00:20:43.000Baby, you're beautiful in black and gray, too
00:20:49.940With your long, long hair hanging down
00:20:54.200i in my early days was a commercial mushroom forager for a bit and i went into it with
00:21:10.240good intentions really not understanding the commercialized industrial global market for them
00:21:17.160And it was heartbreaking to see the forest being ripped up completely stripped of every mushroom and vans of people just going out into national forests, taking everything they could.
00:21:31.800And it wasn't reciprocal, but of course, it's also very complicated with economic needs of people, too.
00:21:38.200and so yeah there's so much there but I really am grateful for you speaking to that because
00:21:44.940especially with fungi it's become so fetishized on social media and everybody wants a piece of it
00:21:52.540and so I've actually really stopped my foraging relationship with mushrooms for the most part
00:21:58.020and I think it's important for us who really do care about the earth to understand what kind of
00:22:03.800impact we can have? Because we may only pick a couple, but if everybody picks a couple,
00:22:08.180there's none left. And what does that mean for the forest?
00:22:11.480Yeah. I mean, one of the rules of foraging is only pick 10% and leave 90% behind for nature.
00:22:19.040But as you're saying, it so much depends on how many other people are foraging in that area.
00:22:23.380And I think part of the problem with global commodities, making wild foods global commodities,
00:22:28.120is that sense that you no longer know what's happening on that local landscape. You don't
00:22:33.160get to go back every year and see how the mushrooms are doing this year. Is it a year
00:22:38.120that you really shouldn't take mushrooms because they need to regenerate? So that capitalist system
00:22:43.280is mediating what should be a much more intimate relationship. Yeah, absolutely.
00:22:49.200Well, before we delve further, I'd like to turn our conversation towards your experience with
00:22:53.940and the politics of the wild meat trade in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
00:22:58.860This is a topic that has been discussed on and off by varying actors for quite some time
00:24:23.700You know, another issue is just population. Issues of population are complicated and important to kind of get at the nuances of, but really there's just more people hunting in the Congo Basin now than ever before.
00:24:37.700The Democratic Republic of Congo also experienced a number of civil wars, and that allowed automatic weapons like AK-47s, AK-15s into the forest, and that really increased the pace of extraction of wild meat.
00:24:53.380Because in the past, when people may have been hunting with a shotgun, with a machine gun, you can take down an entire troop of monkeys in five minutes.
00:25:02.120the other thing that happened there which has happened all over the world is increasing
00:25:06.920urbanization and so suddenly you have a market for forest products in an urban setting and again
00:25:12.760as we're talking about with the mushrooms that kind of spatial distance actually increases the
00:25:18.180value of the product in the cities and has led to more and more people who used to just subsist
00:25:23.860on wild meat in the forest have started selling it as a way to get cash and so now you have these
00:25:28.880huge trade networks of people that come from the city, and they'll bring things like bullets or
00:25:34.760soap or various sort of industrialized products, and they'll trade them for wild meat up in the
00:25:38.980forest communities. So this conservationists have been talking about the bushmeat trade for
00:25:43.94050 years. It's kind of seen like an intractable problem. As you mentioned, it's really tied up
00:25:51.140with the small arms trade with sort of illegal elements. And it's important to also mention that
00:25:56.680eating wild meat is not necessarily illegal in the Congo. Just like in the U.S., they have
00:26:03.100hunting seasons. They have open and closed seasons when you're allowed to hunt.
00:26:07.180You need to have a permit to own a gun. So a lot of the illegality actually comes from sort of
00:26:11.460these smaller scale things where someone might be hunting with a gun that they don't have a permit
00:26:15.740for or hunting out of season or hunting in a national park instead of a sort of other corridor
00:26:21.920forest, which is available for hunting. But increasingly, wild meat can be a status symbol.
00:26:27.720But for a lot of Congolese, it's also part of just culturally what kind of food you would eat.
