Feed Us with Trees - by Elspeth Hay (Paperback)

About the Book

"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."--

Book Synopsis

What if the future of food grew on trees--and had been with us all along?

From acorns to chestnuts, hazelnuts, and beyond, discover the ancient staple crops that could nourish people and heal the planet.

What You'll Learn in Feed Us with Trees

In this groundbreaking and hopeful book, food writer Elspeth Hay reveals how nut trees can transform our diets, landscapes, and future. Drawing from Indigenous knowledge, cutting-edge science, and conversations with farmers and foragers, Hay shows how we can reclaim our role as a keystone species by tending perennial food systems that regenerate rather than deplete the Earth.

Inside, you'll discover:

• Ancient wisdom, modern solutions -- how cultures across the Northern Hemisphere once relied on nut trees as staple foods, and why this matters today.


• Nutrient-dense, climate-smart foods -- nuts are packed with protein, healthy fats, and resilience for a warming world.


• Practical pathways forward -- from agroforestry and permaculture to backyard food forests, learn how you can be part of the shift.


• New stories for a thriving future -- how rethinking what we eat can help us reimagine our place in Earth's ecosystems.

Why This Book Matters

Agriculture as we know it is one of the largest drivers of climate change, water depletion, and biodiversity loss. Yet Hay uncovers a forgotten truth: we don't need to choose between feeding ourselves and sustaining the planet. By restoring perennial food systems centered on nut trees, we can build a future that is abundant, equitable, and resilient.

Whether you're an environmentalist, regenerative farmer, permaculture enthusiast, agroforester, locavore, or simply hungry for change, this book will inspire you to imagine food differently--and give you the tools to start.

Whatever are we going to eat on this cramped, ever-hotter planet of ours? ...The trees just might have our backs.--Paul Greenberg, author, Four Fish and A Third Term

If you care about food security, climate change, or the health of future generations, this book belongs on your shelf.

Buy Feed Us with Trees today and discover how nut trees can help us rewrite the future of food.

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

About the Author

Elspeth Hay is a writer, public radio host, and creator of the Local Food Report, a weekly feature that has aired on CAI, the Cape & Islands 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 and the environment. Elspeth's work has been featured in the Boston Globe, NPR's Kitchen Window, Heated with Mark Bittman, The Provincetown Independent, and numerous other publications. Through her conversations with growers, harvesters, processors, cooks, policy makers, Indigenous knowledge-keepers, scientists, researchers, and visionaries, she aims to rebuild our cultural store of culinary knowledge--and to reconnect us with the people, places, and ideas that feed us. Elspeth lives with her family on Cape Cod, MA.