WildFed Podcast — Hunt Fish Forage Food: Recent Episodes
Daniel Vitalis
Hosted by Daniel Vitalis, The WildFed Podcast is about deepening your connection with the natural world through hunting, fishing, foraging, and, of course, food. It’s about the wild food that’s freely available on your landscape, at the edges of your town or city, and sometimes just outside your door. The podcast consists of interviews with biologists, authors, wildlife managers, foragers, hunters, anglers, chefs, friends, and plenty of educational and inspirational solo shows too. WildFed — Food Is All Around You.
It's the final episode of The WildFed Podcast, and Daniel and our show producer Grant Guiliano get together to reflect on the last few years of podcasting together, tie a bow on some of the recurring themes we've discussed on the show, as well as look to the future of WildFed.
They chat about the value in reconnecting with the species in your landscape, their thoughts on the future regulations of hunting and foraging, imposter syndrome, plans for a future podcast + a few teasers for Season 4 of the WildFed TV show, and more.
We're so incredibly grateful for your listenership and support over the years! Stay tuned for what's to come...
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/174
Well, it’s finally here. The last interview of the WildFed Podcast. We'll be back next week with our producer Grant to do a final wrap-up, but as far as guest appearances go, who better to take us out than Dan Flores, and on what better topic than his new book, Wild New World. The book is incredible, even, dare we say, required reading for anyone who’s been following the journey of this podcast. It’s not just a history of North America and the animals that live here now — the extant animals — and the ones that were here before — the extinct ones. It’s also the story of the human predator crossing through Beringia and being unleashed on a homonin-naive megafauna assemblage and the impacts that would have here over the proceeding 20,000 years or so.
It traces its way through the Clovis and Folsom cultures, to the post-ice-age extinction events that led to the great mass of cultures we refer to as Native American, up to the point of contact with European explorers. Then, what follows, as we are all painfully aware, is the Great Dying, which led to the loss of some 80-90% of the indigenous peoples of the continent due to diseases that Europeans had developed significant immunity to but were novel to Native America. And of course, colonization and westward expansion. This then gives way to the most substantial human-induced biomass reduction in known history, the denuding of the land and the commodification of its wildlife — which comes with it several tragic, high-profile extinctions. This part of the book is both compelling and at the same time gruesome and loathsome to read about. It’s truly a blemish on the history of this country and something we are a long way from reconciling still.
Eventually, this leads to the beginnings of the modern conservation movement, which carries us through to the present day, exploring both its sometimes less-than-savory origins, but also its tremendous wins, like the Endangered Species Act.
The book walks us through to the very present with some speculation about the future.
When Daniel last spoke to Dan, he'd only read a few chapters, and those were some feel-good pages. He didn’t really understand what was to come or how it would shake him to the core. He didn’t expect it would cause him to reevaluate many of his assumptions or make him audit his own practices and how they relate to this bigger-picture history.
It’s so easy to forget that we live, not as isolated points in space and time, but rather in a continuum. Embedded in a fabric of living history. Without context for what has come before, we can inadvertently focus myopically on where we are now. Conservation is no different. While our methods for wildlife management are light-years ahead of where they were just a century ago, one thing we've learned making this show is there’s still a LONG way to go. It’s far from perfect.
All that said, humans are and always have been — as long as our genus has existed — predators. Not just dietarily, but behaviorally. Those of us that hunt and fish know this in a very intimate way. The idea of giving that up is not really an option for most of us — despite the hopes of the planet’s vegan contingent who believes we can just implement a species-wide dietary experiment on the human population without any malnourishment consequences to ourselves or children. Daniel has been down that road and it leads, in his opinion, off the rails and into nutritional bankruptcy.
So, it seems to us that we need to learn to balance our needs, wants, and desires as a predatory animal with our needs, wants and desires for intact fauna and healthy ecosystems. No easy task. One that’s not just centuries, but millennia, in the making.
It seems to us that this decade could be characterized by a now hyper-connected and networked human race coming to terms with itself, its past, and its future. Those of us who champion a meaningful ecological trophic connection to wildlife are going to have to do the same. We hope, when the dust settles, we can still hunt, fish, and forage, since as Daniel has stated on this show dozens if not a hundred times — we think this is essentially human.
Who knows where this all leads, but we're grateful to Dan for this book and the incredible work that must have gone into writing such a sweeping ecological and environmental history. We suspect this one is destined to be a classic. Dan is, no doubt, one of the most important environmental writers of our day, and it’s an honor to have him back on the show — and especially as our final interview.
As we mentioned earlier, we'll be back next week for one final, more intimate episode of the show. Thank you so much for following along on this journey, for your support, and for your listenership. It has meant the world to us!
Now, here’s our second interview with Dan Flores on his newest book, Wild New World!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/173
A.J. DeRosa is the founder of Project Upland — a multi-media operation that produces, in addition to video and web-based content, a quarterly, subscription-based premium print magazine. He’s also the author of the deer hunting cult-classic, The Urban Deer Complex. An accomplished hunter, rabid conservationist, and success in the hunting industry, he is not your typical hunter.
Whether it's his politics, which are woven as a through-line throughout his unique positions, or his insistence on activism as a key component of conservation, he occupies a space adjacent — and sometimes quite antithetical — to those typified by what could be seen as an often monolithic mindset amongst those that hunt or fish.
Daniel is someone who’s often felt like an outsider in the world of hunting, frequently expressing views that run counter to those of his fellow outdoorsman, and A.J. is altogether more revolutionary in his approach.
When we first met and heard him speak, it was a surprisingly refreshing, if not sometimes challenging, stream of consciousness we hadn’t heard expressed in hunting circles before.
Being some 6% or less of the American public, those of us that hunt, understandably, have more often than not, chosen to silo ourselves and as a result, have suffered from a kind of slow progress with respect to the rest of the public at large.
But A.J. is different. Different than any hunter or conservationist Daniel has sat down with yet. Don’t expect a rehashing of the same old talking points here. He’s not that guy. But, he might just be the foreshadowing of the voice of the future hunter. As a new generation inherits the 3 million-year-old tradition, they bring to it new ideas, paradigms, ways of viewing the world, ecology, our predatory presence in it, and our place in the grand scheme of ecological diversity.
Change is scary, and often easier to resist than embrace. A lot of us behave like a dog on a leash. Pull back too much, and the dog feels the urge to push forward against the pressure. That’s the knee-jerk response a lot of the hunting world has taken to the changing cultural, economic, scientific, and ecological landscape we are encountering in this rapidly evolving decade and the ones preceding it. We dig in and resist change.
But this is, in our opinion, the wrong approach. At least, it’s an approach that always seems to — eventually — give way to progress regardless. So, if you hear ideas expressed here today that run counter to those you hear at the range, hunting box store, or in hunting camp, know you are, most likely, hearing the voice of the future. However threatening to status quo it might be.
Resistance is, after all, futile. We’ll all be assimilated. Seriously though, change is coming, it’s inevitable. And what is most important isn’t the way we have been doing it, but rather, preserving our relationship to the natural world. Let’s welcome all ideas, even the radical ones. Even the ones that scare us. Even the ones that challenge our most closely held illusions. If we don’t, the world will surely pass us by. If we can’t thread the needle of holding onto what we cherish and allowing ourselves to adapt to change, we — as hunters — might just go the way of the passenger pigeon.
Change is coming. How will we adapt?
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/172
If anyone in America is deserving of the illustrious title of HogFather, it's Jesse Griffiths. He’s a hunter, fisherman, cook and co-owner of Dai Due Butcher Shop & Supper Club and New School of Traditional Cookery in Austin Texas. He’s also the author of the Afield, A Chef's Guide To Preparing and Cooking Wild Game and Fish, as well as his most recent publication, The Hog Book, A Chef's Guide To Hunting, Preparing, and Cooking Wild Pigs.
The Hog Book is one of the best species-specific how-to-hunt-and-cook books that we've got in our library. Even if, like us, you live in a place without a feral hog population, you want to own this book. It’s incredible, and we hope, just the beginning in a long line of books to come.
Jesse is a dynamic dude and gets up to a lot more than just hunting and cooking hogs, but as the leading voice on utilizing wild pigs for food — and not just a voice, he utilizes them extensively on the menu at his restaurant Dai Due — he’s quickly become the hunting world's reference for turning this otherwise deleterious non-native species into excellent table fare.
When it comes to the management of these fecund mammals, Jesse is quick to point out that eating them is unlikely to ever be a total solution. They reproduce far too rapidly, are far too intelligent, and just too well integrated into the landscape to eradicate, but.. eating them does provide us with an excellent source of quality wild protein, provides hunting opportunities to those trying to find an inroad into the world of hunting, and shifts the focus from purely adversarial to something more appreciative. Or at least slightly more amicable anyway.
One of the things we love about his book is that rather than just giving a set of recipes, he keys the recipes out based on the size and sex of the hog you’ve got. Big old boars eat a lot differently than pregnant sows, which are really different than younger piglets. Something we'll get into in this interview.
We also wanted to mention that, as someone who — like Daniel — started hunting later in life, it's incredible to see how he has impacted hunting culture here in the US. It’s a reminder of the rapidly changing hunting demographic and that you don’t have to have grown up hunting in order to develop the skills and culinary craft to feed yourself and educate the public. In fact, we think we’ve only just begun to see the legacy that Jesse is going to leave in the American hunting community.
So, it’s our pleasure to have Jesse Griffiths on the podcast — especially given that this is one of our final episodes. From the start, it was our goal to curate conversations with important players in wild food culture, and he certainly qualifies. We're proud to have him in our lineup.
If you haven’t seen it already, go back to Season 2 of the WildFed TV show on MyOutdoorTV.com to see the episode we made with him in Texas.
And seriously, get the Hog Book. You won’t regret it!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/171
Well, it was bound to happen eventually. But we'll admit, we weren't expecting it to be in this interview. Our guest today is hunter, conservationist, naturalist and filmmaker Donnie Vincent. Someone Daniel was tremendously inspired by — and still is today — when he first set out to get involved in hunting and outdoor media.
Donnie is an iconoclast, standing out amongst successful hunting personalities in the way he hunts, looks, speaks, and for his uniquely thoughtful and artistic approach to outdoor media.
Daniel and Donnie have podcasted together a few times now, and they've always found an easy synergy in their conversations, but this time things went in a direction Daniel simply wasn’t expecting.
We've never given a trigger warning on our shows before, but we feel compelled to give one today. This conversation will be the cause for celebration for some and outrage for others. If you find yourself in the latter category, we hope you’ll, out of respect for both Daniel and Donnie, give their words a fair chance. It’s far too common and easy today to disregard people you don’t agree with, without giving their arguments a fair chance.
