, Which supposedly happenedabout 10,000 years ago and
proceeded on different timelines, on different
continents and in different places, but a sort of this
crowning achievement of humanity.
And while I was researching the book, when I first got
(08:53):
interested in Acorns, I read a really amazing book called
Acorns and Salmon Feed Our People.
And it was written by a non-native sociologist, Carrie
Marie Norgard. And I reached out to her.
It was about the crook people inpresent day Northern California.
And I reached out to her, and she connected me with a Crook
medicine man and cultural biologist named Ron Reed.
(09:15):
And this was during the early days of the pandemic.
So he and I spent a lot of time talking on Zoom and not really
being able to actually meet eachother in person.
And he told me a lot of stories from Kirk culture and how for
thousands of years, his people have tended oaks to produce
acorns as a staple food. And the more we talked, the more
(09:39):
I started to wonder what the difference was between farming
and hunter, hunting and gathering.
Which is the bucket that you know most tree based traditions
have been thrown into because hewas telling me about crook uses
of fire and how prescribed fire in traditional crook Land
(10:00):
Management. Helps keep acorn weevils, which
are a pest out of the acorns andhelps control the water cycle on
the Klamath River basin. Helps prepare the ground for new
acorns to sprout, helps control pathogens.
Helps acts as a fertilizer with this recycling of nutrients and
(10:22):
this boost into the soil. And I thought, OK, watering,
wedding, fertilizing, you know, preparing the ground for
planting, These are all the samejobs that we talked about in
farming. And when I actually went and,
you know, at that point, I had really started to learn a lot
more than what I knew as a kid about the war on indigenous food
(10:44):
systems that's been going on in North America for hundreds of
years now. And so I, I got curious and I
thought, OK, well, hunting and gathering like that must be a
really old term, right? At 10,000 years, we've been
talking about this revolution. And actually, that term came up
in the 1920s and 1930s for the first time.
(11:06):
So it came up during this periodof scientific racism and is
really steeped in that era and has nothing to do with actual
differences in food production, which I was incredibly surprised
by at first, right? I'm sure, yeah, that's that's
pretty jarring. So there's there's a lot of
(11:28):
reframing there and thinking in those terms.
Your visit to Mark Shepherd's Restoration Agriculture Farm
reframed your sense of what abundance can look like.
What struck you the most about that landscape?
Yeah. So Mark Sheppard took about 100
acres, I want to say maybe 95 acres of deeply eroded corn and
(11:52):
soyland that had been in these monoculture crops for decades
and planted it with more than 139 edible perennial species, at
least as of when I visited. And the difference between his
land and the land around it was incredible.
It felt like walking through a nature preserve.
But it was also a very active farm.
(12:14):
So he had chestnuts, He had hazelnuts.
He had pears, apples, plums, asparagus, pigs, you know, a
Maple sugar shack, all these different species.
And he had learned from another Midwestern farmer, Philip
Rutter, that the ecosystem that had been in the Midwest test
(12:34):
under Indigenous management was something called oak Savannah.
And he basically planted a farm to try to mimic that ecosystem,
except often subbing in cultivars for wild plants.
So, you know, cultivars have been specifically bred for yield
and disease resistance. And when I was there, an
(12:56):
endangered species had just moved back onto the land after,
you know, decades of really ecological devastation.
And So what he was doing was trying to restore land through
farming, which is an idea that'sreally caught on in the Midwest
and is spreading pretty rapidly and is exciting.
(13:18):
It's really exciting. How might relearning to see
abundance in wooded ecosystems change how we experience our own
neighborhoods, forests, or backyards?
I think that seeing are wooded landscapes as also food
producing and as also, you know,landscapes where there's an
opportunity for humans to take care of them and really pay a
(13:41):
play a positive role can start to dissolve that line that so
many of us have grown up seeing between humans and the natural
world. The natural world is actually an
idea that I really don't believein at all anymore.
I think there's a living world and we're part of it, and so is
everything else that's alive. And the distinct sanctions that
(14:02):
we tend to draw between humans on this other parts of the
living world are really artificial and our ways of sort
of not joining and not being part of it.
And I think that the more that we are part of it and the more
that we see ourselves as having an active role to play, the more
(14:23):
positive impact we can have on our ecosystems and on other
species around us. I love that reframing.
Thank you. You write about Commonwealth
rooted in trees and shared abundance.
Can you first share what Commonwealth is and what you've
learned about it? And how might reviving this kind
(14:44):
of Commons transform both our food systems and our
communities? When?
I was trying to figure out, you know, I had spent some time with
Ron Reed in California and learned about a lot of these
indigenous Coroic traditions. And sometimes Coroic people call
themselves Fix the World People.And I just kept thinking, wow,
OK, so Ron is part of this culture of fix the world people.
(15:07):
And I seem to be part of a culture of destroy the world
people. And why is that?
What's happened to my people along the way that's gotten us
into this mindset and this pattern?
And so I started trying to figure out, you know, when was
our rupture from a lot of these wooded landscapes.
Because if you go back in history, there are lots of
(15:29):
really ancient European traditions of, you know,
revering oak trees, revering hazelnuts, seeing them as
sacred. There were chestnut cultures all
over Europe in a lot of the Middle Ages.
And I didn't, you know, people didn't wake up one day and
decide, you know, nuts, no good to eat.
I think we'll move on. So I was trying to figure out
(15:50):
like, what happened. And that journey took me to
Appalachia as a starting point because at least in eastern
North America, that's an area where until about 100 years ago,
there still were a lot of Euro American communities heavily
relying on chestnuts as a staplefood and a really important
subsistence crop. And when I was down there, I
(16:14):
learned about history of Commonstending, of holding land in
common that I knew nothing about.
It turns out that until the close of the Civil War in the
United States, any unenclosed land was treated as a Commons.
So it was an area where you could hunt, you could fish, you
could turn out animals to graze.And the laws were different in
(16:38):
different places, but in most areas, the law was that you
defense other people's animals out of areas where you didn't
want them, as opposed to fencingyour own animals in.
And that was a tradition that dated all the way back to
England and a lot of other European countries.
And as I started following it and tugging on this thread, what
(16:59):
I learned is that, in fact, so many early Euro American
immigrants came here because of an internal colonization of
Europe where they lost access tothese wooded Commons at home.
And so we're often told that European immigrants came here
because it was a land of opportunity.
But that's really not the whole story.
(17:20):
About 75% of early Euro Americanimmigrants came because they had
lost access to subsistence landsat home.
And so I was, you know, that wasa pretty surprising historical
threat to start tugging. And it also has a really sad
ending here because what happened after the Civil War is
that formerly enslaved African Americans were able to come and
(17:44):
go from the labor market during that first year after the Civil
War by hunting and gathering andforaging from these wooded
Commons. And within a year of the close
of the Civil War, trespass laws changed in every southern state.
And then that tradition spread West and N.
So when we talk about about why don't we have a relationship
(18:07):
with these trees? Why aren't we eating from wooded
food systems? And we actually look at the
history for many people for generations, it's been very
dangerous to access this food source.
And so, you know, and that includes indigenous communities,
African American communities, and also women were some of the
(18:27):
biggest agitators for getting Commons rights backs in Europe
as they lost them. So, so many of the groups that
are marginalized today also havea history of a relationship with
these food sources and it becoming increasingly dangerous
to access them, which that's a lot to put on learning you can
eat an acorn. But I just kept being more and
(18:49):
more surprised by how far back this history goes well.
It's amazing. As you tug 1 little bit, what
else comes out? As you dig a little, what else
comes out? Yeah.
It's true and a lot of this history is heartbreaking.
It's eye opening and and hopefully causes people to
(19:09):
really examine our systems of today, as I said, and how things
could be changed moving forward.I think one of the strengths of
your book, though, is balancing these harsh realities with joy
and wonder and appreciation of the natural world in your own
(19:30):
life, the life of your family aswell.