00:26:34.940So it's very much a celebratory food. People eat it for weddings and holidays. I like to say it
00:26:41.680would be kind of like if the U.S. outlawed Turkey on Thanksgiving, people would literally be up in
00:26:46.560arms. So to tell a Congolese person that they shouldn't eat this meat when it's so much a part
00:26:51.940of their past and their ancestors and their culture is really, really complicated. And then
00:26:57.060for another sector of Congolese society, and this is shrinking because as game meat becomes more of
00:27:02.620a luxury, as I said, people are more willing to sell it rather than eat it. But for a lot of
00:27:07.560people, it still means a survival. So they live in areas where they don't have access to domesticated
00:27:11.960meat. And so this is what they're subsisting on. They hunt in order to live. And then in other
00:27:16.760areas where there's a lot of illegal mining happening in the forest, these sort of small
00:27:20.640scale mining communities pop up and they often don't have access to imported foods. And so game
00:27:27.720meat becomes a primary source of protein there as well. So, you know, when we're trying to figure
00:27:32.480out how best to pass conservation measures, you know, you have to weigh all of these things1.00
00:27:36.780because, you know, there's no doubt that the bushmeat trade is decimating the forest.
00:27:40.700conservationists call it the empty forest syndrome. And, you know, so many animals have
00:27:46.100been wiped out that there's concern that the trees that rely on these animals to distribute their
00:27:51.180seeds, these trees are not reproducing anymore. And so the whole ecology of the forest is changing
00:27:55.760with the loss of these animals. But, you know, it's incredibly complicated to try and figure
00:28:00.720out how to fix this problem. There is some talk about farming wild meats, particularly smaller
00:28:05.760animals that are easier to cultivate, like cane rats, porcupines, and antelopes. We do that in
00:28:11.120the U.S. with certain kinds of wild animals and birds. But as we've seen in China, there can be
00:28:15.500major problems with that as well, in terms of the health of the animals and the potential for these
00:28:20.020other zoonoses to arise, kind of like coronavirus. So it's a super challenging problem.
00:28:26.440Yeah, I hear that. And it reminds me a lot of what's happening in Alaska with salmon and subsistence versus commercialization versus sports fishing and who gets to eat it and who should be eating it, if anyone. It's really complicated.
00:28:47.740And there was another part in your book that was talking about the introduction of chicken into the Congo. And I would love if you could speak a little bit about that, just how they're trying to kind of sell this idea of the Western diet as something to strive for and how bringing chicken in could really potentially be extremely harmful, perhaps. So yeah, if you could speak to that, too. I thought that was really interesting part in your book.
00:29:15.620Yeah. I mean, I think it goes to what you're saying about who gets to eat these foods and
00:29:19.180who gets to decide, right? So in DRC, a lot of these attempts at getting people to stop eating
00:29:26.320bushmeat, you know, for a long time, the trade was really focused on the hunting of the animals.
00:29:32.160So trying to get people to stop hunting, trying to give, you know, alternative livelihoods to
00:29:37.060people who were hunters, working on the networks. And now people are starting to realize that
00:29:41.700really the demand for the meat for the wild meat is part of what's is a huge part of what's driving
00:29:46.720this trade and so how do we start to change that demand so one conservation organization that i
00:29:52.460that i interviewed they're trying to start a massive chicken farming operation in order to get
00:29:58.080more and more sort of fresh and frozen chicken to the markets in kinshasa in the hopes that people
00:30:03.980will prefer or start eating chicken over eating wild meat and you know there's various issues
00:30:10.860with this so for instance the chicken feed that they need requires industrial you know to grow
00:30:17.36080,000 chickens a year you need a lot of feed and where does that feed come from well in this case
00:30:22.480the feed has to come from Brazil because there isn't that source of feed currently happening
00:30:27.920in Congo or in the neighboring areas neighboring countries so you have to feed them another issue
00:30:33.300in DRC is that there's often rolling blackouts and so the cold chain or sort of this the cold
00:30:39.420chain is like all the refrigerated trucks and refrigeration that is required to have meat like
00:30:44.080this that isn't super reliable and so people get sick eating chicken and so there's sort of an
00:30:49.580association with it not being as healthy whereas game meat is slow roasted over many days and that's
00:30:56.420its preservation technique and so people actually consider game meat to be much healthier because it
00:31:00.640doesn't have the same association with illness that domesticated meats might have and so and