Donnie and Daniel, it seems, both see a dystopia unfolding in front of us, and its implications for the future of what we do as hunters and foragers are hard to ignore. Not to mention its impact on our personal liberties and basic freedoms.
That said, it was refreshing for Daniel to be honest and forthright about topics he's danced around for years, since it’s felt rather stifling for him to remain silent. But he did because these things weren’t really part of the brand or the focus of this podcast. It’s ironic then, that as we approach the final episodes of this show, that it would come up in this way.
So, in this interview, Daniel and Donnie will be talking at length about things that you’re not really supposed to talk about publicly. We suspect many of you will feel similarly, but of course, some of you will feel very differently. If you disagree, we do hope that — in the spirit of dialectic — you’ll support their inherent right to have this conversation. And understand how challenging it’s been to feel like they haven’t been able to for years.
So, when Daniel promised last week that this week's guest would express some really different ideas than last week's, now you’ll see what he meant. Here goes…
This is Daniel's most recent conversation with Donnie Vincent.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/170
Our guest today is Andrew Zimmern, who you may know from the long-running cable TV series Bizarre Foods or most recently on Outdoor Channel, Andrew Zimmern’s Wild Game Kitchen (which you can watch free on outdoorchannel.com).
Daniel has been a fan of Andrew's shows for a lot of years. In fact, they were some of his early inspiration for creating the WildFed TV show. Aside from his television work, Daniel didn’t know much about Andrew, and this was his first time talking with him.
Like Daniel, he wants to reframe the way we handle and cook wild foods.
But, Daniel quickly realized that Andrew's work, though centered around food, is for him, a lot deeper. In fact, it’s inseparable from his perspectives on politics and sociology. Though they have some differing opinions about all of this, he, like Daniel, describes what he does as a trojan horse. So, while they might not share the same perspectives on current events or what constitutes the existential threats to our species, Daniel certainly relates to having a deeper “why” for what we do.
One thing they definitely agree on is the way that the food IQ of Americans has grown in recent years, that food can bring disparate parties together, and that we can — regardless of how we view the world — break bread together. In fact, we should.
That’s an important and timely message.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/169
Today’s episode is with our good friend Tony Seichrist. Daniel first met Tony at his restaurant, The Wyld, in Savannah, Georgia where he cooked Alligator for Season 1 of WildFed. Since then, he's been featured in two episodes of Season 2, and he was just with us for an episode of Season 3 — making him our most frequent guest on the WildFed TV show.
Tony is one of Daniel's favorite people. They share a lot of ideas, opinions and stances on things, yet both help one another to think in new and fresh ways too. He's one of those friends that inspires us to strive to be better.
He’s also an incredible chef and a passionate foodie — though he’d probably hate being called anything that clichè. So maybe epicurean would be better. Every time we're around him we learn something new about food — whether it's sourcing, cutting, or cooking, his experience working with food is tremendous.
We recorded this early in the morning before heading to the airport, just after a 3-day snowshoe hare hunt. Our hunt was great, but our visit was far too short. Tony, we're looking forward to our next session!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/168
As someone that came to hunting late in life, someone that wasn’t raised understanding the intricacies and nuance of the North American conservation model or how our wildlife resources are allocated and ultimately utilized, Daniel was very impressed with the scope and breadth of our opportunities here in the United States as he started to take advantage of them. The more he participated, the more clearly he saw just how blessed we are here to have the ability to participate in this imperfect but extremely functional system.
While it can always and should always be improved upon, when we hunt we do so with the knowledge that biological, ecological, and even social concerns have been addressed and that the system is, for the most part, sound.
State and Federal wildlife management ensures that population dynamics are strong amongst game species, that there is sufficient opportunity for everyone to participate, and that science is conducted rigorously so that the hunt can be pursued in perpetuity.
But what about our right to hunt and fish. Do we really have one? One that is enshrined at the constitutional level? Well, no, not really. At least, not in the way that, say, the 1st amendment protects free speech and peaceable assembly or that the 2nd amendment guarantees citizens the right to keep and bear arms. But can our right to hunt and fish be protected in similar ways? At least at the State Constitutional level?
Our guest today is Ellary TuckerWilliams, from the Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation — and they are working on that very thing. They’re at it around the clock, behind the scenes, protecting our ability to hunt and fish in ways that we’d not heard about before, but now that we have, seem indispensable. They work at the political level, not only to enshrine our rights but also to protect the heritage of hunting against what is a constant onslaught from groups that would, if they could, slowly erode our legal ability to hunt until nothing remains.
For the most part, we at WildFed are simply interacting at the resource level, so we're glad to know folks like Ellary are out there — communicating with people in our Federal and State Governments, educating them on the issues that matter to those of us who utilize the resources on our landscape. We need that kind of representation in those places that most nature lovers won’t or don’t go. Namely, into the halls of government.
So big thanks to Ellary and the Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation — many of us have benefited greatly from the work they do, likely, without ever knowing it.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/167
Philipp Spahn and Daniel have been chatting on Instagram for years. Like Daniel, he's a modern-day hunter-gatherer who loves to pursue wild foods in many diverse ways, across the landscape where he lives. Also, like Daniel, he arrived at wild foods through a background in health, nutrition and exercise, and like Daniel, he’s also documenting what he does in video form, which he presents on his YouTube channel The Wild Table.
Unlike Daniel, he’s in New Zealand, which has a radically different hunting and fishing management system, a diverse bestiary of game species that are almost exclusively non-native, and a radically different landscape and culture to contend with.
This was their first time actually connecting for a conversation so it's a bit of a get-to-know-each-other as well as Daniel's crash course into New Zealand's hunting culture. For those raised in the North American model, it's a shocking departure from the conservation we practice here. For instance, there's no hunting license needed. Geese can be shot with rifles, and with all the game being exotic, there aren’t even seasons for most species.
Even though this was their first time talking, Philipp felt like an old friend. You can find him on Instagram @wild_heart_hunter @the.wild.table. And hopefully, if all goes well, you’ll see him in a future episode of the WildFed TV show.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/166
It’s our privilege today to have author Dan Flores on the podcast. Dan Flores is A. B. Hammond Professor Emeritus of Western History at the University of Montana. A distinguished historian of the American West, he is the author of the best-selling books Coyote America and American Serengeti. Daniel had the opportunity to interview him back when those books were published, and he's pleased to be talking with him now about his latest book, Wild New World, The Epic Story of Animals and People in America.
Dan is a uniquely gifted environmental historian, and this was on full display in American Serengeti where he wrote about North America’s incredible late Pleistocene bestiary, a topic we find incredibly compelling. If you’ve listened to the show for a while you’ve no doubt figured that out about us. When the topic of North America 10,000 years ago comes up, we just can’t resist it.
Dan’s newest book is even more ambitious in its scope, beginning with the comet that ended the reign of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago, and taking us up through to the present and even into the future.
Daniel really enjoyed this interview with Dan, but if he had one regret, it's that he hadn’t finished the book before they spoke. So, it’s his hope to bring him back soon to discuss it further. But for now, this interview is incredible, and we trust you’ll really enjoy it.
If you haven’t read his books before, we highly recommend you do. He’s not just a great author, but an important one. And understanding the past he writes about is — in our opinion — crucial to understanding both where we are today, and where the future might carry us.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/165
Our guest today is Tim Clemens of Ironwood Foraging, back for his second appearance. And this one is a lot of fun. In fact, Daniel was enjoying this conversation so much that he had to pull himself away to make his next appointment. They kind of range all over a pretty broad topic set just having fun and seeing where the conversation led them. We think you’ll appreciate the outcome.
Otherwise, we're going to be brief today, and let this conversation speak for itself because the grid is down here, and we’ve been without power for a few days now. Daniel had to shut the generator down to record the podcast intro due to the incessant grumbling noise it makes, so had to record on battery power. There’s a thick blanket of heavy wet snow bending all the gray birches and young poplars over pressing their canopies to the frozen ground. They say we won’t get power restored for another 36 hours or so, which is just part of living in rural Mane. It’s a bit of fun having this disruption to modernity, but it also makes things like podcasting a bit more challenging.
Oh, and one quick bit of housekeeping, we’re going to take next week off from the show to focus on the Holidays, so there won’t be a podcast next Tuesday. But of course, we’ll be back the following week.
Until then, we hope you have an incredible winter solstice and Christmas. As the Crooners say “It’s the most wonderful time… of the year!”
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/164
Daniel met Dr. Ann Cleveland back on Halloween of this year, when he was invited to give a guest lecture at the Maine Maritime Academy where she’s a Marine Biology Professor. Her husband, Dr. Alan Verde, who is also a professor there, was a guest on our show back on episode #160.
While they were there, Ann gave Daniel and his wife a tour of the campus, and they had the opportunity to talk a bit about her work there, and he thought it would be great to get her on the show to discuss it. We didn’t expect for them to take such a deep detour into the big picture of our precarious situation here on earth, but we're glad they did. Daniel and Ann go deep on topics of climate, fisheries, and our future here on this beautiful planet.
We always imagine that those in marine biology must have a front-row seat from which to view the severity of our pollution crisis, habitat and biodiversity loss, and the rapid climate-induced ecological changes that are taking place in a way that most of us — especially if we aren’t engaged ecologically with nature — are only intellectually aware of at best or oblivious to at worst.
So, in this conversation, Daniel quickly found himself parting with ichthyology and focusing more on the existential. It’s hard not to, since the more time we spend hunting, fishing, and foraging, the more concerned we grow for the planet’s ecology. Not because of hunting, fishing, or foraging themselves, but because — like we just mentioned for marine biologists — these food pursuits bring you face to face with the reality of what is happening in the “environment” that everyone loves talking about but so few really go out and experience.
In particular, we wrestle with the population-wide reliance on commercial fisheries. We always cringe to say that out loud. We have several friends that make their living as fishermen. We love what they do, love to eat their harvest, and love to go out fishing with them when we have the opportunity. We deeply respect the trade, profession, and ancient lifestyle of those who work the sea. We recognize its important place in our heritage and that it's a lot more than just a job.