And I particularly really enjoyed your chapter on twigs,
which pointed to the overlooked magical parts of tree life,
which included basket weaving, which you've learned throughout
this process of examination and research and learning.
(19:51):
Could you tell us what have twigs and practices like
copacing taught you about reciprocity in our natural
world? One of the themes that I kept
hearing from people tending nut trees in a huge variety of
places, Greece, California, England, all these different
places, was that they like interaction.
(20:14):
So different cultures and peoplein different places that I spoke
with had different ways of providing that interaction.
Some places people would coppice.
So a lot of nut trees like to becut back, whether that's through
coppice, which is cutting that'smore common with hazelnuts, or
pollarding, which is more commonwith oaks and chestnuts and
(20:37):
bigger trees. And then they'll send out a new
flush of growth. And that flush of growth tends
to go through a stage where it produces more nuts and then, you
know, slowly it gets older. One guy told me I was asking him
about an oak stand. And I, I was like, well, I don't
see a lot of acorns. And he said, well, do you see a
lot of babies in a nursing home?And I was like, no, I don't.
(20:59):
OK, I get what you're saying. So coppicing and pollarding and
also prescribed fire or culturalfire are all ways of renewing
plants to not kill them, keep them alive, have them come back
either from the trunk or the rootstock, but keep them
producing. And it was really exciting to
(21:23):
hear from different people how important this was.
Because I think in a lot of the stories I grew up with, the
natural world or the living world was always better off
without humans. You know, we've all seen the
post apocalyptic movies or booksand it's like, oh, the river is
clean again and the trees have come back and everything's
better 'cause we went away. But actually, in a lot of the
(21:44):
stories that I heard from not tending people, these trees
really need us and they really need our interaction in order to
thrive. There's actually been a lack of
oak regeneration in a huge variety of places over the past
80 or so years. And a lot of people have tied
that to fire suppression and to the elimination of some of these
(22:06):
older cultural practices like compassing and pollarding of
cutting them back. And so through learning about
that, I met when I was with Ron Reed in California, there was a
woman, Kathy Mccovey, who showedme these incredible hazelnut
baskets made by correct women. And I came back and I was all
inspired. I thought, OK, I'm going to
(22:27):
learn to weave with hazelnut. Like that's so beautiful.
But nobody in New England was teaching hazelnut weaving.
So I found a Willow weaving course And Willow actually very
similarly to a lot of these nut trees, really likes to be cut
back and can live longer with that kind of.
And so I took a course and was immediately hooked.
And now I've been selling baskets at my local farmers
(22:50):
market and just cannot stop weaving.
There's something about the movement with your hands.
But also, every time I do it, I have this feeling like somewhere
back in my lineage, like someonehas been doing this before, like
it just feels right, yes. It's in your DNA.
I, I looked at your social mediaand the baskets that you now
(23:12):
weave are magnificent. They're absolutely beautiful.
And so it's interesting to read about the early stages of the
challenges and the frustrations of learning how to do that.
And then to see where you've you've gone to in, in this art
in not a very long amount of time.
So they're beautiful. Thank you.
(23:34):
Yeah, I've, I've done a little bit of teaching of friends and I
always bring my first basket with me because I'm like this.
This is where it starts. And you will.
It will get easier. It doesn't start easy.
Don't be discouraged. Just keep going like any craft
honestly. So yes, it all takes.
Practice. That's inspiring.
As well, I'd like to go back to a point that you touched on
(23:58):
involving something else that you write about in the Book of
Fire in Shaping our woods and food systems.
And I'm wondering if you could tell us how can learning from
Indigenous fire stewardship change how we approach today's
ecological crisis in our world and country all over North?
(24:18):
America. There's a really long history of
indigenous fire as a Land Management practice.
There's some really beautiful writing on this from a paper Co
written by a Crook man named Frank Lake and Robin Walkemerer
who a lot of people are familiarwith.
And they have written that, you know, almost every landscape in
(24:38):
North America. If you actually look at it
closely, you'll see a history offire and fire is in a variety of
cultures around the world, sort of humanities defining gift as a
species. If you look at mythology and
cultural practices, so many places from, you know, Australia
to the Amazon to North America have this history with fire and
(25:02):
with human management of the landscape with fire.
And so I first learned about it in California when I was out
there. And that kind of made sense to
me because I thought, you know, wildfires, yes, prescribed
burns, That makes sense. We're reducing fuels.
And it was also, you know, I wasshown the ways that it's an
important part of a food system,but I didn't expect for it to be
(25:24):
a part of my landscape at home. And what I learned when I came
back and started doing a little bit of inquiring is that
actually Cape Cod also has a really long history with fire
and, and a lot of the Northeast has a really long history with
fire that many of us don't know about.
So I think I mentioned before that white oak has been the
(25:45):
dominant species in the Northeast for 9000 years.
And that's despite several periods of like pretty dramatic
little climate shifts. And many ecologists believe that
that's because of Indigenous burning and because indigenous
people have kept oak and other fire tolerant and fire adopted
species dominant on the landscape through regular burns.
(26:08):
And that's not to say that everywhere gets has historically
been burned all the time. It's more of a mosaic.
So what burning does is it checks the succession of the
forest. So for listeners who aren't
familiar with ecological succession, it's the process
where a landscape goes from likea big disturbance, a flood or a
fire or plowing or something of bare earth all the way to to,
(26:32):
you know, the most mature ecosystem that that ecosystem
can bear. And for a lot of places in the
Northeast, that's a closed canopy forest.
But oaks actually don't thrive in a closed canopy forest.
Neither do hazelnuts, Neither dochestnuts.
A lot of these trees like the middle stage.
So they like a little bit of space.
They like to regenerate with a little bit of light.
(26:53):
And when you put regular fire onthe landscape and different
places you know have different fire return intervals is the
word they use. So like in some places you might
want to burn every year and someplaces you might want to burn
once every 10 years. It depends.
But putting regular fire on the landscape isn't just about
reducing fuel loads. It also helps with that, but it
(27:15):
also keeps succession in sort ofthis steady held pattern instead
of ping pong in between dreams. So like, what we're seeing in
California now is there'll be a wildfire, OK.
That ecosystem is going all the way back to the beginning of
succession, and then it's movingthrough, and then it's getting
dense and overcrowded, and then it's going all the way back to
the beginning instead of just sort of hanging, being steady in
(27:39):
the middle. So there's so much, you know,
we're used to managing succession with a plow, but many
of us have forgotten that there are other tools and that there
are other stages of succession where you can hold the land
besides just that first stage. And there's, we can go into it
or not. But there there are also some
(27:59):
really important climate implications for what stage of
succession you're holding the land in and the ways that you're
disturbing it. Yes.
Let's go into it. Could you offer, I know your
book goes into this quite in depth and people should read the
book also to hear about your experience participating in a
burn near your home or within a mile or so of your home.
(28:21):
But yes, could you maybe highlight a few of those things
that you did learn about the climate implications?
Yeah, Well, one of. The first things I learned was
with a soil scientist who explained to me the way that
every time we plow up a field, the soil is releasing carbon
dioxide into there. He called it.
He said it's burping it out. And what happens is that plants
(28:45):
with their roots are are storingcarbon in the ground.
So they're putting carbon into the ground year after year.
And when you hold a forest in sort of the middle or an oak
grassland ecosystem in these middle stages of succession,
instead of completely digging upthe roots, you hold on to that
(29:06):
below ground soil carbon. And so there's a pretty big
difference between managing an oak grassland ecosystem year
after year after year, building up carbon, and also every time
you have a fire, some of that burn turns to ash and some of it
turns to basically biochar. So you're also, there's kind of
(29:27):
like 2 carbon cycles, right? There's the short term carbon
cycle, which is like, okay, a plant grows, it's releasing
carbon dioxide as it decomposes,then it grows again.