00:31:08.460then another thing is that people eat game meat to vary their diet. So as we were talking about
00:31:13.140earlier, sort of, even though we might crave fat and sugar, we also crave sort of diversity in our
00:31:18.820flavor palates. We want to eat a different thing for dinner every night. And so for Congolese
00:31:22.960people who eat game, and again, not all Congolese people do, it's primarily associated with people
00:31:28.220who had ancestors that lived in the forests. But, you know, wild animals taste very different. So
00:31:34.080an antelope is going to taste different than a bush pig. And so people eat wild game to vary
00:31:39.060their diets in that way. And the idea that you could, you know, would eat chicken every night
00:31:43.080is kind of preposterous. So these Western conservation organizations are hoping that
00:31:48.560they can kind of change hearts and minds and say, look, you can cook chicken in lots of different
00:31:52.400ways. And, you know, I think they're really targeting sort of the second generation urban
00:31:56.960dweller. So whereas someone who maybe moved to the city as an adult or still had some connection to
00:32:03.800their ancestral villages would still prefer gay meat. Maybe that next generation actually doesn't0.99
00:32:09.500prefer it and is totally happy to eat a Western diet of chicken. There's also some really
00:32:15.400interesting sort of gender dynamics where white meat isn't really seen as meat to some Congolese
00:32:22.500men. So the sort of red meat, that quality of gay meat is what gives a man his sort of vitality,0.85
00:32:28.660much in the way that you might say like chicken is different than like eating that that perfect0.98
00:32:34.180hamburger or something you know we have some of those similar kind of ideas about meat and
00:32:38.440masculinity in this country as well wow it's so complex we've gotten ourselves in such a
00:32:46.420pickle here um it's yeah and i know and it was millions of years in the making
00:32:52.560oh no yeah well in your work you beautifully chronicle the relationship between wild foods
00:33:00.780and their environments which we talked about a bit already but now i'm particularly thinking
00:33:05.960about the history of green turtles during the 17 and 1800s and how after their population was
00:33:12.020disseminated through the popularity of green turtle soup epithetic algae grew rampantly
00:33:17.880which in turn led to suppressed seagrass productivity, widespread mortality of the
00:33:23.140long-spined sea urchin, coral reef die-off, and beach erosion. And so with this understanding
00:33:30.240as an entrance point, I wonder what the relationship is between reviving wild foods and
00:33:35.980fostering comprehensive environmental conservation. How might our reverence for wild foods replace
00:33:42.700long-forgotten culture beliefs that once aided in the conservation and protection of ecology
00:33:47.660for many? Yeah, this is such a good question. And again, we could probably spend hours talking
00:33:53.720about this one as well. But when Columbus came to the quote unquote, new world, there were tens of
00:34:00.120millions of sea turtles in the ocean. I mean, there were so many that sailors used to think
00:34:05.380that they were rocks in the sea, you know, and, and there were stories of sailors using the sound
00:34:10.560of these turtles swimming to navigate because there's so many of them in the oceans. So, you
00:34:16.920know the the level of wild food abundance in the past is like is really really hard to fathom
00:34:22.380sometimes um in our present ecological state to think about how quickly we decimated these
00:34:29.420creatures as well again this is a pattern that we see over and over the green turtle was consumed
00:34:34.480as subsistence by early colonists it was fed to enslaved people and then as it becomes became
00:34:42.060rarer, it became a luxury in England where sort of like if you were going to have a banquet,
00:34:47.920you had to serve green turtle soup. And as you mentioned, as the turtles were decimated, they
00:34:52.400were a keystone species in the ecosystem, and they helped to regulate these underwater seagrass beds.
00:34:58.460They helped to fertilize coral and kind of maintain nutrients on beaches.
00:35:03.860So as they were decimated, the whole ecology of the ocean changed. But, you know, this relationship
00:35:09.340between conservation and wild food has a really long history. So in the Middle Ages, kings passed
00:35:15.860some of the earliest conservation laws in order to protect the forests where they hunted. As a result,
00:35:22.120we still have some of these really ancient forests today because that sort of conservation law got
00:35:27.200passed down through the centuries. And it was really just to protect this sort of kingly appetite1.00
00:35:32.380for wild meat. More recently, we have something like the duck stamp tax in the U.S., which allows0.95
00:35:38.720for both hunting of, of waterfowl and the conservation of wetlands, you know, so there's
00:35:45.840this kind of uncomfortable, but also really interesting relationship between hunters,
00:35:52.020foragers and conservation, you know, sort of the paradox of consuming something to save it, right?