We also feel that ending the market hunt was one of the best things we could have done for conservation and it's the reason that contemporary folks like you or me get to hunt in North America. If we had continued on, harvesting our game for the market, it’s unlikely they’d be much of anything to hunt today. Many now recovered expirations would have, no doubt, become extinctions. We'd be remiss not to mention the passenger pigeon as a perfect example of what we mean. Things in our sea are more complex. First, they are far more productive than our terrestrial ecosystems, giving the false impression that they can supply our population with protein limitlessly. Due to the water’s obfuscation, the ocean’s reserves can seem bottomless. But of course, they aren’t. With so much of the modern world still dependent on the sea for its food, we don’t think it's alarmist to be concerned about the sustainability of this approach. But unlike landmasses with sovereign borders, the seas are a shared resource. Who can regulate them? Who would we trust to regulate them?
And while we here in the US have made tremendous strides towards sustainable regulation, much of the world is far too concerned with immediate subsistence to trifle with such concerns. People need to eat.
We believe in wild foods — of course — it's why we make this show. In particular, we think the wild foods of the sea are critical to our health and can help foster an important relationship to planetary ecology when approached with that intention. But, like a good old case of cognitive dissonance, we simultaneously fear we are taking too much, too fast, with technologies that are too disruptive or too effective.
Want to know the solution? Yea, us too. But until then, we appreciate being able to have the conversation. So a big thanks to Dr. Ann Cleveland, who came on to talk about ichthyology, and found herself in a conversation about the sustainability of the human lifeway on planet earth. Ann, we really appreciate your input and perspectives here. We hope this conversation inspires some deeper thought and inquiry into the topic. It certainly is becoming a pressing one. And we can’t help but think things are just getting started!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/163
Thanks for tuning in today! Every once and a while it's fun to take a break from interviewing and just have a conversation between Daniel and our producer and editor Grant — musing, rambling, and recounting our recent adventures and shenanigans.
If you’re new to the show, maybe go back an episode to hear our typical format. Otherwise, behold the obnoxious characters who bring you these shows each week, as they sound when not speaking to their betters.
Here in Maine, we are beginning the descent into winter. We're pretty excited about that. We're gonna get some much-needed catch-up time at home, the ice fishing season will start soon, and we can put the finishing touches on Season 3 of the WildFed TV show before it goes to air.
We still have a little bit of filming left for Season 3 of WildFed, and everything is on track for a Season 4 — so if all goes as planned we’ll jump right into filming again this coming spring! We still have time for your TV episode ideas, so please write us at info@wild-fed.com or on our social media to plant the seeds of future episodes you’d like to see, host, or even be a part of.
In the meantime, we just want to thank you again for all your support! It means the world to us to have such a wonderful audience for the content we produce. So thank you for tuning in here for the podcast, and on the Outdoor Channel or Amazon Prime for the TV show.
And of course, we’ll be back next week with another interview — covering the kinds of wild food and ecological literacy topics we love to feature here.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/162
We've got a really important episode for you today. At least, important to us, and probably to you too if you’ve been listening to this show for a while. In fact, in some ways, it feels like it helps to make sense of a couple of important themes we’ve explored again and again here over the last 160 episodes. Most notably, those of wild game conservation — who funds it and where its efforts have been focused, as well as invasive species — and in particular, how significant the threat from them is, how we could or should be dealing with them, and what feedback loops we may be creating through our attempted conservation efforts.
The interview is with Dr. Bernd Blossey, who specializes in the intersection between whitetail deer and their high populations, invasive earthworms in North America, and invasive plant species and how the three of these factors intersect, overlap, and exacerbate the issues that each, individually, creates on the landscape.
Basically, it's like the title says. Too many deer, too many earthworms. Specifically, too many whitetail deer on our landscape, far more than can be sustainably supported by our ecosystems. And the invasion of earthworms beneath our feet in North America, most of which are not native here, since the last glaciation pushed all the worms back to the deep Southern United States. There were, after all, 2 miles of ice covering the land that now is home to now our northern forests. When those forests regrew, they did so in the absence of earthworms, and the worms that are here now are not just exotic but extremely deleterious to those forests and many of the native plant species that live there. These two factors — over-populated whitetail deer from above and exotic earthworms from below — might be influencing the spread of invasive plant species in ways that aren’t readily apparent to the untrained observer.
But Dr. Blossey — a professor who heads up the Ecology and Management of Invasive Plants Program at Cornell University — is going to pick that apart for us today, helping to make sense of the data. He’s also a hunter himself, so his view of conservation is informed from an inside perspective.
The conclusion we've walked away with is that a lot of what we’ve been calling conservation in the hunting community has really been about creating sufficient deer hunting opportunities. This makes sense since it’s been hunters footing the conservation bill over the years, but high deer numbers aren’t synonymous with healthy ecology, and we may have reached, and exceeded the ecological carrying capacity for whitetail deer in much of the country. This might be a welcomed problem were it not for the devastating consequences this is having on our flora, and in particular how it might contribute to the spread of deleterious exotic species. Like a lot of us, Dr. Blossey likes to hunt and eat whitetails, so he’s sympathetic to our desire to have ample opportunities, but after listening, one can’t help thinking we need a more holistic approach to conservation in North America. And one that, and we say this a little begrudgingly, brings more than just hunter's voices to the table.
After several years of actively exploring these issues, we feel that this conversation has been a missing piece of the puzzle. Certain things just weren’t adding up for us. It’s already changing the way we look at the landscape and our role as hunters.
We hope you find it as eye-opening as we have.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/161
Who doesn’t love Marine Biology? Daniel recently had the opportunity to give a talk at the celebrated Maine Maritime Academy, addressing a class of marine biology and oceanography students. While he was there he met today’s guest, Dr. Alan Verde. Alan is a biologist and diver who specializes in corals, anemones, jellyfish, sea cucumbers and octopus.
Alan, along with the school where he teaches, is training the future generations of young people who will eventually contribute to the stewardship of our seas. It’s a big responsibility, given the precarious situation we now find ourselves in on planet earth.
Beyond the classroom curriculum, Alan leads multi-week dive trips with his student base to spend time with the organisms they’re studying in their natural habitats. It’s so important, because it’s all too easy to study a topic from afar, or from an ivory tower, not realizing you only know the thing superficially, rather than intimately. But Alan makes sure his students are getting below sea level to interact in ways that are more meaningful than just turning the page in a textbook or turning in a paper.
It’s why we promote participating in hunting, fishing, and foraging for food. We worry that without an intimate relationship, one that's up close and personal, we’ll just slowly forget the organisms we share this planet with. So whenever possible, whether it's through eating, like we promote so much here, or it's through biological work like Alan teaches, we need to get hands-on. Once you know a creature it's hard not to factor its needs into your decision matrix.
That’s the kind of experiential knowledge we’ll need the policymakers of the future to have.
Of course, the biology, physiology, and ecology of the particular organisms that Alan focuses on are fascinating all on their own, so there’s plenty to learn here today too. The underwater world is so physiologically alien to our own as to make it, effectively, another world. Yet we do share this planet with these creatures, as well as, ultimately, a common ancestor. So, foreign as they seem, they are our relations. And while it’s important to remember who we share the planet with, it’s also easy to forget if we have no contact with them. That’s why Alan and Daniel both, in their own ways, recommend you get out there. There’s still a whole world populated by incredible and unique organisms just waiting to be remembered and factored in by us. All we have to do is go meet them!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/160
If you haven’t been already, we're thrilled to introduce you to Dr. Mike Chamberlain. Somehow, over our years of making this show, we weren't aware of this man or his incredible work on turkeys. Now we feel like we've been stumbling around in the dark. Ok, that’s probably an overstatement, since we’ve had some great mentors, and we’ve had several excellent and very informed turkey hunters and biologists on the show over the years. But Mike seems to possess a meta-knowledge of these birds, seamlessly combining the science of their biology and ecology with the experience of a seasoned hunter.
As a relatively new hunter himself, one who grew up with little of the ecological knowledge needed to be successful in the pursuit, Daniel has relied heavily on his adult learning skills, and that's included finding mentors that can accelerate his learning curve. He started out in his mid-30s, which means he didn’t get those crucial couple of decades of watching, listening, learning, and making mistakes. At his age, being successful early on was pretty important if he was going to stick with it and feed himself off the landscape.
Without that early life on-ramp to guide him through the typical hunter's journey, he's had to rely on friends, books, videos, podcasts, and of course, many mistakes in the field as his main educational inputs. It’s also meant getting occasionally waylaid by the “hunter science”. You know — those often repeated but ill-informed tropes that stick around in hunting camps, subtly leading us astray and speaking to the disconnect that often exists between the work of field biologists and the hunters that pursue the quarry. If he had known about Mike’s work several years ago he would have relied heavily on it to inform his knowledge of the species and his hunting strategies.
Our goal with making the WildFed Podcast has been to curate voices from the world of hunting, fishing, foraging and wild foods cooking, in order to make the road a little easier and the education more concise for those who — like Daniel — are embarking on this journey later in life or in a non-traditional way. So, in that sense, Mike represents just the kind of guest we're looking for. Someone who can rapidly accelerate what you understand about a specific species to make up for the lack of ecological, place-based knowledge many of us suffer from as a result of being raised in a nature-divorced culture.
We need Mike Chamberlains for every species — folks that can guide our learning, distilling the scientific knowledge into simple to absorb, useful lessons that help to deepen our connection to our wildlife neighbors.
So if you love wild turkeys, and particularly if you love — or hope to love — hunting them, here is an authoritative voice on the topic. Just talking to him has us very excited about next spring!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/159
We're talking today with Paul McCarney, PhD. Paul’s an environmental social scientist, hunter, and conservationist that lives in Canada’s remote Yukon. You could think of it as our northern neighbor’s Alaska. He’s in Whitehorse, which is north of Juneau but east of Anchorage.
Most recently, Paul hosted the HuntToEat Podcast, where he covered topics that, until recently, haven’t been part of the typical hunting or conservation conversation. Like Daniel, Paul’s an adult-onset hunter.
Coming to it later in life — like so many people today — has given him some unique perspectives that differ a lot from those typically held by folks raised in North American hunting culture.
Now, Paul and Daniel have some very different socio-political views, which will become apparent in this interview, yet they approach this conversation as a dialectic. Neither of them are interested in playing gotcha, but rather wanted to hear from one another on issues that can be contentious, or even taboo in the world of conservation. We think this approach is needed now more than ever, since we’re allowing these cultural issues to divide us to a degree we haven’t witnessed before in our lifetime. Hopefully this conversation inspires more dialectic and a little less pointless debate.
That said, Paul and Daniel are both very intrigued by the rapidly changing demographics in hunting, though Paul’s interests lie more in the intersection of race, gender, and culture. Issues that have become significant talking points in most other arenas in recent years, but that have only just started to become issues in the realms of hunting and conservation. So it’s really interesting to get his take on this. We've seen a lot of changes happening in this area recently, but of course, there's still a lot of work to be done.