But there's the longer term carbon cycle, which is where
like fossil fuels live and also biochar.
Biochar stores carbon for a verylong time.
(29:49):
So in addition to the fact that managing with fire allows plants
to keep putting carbon underground without that carbon
coming out and being disturbed, it's also adding layer after
layer after layer of biochar on the land every year.
And when we look at prime agricultural soils all over the
(30:09):
world, almost all of them are these mollusals which have been
created through repreted fires over millennia.
So that that fertility of the Midwest that we're kind of
mining right now with our industrial row crop agriculture
was actually created through indigenous management using
fire. So interesting.
And that biochar you write aboutquite a bit as well, including
(30:32):
the friend who now sells it and,and how your plants can flourish
with just the right amount of that added to their soil.
Yeah. There seems to be a long
tradition of creating biochar, maybe under different names in a
lot of places. So the the person who I learned
from, who lives in East Ham, here on Cape Cod, he traveled to
(30:55):
the Amazon where they have a soil called tarapreda, which is
basically this Amazonian sort ofviscous clay, not very nutrient
rich, but enhanced with broken shards of pottery and biochar to
create this incredibly fertile soil.
And different cultures all over the world have been realizing
(31:19):
the ways that biochar boosts soil fertility for a long time.
And it's not an amendment the way that we think of fertilizers
today. It's not adding like a boost of
potassium and nitrogen. It's actually creating habitat
for beneficial microorganisms that then nurture and have
(31:40):
relationships with the plants tokeep them healthy.
When you plant with biochar, we actually just planted about 180
nut trees on some land that we own in Maine and we did an
experiment where a few of the holes we didn't put biochar.
Most of the holes we did. And on the first day when we
were watering the seedlings in the holes with the biochar, when
(32:00):
you walked by 20 minutes later, there was still a little puddle.
They still looked wet. And the holes with no biochar,
that water was just gone. So it's pretty interesting just
in real time to see the ways that it can change the soil
composition, yes. There's much to learn, there's
much to information to spread. So sort of segwaying from fire
(32:25):
into the kitchen. Your book ends by bringing us
into the kitchen. Why was it important for you to
ground your vision and the things that you had written
about of ideas for the future inrecipes and and meals?
I think that cooking. Has always been kind of my first
(32:47):
connection to the living world around me, like my my first way
of interacting with excitement and love.
I've always loved when you can grow something or pick something
and then figure out what to do with it.
I wrote a cooking column for a long time and these a lot of
(33:08):
these nuts, we're really, we've lost so much of the cultural
knowledge around how to process and cook with them.
And they've also been villainized in a lot of ways
through sort of the low fat craze of the 70s.
And so it was exciting to me to start playing around with them
(33:29):
and figuring out, OK, if you're talking about a staple food,
you're talking about something that you need to know how to
cook like 300 different ways because you're eating it every
day. And when I was researching the
book, I have a friend who's fromSwitzerland, and there's this
mountainous town there that I ended up going to visit.
And they told me that in some areas of Switzerland,
(33:52):
historically, the average personate 330 lbs of chestnuts per
person per year, which when I started thinking about it, I was
like, that is just an incredibleamount of chestnuts.
And so I started playing around just trying to figure out like,
(34:12):
if you were going to eat that many chestnuts or that many
acorns or that many hazelnuts, like, what does that actually
look like on your plate? How are you doing that?
And what I discovered is that weknow a lot about chestnuts.
There's a lot of European and your American history around
chestnut cuisine that is very accessible.
(34:34):
And we kind of know about hazelnuts, although most people
just sort of eat them because they are delicious roasted and
like you don't really need to doa lot to them.
But when it comes to acorns, there has been such a war on so
many of the cultures that have acorn knowledge that either that
knowledge has in some cases beenlost or isn't being shared for
(34:56):
really understandable reasons. And I started thinking about
like, imagine if we lost everything that we know about
wheat processing and cooking with wheat.
Like how long would it take you to get to a croissant?
You know what I mean? Like you're, you're not going to
figure that out on day 2. And that's kind of where we're
at with acorns in a sense, whichon the one hand is overwhelming
(35:21):
and on the other hand is super fun because there's lots to try.
It's an adventure. And I will say I was inspired by
you. I'm from Wisconsin, and my dad
on some land near central Wisconsin, not far from where
you were visiting. And I visited him last weekend
and we were sort of talking about the book and about you.
(35:42):
And he, I had no idea. But he's planted Chinese
chestnut trees on his land. And so I gathered some of the
chestnuts. They're just like barely ripe,
just there. And I'll be watching for the
other ones. But later this week I'm going to
roast them in the oven and and sort of dive right into to the
example that you've set. That's really.
(36:05):
Exciting. And I think one of the most
hopeful and exciting things thatI saw as I was writing the book
and talking with different people is just this incredible
resurgence of interest in agroforestry in the Midwest in
particular. I was just out at the Northern
Nut Growers Annual Conference inAugust in Michigan, and there
(36:26):
were so many different farmers from all over the Midwest who
are fed up with the current system and looking for change
and who are starting to find support through nonprofits like
the Savannah Institute, which isa institution, A nonprofit
promoting some of these woody agriculture crops.
And they're really building community around excitement
(36:50):
about these foods. And it's a lot of fun to be in
those groups and to feel the energy.
And, you know, people are swapping recipes.
And people were swapping differently, you know, foods
that they had made. There were these Papa Brownies
and, you know, someone had brought acorn flour.
And so it's really exciting to see the people who are, you
(37:12):
know, in many ways bearing the brunch of the current farming
crisis also getting excited about alternatives.
It's wonderful. That is really.
Exciting and And since you've been talking to different people
about different recipes, of all the nut based dishes you've
experimented with, I assume you have not yet made the acorn
(37:36):
croissant, but I'd be excited ifyou did.
Which one are you most excited about and which one most
captures the future you'd hope for?
Oh, that's such a. Good question.
I think there's two that pop right to mind when you say most
excited about 1 is this chestnutmushroom saute, which I keep
(38:00):
making and then doing different things with.
One of the things that I've noticed about chestnut recipes
is that so many of them are paired with mushrooms and I,
being sort of an ecosystem geek,get really excited about that
because they grow together. So it's always exciting to take
things that grow together and cook them together.
And I have this great, I think it's just called the Chestnut
Cookbook. You just saute garlic and
(38:23):
chestnuts and mushrooms and thenyou add like a tiny bit of heavy
cream at the end and it sounds so weird.
And as you're making it, you're like, what is this?
And it's so good. It's so good.
It's really good with like, you know, I've had it with meat and
like sauteed cabbage. I've had it in a crepe sort of
folded in with ricotta. There's just a lot of different
(38:44):
ways to use it. And then the other and that, you
know, that mushroom chestnut extension connection extends to
a lot of foods. I've made mushroom chestnut
soups. I've made a quiche with
mushrooms and chestnuts. There's just a lot of really
good ways to combine mushrooms and chestnuts and then with
acorns. I think the most exciting thing
that I've made where, you know, like I said, I'm looking for
(39:06):
that staple food. So I'm it people are making like
acorn brownies and you're like, OK, but that's not a staple
food. I've been making these nut and
seed crackers with an acorn flower base.
So people have probably seen, you know, you can buy those
really great seed crackers whereit just looks like a bunch of
pumpkin seeds and flax seeds andstuff all rolled out.
(39:28):
And I've been making a version with acorn flower and then
throwing in whatever random nutsand seeds I have.