00:35:58.340And I worry that as we've lost the sort of direct reason of sustenance to care for our lands,
00:36:04.400that it becomes much more, much easier to just pave over something and turn it into a shopping
00:36:09.860mall. You know, we no longer see that place as something that we can rely on for food or for
00:36:14.380survival or for delicious flavors. And it's easy to forget that past abundance that could be revived
00:36:20.820in these places. Our obsession with wild foods, both as a fetish and as a need, has driven
00:36:27.120environmental conservation. And so how do we revive sort of both those diets and that link
00:36:33.800to conservation, while recognizing that we exist in the system that, you know, something becomes a
00:36:40.580commodity, does that still allow us to create that, that revitalization in these ecosystems?
00:36:47.440Yeah. Yeah, when things become commodity, it just seems like such a slippery slope
00:36:54.140downwards. And it's really challenging to keep integrity while commodifying something. And
00:37:00.300And to keep on this topic, it's as so often happens with recorded history, women's contributions and whether that's botany, agriculture and foraging have been erased alongside their knowledge keeping counterparts, which is particularly ironic considering that historically women have been primary food producers.
00:37:18.820So I'd like to ask about not only women's role in the past, but how this everlasting knowledge poises women throughout the world to take the lead in wildlife conservation.
00:37:28.620the food and agricultural organization estimates that globally around 1 billion people still rely
00:37:36.760on wild food for at least some portion of their diets and this food is majority of the subsistence
00:37:43.420food resource is procured by women so you're absolutely right that these contributions
00:37:47.420to global food supply are incredibly important and yet they're nearly invisible because
00:37:52.560a lot of times with these wild foods they're informal they're sort of not counted as part
00:37:56.620of the larger agricultural economic system. So we don't recognize this labor and we don't
00:38:02.900recognize this knowledge. But the women who procure wild foods from these regions, they have1.00
00:38:07.560really intimate knowledge of these ecologies. I mean, they spend every day, you know, out foraging,1.00
00:38:12.880out fishing, observing the changes in the landscape. Another thing is that as climate
00:38:18.180change reduces agricultural yields, it's predicted that wild foods are going to play an increasingly
00:38:23.780critical role in food security and nutrition for a lot of people. And so women are both a1.00
00:38:29.720particularly vulnerable group to climate change, but also, which I think is really exciting,
00:38:34.420they're also at the forefront of many conservation, resiliency, and sustainability initiatives.
00:38:40.380And so the question is, how do we support that knowledge? You know, preliminary studies have
00:38:44.700found that when we give women decision-making power over the harvest of wild ingredients,
00:38:49.060they choose to invest more time and resources into sustainable management than men you know
00:38:54.740so i think this is in some ways like the next frontier in kind of community conservation or
00:38:59.540conservation goals is really looking at at this silenced hidden knowledge you know we have these
00:39:05.220sort of root assumptions that people tend to value nature to the degree that they can subtract
00:39:10.260themselves from it so if you don't have to subsist on it any longer then you suddenly can say like
00:39:15.480nature is wonderful and I appreciate it. But if you're there every day, you might think of it as
00:39:19.260as something of less value. But and I think that ties into another root assumption that we have
00:39:24.220that that human action is inherently degrading. But from the perspective of women who know these
00:39:30.160wild species intimately, who rely on them, who spend time with them every day, neither of these
00:39:35.380assumptions are true. You know, and I think they can embody a much more mutual and loving relationship
00:39:40.740with these wild creatures. You know, so I think for me, something that's really exciting is kind
00:39:47.360of challenging our assumptions about the tragedy of the commons. It's usually told that sort of
00:39:52.800individuals will destroy and degrade communal resources motivated by their own selfish profits.
