Feasting Wild
In Search of the Last Untamed Food
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review Summer Reading Selection
“Delves into not only what we eat around the world, but what we once ate and what we have lost since then.”—The New York Times Book Review
Two centuries ago, nearly half the North American diet was foraged, hunted, or caught in the wild. Today, so-called “wild foods” are becoming expensive luxuries, served to the wealthy in top restaurants. Meanwhile, people who depend on wild foods for survival and sustenance find their lives forever changed as new markets and roads invade the world’s last untamed landscapes.
In Feasting Wild, geographer and anthropologist Gina Rae La Cerva embarks on a global culinary adventure to trace our relationship to wild foods. Throughout her travels, La Cerva reflects on how colonialism and the extinction crisis have impacted wild spaces, and reveals what we sacrifice when we domesticate our foods —including biodiversity, Indigenous and women’s knowledge, a vital connection to nature, and delicious flavors. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, La Cerva investigates the violent “bush meat” trade, tracking elicit delicacies from the rainforests of the Congo Basin to the dinner tables of Europe. In a Danish cemetery, she forages for wild onions with the esteemed staff of Noma. In Sweden––after saying goodbye to a man known only as The Hunter––La Cerva smuggles freshly-caught game meat home to New York in her suitcase, for a feast of “heartbreak moose.”
Thoughtful, ambitious, and wide-ranging, Feasting Wild challenges us to take a closer look at the way we eat today, and introduces an exciting new voice in food journalism.
“A memorable, genre-defying work that blends anthropology and adventure.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, New York Times-bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction
“A food book with a truly original take.”—Mark Kurlansky, New York Times bestselling author of Salt: A World History
“An intense and illuminating travelogue... offer[ing] a corrective to the patriarchal white gaze promoted by globetrotting eaters like Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern. La Cerva combines environmental history with feminist memoir to craft a narrative that's more in tune with recent works by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Helen Macdonald and Elizabeth Rush.”—The Wall Street Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
La Cerva, a geographer and environmental anthropologist, explores in her impressive debut humans' relationship to wild food and the disappearing places and animals that provide it. Starting at Noma, the Michelin-starred Danish restaurant that relies exclusively on local and wild ingredients, La Cerva explores how "the seemingly archaic practice of gathering wild plants is having a resurgence." She travels to several continents to explore the landscapes that once provided a natural abundance of food but have been dramatically impacted by development, climate change, and shifting values. She recalls her "feral" upbringing in New Mexico (where she picked "the fuzzy hairs of prickly pears out of my fingers, the tips stained red from the peeling of the fleshy fruit"); travels to Poland to explore her ancestral roots ("I withdrew toward the wilderness to strip away the superficialities to regain contact with the essential") as she wanders through "grasslands filled with rare birds"; and meets folks living off the land, such as "The Hunter," a Swede living in the Congo who also heads an anti-poaching patrol in local national parks. La Cerva's beautifully written narrative is as tantalizing as it is edifying.