So the last version, I think I did pumpkin seeds, walnuts, I
had some pistachios laying around, a few hazelnuts and you
just add water and I put it in aVitamix and I, you know, I
didn't blend it forever, but just enough that you're not
getting the huge nut chunks and then rolled it out between two
(39:51):
pieces of parchment paper and put on big flaky sea salt and
just baked that until it was crispy.
And that was something where I felt like I could eat this for a
really long time before I get sick of it.
And it was delicious. Those.
Both sound so. Dynamic that you could like pair
them with different things and you know you could find a ton of
(40:14):
variety with them Yeah, and a lot of the nut.
Cultures. What's cool is that often like
I, I went to Corsica actually right after finishing the book,
which had been a dream of mine because they have this really
ancient chestnut system and so many of the tree based systems.
It's not just the trees. The trees are in a relationship
also with animals that are producing either meat or milk.
(40:37):
And so there's often this chestnut cuisine all over
Corsica. They had like chestnut sausage,
chestnut fed animals that the milk had been turned into
cheese. And so then you've got that nut
seed cracker with like a little piece of sausage or some cheese.
And then you're really feeling like, OK, this is good.
We could go on like this for a while.
(40:57):
You're like. Now we're moving.
Moving in the right direction. So Speaking of moving in that
direction, you've called oak trees are a food plant.
A revolutionary statement for listeners who feel inspired but
maybe a little overwhelmed. What are small everyday acts
(41:18):
they can take to join in that revolution?
So first I just want. To credit Alan Burgo, who is the
first person that I read who said that I have his book, it's
amazing. He's calls himself the forager
chef. And I think that small steps
that people can take is first toreally learn and understand the
(41:39):
history of how we got to where we are in our food system and in
our cultural relationships with Indigenous people and how the
landscape got to be where it is today.
And then what I think is really simultaneously terrible and
exciting is that all of the problems that we're experiencing
(42:04):
today are connected. And when we trace them all back,
they're really all rooted in ourcurrent economy and our current
agreements about property ownership and money.
And so anything that you're doing to take that apart and to
rebuild something different, I think is part of the solution.
(42:25):
And for people who like things to be a little more specific, I
would say one thing you can do is get to know the keystone
plant or animal species in your area.
Anytime that you are increasing habitat or well-being of a
keystone species, you're increasing life in your
ecosystem where you live. And so anything that you're
(42:47):
doing to learn more about and help tend keystone species is
increasing life. And that's kind of what it's all
about. That is, kind of.
What it's all about, and that's a beautiful way to think about
it and to frame it, especially for those of us who are are
really shifting the the way we think about food, the way we
(43:08):
think about agriculture, the waywe think about community.
And, and it's so helpful for youto share your words and to share
your research to help us on thatjourney as we shift our
perspectives. And Elizabeth, we truly
appreciate the way you tug at strings, your ability to
(43:29):
research the history of the land, of agriculture, of the way
people live, of the way people eat, of connecting with so many
doers, listening to the living world and sharing all this with
us in your profound book. And today in this conversation,
Jonathan, I found it so inspiring and even more so to
(43:51):
hear you speak face to face. It's just so wonderful.
So thank you for your work and your words.
And we're going to support you all the way in spreading this
important information, sort of the way you spread seedlings of
hazelnut, chestnut or oak trees.Thank you so much for today,
Elizabeth. Thank you.
Thank you so much for. Having me, it's been a pleasure.
(44:17):
I'm so very. Grateful that we had the
opportunity to speak with Elsbeth Hay for such a
interesting conversation where she planted the seeds of so many
ideas. Specifically, what if food
revolution begins not with grandgestures, but with remembering
where nourishment truly comes from?
(44:39):
What if the future of food isn'tsomething we have to invent, but
something we have to recall? An ancient partnership waiting
for us to return? In a moment when so many are
struggling to put food on the table, when we are reaching for
ultra processed food sources that are not always nourishing,
(45:02):
and the grounds feel less stablethan ever, there's comfort in
the idea that it's possible to build food systems rooted in
generosity. And maybe.
That's the greatest invitation Elspeth Hay offers us to look
up, to look around, and to look back to the trees that have been
(45:23):
feeding us in quiet, steadfast ways for millennia.
They ask for. So little, yet give so much.
They are models of patience, of interdependence, of a
nourishment that is shared rather than hoarded.
If we choose to follow their lead, we're not just planting
(45:45):
food sources. We're planting a different kind
of future, One where resilience grows ring by ring, one where
generosity becomes our natural habitat, and one where the
simple act of tending a tree becomes an act of hope.
(46:07):
This week's episode was recordedand produced in Massachusetts on
the native lands of the WabanakiConfederacy, Pennacook,
Massachusett, Nossett, and Pawtucket people in Wisconsin on
the lands of the Ho Chunk, Potawatomi, and Menominee
people. Find us on Instagram at Tree
Speech Podcast or Tree speechpodcast.com.
(46:31):
This is also where you can find our show notes and learn more
about our featured trees. And thank you for joining Tree
Speech today.
My name is Dorie Robinson and this is Tree Speech, a podcast
where we examine our ever evolving relationship with
nature and especially trees. And I'm Jonathan Zoutner.
We're living in a moment when our food systems feel
increasingly fragile. Grocery prices keep rising.
(00:27):
Farms are struggling under droughts, floods and fires, and
an agricultural system that is increasingly stacked against
them. And for many people across the
country, the recent sudden cancellation of SNAP benefits
has deepened a sense of food scarcity and inequality.
(00:48):
Today's guest, food writer and researcher Elsbeth Hay, opens
our eyes to some resources that would diversify our options.
In her luminous new book, Feed Us with Trees, she reimagines
how we think about sustenance, revealing that acorns,
chestnuts, and hazelnuts once fed entire civilizations.
(01:12):
Drawing from Indigenous knowledge and her own hands on
experiments in foraging and cooking, Elspeth shows how trees
can nourish both people and the planet, offering resilience,
reciprocity, and hope in a time of uncertainty.
Feed Us With Trees is haze manifesto about a brighter, more
(01:36):
abundant future and a critical look at the long held stories
we'll need to rewrite to build it.
Elsbeth 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
(01:59):
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.
She lives in Wellfleet, MA. Today's episode isn't only about
food. It's a story about memory, about
(02:20):
what we've forgotten and what wecan remember again.
About restoring balance between taking and tending.
About learning to see our forests not just as wilderness,
but as pantries, pharmacies, andplaces of deep connection.
We invite you to sit with us beneath our canopy of old growth
(02:44):
oak trees, to listen, to imagine, and to remember what it
means to be fed by the world around us.
Here's our conversation with Elspeth Hay, author of Feed Us
with Trees. Well, good morning, Alice.
(03:09):
Beth, welcome to Tree Speech. Good morning.
It's so nice to be here. It's nice to see you.
I have to say I'll jump right in.
That your book Feed Us with Trees, Nuts, and the Future of
Food expanded both Dorian and myminds and LED to many
transformative moments for both of us regarding our food systems
(03:31):
and history and the structures and systems in our society that
are in desperate need of being questioned and rethought and
reworked. So your book opens with your own
transformative moment when you realized that acorns are food.
Could you share with us that story and tell us what shifted
(03:52):
in you when you held that kernelof knowledge in your hands, both
literally and figuratively? Yeah, I, I still remember.
I was just, you know, going through emails, a very normal
morning. And a friend had sent an e-mail
with this link to this Ted X talk.
And I thought, like, I don't really have time to watch this
(04:14):
right now, but I'll just click on it.
And it was one of those talks where, like, as soon as the
person started talking, I completely forgot everything
else I had going on because she said that you can eat acorns.
It was this woman, Marcy Mayer, who's an expat living in Greece.
And she said that not only can we eat acorns, but actually
(04:34):
they're a superfood and one of humanity's oldest foods.
And I, at that point, had been reporting on food and the
environment for over a decade. And I thought, wait, what?