Like Paul, we want to see the world of hunting be a place that all people feel welcome, since we see it as a fundamentally human pursuit. Not one that belongs to specific race or gender or ideology. It’s a heritage that belongs to all the peoples of the world. So while Paul and Daniel might approach the conversation differently, Daniel doesn't see them as being on different teams, rather more like the two different wings on a plane. You need both to get where you’re going safely. It would be a very bad idea for folks on one side of a plane to try to actively dismantle the other side’s aisle and wing. But, unfortunately, that’s just become the norm in our — as Mike Judge would say — Idiocracy.
So, it's in the spirit of dialectic we present this conversation with Paul McCarney. We're looking forward to your thoughts and feedback. We don’t touch on these topics often here, so we honestly don’t know where you, as a listener, stand. So please don’t hesitate to comment on the post associated with this interview on Instagram and Facebook. We'll keep an eye out for your thoughts.
Until then, let’s continue the dialectic. We can all learn a lot from each other. We just have to be open and listen.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/158
Our guest today is Lisa Rose, author of the new book: Urban Foraging, Find, Gather, and Cook 50 Wild Plants, as well as a few other titles on foraging and food.
Though urban foraging doesn’t come up much on this show, it's always been important to Daniel. It was how he first started foraging, finding plants that grew in his backyard, snacks that grew up through the cracks in his sidewalk, or most importantly, harvesting fruits from neighborhood trees and abandoned lots around town. So we were glad to see that Lisa took this topic on, as it's a great way to introduce someone new to foraging, without having to simultaneously immerse them in wild places that might otherwise add to the complexity of what they’re experiencing or learning.
Of course, urban foraging poses some unique challenges outside of just land use issues, and that has to do with contamination by pollution. But then again, we face similar threats at the supermarket, where much of the food has also been contaminated by dangerous and pervasive chemicals like pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. We say that, just to point out that, in 2022 we have to be thoughtful about anything and everything we eat, no matter the source.
Daniel's conversation with Lisa also gets pretty philosophical, because foraging, though intensely practical, is today, something we usually do for reasons beyond the pragmatic. We take it on because it holds meaning to us. At least, that — in addition to foods we can’t get anywhere else — is what keeps us going out there to encounter species that live on the margins of our nearly ubiquitous human settlements.
Though we, as a species, are swimming in excess calories today, relegating foraging to something of an anachronism, we would argue that it’s more important now than ever before. Not because we need to do it for food, but because food is the primary way we interact with other species. Because that's what food is after all. Other species. And when we interact only with each other and the suite of domesticated species that we typically live amongst or eat, it becomes easy to forget we share this planet with other creatures. Creatures much older than us or our way of life, creatures that have been here all along. Food is our doorway to ecological literacy. And without that, our planet, we fear, is doomed to be simplified into — eventually — one giant dystopian factory farm, with humans as much the farmer as the farmed.
So, while much of the world sees foraging as a throwback to a time long passed, we see it as a doorway to a better, more integrated, and more ecologically diverse future.
That makes Urban Foraging a significant act. More than a hobby. It’s an investment in a better world.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/157
As eaters of wild turkey meat, maybe we're a little biased, but we're huge believers in the National Wild Turkey Federation’s mission.
Turkeys were Daniel's gateway into hunting itself, and he has initiated several other new hunters by bringing them out for their first birds too.
We're of the opinion that stewarding turkeys and turkey habitat is, in a way, caring for lots of other species too. Turkey habitat is, after all, deer and bear habitat. They share the woods with lots of other game and nongame species that we all love and celebrate. And, we hunters aren’t the only ones who like eating turkey. They’re also an important prey species for a lot of the predators on our landscapes.
Daniel's been a member of the National Wild Turkey Federation for years, and we've hosted their New England Regional Director, Carter Heath on the show a few times now too. So we were eager to meet Fred Bird — yes, you read that right, his last name is “Bird” — their Social Media Manager and host of the NWTF’s Turkey Call All Access podcast.
Daniel and Fred really hit it off, as they see eye to eye on a lot of issues and both represent what they see as hunting's rapidly changing demographic. They have a fun and lively conversation, and we expect it will lead to many more.
The fall turkey season is open in a lot of states right now, so we hope you’ve got time to get out there and get after them this year! It's easy for us to take them for granted, with such high populations around the country. It’s also easy to forget that just a few decades ago, they were nearly extirpated from the landscape. Thanks to the efforts of conservationists, hunters, and of course, the National Wild Turkey Federation, populations are strong and the turkey is here to stay.
And with Thanksgiving quickly approaching, now's the time to take advantage of the many opportunities we have across the US — in 49 states — to eat what almost became America’s national bird!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/156
Pascal Baudar is a legend in the world of wild foods, constantly advancing the practice of foraging into new and unexplored terrain. While many of us focus on calories or medicinal plants, Pascal is uncovering the terroir hidden in places most of us just don’t think to look.
Sure, there’s been a lot of work done on fermentation in the last decade, but nothing quite like what Pascal has been doing. He marches to the beat of his own drum, and if he’s drawing off of other influences, we certainly can’t tell. He seems to be inspired from some mysterious, unseen source. Just take a look at his social media, and you’ll see things that you just won’t find anywhere else.
When we set out to start this podcast, we wanted to curate the voices of the most influential characters in the world of wild food. It wouldn’t be complete without Pascal.
We really enjoyed the interview, because, aside from discussing his new book, and the work he’s been doing on vinegars and ferments, we go beyond food and get into the philosophy that underlies the “why” of what he does.
Pascal, thanks for all your original and groundbreaking work, and thanks for the reminder about what’s really important in life.
This interview was an inspiration.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/155
Our interview today is with Kristen Gremillion, PhD — Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Ohio State University.
She wrote a book in 2011 called Ancestral Appetites, looking at the archeological evidence and ethnographic knowledge we have about human diet throughout our species' history.
We love interviewing folks like Kristen because deep historical context sets the stage for clearer thought and makes it abundantly obvious just how profoundly confused we’ve become about what we should or could be eating. Kristen’s perspective is refreshing because she isn’t taking a dogmatic approach — for instance, she doesn’t believe that there’s some pure, pre-agricultural or traditional diet we should be adhering to. In fact, she’s quick to point out, both in her book and here, that humans have successfully added novel foods into our diet throughout our species' timeline. In some cases, like lactase persistence, our bodies physically change in response to novel foods, a testament to the success of these novel dietary changes. Lactase persistence is the adaptation to dairy consumption that has led some populations to continue the production of lactase into adulthood — that’s the enzyme that breaks down the sugars in milk — rather than ceasing production after weaning. We often say someone is lactose intolerant, as if this was a disease or aberration. However, lactose intolerance in adults is the human biological norm. Lactase persistence is a mutation that allows some of us to easily digest milk products as adults — those of us that can digest dairy… are the mutants. In other words, sometimes our bodies respond favorably to new foods. So, we shouldn’t be quick to dismiss novel ingredients. We’ve been discovering them for millennia.
But, Kristen is also wary of a Soylent Green type of dystopian future diet, the kind of thing that some folks see on the nutritional horizon. Her longtime study of human diet seems to lead to a preference for foods that are recognizable as foods. Daniel and Kristen discuss a bit of that in this interview today. Not just where human diets were and are, but where they are headed too.
It’s an interesting conversation in a continuing dialogue with those who’ve made this field of inquiry their profession.
We're of the opinion that the more we understand about our history, the clearer the path forward will be. And this will become ever more important as we, a rather unique but also very confused, species of ape, grapple with an incredibly uncertain future.
In the last few decades, food wasn’t something many people had to think a lot about, at least in the more opulent nations of the world. But that is changing, and it’s poised to change a whole lot more in the coming decade. One way or another, humanity is gearing up to come face to face with our food and food supply. There’s no way around it. And knowing where we’ve been might just be incredibly important… as we move forward… into this brave new world.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/154
Our interview today is with Philippe Grenade-Willis, someone Daniel's been working with for a few years now on various art projects for both WildFed and Surthrival. Philippe is an incredible illustrator with a passion for the outdoors and the creatures that live there.
In a nod to Daniel's former podcast, ReWild Yourself, today’s episode is a bit more esoteric than most of the content we curate here, but it’s also a LOT of fun. Daniel and Philippe talk about art, dreams and archetypes. About the metaverse, transhumanism, and how quickly we are headed into artificial worlds at the expense of the natural one. And they discuss the journey that those of us who didn’t grow up as hunters must embark on to embrace our new roles as ecological predators. It's a fascinating conversation that we didn’t want to end.
Philippe is currently working on the art for the packaging on a new and very exciting Surthrival product and just finished up a t-shirt design that we are launching today — our Antidote to the Metaverse shirt. We highly recommend you check out his art on his instagram page — @OurNuminousNature. It’ll give you some insight into the things we talk about in this episode.
As we discuss here today, our world is changing fast. Soon, it just might be unrecognizable from the one you were born into. But nature is a compass that is true, one you can trust to keep you grounded in reality. It’s something more complex and beautiful than anything humans can create themselves, and as captured as we may be by the glitz and bright lights of our technology, it doesn’t take much more than a walk in the woods to prove it. We suspect you already know and believe that, and that’s why you listen to a show like this one.
Nature truly is an antidote to the metaverse. One, we suspect, we’re all going to desperately need in the years ahead.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/153
What a fun and thoughtful conversation today with Dylan Tomine. In addition to working at Patagonia as a Fly Fishing Ambassador, and recently releasing a book under Patagonia's publishing house called “Headwaters,” Dylan Tomine has traveled the world fly fishing and writing about it. His writing is engrossing and almost lyrical, each short chapter feeling almost like a dream you’ve had about some distant adventure on the water. He really captures the feelings of being there, somehow communicating, though subtly, the “why” behind adventures like these.
But adventures aside, our conversation today takes us into other territory. In particular, that pesky little concept known as “shifting baseline syndrome” wherein anglers tend to think of their childhood fishing experiences as the time when “things were good” and then become dismayed as they watch fisheries decline as they grow older. But the concept really comes to life when you think of it generationally. Our parents saw their childhoods as “the good old days,” not realizing that it was considerably better for their parents, and so on and so on. In other words, without context, we tend to notice degradation in our own time but fail to see where we are in the big picture of history. If we could see the truly good old days we’d realize the real extent of the habitat loss, drawdown on species density, and the loss of biodiversity.