00:39:57.860But if you took a sort of larger view and you look at women's role in this, you kind of start0.63
00:40:03.040to understand that, you know, this theory relies on a belief that economic decisions exist outside
00:40:08.920of the details of everyday life. So something that I really love talking about in this book
00:40:13.960are these sort of what I call like these quiet stories, these hidden stories, these stories that
00:40:18.380are so mundane that we don't think to recognize them. And women going out and gathering every day
00:40:23.700is one of those stories that you just, it doesn't make the news. It's not bright and flashy, but
00:40:27.920it's such an important aspect of global conservation going forward. And so for me, you know, the idea
00:40:34.520that humans are idle part of keeping nature wild is a really old one. And I think we need to start
00:40:39.600remembering that, that we're capable of creating the conditions for abundance, for mutual thriving
00:40:45.540of all the diverse creatures that live on this earth. And that sort of inherent connection with
00:40:50.520nature that we've lost and we've devalued as we've devalued women and their role in producing food0.97
00:40:56.520and their environmental knowledge. So, you know, as we remember and celebrate the silenced
00:41:01.540knowledge, I think we can not only discover sort of how to protect these places, but also
00:41:07.200recreate a relationship with our own wildness.
00:42:08.840Well, for those of us in the so-called global north
00:42:13.400who remain relatively trapped within the global food chain,
00:42:17.260we're being forced to pay attention to global food security
00:42:20.120and the fact that the global marketplace doesn't actually exist to feed people.
00:42:25.320Comparatively, you reference how amidst the Black Plague,
00:42:28.300people turned to abandoned fields and the peripheries of place to eat whatever grew.
00:42:33.920And so as the global food chain becomes more and more uncertain,
00:42:37.320and the absurdity becomes clearer and clearer,
00:42:40.000perhaps more people will hanker for a similar opportunity.
00:42:43.580But I wonder, what does this appetite mean for the largely urbanized and suburbanized world?
00:42:50.320How can we live and eat within the caring capacity of what is around us,
00:42:54.720especially when urban areas can't provide enough wild foods?
00:42:58.300Yeah, I mean, for me, the idea of feasting wild is not necessarily about going out and eating something wild, right? There's really too many of us, there's not enough wild landscapes for that to be a viable option. As you point out, a lot of people live in urban areas where wild plants are often contaminated from growing out of, you know, contaminated soils.
00:43:18.020so much of this book is trying to understand how wild food how we can prevent wild foods from just
00:43:23.300being luxuries to an elite few you know and really so it's really issues of social justice
00:43:28.900and environmental justice go hand in hand for me and so it's a hard one right but I think
00:43:34.200for me feasting wild is more of a mentality in terms of how we approach our food so it's more
00:43:40.020it's an improvisation and how we connect to our food and our diets and our communities and the
00:43:46.300nature that is all around us. For me, it's about a curiosity and a noticing and sort of as cheesy
00:43:53.500as it sounds like a gratitude for every bite of food that we have. I think one thing this pandemic
00:43:58.140really has brought up has been people's unequal access to just food in general, much less wild
00:44:03.720food, you know, so people of a certain class are able to go out and buy a month's worth of groceries
00:44:09.560and other people don't know how they're going to pay for tomorrow's food. And so I think those
00:44:13.800really stark contrasts in food access are so important and such an important place to start
00:44:19.360when we're talking about all of these things in terms of nature. So I've loved seeing sort of
00:44:26.520the expansion of time that people are appreciating during quarantine. And so people are starting to
00:44:31.540do things like fermentations and sourdough, making kitchen victory gardens, regrowing scallions from
00:44:39.260the leftover roots, composting in a bin in their house, improvising food out of what's left in
00:44:45.600their pantry. So I think that level of kind of creativity and play around food is part of what
00:44:52.100I wanted to capture in Feasting Wild and part of what we've lost in a sort of industrialized food
00:44:56.880system. But yeah, it also means becoming more aware of what kind of edible weeds are growing
00:45:01.540in the backyard or the kind of edible invasive plants and animals that might be, you know,
00:45:06.360accessible. And just, as you said, kind of becoming more attuned to the wild nature that's
00:45:11.760all around us. So it's been great to see people like start to notice the trees outside their
00:45:16.280window that they never noticed before. So that's sort of on an individual level, but
00:45:20.480it's also on a larger political and cultural level. Like we have a lot of work to do
00:45:25.960to make our food system accessible, healthy for everybody. But there's a lot of stuff that I'm
00:45:33.120really excited about, and different ways that we can begin to rewild our agricultural system.