I live in an oak forest. No one has ever said anything
about eating an acorn. How is it possible that we're
surrounded by all this food? I mean, acorns literally rain
(04:57):
onto my house in the fall. They're everywhere.
They're in the way. They're considered a nuisance.
And I just it, it just blew my mind that this food would be all
around us that we didn't even recognize as edible.
And so that was sort of the start of a very long and often
times very surprising journey ofdiscovery.
(05:19):
From that moment where you realized that that acorns were
food, you go on to describe oak trees as being a food plant and
that being an act of revolution.What do you think makes these
words so powerful to people who might not consider acorns as
food, or who have been taught that acorns are poisonous or
(05:43):
actually bad for us? I grew up with a story that I
think a lot of people in sort ofdominant Western culture grow up
with, which is this story that Icall No Farms, No Food, which is
also a bumper sticker for a great organization.
So I don't mean to, to knock that bumper sticker, but it's
(06:03):
this idea that we are separate from the natural world, even
that there, you know, is such a thing as the human world and the
natural world. I don't really believe in those
distinctions anymore, but I, I very much did growing up.
And I, I think a lot of that, you know, I trace it back into
the book to the history of colonialism and capitalism.
But I didn't know any of that asa kid.
(06:25):
And I grew up in Maine with two parents who were bird watchers.
And they were writing this birders guide to the coast of
Maine when I was a kid. And my sister and I spent a lot
of time being dragged on these bird watching trips all over
Maine and visiting different habitats.
And I remember, I don't think I could have expressed it at the
(06:45):
time, but this sense of like, what is wrong with our species?
Because all these places we would go, we would learn about
all these plants and animals andbirds.
And, you know, my parents have always been really interested in
ecosystems and, and the way thatthey interact and every other
species was perfectly adapted toits place.
(07:06):
And they had all these really beautiful networks to meet their
needs. You know, I we would learn about
SAP suckers which drilled these little rows of holes in trees
and that was how they fed themselves.
And I remember we banded leeches, storm petrols and they
would skim over the water off the coast of the Atlantic and,
and feed themselves. And then we would go to the
grocery store where we are getting our food from these
(07:29):
industrial farms that I knew were destroying wild places.
And I just couldn't understand why we didn't fit the same way
that other species did. And to me, that didn't that
didn't seem like it was a cultural thing.
As a kid, I thought, like, there's just something
fundamentally wrong with us. We're not part of nature and we
(07:49):
don't fit. And I think that so many of us
have grown up with that story. And so for me, learning that we
can eat acorns was like the first crack into like, wait,
maybe that's just a story. Maybe that's not like a fact.
And thinking about that idea of no farms, no food, in schools
(08:10):
and cultures, farming is often presented as humanity's
inevitable destiny. So as you're exploring all of
these alternative or different ways of feeding our society and
and people in our country and around the world, what
alternative stories of food production most expanded your
(08:30):
imagination? Yeah, I always thought farming
was this thing that came out of the agricultural revolution,
right, Which supposedly happenedabout 10,000 years ago and
proceeded on different timelines, on different
continents and in different places, but a sort of this
crowning achievement of humanity.
And while I was researching the book, when I first got
(08:53):
interested in Acorns, I read a really amazing book called
Acorns and Salmon Feed Our People.
And it was written by a non-native sociologist, Carrie
Marie Norgard. And I reached out to her.
It was about the crook people inpresent day Northern California.
And I reached out to her, and she connected me with a Crook
medicine man and cultural biologist named Ron Reed.
(09:15):
And this was during the early days of the pandemic.
So he and I spent a lot of time talking on Zoom and not really
being able to actually meet eachother in person.
And he told me a lot of stories from Kirk culture and how for
thousands of years, his people have tended oaks to produce
acorns as a staple food. And the more we talked, the more
(09:39):
I started to wonder what the difference was between farming
and hunter, hunting and gathering.
Which is the bucket that you know most tree based traditions
have been thrown into because hewas telling me about crook uses
of fire and how prescribed fire in traditional crook Land
(10:00):
Management. Helps keep acorn weevils, which
are a pest out of the acorns andhelps control the water cycle on
the Klamath River basin. Helps prepare the ground for new
acorns to sprout, helps control pathogens.
Helps acts as a fertilizer with this recycling of nutrients and
(10:22):
this boost into the soil. And I thought, OK, watering,
wedding, fertilizing, you know, preparing the ground for
planting, These are all the samejobs that we talked about in
farming. And when I actually went and,
you know, at that point, I had really started to learn a lot
more than what I knew as a kid about the war on indigenous food
(10:44):
systems that's been going on in North America for hundreds of
years now. And so I, I got curious and I
thought, OK, well, hunting and gathering like that must be a
really old term, right? At 10,000 years, we've been
talking about this revolution. And actually, that term came up
in the 1920s and 1930s for the first time.
(11:06):
So it came up during this periodof scientific racism and is
really steeped in that era and has nothing to do with actual
differences in food production, which I was incredibly surprised
by at first, right? I'm sure, yeah, that's that's
pretty jarring. So there's there's a lot of
(11:28):
reframing there and thinking in those terms.
Your visit to Mark Shepherd's Restoration Agriculture Farm
reframed your sense of what abundance can look like.
What struck you the most about that landscape?
Yeah. So Mark Sheppard took about 100
acres, I want to say maybe 95 acres of deeply eroded corn and
(11:52):
soyland that had been in these monoculture crops for decades
and planted it with more than 139 edible perennial species, at
least as of when I visited. And the difference between his
land and the land around it was incredible.
It felt like walking through a nature preserve.
But it was also a very active farm.
(12:14):
So he had chestnuts, He had hazelnuts.
He had pears, apples, plums, asparagus, pigs, you know, a
Maple sugar shack, all these different species.
And he had learned from another Midwestern farmer, Philip
Rutter, that the ecosystem that had been in the Midwest test
(12:34):
under Indigenous management was something called oak Savannah.
And he basically planted a farm to try to mimic that ecosystem,
except often subbing in cultivars for wild plants.
So, you know, cultivars have been specifically bred for yield
and disease resistance. And when I was there, an
(12:56):
endangered species had just moved back onto the land after,
you know, decades of really ecological devastation.
And So what he was doing was trying to restore land through
farming, which is an idea that'sreally caught on in the Midwest
and is spreading pretty rapidly and is exciting.
(13:18):
It's really exciting. How might relearning to see
abundance in wooded ecosystems change how we experience our own
neighborhoods, forests, or backyards?
I think that seeing are wooded landscapes as also food
producing and as also, you know,landscapes where there's an
opportunity for humans to take care of them and really pay a
(13:41):
play a positive role can start to dissolve that line that so
many of us have grown up seeing between humans and the natural
world. The natural world is actually an
idea that I really don't believein at all anymore.
I think there's a living world and we're part of it, and so is
everything else that's alive. And the distinct sanctions that
(14:02):
we tend to draw between humans on this other parts of the
living world are really artificial and our ways of sort
of not joining and not being part of it.
And I think that the more that we are part of it and the more
that we see ourselves as having an active role to play, the more
(14:23):
positive impact we can have on our ecosystems and on other
species around us. I love that reframing.
Thank you. You write about Commonwealth
rooted in trees and shared abundance.
Can you first share what Commonwealth is and what you've
learned about it? And how might reviving this kind
(14:44):
of Commons transform both our food systems and our
communities? When?
I was trying to figure out, you know, I had spent some time with
Ron Reed in California and learned about a lot of these
indigenous Coroic traditions. And sometimes Coroic people call
themselves Fix the World People.And I just kept thinking, wow,
OK, so Ron is part of this culture of fix the world people.
(15:07):
And I seem to be part of a culture of destroy the world
people. And why is that?
What's happened to my people along the way that's gotten us
into this mindset and this pattern?