Our relatively short lifespans give us a very limited window through which to view our place in the planet's ecological history. Bottom line, while thankfully, here in the US at least, our waters are still fishable, we can scarcely claim the incredible fish populations that we could a few centuries back.
Daniel and Dylan also discuss the very controversial, though currently still active fish stocking programs that are meant to offset declining fish populations. Declining, in most cases, not because of recreational fishing, but because of dams, pollution, general habitat loss, industrialization, and other insults to our waters and the fish that live in them. As Dylan points out here in the episode, and in a great chapter of Headwaters called “The Myth Of Hatcheries,” the hatchery programs today seem to be leading us down a path of extinction for the very sub-populations of the species they are meant to save.
All this to say, it’s complicated. Those of us who fish, love to fish. And we also love the fish we fish for. We're not sure there are simple solutions, but these difficult conversations have to happen. We're honored to get to have that conversation with one of the great fly fishing authors of our time… Dylan Tomine.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/152
It’s always fun for Daniel to sit down with his good friend — WildFed producer and cinematographer Grant Guiliano — to podcast without a guest. Just them, talking behind the scenes. Daniel and Grant are currently filming Season 3 of the WildFed TV show for Outdoor Channel, which means they're on the road a lot — flying, driving, boating, hunting, fishing, and foraging, and, of course, filming it all. It’s a lot of hotels, AirBnBs, and time away from home. One constant is the time they end up spending together, so there’s always a lot to talk about when they sit down to record a show like this one.
Our team has just come off of a really exciting trip out to Maryland, where we did some offshore fishing and some inland pawpaw foraging, and so it was fun to recap those experiences.
Currently, we’re in the midst of filming an archery deer hunt on an island off the coast of Maine, and then we’ll have 2 more episodes to make to finish out our season! Those episodes will all go live in just a few more months, so stay tuned for that!
In the meantime, if there are any topics you’d like to hear us discuss or guests you’d like to hear on the show, write us at info@wild-fed.com or hit us up on any of our social media feeds. We always love hearing from you!
Thanks for all your incredible support and know we are hard at work creating another great season of the WildFed TV show for you!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/151
The pawpaw is a North American native, growing wild in 26 States! But you wouldn’t know it by seeing or tasting it. About the size of a small to medium-sized mango, with a custardy flesh that ranges from creamy white to pumpkin pie orange, you’d swear it's a tropical fruit. But, you’d be wrong, since it is, in fact, a temperate species. Despite its more mild climatic preference, it still boasts quintessential tropical flavor notes. Mango and papaya, pineapple and banana, caramel and some aroma we can only describe as a combination of nutmeg, cinnamon, and clove.
Unlike so many fruits, it isn’t acidic, rather just creamy like a pie filling, or flan. Which is why the tropical fruit family it belongs to is known as the custard apples, or Annonaceae.
Up until recently, Daniel had only tried a few pawpaws, specimens mailed to us by listeners to the show. To taste more, our next step was obvious. We needed to head south. All the way to Frederick, Maryland to meet up with Michael Judd. Michael wrote an excellent little book on raising North America’s largest fruit, called For The Love Of Pawpaws, and this month, the month of September, is prime pawpaw season!
From the moment we arrived there, we were eating pawpaws constantly, as Michael kept a steady stream of them headed directly towards our mouths. Mango-like, orange-fleshed Susquehannas. Vanilla-custardy Shenandoahs, and the hopefully-able-to-grow-here-in-Maine PA Golden, which is a nice, mild, balance of the other two.
Michael is a character like no other. A fun-loving, zany plant person, whose eclectic personality is rivaled only by his hat collection and perhaps by the fruit for which he is a fervent ambassador. He resides in a beautiful, round, straw-bail-construction home with his lovely family, beside a productive food forest with a distinguished pawpaw patch.
He served us more than just raw pawpaws, we had pawpaw ice cream, pawpaw cornbread, and pawpaw pudding too. And not just our bellies, he satiated our minds too, with plenty of pawpaw facts and legends, and we came home with pockets full of pawpaw seeds and a couple of flats of very ripe fruits, whose aromatic bouquet kept us alert through the 10-hour drive north.
Now that Daniel is home, and has fed his wife and friends some pawpaws too, he's wishing we had patches of them here in Maine. But, at least he has a couple dozen in the freezer, which he's been pulling out, peeling, and pulping for my morning smoothie. That’ll have to do until he grows some plants of his own and figures out how to get them to fruit here in zone 5A!
Michael is a blast to be around. If you ever get the chance to work with him or manage to secure a ticket to his quick-to-sell-out pawpaw festival, we highly recommend you do so. If a pawpaw was ever transfigured into flesh, it might just resemble Michael Judd.
Oh, one last thing, our visit with Michael will be featured in an episode of Season 3 of the WildFed TV show on Outdoor Channel so stay tuned for that! We’ll start airing around the beginning of 2023. In the meantime, if you are hearing this in September and you’re in pawpaw country, make it a point to track some down. Either wild, by foraging your local creek and river banks, or by finding a cultivator near you.
Also, you can get on the pre-order list on Foraged.Market — they’ll start shipping as soon as Ohio’s commercial harvest begins. Don’t wait because it's a limited supply! They’ve got a great landing page for all things pawpaw at Foraged.Market/Pawpaws.
You owe it to yourself to taste this American Treasure!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/150
We’re back today with our good friend Molly Lutcavage, Oceanographer, Bluefin Tuna and Sea Turtle Physiologist, and the Director of Large Pelagics Research at the University of Massachusetts.
Her last appearance on the show was back on episode 16 of this podcast, The Truth About Bluefin Tuna, making her one of our earliest podcast guests! She was also featured in Season 2 of the WildFed TV show on Outdoor Channel, in our Atlantic Bluefin Tuna episode. Her ground-breaking work on Atlantic Bluefins has revealed that, contrary to what most folks have been led to believe, the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna population is strong, and the fishery has been rebuilt. That work led Daniel to harvest his first bluefin last year, and to feel really good about eating locally sourced bluefin from here in the Gulf Of Maine — a fish that he had avoided because he believed the fishery was being over-exploited.
We're glad we learned otherwise because participating in that fishery was an incredible experience. And, Daniel's still eating the tuna he caught last year. In fact, he served some last weekend as poké to some guests he had in town. Bluefin as a food — even when it's been in the freezer for almost a year, like Daniel's — is one of the most incredible delicacies available to us from the wild world.
But Molly doesn’t just work in the Gloucester fishery here in New England, she winters on the island of Kauai, in Hawaii where she’s involved in marine research efforts there too. She recently returned home to the North East for the summer, and we had been in Hawaii recently too, so we thought it would be great to get back together and discuss, not just bluefin and sea turtles, but also talk about her work in Hawaii and about closing the loop between fisherman and the consumer.
You probably already know, but Americans are exporting far more of our fish than we are eating and up until recently it’s been a lot harder for the public to access fresh fish from the fleet than it has been for us to connect with our local farmers. Of course, we can get local fish, but it’s often passed through several middlemen first.
But Molly and others are developing models that help to close that loop and bring the consumer and the fisherman closer together. She also believes in utilizing more of our catch and continues to combat the myth of methyl-mercury toxicity from large pelagic like tuna.
All in all, Molly is a living legend, specializing where the worlds of marine biology and fisheries intersect. She’s had an incredible career at sea and her insights are invaluable to us and many others, so it's always a pleasure to sit down with her for another great conversation.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/149
We’re back today with internationally-known archaeologist, primitive technologist, and chef, Bill Schindler.
Bill’s been on the show once before to discuss his book, Eat Like A Human, and he’s back today to talk about the human diet, through the lens of his professional focus of ancestral human foods, food acquisition, and the traditional processing techniques we once used to make our food edible or more nutritious.
After our recent episode with Sally Norton, which was episode #142 “Are Oxalates Destroying Your Health” — where we discuss oxalic acid and other oxalates in our food supply — Daniel wanted to get another opinion.
We didn’t tell Bill beforehand that we wanted to discuss this, as we wanted his honest and unbiased take on the subject. But, as it turns out he’s been keenly interested in this topic for some time and has been actively cutting oxalates out of his own diet — with some pretty profound results.
So, while Bill and Daniel discuss fad diets in general today, they really take their time exploring the issue of dietary oxalates, since — if they are as deleterious to our health as some allege — the ramifications are significant and affect most of us.
So this is a continuation of a conversation we began with Sally Norton, and it’s something Daniel would like to continue exploring over time, at least until he feels like he's gotten a pretty good handle on it. For now, he remains undecided. Not a total skeptic, but he's not drinking the kool-aid either.
That said, he's been experimenting with his own diet a bit, by gently but consistently removing some of the highest oxalate foods he's been eating, which you’ll also hear him discuss here today. He's not going all in, since he still has some doubts, and because he's grown progressively more allergic to dietary restrictions as he's matured, but he has noticed some anecdotal improvements in his own subjective experience. So for now, he'll keep pursuing it.
In closing, Daniel got interested in wild foods — and in particular — hunting, fishing, and foraging — because he's interested in human diet and nutrition. Sometimes in the world of wild foods we get more focused on what we can eat rather than what we should eat. We don't mean that ideologically, but rather nutritionally. So, from time to time, we think conversations like this are helpful, because they remind us of why and how we got here: wanting to be our best and healthiest selves. We want that for you too, so we hope this interview helps you in that pursuit!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/148
Our guest today is none other than Sam Thayer.
If you’re serious about wild foods, you’ve probably read Sam’s incredible books — The Forager's Harvest, Nature's Garden, and Incredible Wild Edibles. They’ve become the gold standard in plant foraging by setting a new benchmark for what readers should expect from authors on the topic.
Sam set the record straight on several plants but also chose to only write about plants with which he had lots of real world experience. These aren’t simple, one-paragraph entries saying such-and-such plant is edible, rather, these were in-depth monograph-type chapters that gave foragers tools for finding, identifying, and really eating these species. Up until then, most foraging literature was more about trail nibbling or novelty than it was about making these foods a serious part of your diet.
We were recently in Sam’s home state of Wisconsin filming with him for an episode of Season 3 of the WildFed TV show, and we got to sit down and talk about our time together, about wild foods and foraging, but also, about another academic interest of his: the shocking origins of anthropology and why something he calls agrocentrism was perhaps the most important underlying belief that allowed for the marginalization of hunter-gatherer peoples by the agents of colonialism. This is essentially the belief that farming is what makes us human, and that foraging peoples — hunter-gatherers — were a primitive form of human or even subhuman. Now, of course, this sounds pretty repugnant today, and biologically untrue, but it was a well-accepted belief amongst the European intellectual elite at the time when anthropology was first becoming a credible field of science. It not only permeated the field but is recorded, as will be shown in a forthcoming book that Sam is working on, in the writings of many of the foundational thinkers of that time.