00:45:44.640heirloom seeds and seed saving of land-race varietals, growing kelp and other things on
00:45:49.660a small scale, regenerative herding, biodynamic arboreal culture, farming the forest. I mean,
00:45:54.280the list goes on. And you can hear I'm kind of getting excited about this because I think we
00:45:58.420need all of it. We need all of those things right now. Mushroom cultivation. I mean, remediation of
00:46:04.080polluted soils through growing certain plants. It just goes on and on. So, you know, I think it's
00:46:09.880really, it's about making our agricultural systems more closely mimic wild ecosystems and bringing
00:46:18.100that into a community level where we are concerned not just about our own sustenance, but about the
00:46:23.780assessments for everyone around us. I think wild food is not uniform. It is chaos in embodied form.
00:46:31.780Oh, I love that. Well, there was another quote that I wanted to read that you wrote saying,
00:46:39.140in losing wild foods from our diets, from the landscape, we lose something unnameable.
00:46:44.880The silences are so loud, they have become their own sound. We face a spiritual crisis,
00:46:50.660an existential loneliness greater than any heartbreak. To be without the ecstasy of the wild
00:46:56.640is to face a bland future. Of course, we can't all go back to eating wild foods. There are too
00:47:02.580many of us and not enough wild places left. We would need many earths to satisfy our hunger.
00:47:08.560Yet for many people, wild foods remain a necessity. So in closing, I'm wondering,
00:47:14.020what does the future of wild foods look like to you? Yeah, well, I sort of jumped the gun on that
00:47:19.000question when I went on my ramble about all these different ways that we can rewild our agricultural
00:47:23.160system. But I think on a more sort of spiritual or philosophical level, I think remembering that
00:47:29.580eating is an act of survival and feeling not on a really deep level is so important. And eating is
00:47:36.220an act of love. And it's so easy to forget that with having to, you know, three meals a day and
00:47:41.560going about our busy lives. But in so many ways, the wild is just inherently unknowable.
00:47:49.100And so how do you have a relationship with something that is inherently undefinable?
00:47:53.440And yet, you know, just as our relationships to people, the wild will always be a stranger on
00:47:58.560some level. So how do we celebrate that quality of the unknowable, of the hidden, of the silent,
00:48:03.760of the lost? For me, rewilding doesn't necessarily require, you know, removing ourselves from the
00:48:10.880capitalist grid, but I think it requires severing ourselves from a grid mentality. So it's about
00:48:16.580opening ourselves to that infinite possibility of coincidence, of coexistence. You know, to be
00:48:22.340alienated from wild nature is to be alienated from ourselves. And as we have domesticated the planet,
00:48:27.940we unintentionally domesticated ourselves. So really feasting wild, the feasting wild mentality
00:48:33.960is about rediscovering that wild nature within ourselves. And it's up to us to imagine how the
00:48:39.900world begins again. That's beautiful. Well, Gina, I really appreciate the depth in which you talk
00:48:48.920about wild foods because like we've discussed in this conversation with this dominant culture that
00:48:56.580just fetishizes and commodifies everything and with the popularity of wild foods growing,
00:49:02.800They're really in danger in so many ways, whether it's because of popularity for privileged folks who are actually separated from wild foods or even people who really rely on wild foods and land use change and destruction and how that implicates just the very complex relationships that we have with these plants and animals.
00:49:29.660And I just appreciate the integrity that you have when writing and speaking about this
00:49:35.100topic and all the ways in which you hold the many, many threads that come into this.
00:50:22.680You know, this book took me six years to write, and it went through many different iterations
00:50:27.060and forms to try and weave all these different strands together. Because I really wanted to
00:50:32.500paint a larger picture, you know, that tapestry, that web of relations, and, and really trying to
00:50:37.340understand how, you know, what is our role in this ecology? What is our, I don't like to think of
00:50:42.180myself, much less my fellow humans as just horrible, destructive beasts. And that's certainly0.60
00:50:47.500a side to our natures and our existence, but it's not all of it. But I think this for me was also,
00:50:53.280It was a book of heartbreak. It was a book of acknowledging sort of the grief, the low-level grief that I feel all the time about environmental destruction that's happening everywhere.
00:51:04.600Humans are not that great at holding paradox and contradiction in our minds, but I think so much of this book was about that as well.
00:51:11.020Like, how do we hold these different paradoxes and contradictions that our desire for wild
00:51:15.840food is both our birthright and brilliant and, and gorgeous and also destructive and