And so I started trying to figure out, you know, when was
our rupture from a lot of these wooded landscapes.
Because if you go back in history, there are lots of
(15:29):
really ancient European traditions of, you know,
revering oak trees, revering hazelnuts, seeing them as
sacred. There were chestnut cultures all
over Europe in a lot of the Middle Ages.
And I didn't, you know, people didn't wake up one day and
decide, you know, nuts, no good to eat.
I think we'll move on. So I was trying to figure out
(15:50):
like, what happened. And that journey took me to
Appalachia as a starting point because at least in eastern
North America, that's an area where until about 100 years ago,
there still were a lot of Euro American communities heavily
relying on chestnuts as a staplefood and a really important
subsistence crop. And when I was down there, I
(16:14):
learned about history of Commonstending, of holding land in
common that I knew nothing about.
It turns out that until the close of the Civil War in the
United States, any unenclosed land was treated as a Commons.
So it was an area where you could hunt, you could fish, you
could turn out animals to graze.And the laws were different in
(16:38):
different places, but in most areas, the law was that you
defense other people's animals out of areas where you didn't
want them, as opposed to fencingyour own animals in.
And that was a tradition that dated all the way back to
England and a lot of other European countries.
And as I started following it and tugging on this thread, what
(16:59):
I learned is that, in fact, so many early Euro American
immigrants came here because of an internal colonization of
Europe where they lost access tothese wooded Commons at home.
And so we're often told that European immigrants came here
because it was a land of opportunity.
But that's really not the whole story.
(17:20):
About 75% of early Euro Americanimmigrants came because they had
lost access to subsistence landsat home.
And so I was, you know, that wasa pretty surprising historical
threat to start tugging. And it also has a really sad
ending here because what happened after the Civil War is
that formerly enslaved African Americans were able to come and
(17:44):
go from the labor market during that first year after the Civil
War by hunting and gathering andforaging from these wooded
Commons. And within a year of the close
of the Civil War, trespass laws changed in every southern state.
And then that tradition spread West and N.
So when we talk about about why don't we have a relationship
(18:07):
with these trees? Why aren't we eating from wooded
food systems? And we actually look at the
history for many people for generations, it's been very
dangerous to access this food source.
And so, you know, and that includes indigenous communities,
African American communities, and also women were some of the
(18:27):
biggest agitators for getting Commons rights backs in Europe
as they lost them. So, so many of the groups that
are marginalized today also havea history of a relationship with
these food sources and it becoming increasingly dangerous
to access them, which that's a lot to put on learning you can
eat an acorn. But I just kept being more and
(18:49):
more surprised by how far back this history goes well.
It's amazing. As you tug 1 little bit, what
else comes out? As you dig a little, what else
comes out? Yeah.
It's true and a lot of this history is heartbreaking.
It's eye opening and and hopefully causes people to
(19:09):
really examine our systems of today, as I said, and how things
could be changed moving forward.I think one of the strengths of
your book, though, is balancing these harsh realities with joy
and wonder and appreciation of the natural world in your own
(19:30):
life, the life of your family aswell.
And I particularly really enjoyed your chapter on twigs,
which pointed to the overlooked magical parts of tree life,
which included basket weaving, which you've learned throughout
this process of examination and research and learning.
(19:51):
Could you tell us what have twigs and practices like
copacing taught you about reciprocity in our natural
world? One of the themes that I kept
hearing from people tending nut trees in a huge variety of
places, Greece, California, England, all these different
places, was that they like interaction.
(20:14):
So different cultures and peoplein different places that I spoke
with had different ways of providing that interaction.
Some places people would coppice.
So a lot of nut trees like to becut back, whether that's through
coppice, which is cutting that'smore common with hazelnuts, or
pollarding, which is more commonwith oaks and chestnuts and
(20:37):
bigger trees. And then they'll send out a new
flush of growth. And that flush of growth tends
to go through a stage where it produces more nuts and then, you
know, slowly it gets older. One guy told me I was asking him
about an oak stand. And I, I was like, well, I don't
see a lot of acorns. And he said, well, do you see a
lot of babies in a nursing home?And I was like, no, I don't.
(20:59):
OK, I get what you're saying. So coppicing and pollarding and
also prescribed fire or culturalfire are all ways of renewing
plants to not kill them, keep them alive, have them come back
either from the trunk or the rootstock, but keep them
producing. And it was really exciting to
(21:23):
hear from different people how important this was.
Because I think in a lot of the stories I grew up with, the
natural world or the living world was always better off
without humans. You know, we've all seen the
post apocalyptic movies or booksand it's like, oh, the river is
clean again and the trees have come back and everything's
better 'cause we went away. But actually, in a lot of the
(21:44):
stories that I heard from not tending people, these trees
really need us and they really need our interaction in order to
thrive. There's actually been a lack of
oak regeneration in a huge variety of places over the past
80 or so years. And a lot of people have tied
that to fire suppression and to the elimination of some of these
(22:06):
older cultural practices like compassing and pollarding of
cutting them back. And so through learning about
that, I met when I was with Ron Reed in California, there was a
woman, Kathy Mccovey, who showedme these incredible hazelnut
baskets made by correct women. And I came back and I was all
inspired. I thought, OK, I'm going to
(22:27):
learn to weave with hazelnut. Like that's so beautiful.
But nobody in New England was teaching hazelnut weaving.
So I found a Willow weaving course And Willow actually very
similarly to a lot of these nut trees, really likes to be cut
back and can live longer with that kind of.
And so I took a course and was immediately hooked.
And now I've been selling baskets at my local farmers
(22:50):
market and just cannot stop weaving.
There's something about the movement with your hands.
But also, every time I do it, I have this feeling like somewhere
back in my lineage, like someonehas been doing this before, like
it just feels right, yes. It's in your DNA.
I, I looked at your social mediaand the baskets that you now
(23:12):
weave are magnificent. They're absolutely beautiful.
And so it's interesting to read about the early stages of the
challenges and the frustrations of learning how to do that.
And then to see where you've you've gone to in, in this art
in not a very long amount of time.
So they're beautiful. Thank you.
(23:34):
Yeah, I've, I've done a little bit of teaching of friends and I
always bring my first basket with me because I'm like this.
This is where it starts. And you will.
It will get easier. It doesn't start easy.
Don't be discouraged. Just keep going like any craft
honestly. So yes, it all takes.
Practice. That's inspiring.
As well, I'd like to go back to a point that you touched on
(23:58):
involving something else that you write about in the Book of
Fire in Shaping our woods and food systems.
And I'm wondering if you could tell us how can learning from
Indigenous fire stewardship change how we approach today's
ecological crisis in our world and country all over North?
(24:18):
America. There's a really long history of
indigenous fire as a Land Management practice.
There's some really beautiful writing on this from a paper Co
written by a Crook man named Frank Lake and Robin Walkemerer
who a lot of people are familiarwith.
And they have written that, you know, almost every landscape in
(24:38):
North America. If you actually look at it
closely, you'll see a history offire and fire is in a variety of
cultures around the world, sort of humanities defining gift as a
species. If you look at mythology and
cultural practices, so many places from, you know, Australia
to the Amazon to North America have this history with fire and
(25:02):
with human management of the landscape with fire.
And so I first learned about it in California when I was out
there. And that kind of made sense to
me because I thought, you know, wildfires, yes, prescribed
burns, That makes sense. We're reducing fuels.
And it was also, you know, I wasshown the ways that it's an
important part of a food system,but I didn't expect for it to be
(25:24):
a part of my landscape at home. And what I learned when I came
back and started doing a little bit of inquiring is that
actually Cape Cod also has a really long history with fire
and, and a lot of the Northeast has a really long history with
fire that many of us don't know about.
