Description: "We're thinking about agriculture all wrong. Feed Us with Trees breaks down the stories trapping us in today's ruinous food system and destroying our ecological health--and reminds us that all over the Northern Hemisphere, humans once grew our staple foods on perennial nut trees such as oaks, chestnuts, and hazelnuts."--
Brief description:
Elspeth Hay is a writer and the creator and host of the Local Food Report, a weekly feature that has aired on Cape Cod's NPR station since 2008. Deeply immersed in her own local-food system, she writes and reports for print, radio, and online media with a focus on food, the environment, and the people, places, and ideas that feed us. She lives in Wellfleet, MA.
Review Quotes:
This book--I guarantee it--will blow your mind. Twenty pages in and you'll be looking at the world in different ways.
--Bill McKibben, author, Here Comes the Sun!
How would you like to live in a world where biodiversity is increasing rather than disappearing, where more carbon is being stored in the ground than is being pumped out of the ground, where ocean dead-zones and topsoil loss are things of the past, and where diet-related health problems are exceptions, rather than the norm? With irrefutable logic, excellent prose, and meticulous research, Elspeth Hay describes such a world. It is not fantasy; it is the future!
--Douglas Tallamy, author, Nature's Best Hope
Whatever are we going to eat on this cramped, ever-hotter planet of ours? Elspeth Hay's fast-moving account wisely tells us to just look up. The trees just might have our backs.
--Paul Greenberg, author, Four Fish and A Third Term
Elspeth Hay's compulsively readable book reveals just how deeply entangled we humans have always been with commoning the earth, and why we need to rediscover this lost way of life. Let us re-learn how to steward trees with loving care and subtle intelligence, and they will gift us many times over with untold treasures!
--David Bollier, author, Think Like a Commoner, Second Edition
Beautiful and compelling. Local tree nuts are the perfect nutrient-dense pantry food. Nuts belong at every farmers market.
--Nina Planck, author, Real Food: What to Eat and Why
Through heart-centred and meticulous research, Elspeth Hay delves into hard questions about human land management and food production. She brings us lessons from Indigenous Peoples and a manual for a beautiful future. This book gives me hope.
--Mikaela Cannon, author, Foraging as a Way of Life
Timeless and timely is the promise that nut-trees can feed the world. Hay's book is a story that meanders from savannah to forest and back, visiting the woodlots of visionaries as it makes a powerful case for a tree-studded future of healthy and sustainable food.
--Samuel Thayer, author, The Forager's Harvest
The nut tree is the king of the forest. This is the "bush food," eaten by the First Nations for millennia. The nutmeat supplies folded sugars, essential fatty acids, and first-class proteins. To understand the importance of this in our food stream would make anyone's life unravel. Thank you Elspeth Hay and Feed Us with Trees.
--Dr. Diana Beresford-Kroeger, author, Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests
Feed Us with Trees is an exploration of the history, present, and future potential for trees to provide staple food for humanity. These questions are essential to a future food system that provides climate change mitigation and resilience. Thank you to Elspeth for walking readers through many of the nuanced questions of yields and more.
--Eric Toensmeier, author, The Carbon Farming Solution