Feed Us With Trees Nuts And The Future Of Food – Elspeth Hay

“And these are persimmons, there’s an English walnut right there, a whole oak grove over there of different species, including a bunch of the really large nut Burr oaks,” said Paschall. “And do you see those two giant multi-stems?” I nodded. “Those are the hazelnuts.” “Those are hazelnuts?! Holy smokes,” I breathed. The native Beaked and American hazelnuts I’d planted a few years ago in my yard came up to my shoulders; but these were definitely some sort of Euro-American hybrid and far bigger than any I’d ever seen.

The crowns of the plants were at least twenty-five feet in diameter and their branches stretched up thirty feet; I could only imagine the productivity. Another undeveloped lot down the street boasted a grove of honey locusts — a plant I’d read about in Paschall’s blog post about Hershey but never seen in person — and the bean-like pods they produce still lay all over the fresh spring grass. “How do you eat this thing?” I asked, picking one up that was about eight inches long and turning the leathery, maroon legume over between my fingers.

Elspeth standing in front of two of the Hershey hazelnuts. Credit: Dale Hendricks “You don’t,” Hendricks told me. The edible part of the honey locust is what’s inside the skin: seeds and pith. Honey locusts, Bennett told me, have been food for mammals since before the last ice age, when they evolved alongside the giant megafauna that still roamed the East. The trees themselves are covered in huge thorns that would have prevented these now-extinct mammals from rubbing up against their bark and munching away at their branches, and the sugars inside the pods remain beloved to a long list of mammals: cattle, deer, rabbits, raccoons, opossums, squirrels, pigs — and, when we remember them — humans.

“Gnaw on the pith a little bit,” Hendricks recommended, and I pried open the pod. Beneath the little dried- bean-like seeds, I found a sweet, sticky substance that looked very similar to old caramel.

Praise for Feed Us with Trees 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 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.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 6121441a5ac72e2d
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 12,722,374 bytes (12.133 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9780865719729, 9781550927665, 9781771423625
• Pages: 279
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 482.62 minutes
• Total Words: 96,525
• Total Characters: 570,310
• Average Words per Page: 345.97
• Average Characters per Page: 2044.12

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