So I think I mentioned before that white oak has been the
(25:45):
dominant species in the Northeast for 9000 years.
And that's despite several periods of like pretty dramatic
little climate shifts. And many ecologists believe that
that's because of Indigenous burning and because indigenous
people have kept oak and other fire tolerant and fire adopted
species dominant on the landscape through regular burns.
(26:08):
And that's not to say that everywhere gets has historically
been burned all the time. It's more of a mosaic.
So what burning does is it checks the succession of the
forest. So for listeners who aren't
familiar with ecological succession, it's the process
where a landscape goes from likea big disturbance, a flood or a
fire or plowing or something of bare earth all the way to to,
(26:32):
you know, the most mature ecosystem that that ecosystem
can bear. And for a lot of places in the
Northeast, that's a closed canopy forest.
But oaks actually don't thrive in a closed canopy forest.
Neither do hazelnuts, Neither dochestnuts.
A lot of these trees like the middle stage.
So they like a little bit of space.
They like to regenerate with a little bit of light.
(26:53):
And when you put regular fire onthe landscape and different
places you know have different fire return intervals is the
word they use. So like in some places you might
want to burn every year and someplaces you might want to burn
once every 10 years. It depends.
But putting regular fire on the landscape isn't just about
reducing fuel loads. It also helps with that, but it
(27:15):
also keeps succession in sort ofthis steady held pattern instead
of ping pong in between dreams. So like, what we're seeing in
California now is there'll be a wildfire, OK.
That ecosystem is going all the way back to the beginning of
succession, and then it's movingthrough, and then it's getting
dense and overcrowded, and then it's going all the way back to
the beginning instead of just sort of hanging, being steady in
(27:39):
the middle. So there's so much, you know,
we're used to managing succession with a plow, but many
of us have forgotten that there are other tools and that there
are other stages of succession where you can hold the land
besides just that first stage. And there's, we can go into it
or not. But there there are also some
(27:59):
really important climate implications for what stage of
succession you're holding the land in and the ways that you're
disturbing it. Yes.
Let's go into it. Could you offer, I know your
book goes into this quite in depth and people should read the
book also to hear about your experience participating in a
burn near your home or within a mile or so of your home.
(28:21):
But yes, could you maybe highlight a few of those things
that you did learn about the climate implications?
Yeah, Well, one of. The first things I learned was
with a soil scientist who explained to me the way that
every time we plow up a field, the soil is releasing carbon
dioxide into there. He called it.
He said it's burping it out. And what happens is that plants
(28:45):
with their roots are are storingcarbon in the ground.
So they're putting carbon into the ground year after year.
And when you hold a forest in sort of the middle or an oak
grassland ecosystem in these middle stages of succession,
instead of completely digging upthe roots, you hold on to that
(29:06):
below ground soil carbon. And so there's a pretty big
difference between managing an oak grassland ecosystem year
after year after year, building up carbon, and also every time
you have a fire, some of that burn turns to ash and some of it
turns to basically biochar. So you're also, there's kind of
(29:27):
like 2 carbon cycles, right? There's the short term carbon
cycle, which is like, okay, a plant grows, it's releasing
carbon dioxide as it decomposes,then it grows again.
But there's the longer term carbon cycle, which is where
like fossil fuels live and also biochar.
Biochar stores carbon for a verylong time.
(29:49):
So in addition to the fact that managing with fire allows plants
to keep putting carbon underground without that carbon
coming out and being disturbed, it's also adding layer after
layer after layer of biochar on the land every year.
And when we look at prime agricultural soils all over the
(30:09):
world, almost all of them are these mollusals which have been
created through repreted fires over millennia.
So that that fertility of the Midwest that we're kind of
mining right now with our industrial row crop agriculture
was actually created through indigenous management using
fire. So interesting.
And that biochar you write aboutquite a bit as well, including
(30:32):
the friend who now sells it and,and how your plants can flourish
with just the right amount of that added to their soil.
Yeah. There seems to be a long
tradition of creating biochar, maybe under different names in a
lot of places. So the the person who I learned
from, who lives in East Ham, here on Cape Cod, he traveled to
(30:55):
the Amazon where they have a soil called tarapreda, which is
basically this Amazonian sort ofviscous clay, not very nutrient
rich, but enhanced with broken shards of pottery and biochar to
create this incredibly fertile soil.
And different cultures all over the world have been realizing
(31:19):
the ways that biochar boosts soil fertility for a long time.
And it's not an amendment the way that we think of fertilizers
today. It's not adding like a boost of
potassium and nitrogen. It's actually creating habitat
for beneficial microorganisms that then nurture and have
(31:40):
relationships with the plants tokeep them healthy.
When you plant with biochar, we actually just planted about 180
nut trees on some land that we own in Maine and we did an
experiment where a few of the holes we didn't put biochar.
Most of the holes we did. And on the first day when we
were watering the seedlings in the holes with the biochar, when
(32:00):
you walked by 20 minutes later, there was still a little puddle.
They still looked wet. And the holes with no biochar,
that water was just gone. So it's pretty interesting just
in real time to see the ways that it can change the soil
composition, yes. There's much to learn, there's
much to information to spread. So sort of segwaying from fire
(32:25):
into the kitchen. Your book ends by bringing us
into the kitchen. Why was it important for you to
ground your vision and the things that you had written
about of ideas for the future inrecipes and and meals?
I think that cooking. Has always been kind of my first
(32:47):
connection to the living world around me, like my my first way
of interacting with excitement and love.
I've always loved when you can grow something or pick something
and then figure out what to do with it.
I wrote a cooking column for a long time and these a lot of
(33:08):
these nuts, we're really, we've lost so much of the cultural
knowledge around how to process and cook with them.
And they've also been villainized in a lot of ways
through sort of the low fat craze of the 70s.
And so it was exciting to me to start playing around with them
(33:29):
and figuring out, OK, if you're talking about a staple food,
you're talking about something that you need to know how to
cook like 300 different ways because you're eating it every
day. And when I was researching the
book, I have a friend who's fromSwitzerland, and there's this
mountainous town there that I ended up going to visit.
And they told me that in some areas of Switzerland,
(33:52):
historically, the average personate 330 lbs of chestnuts per
person per year, which when I started thinking about it, I was
like, that is just an incredibleamount of chestnuts.
And so I started playing around just trying to figure out like,
(34:12):
if you were going to eat that many chestnuts or that many
acorns or that many hazelnuts, like, what does that actually
look like on your plate? How are you doing that?
And what I discovered is that weknow a lot about chestnuts.
There's a lot of European and your American history around
chestnut cuisine that is very accessible.
(34:34):
And we kind of know about hazelnuts, although most people
just sort of eat them because they are delicious roasted and
like you don't really need to doa lot to them.
But when it comes to acorns, there has been such a war on so
many of the cultures that have acorn knowledge that either that
knowledge has in some cases beenlost or isn't being shared for
(34:56):
really understandable reasons. And I started thinking about
like, imagine if we lost everything that we know about
wheat processing and cooking with wheat.
Like how long would it take you to get to a croissant?
You know what I mean? Like you're, you're not going to
figure that out on day 2. And that's kind of where we're
at with acorns in a sense, whichon the one hand is overwhelming
(35:21):
and on the other hand is super fun because there's lots to try.
It's an adventure. And I will say I was inspired by
you. I'm from Wisconsin, and my dad
on some land near central Wisconsin, not far from where
you were visiting. And I visited him last weekend
and we were sort of talking about the book and about you.
(35:42):
And he, I had no idea. But he's planted Chinese
chestnut trees on his land. And so I gathered some of the
chestnuts. They're just like barely ripe,
just there. And I'll be watching for the
other ones. But later this week I'm going to
roast them in the oven and and sort of dive right into to the
example that you've set. That's really.