While these ideas seem outmoded today, one doesn’t have to look far to see that the shadow of these ideas is still very present in our world, as folks interested in wild foods well know. After all, it's no mystery that the general public thinks of hunting and gathering as something from the past, for the poorest peoples of the world, or something you do in a survival situation. Certainly, it’s not a viable way to live anymore. Agrocentrism is an implicit bias, and those that hold it aren’t usually aware of it, rather, it's something that they just assume to be true without any conscious thought. But, rethinking what we believe about human food acquisition could be critical to finding truly ecologically-sound, sustainable, and human-healthy food systems in the future.
Sam has presented the idea of ecoculture as an alternative approach to agriculture, and there’s a great essay about that in his book, Incredible Wild Edibles. We highly recommend reading that if you haven’t already.
Lastly, we'll just say that Sam is a man of many talents, and this goes beyond mere plant identification, writing, teaching, and philosophizing on the origins of agriculture. It turns out, he also has a knack for song — as anyone who has spent an evening around the campfire with him already knows. It took some convincing, but he performed a great piece for us, rather impromptu, at the end of the interview, so stick around cuz you won’t want to miss that!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/147
Dr. James Agee knows fire and is one of the nation's leading minds, voices, and advocates for its ecological use on the landscape.
He’s an emeritus professor of forest ecology at the College of Forest Resources at the University of Washington, Seattle. Before that, he was a forest ecologist and research biologist for the National Park Service in Seattle and San Francisco. Agee received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973. He is the author of more than 100 technical reports and professional papers in forest and fire ecology, and he’s got extensive experience with fire research and management in the Pacific Coast states.
Today Dr. Agee makes a cogent argument for why — despite the incredible wildfires we’ve experienced in recent years — we are actually suffering from an under-sufficiency of fire on the North American landscape. Though these wildfires have taken many lives and caused unprecedented damage to people's homes, work, and health, they’re caused, in part, by many decades of intentional fire suppression. While fire suppression, at first glance, seems like an obvious choice, counter-intuitively, it's actually out of synch with North American ecology, which developed in tandem with both wildfire and intentionally set and managed fires used by the continent’s indigenous population for everything from warfare, to forest management to improving harvest and hunting grounds. The evidence is written into the life history of fire-adapted plants native to North America, and the evidence of these managed fires is a part of our ethnographic and archeological record.
But, the Eurocentric mind, set loose upon this continent had other designs, and wild or intentionally set fire wasn’t part of that. So, for decades, fires were suppressed even as fuel, once routinely burned off in large-scale fires, or gathered for use in campfires, has been allowed to accumulate. The result has been changes to the landscape that have diminished ecological productivity while at the same time becoming a recipe for disaster-level fires once they exceed our ability to suppress them.
Experts like James Agee see fire as integral to a healthy, well-managed landscape, though — unfortunately — the public, policymakers, and the circumstances created by our modern culture of land ownership and use are slow to accept or allow this time-proven method.
When we think about what really makes human beings different from other animals, we inevitably arrive at the domestication of fire. Ironic then, that we are destroying our own ecosystems, in part, by depriving them of it.
Yet, this is the very situation we find ourselves in. And it’s a topic we'd like to continue exploring here on this podcast. And who better to lead us into this conversation than Dr. James Agee. Someone who’s spent their career studying fire ecology.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/146
10 days on Molokai, hunting, gathering, and connecting with local people to learn a bit about their culture and life there. We couldn’t be more grateful to have had this kind of experience!
Unlike Waikiki Beach in Oahu’s Honolulu, Molokai isn't cluttered with high-rise hotels and high-end shopping centers. You have the distinct impression you're on people's home turf. The infrastructure that’s there is for the people who live there. The island is small, just 10x38 miles, and it’s been through its share of hardships.
Bombed by the US military for ordinance testing, exploited for cash crops by the pineapple industry, overgrazed by the cattle industry, and currently, a test site for GMO crops, this island and its people have a reason not to want the steady stream of outsiders that have turned some of the other Hawaiian islands into popular tourist destinations.
That said, it's still something of a paradise, protected as it is on three sides by its sister islands, and by the world's highest sea cliffs that stand sentinel on its Northern shores — there’s a reason it's considered the piko, or navel, of the Hawaiian Archipelago. With its incredible lush Eastern half, complete with enormous cascading tropical waterfalls, its beautiful beaches, abundant and productive ocean, and of course the spirit of Aloha which infuses everything as a kind of constant ambiance that sets the tone for a more relaxed and chilled out way of living than mainlanders like ourselves are used to.
But, Molokai has a serious exotic animal issue, and at a level like nothing we've ever witnessed before. We've heard, many times during our hunting years, about animal populations that exceed carrying capacity and require intensive management, specifically where hunting is the primary tool for doing so. But wow, we just weren't prepared for the level of axis deer overpopulation that we witnessed there. On any given day of hunting, our team would find dozens of shed antlers, and several deadheads too, the skeletal remains of animals that have died due to drought and competition for the limited nutritional resources they need to survive.
Now, it’s important to mention, that many of the residents there we met subsist on Axis deer, which most agree is amongst the finest venison in the world, so as far as problems go, there’s at least this incredible culinary opportunity. But, despite the significant hunting pressure the locals exert, and the mortality induced by the drought, the animal numbers remain staggeringly high. So, outfitters like Ku, our guest today, guide visiting clients on incredible hunts.
As you can imagine, hunting there — especially for does and ewes — feels like a valuable conservation effort. And, as far as hunts go, we're not sure it gets better! Just imagine glassing for, and spot and stalking animals — western big game style — while looking out over the Pacific Ocean on three sides of you, with Oahu, Lanai and Maui in the distance, rising up out of the turquoise and jelly-blue inter-island channels that separate these tropical land masses.
And while the island and its inhabitants might be initially skeptical of visitors from away — particularly from the mainland — they are also incredibly generous and warm once you’ve demonstrated a willingness to tread lightly, listen, and not interfere with the vibes of a place that has had enough meddling by outsiders. While our experience there was unique, we quickly felt welcomed and looked after. We'll never forget the hospitality we experienced there.
So despite being from away, we were lucky enough to be let in on some incredible opportunities, like foraging fruit near some majestic ancient ruins, harvesting abundant pools of dried sea salt from the rocky coast, crabbing with grandma at a new moon low tide, or eating fresh, raw limpets and urchins from the tidal pools overlooking the islands western coast.
If you're listening to this, thinking you’d like to do some hunting on Molokai too, reach out to Ku. He’s definitely your guy. Just be cool, and leave the intensity of the Mainland life at home. Trust us, you’ll be glad you did.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/145
Welcome to today’s episode with Nat Bletter, PhD, which we’re jokingly calling “episode 1 of the KavaCast”, since Nat, an ethnobotanist, prepared kava kava, or what the Hawaiians call ava for Daniel and Grant just prior to recording.
Kava is the root of Piper methysticum, a member of the black pepper family, with mildly intoxicating properties that have been used deep into antiquity by Polynesian people throughout the South Pacific. Since it’s often used to facilitate conversations, meetings, and negotiations, as well as to celebrate gatherings, we decided it would be a great beverage to consume while we discuss the plants of Hawaii.
Daniel and Grant are now back in Maine after 2 weeks of filming on the Hawaiian Islands. We were there making two episodes for our upcoming Season 3 of the WildFed TV show. The first few days we spent on Oahu, and our remaining time was spent on Molokai. You’ll hear all about our 10 days on Molokai in next week's show, but today's episode was recorded after a day of foraging with our guest Nat, both in his food forest garden, and out in a valley on the edges of Honolulu.
The Hawaiian Islands are of course incredible to visit, and as a wild-food enthusiast, they offer a very unique perspective, given that most of the edible species there are not truly native to the islands, but rather were brought by the Polynesian Voyagers who first settled the archipelago.
They came on double-hulled canoes and brought with them a suite of domesticated and semi-domesticated animals and plants, including pigs, dogs, and chickens, as well as plants like breadfruit, taro, kava, kukui nut, banana, coconut, mountain apple, turmeric, and sweet potato — just to name a few.
Being so isolated, and having no native mammals save a single bat species and a native seal, it's questionable whether it would have even been possible for Native Hawaiians to have thrived on these islands without these species they were traveling with.
In addition to the original plants and animals that came with those Polynesian voyagers, today there are many more animals and plants that have been brought from outside and are now essentially naturalized to the island chain. This makes it easy for foragers to focus on non-natives, since they’re abundant and harvesting them takes the pressure off the native species who are often threatened by new introductions.
Of course, the climate of the Hawaiian islands is also ideal for tropical fruit horticulture, so many species of exotic fruits are grown there today — such as cacao, which Nat grows and uses to produce his award-winning bars, including some made exclusively with Hawaiian-grown cacao beans. Or Mamey Sapote, which I’d describe as tasting like the filling of a pumpkin pie, just better. Or jackfruit, which tastes like juicy fruit gum. Or Macadamia nut, or pineapple, or mango… we could go on.
Our time in Hawaii had a big impact on us, and true to WildFed form, we didn’t just get to see these beautiful islands, or hear the sounds of the birds and the waves, or smell the tropical air, or feel the sand between our toes, we got to taste these islands too. That’s a big part of what we do with this project, bringing that 5th sense into our experience of a place. From the fruits and vegetables, to the animals, algaes, and even sea salts, we imbibed the place. Making a little bit of ourselves out of one of the planet's most special and unique locations.
There’s so much more we want to say about Hawaii, but we'll save some of that for next week, when we’ll go a layer deeper. For now, let’s enjoy a coconut shell of Kava with Nat Bletter, and learn a bit about the botany and ethnobotany of the Hawaiian islands.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/144
Arizona is one of Daniel's favorite places on earth. He first started going while he was in his 20’s visiting a hot spring there several times a year, which was once the healing grounds for Geronimo and the Apache who rode and raided with him. Over the years he's gone often, from the Mexican border up to the Grand Canyon, from the high-altitude, forest canopies of the Sky Islands to the arid low-lying Sonoran desert. He's even spent a couple of winters in Sedona, which has to be one of the prettiest places in North America.
All the while, he's been passionate about wild foods — foraging there and experimenting with the unique ingredients found on that landscape. Yet somehow had never met Chef Brett Vibber of Wild Arizona Cuisine.
