Feed Us with Trees - by Elspeth Hay (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A new and ancient story about perennial nut trees, our ecological role as humans, and the future of food

The day Elspeth Hay learned that we can eat acorns, stories she'd believed her whole life began to unravel.

Until then she'd always believed we must grow our staple foods in farmed fields-- the same fields wreaking havoc on our land, air, and water. But all over the Northern Hemisphere, Hay learned, humans once grew our staple foods in forest gardens centered on perennial nut trees: oaks, chestnuts, and hazelnuts. In Feed Us with Trees, Hay brings us along as she gets to know dozens of nut growers, scientists, Indigenous knowledge-keepers, researchers, and food professionals--and discovers that in tending these staple trees, we once played a vital environmental role as one of Earth's keystone species.

Feed Us with Trees is Hay's hopeful manifesto about a brighter, more abundant world-- and a critical look at the long-held stories we'll need to rewrite to build it. It will appeal to environmentalists, regenerative farmers, permaculture enthusiasts, agroforesters, locavores, and anyone hungry for a more vibrant future.

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.