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A writer and anthropologist searches for wild foods-and reveals what we lose in a world where wildness itself is misunderstood, commodified, and hotly pursued. Two centuries ago, nearly half the North American diet was found in the wild. Today, so-called "wild foods" are becoming expensive commodities, served to the wealthy in top restaurants. In Feasting Wild, geographer and anthropologist Gina Rae La Cerva traces our relationship to wild foods and shows what we sacrifice when we domesticate them-including biodiversity, Indigenous knowledge, and an important connection to nature. Along the way, she samples wild foods herself, sipping elusive bird's nest soup in Borneo and smuggling Swedish moose meat home in her suitcase. Thoughtful, ambitious, and wide-ranging, Feasting Wild challenges us to take a closer look at the way we eat today.… (more)
User reviews
My favorite part was right here on the east coast of the USA. She walks through a deserted and drinking Winchester factory and shows how the factory was used at one time and how nature has retaken much. What nature did and could not reclaim was the land the pilgrims found when they arrived, a land the American Indians had taken care of for hundreds of years. The plentiful birds, a skynfilked with carrier pigeons, twelve different types of ducks. So many wild turkeys. Many no longer in existence, we have not been good caretakers of our home.
The Congo was heartbreaking. Bush meat and poaching a way of life. No easy answers, trying to balance conservation with the need of people to eat and of course the trees of other countries who pay top dollar for parts of the animals and the bush meat. Some tough reading there.
A valuable book showing us how damaging we have been, how the animals, and other forms of wildlife have suffered or been wiped out completely.
ARC from Edelweiss.