While we've known many casual foragers in Arizona, none of them have been professional chefs — so this interview was a treat, getting to talk with someone who not only forages these desert ingredients, but also cooks with them for a dining room full of guests. You learn a lot from folks who have to think about ingredients at scale, and in particular, efficient ways to harvest and process these foods. As well as ways of using them you just wouldn’t normally consider.
Though on different career paths, Brett and Daniel have a lot of overlap in their food philosophy, and this interview sounds a bit like two friends excitedly conversing about a hobby they both share.
Next time we're on that desert landscape, we'll be visiting with Brett. Learning about what’s in season and how he uses it. Far from the empty landscape that many people assume it is, he’s carved out a wild food niche in a place where water is the limiting factor, where the summer sun can rob you of your body's moisture, and where the dry nighttime air can kill you with hypothermia. In other words, Brett’s cuisine is forged in the fires of Arizona’s extreme climate. And that makes it all the more exciting.
It’s a place of sharp spines and venomous animals, of strongly psychedelic plants and even amphibians, a place where, not long ago, battles were waged to defend territory from invaders and to establish nation-states. Historic and also harsh in the extreme but also incredibly beautiful, giving rise to flavors found nowhere else.
This is foraging Arizona!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/143
Today’s show is a bit of a departure from our typical conversation here on the podcast, but it's one we've been wanting to have for quite some time.
Our guest is Sally Norton, and she’s become really well known for talks she’s given on Oxalic Acid and Oxalates — compounds and even crystalline structures frequently found in plant foods, and often present in some of our most cherished wild plants and commercially available superfoods.
We've been aware of oxalates and oxalic acid for a long time, since it's present in plants like sheep and wood sorrel — sour plants that are often one of the first that new foragers learn. But we've also experienced the damage that oxalate crystal macrostructures can do when they are present in plants like jack-in-the-pulpit, which burn the delicate mucous membranes of our mouth and throat if you are daring enough to try ingesting them.
We were surprised when we started hearing from some folks, usually those associated with the ancestral health community, and in particular, the carnivore diet proponents, that oxalates might be a hidden culprit undermining human health in many profound ways.
Now, to be fair, we’ve seen this kind of thing before. Compounds in foods — and by that we mean compounds that have always been in our foods, like cholesterol for example, or saturated fat — being touted as incredibly dangerous for your health in one decade, only to see a reversal, where they are considered healthy in the next.
So, when we first heard about the supposed dangers of oxalates, we were pretty dismissive, since these compounds and associated structures are common and were most certainly part of our diet for a very long time, being present in traditional and wild foods. Add to that the way carnivore diet proponents sometimes cherry-pick data to confirm their preexisting bias against plants — the very same way vegans do about animal foods — let’s just say, we were skeptical.
But, in the spirit of keeping an open mind, and because we knew that oxalates can be damaging and dangerous in strong concentration, we thought we'd give this idea its day, and hear the argument.
We present it here today, not as an endorsement of the idea, but rather to let you hear it too, if you haven’t already. As plant eaters and foragers, we remain skeptical, but we're going to sit with it for a while. If it is in fact true, it would mean, for us at least, a bit of a dietary redesign would be necessary.
Who knows, maybe in a decade it’ll be common household knowledge, with oxalate content being — as Sally hopes — labeled on packaged foods. Or, maybe, like saturated fats — something we’ve always eaten, but by the 80s were being blamed for heart disease and heart attacks, only to reverse course a few decades later — we’ll decide that no, oxalates are not the culprit we thought they were.
Whatever the case, oxalates are real and they probably deserve our attention. Whether we should be cutting them out of our diet to the extent that we can is up to you.
It’s a fun interview, and we learned a lot. It’s certainly got Daniel reassessing the chia seed, cacao nib, and nut butter in his smoothie each day… That said, he drank one this morning. The verdict, we're afraid, is still out on this one!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/142
Our guest today, back now for his second time, is Adam Haritan of LearnYourLand.com. He’s probably best known for his fantastic YouTube channel by the same name. He’s got over 175 videos there that teach folks how to identify and use the wild species all around them.
Recently he launched a tree identification course that caught Daniel's eye, and we thought it would be fun to talk with him about trees from a wild food perspective.
Trees provide us with so much, and it’s easy to take that for granted. Wood for our homes and for fuel, fruits and nuts for food. But it goes much further than that, from maple syrup — a simple carbohydrate source we can easily manufacture at home, to Pine Pollen that’s abundantly available in late spring as a testosterone support, to the edible spring leaves of basswood — many trees are important to the forager. In addition, they often host mushrooms that we prize as well, like the Chaga we harvest exclusively from birch trees, to the Maitake that’s found just on oaks.
It turns out, that while most new foragers tend to get pretty focused on annual and biannual herbaceous plants or fruiting shrubs, knowing the trees where you live can really accelerate your ability to utilize the wild resources on your landscape.
So, like the Lorax, Adam and Daniel are here today to speak for the trees. Encouraging you, if you haven’t already, to get to know them a bit. After all, they can enrich your life, feed and heat you and your family, and convert the so-called “wall of green” that most botanically illiterate folks see in the woods, on the side of the road, or on the trail edge from a conglomerate of trunks and leafy canopies to a dynamic, intermingled party of individual species we call a forest!
It starts, just like getting to know people, with one species at a time.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/141
Today Daniel's sitting down with his good friend, WildFed Cinematographer and Producer Grant Guiliano to talk a bit about what we've been up to this year and to give you a behind-the-scenes look at our upcoming third season of the WildFed TV show on Outdoor Channel.
We’re currently filming ten new episodes that’ll debut this coming winter, so we’ve been in the woods and on the water, but also in the air and on the road too.
Grant and Daniel don’t get to do too many shows like this one, just catching up and sharing what we've been working on, so this was a lot of fun for them. We hope you enjoy it, and we hope that you — like us — are having a great season too!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/140
Our guest today is Tama Matsuoka Wong, AKA the Meadow Doctor. She’s a commercial forager, weed eater, lawyer and mother of three, as well as the developer of a commercial wild food-beverage made with staghorn sumac — which we’ll discuss in the episode.
She’s also the author of the backyard field guide and cookbook Foraged Flavor, which was nominated for a James Beard award back in 2013.
Her story is really unique in that prior to her life as a commercial forager she was a Harvard Law School graduate who worked for 25 years as a financial attorney in Tokyo, New York, and Hong Kong. Not that those two lifestyles have to be mutually exclusive, but…. they probably couldn’t be more different.
It’s a testament to the attraction that the land and the wild things that live there can have on us, even when our lives have taken us deep into the built environment.
We're reminded that foraging is no longer just the realm of Birkenstock-wearing bush hippies. It still is, of course, but it's now for a lot of other folks too. Because, when you get down to it, foraging is a fundamentally human action. And, like the mythic siren's song, wild plants call us back to the earth in a way that — for some of us, even high-powered attorneys — is often irresistible!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/139
You may remember that last September we had the honor and privilege of going out to the Standing Rock Reservation to harvest a buffalo — or bison for those who prefer the scientific name — for the second season of the WildFed TV show.
Our friend Travis hosted us, showed us around, and introduced us not only to the buffalo, but to the people and the Dakota culture too. He was with us for the hunt, and he and Daniel broke that buffalo down together on the prairie too. It was an incredible experience.
While we were there we were particularly taken by two other species, both traditional foods of the prairie. One that we ate, the prairie turnip, or what the Dakota and Lakota call Tinpsila, a tuber that can be eaten raw or cooked, and that when dried lasts nearly indefinitely. Folks there keep long braids of it they make by peeling the tuber itself — which looks something like a small, white potato — but leaving the tap roots on which they plate into beautiful braids that make these vegetables easy to store, transport, and hang up as decorations until they’re ready to be used.
We had them cooked into a buffalo stew, and we were so impressed by their flavor, texture and nutritional composition that we knew we'd have to come back to experience the harvest myself.
The other species was the Prairie Dog, a very gregarious ground squirrel that lives in enormous colonies called “towns” that dot the prairie’s landscape. These subterranean dwellers are always popping out of their burrows and standing tall on their mounds, surveying the surrounding grassy plains, which they keep mowed short to prevent hidden avenues of approach for predators that might like to dine on the prairie's most iconic small game species.
Both having the prefix “prairie” in their common name was a coincidence that we couldn’t overlook, and we spent the winter daydreaming about going back to harvest both for a meal that would become an episode of the third season of WildFed.
Well, it happened, which brings us to today’s podcast — a conversation with Travis “Good Bull Man” Condon, Daniel, and WildFed producers Grant and Oliver who were there filming and directing the episode. Just as before, our time on the plains was inspiring and refreshing, as the beauty of the reservation lands is almost indescribable. Big sky, tall grass undulating in the wind like waves in the sea, and vistas that stretch on for a hundred miles. It was also a little poignant too, as it's all too easy to see and feel what’s been lost in the last few hundred years of Westward expansion, industrialization, agricultural and urban development, and of course, the denuding of the landscape's native flora and fauna. Still, despite these insults to the land and the people, the prairie still radiates a power and strength, as if it is ready to rise again, restoring itself to its former glory.
Whatever the future holds, we hope the journey and adventure of life keep bringing us back to this incredible place and the incredible people who live there.
Also, before we go, we wanted to give a quick shout-out to Linda and Luke Black Elk who prepared the incredible meal for the show at their annual tinpsila camp, along with their son Wawikiya, Linda’s sister Lisa, and Luke’s mom Candice. It was a real pleasure working with you all and learning about Tinpsila and the harvest and preparation of this incredible plant.
Wophila — thank you.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/138
We've got a great show for you today, but first, we think a little context is important. Please listen to Daniel's monologue in the introduction to this podcast.
As a podcaster, Daniel's always been interested in topics that flirt around the edges of the taboo. And today’s episode certainly qualifies. Hunting itself has become controversial in our modern era, which, given that this was our primary food acquisition method for something like 300,000 years — in other words, our entire existence — until just recently, seems strange. But even where the general public has accepted it as a legitimate pursuit and method of protein procurement, there are some animals that — despite the long legacy of hunting them — are just too off-limits to talk about.
Usually, these animals fall into a category we call “Charismatic Megafauna,” and you know these species well, since they’re the subject of documentaries, calendars, cartoons, and stuffed animals. Often, the public is so opposed to the hunting them that, even when management is required due to deprivation, attacks on humans, or localized carrying capacity issues, they’d rather pay state-funded shooters to kill them as part of a management program than to allow hunters to pay into the state to harvest them through lawful hunting. Because, it’s about optics. Someone enjoying the experience is just too distasteful to them.