(36:05):
Exciting. And I think one of the most
hopeful and exciting things thatI saw as I was writing the book
and talking with different people is just this incredible
resurgence of interest in agroforestry in the Midwest in
particular. I was just out at the Northern
Nut Growers Annual Conference inAugust in Michigan, and there
(36:26):
were so many different farmers from all over the Midwest who
are fed up with the current system and looking for change
and who are starting to find support through nonprofits like
the Savannah Institute, which isa institution, A nonprofit
promoting some of these woody agriculture crops.
And they're really building community around excitement
(36:50):
about these foods. And it's a lot of fun to be in
those groups and to feel the energy.
And, you know, people are swapping recipes.
And people were swapping differently, you know, foods
that they had made. There were these Papa Brownies
and, you know, someone had brought acorn flour.
And so it's really exciting to see the people who are, you
(37:12):
know, in many ways bearing the brunch of the current farming
crisis also getting excited about alternatives.
It's wonderful. That is really.
Exciting and And since you've been talking to different people
about different recipes, of all the nut based dishes you've
experimented with, I assume you have not yet made the acorn
(37:36):
croissant, but I'd be excited ifyou did.
Which one are you most excited about and which one most
captures the future you'd hope for?
Oh, that's such a. Good question.
I think there's two that pop right to mind when you say most
excited about 1 is this chestnutmushroom saute, which I keep
(38:00):
making and then doing different things with.
One of the things that I've noticed about chestnut recipes
is that so many of them are paired with mushrooms and I,
being sort of an ecosystem geek,get really excited about that
because they grow together. So it's always exciting to take
things that grow together and cook them together.
And I have this great, I think it's just called the Chestnut
Cookbook. You just saute garlic and
(38:23):
chestnuts and mushrooms and thenyou add like a tiny bit of heavy
cream at the end and it sounds so weird.
And as you're making it, you're like, what is this?
And it's so good. It's so good.
It's really good with like, you know, I've had it with meat and
like sauteed cabbage. I've had it in a crepe sort of
folded in with ricotta. There's just a lot of different
(38:44):
ways to use it. And then the other and that, you
know, that mushroom chestnut extension connection extends to
a lot of foods. I've made mushroom chestnut
soups. I've made a quiche with
mushrooms and chestnuts. There's just a lot of really
good ways to combine mushrooms and chestnuts and then with
acorns. I think the most exciting thing
that I've made where, you know, like I said, I'm looking for
(39:06):
that staple food. So I'm it people are making like
acorn brownies and you're like, OK, but that's not a staple
food. I've been making these nut and
seed crackers with an acorn flower base.
So people have probably seen, you know, you can buy those
really great seed crackers whereit just looks like a bunch of
pumpkin seeds and flax seeds andstuff all rolled out.
(39:28):
And I've been making a version with acorn flower and then
throwing in whatever random nutsand seeds I have.
So the last version, I think I did pumpkin seeds, walnuts, I
had some pistachios laying around, a few hazelnuts and you
just add water and I put it in aVitamix and I, you know, I
didn't blend it forever, but just enough that you're not
getting the huge nut chunks and then rolled it out between two
(39:51):
pieces of parchment paper and put on big flaky sea salt and
just baked that until it was crispy.
And that was something where I felt like I could eat this for a
really long time before I get sick of it.
And it was delicious. Those.
Both sound so. Dynamic that you could like pair
them with different things and you know you could find a ton of
(40:14):
variety with them Yeah, and a lot of the nut.
Cultures. What's cool is that often like
I, I went to Corsica actually right after finishing the book,
which had been a dream of mine because they have this really
ancient chestnut system and so many of the tree based systems.
It's not just the trees. The trees are in a relationship
also with animals that are producing either meat or milk.
(40:37):
And so there's often this chestnut cuisine all over
Corsica. They had like chestnut sausage,
chestnut fed animals that the milk had been turned into
cheese. And so then you've got that nut
seed cracker with like a little piece of sausage or some cheese.
And then you're really feeling like, OK, this is good.
We could go on like this for a while.
(40:57):
You're like. Now we're moving.
Moving in the right direction. So Speaking of moving in that
direction, you've called oak trees are a food plant.
A revolutionary statement for listeners who feel inspired but
maybe a little overwhelmed. What are small everyday acts
(41:18):
they can take to join in that revolution?
So first I just want. To credit Alan Burgo, who is the
first person that I read who said that I have his book, it's
amazing. He's calls himself the forager
chef. And I think that small steps
that people can take is first toreally learn and understand the
(41:39):
history of how we got to where we are in our food system and in
our cultural relationships with Indigenous people and how the
landscape got to be where it is today.
And then what I think is really simultaneously terrible and
exciting is that all of the problems that we're experiencing
(42:04):
today are connected. And when we trace them all back,
they're really all rooted in ourcurrent economy and our current
agreements about property ownership and money.
And so anything that you're doing to take that apart and to
rebuild something different, I think is part of the solution.
(42:25):
And for people who like things to be a little more specific, I
would say one thing you can do is get to know the keystone
plant or animal species in your area.
Anytime that you are increasing habitat or well-being of a
keystone species, you're increasing life in your
ecosystem where you live. And so anything that you're
(42:47):
doing to learn more about and help tend keystone species is
increasing life. And that's kind of what it's all
about. That is, kind of.
What it's all about, and that's a beautiful way to think about
it and to frame it, especially for those of us who are are
really shifting the the way we think about food, the way we
(43:08):
think about agriculture, the waywe think about community.
And, and it's so helpful for youto share your words and to share
your research to help us on thatjourney as we shift our
perspectives. And Elizabeth, we truly
appreciate the way you tug at strings, your ability to
(43:29):
research the history of the land, of agriculture, of the way
people live, of the way people eat, of connecting with so many
doers, listening to the living world and sharing all this with
us in your profound book. And today in this conversation,
Jonathan, I found it so inspiring and even more so to
(43:51):
hear you speak face to face. It's just so wonderful.
So thank you for your work and your words.
And we're going to support you all the way in spreading this
important information, sort of the way you spread seedlings of
hazelnut, chestnut or oak trees.Thank you so much for today,
Elizabeth. Thank you.
Thank you so much for. Having me, it's been a pleasure.
(44:17):
I'm so very. Grateful that we had the
opportunity to speak with Elsbeth Hay for such a
interesting conversation where she planted the seeds of so many
ideas. Specifically, what if food
revolution begins not with grandgestures, but with remembering
where nourishment truly comes from?
(44:39):
What if the future of food isn'tsomething we have to invent, but
something we have to recall? An ancient partnership waiting
for us to return? In a moment when so many are
struggling to put food on the table, when we are reaching for
ultra processed food sources that are not always nourishing,
(45:02):
and the grounds feel less stablethan ever, there's comfort in
the idea that it's possible to build food systems rooted in
generosity. And maybe.
That's the greatest invitation Elspeth Hay offers us to look
up, to look around, and to look back to the trees that have been
(45:23):
feeding us in quiet, steadfast ways for millennia.
They ask for. So little, yet give so much.
They are models of patience, of interdependence, of a
nourishment that is shared rather than hoarded.
If we choose to follow their lead, we're not just planting
(45:45):
food sources. We're planting a different kind
of future, One where resilience grows ring by ring, one where
generosity becomes our natural habitat, and one where the
simple act of tending a tree becomes an act of hope.
(46:07):
This week's episode was recordedand produced in Massachusetts on
the native lands of the WabanakiConfederacy, Pennacook,
Massachusett, Nossett, and Pawtucket people in Wisconsin on
the lands of the Ho Chunk, Potawatomi, and Menominee
people. Find us on Instagram at Tree
Speech Podcast or Tree speechpodcast.com.
(46:31):
This is also where you can find our show notes and learn more
about our featured trees. And thank you for joining Tree
Speech today.
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