Things get even more complex when there is an indigenous tradition of hunting these charismatic species. Beluga and Bowhead whales come to mind, or African elephants, or — as is the case with today's podcast, Polar Bears.
Today’s guest is Jen Shears. Jen is a Newfoundlander, mom, wife, adventurer, business owner, blogger, traveler, and hunter — and she has been confronting the very same issues that Daniel speaks about in this episode's intro monologue for years.
Recently she visited the arctic to hunt a polar bear herself, and Daniel was incredibly interested to talk with her about the experience, the politics, the science, and, of course, the meat, which he's been curious about for years.
Jen is, in our opinion, incredibly brave and fearless in her willingness to publicly confront the media-driven, unscientific public rhetoric and even to weather the frenzied reactions of the activists who support the anti-hunting agenda being promulgated by the pseudo-scientific wing of the environmentalist movement.
Jen, thank you for taking this issue on, being willing to due so publicly, and for talking about it here on this show. We appreciate and value what you are doing and saying.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/137
Michael Judd is a really cool guy. He lives, and has lived, a very inspiring life.
Today his focus is on, as he calls it, “designing for neglect.” That is, creating living food systems that function like natural ecosystems, providing long-term food security with very little input. Many of the species he works with are cultivars of plants we mostly think of as wild species, like America’s iconic and only tropical fruit, the Paw Paw.
While governments are busy trying to regulate cow farts and developing carbon credits, Michael has been building systems that truly integrate people and the landscape in ways that solve real and pressing problems — combining the indigenous knowledge he gained while living in Latin America with the permaculture design he learned here in the States.
From birth to death — we mean that literally, since Michael and Daniel get into natural burial later in this episode — he’s developed and implemented systems that dramatically increase his and his family's own sustainability in very real, relatable, and surprisingly simple ways.
While we don’t believe a utopia has or ever will exist, it’s certainly entertaining to imagine what would happen if more people started to implement similar systems in their own lives.
We'll be headed south to work with Michael in an upcoming episode of the third season of the WildFed TV show, so stay tuned for that, and in the meantime, prepare to be inspired. Michael is showing, by example, what we can do to increase the amount of nature, food, and personal sovereignty we can have when we start building self-managing, living systems. It can be done, and you can tell from listening to Michael, it can be fun and very fulfilling too.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/136
Our guest, here for his second appearance, is Mansal Denton. Mansal is a very unique voice in today's hunting culture, working at the intersection of trans-cultural ceremonial shamanism and hunting, seamlessly blending the two in a program — and brand — he calls Sacred Hunting.
Of course, it's not that other hunting isn’t sacred, but rather, that often this ancient and fundamentally human part of the hunt is forgotten by our modern culture, in favor of more gear, tech, or trophies. And that works for a lot of people, so we don’t say it to take away from the pursuits of others. Rather, we say it to highlight the need many folks feel for a more connected and holistic approach to the hunt, the land, and the animals they harvest.
We believe history will record this decade as a pivotal transitional moment in the way humans relate to the land, ecology, and the species we cohabitate with. We suspect, for hunting to have a secure place in our future, we’ll need to fundamentally re-order the way we approach it, since many folks today and probably many more tomorrow will struggle to understand hunting culture as it exists right now. We need to be sure that hunting isn’t legislated away like some relic of the past but instead remains a living tradition with a place in our new, increasingly complex society.
This show has been a small part of a greater shift back towards a more food-centric view of hunting. And of course, in bringing a more holistic ecological perspective too. Mansal’s work goes a bit further, reimagining our modern spiritual relationship to the hunt and the animals we pursue. This spiritual approach was, throughout most of human history, inextricable from the hunt itself, which means that today’s more secular approach is kind of a radical new experiment in some regards. And we think that has left many would-be-hunters feeling alienated from this really foundational human pursuit.
So, while Mansal’s approach to hunting might not be for everyone, we think it’s a crucial slice of the pie chart that is modern hunting. It’s certainly recruiting, retaining, and reactivating certain individuals who’ve become jaded towards what they perceive as a spiritless hunt.
And many of us, even if we don’t choose to express it so openly, know, deep down, hunting isn’t just a physical experience, it truly is an expression of the spirit.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/135
Our guest today is Clay Bowers of NoMiForager.com — Clay is a wild food enthusiast and educator in Northern Michigan, who teaches foraging classes and workshops, and writes about foraging on his blog and social media. He’s come on the show today to discuss the increasingly contentious issue of ramp foraging, or wild leeks as we like to say in our neck of the woods. This plant is probably one of the best-known wild edibles in the US, for both foragers but also culinary professionals, who pay top dollar to get them on their menus each spring.
In the commercial market, a ramp — a member of the alliums, or onion family — is a pungent bulb with two or three green leaf blades attached that when cooked are surprisingly sweet. They're wonderful sautéed, roasted, or grilled, and make incredible pesto-like oil preserves.
But their popularity has come at a cost, with the ever-present concern of over-harvest looming over this delicious spring ephemeral. As a result, a new ramp foraging ethic has emerged, which suggests harvesters take only “one leaf per plant” and leave the bulbs in the ground. This leaves another leaf or two for the plant to continue to photosynthesize, and the bulb to continue living in the ground.
But Clay — along with some other prominent foragers in the densest part of leek country — has been challenging this “only one leaf per plant” conservation ethic, suggesting that it's unnecessarily restrictive and might even be stymying the productiveness of ramp colonies.
Now, we want to say upfront, living in a place where ramps are scarce and colonies are small, we subscribe to — and even promote — the “one-leaf” idea. We take one leaf per plant because the stands of wild leeks we harvest from could easily and quickly be denuded by overzealous harvesters. And when they're found by commercial harvesters they are often over-exploited.
But not everyone lives at the extreme ends of this plant's range, and so for those in areas of greatest ramp density, this “rule” is not only unnecessary, it can seem like a pretentious encumbrance dreamt up by hall-monitoring ecological do-gooders.
Of course, like most conservation issues, there are a lot of nuances here to be unraveled.
So, as a “one leaf guy” Daniel thought it would be fun to talk to Clay, who’s more of a “bulb and all” kind of guy.
Not to determine who is right and who is wrong, because it's not that simple, but more to get a sense of when a one-leaf approach might be warranted, and also when taking the bulb-and-all might be more beneficial to a stand of plants.
Perhaps too, it’s worth mentioning that we are still foraging in a very unregulated environment. Hunting, by contrast, has become — and born out of necessity — a very controlled harvest, with each legally hunted species getting its own harvest regulations based on its unique life-cycle and population dynamics.
And while we suspect, we’ll see foraging regulated more broadly in our own lifetimes, at present we, as harvesters, are currently responsible for regulating our own harvests. It’s a big responsibility, and because personality types differ wildly, it’s unlikely that we will all reach a consensus about best practices.
So, for that reason, hearing all the sides of an argument in a dialectic manner, in other words, searching for what’s most true, vs what we want to be true, is a wise approach. While we won’t all arrive at the same conclusions, hopefully, our individual assessments will contribute not just to conservation, but to increasing our botanical resources.
One day we’ll tell the kids how we used to forage without a license and they’ll have a hard time imagining it, just like when we read about the unregulated days of the market hunts. For now, though, let’s all make wise decisions. The future of our unique — and ancient — passion depends on it.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/134
Today’s episode is a very special one for Daniel. Not just because our guest is his brilliant and beautiful wife Avani Vitalis, but also because they're talking about her very first hunt.
Until this spring turkey season, Avani never really imagined herself hunting. She’s been incredibly supportive of Daniel as a hunter, not just cheering him on, but helping with both practical and logistical aspects. Whether it’s been paddling the canoe on his squirrel hunts or cleaning the grinder and cutting boards after he butchers game, it's always been a team effort. But when it’s come to pressing the trigger, it’s always been him. But that changed this season when she, rather spontaneously, decided she wanted to hunt a turkey herself.
Of course, they had an amazing time, hunting three days in a row, finally harvesting a turkey, breaking down her bird, and, all the while, filming it all for Season 3 of the WildFed TV show on Outdoor Channel.
So, back for her second WildFed Podcast appearance, Avani and Daniel are discussing what it was like to make the transition from non-hunter to hunter. How it felt to be filmed on her first hunt. And what led to her decision. Also, a big focus of this episode is about training and preparation, and in particular, getting comfortable with weapons handling — both manipulation and marksmanship, since these can be significant obstacles to new hunters.
This is a really great episode. And a perfect listen for anyone on the fence about hunting for the first time. So, if you know someone who might benefit, please share it with them.
We hope it inspires you. And as Avani says in the episode, not just inspires you to hunt, but to always be challenging yourself by trying new things. It’s one of the secrets to staying cognitively young, mentally fit, and vital.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/133
If you’ve been listening in lately, you’ve no doubt heard Daniel and a few of our guests mention Cahokia, an ancient North American city near present-day St Louis, that, at its peak habitation, may have been home to some 14-18K thousand people.
The largest, and believed to be the most influential city of the Mississippian culture, it was first inhabited around 1050 and eventually disbanded by 1350 CE, something like 142 years before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the so-called “New World."
While the folks who lived there still hunted and gathered, we now know they relied heavily on a suite of domesticated or semi-domesticated crops — and no, we're not talking about maize — but rather a handful of species that have come to be known as the Eastern Agricultural Complex.
This is significant because unlike maize, which was domesticated in present-day Mexico, these plants are native to North America.
Our knowledge of this fundamentally rewrites our understanding of North American history and reframes our understanding of the life way of the people who inhabited this region.
And that brings us to today’s guest, Gayle Fritz, PhD. She’s a paleoethnobotanist who worked out of Washington University in St. Louis and a world expert on ancient crops. Gayle ran the Paleoethnobotany Lab at Washington University in St. Louis under the auspices of the Anthropology Department and is the author of the book, Feeding Cahokia, Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland.
If you find these kinds of topics as fascinating as we do, you’ll want a copy for your personal library.
Now retired, Gayle was kind enough to come on the show to discuss her book, her findings, and her impressions about what the diet of the Cahokian diet might have been like. She’s also passionate about the role some of these once-domesticated crops could play in our modern food systems if we were to de-extinct them — a very interesting concept to ponder.
We've noticed a trend, and you probably have too. Wherever we look in the world, we seem to find that the people who lived there in the ancient past were far more advanced and capable than we once believed. And we don’t see this trend diminishing any time soon. Thanks to folks like Gayle Fritz, we’re finally getting an unbiased look at the evidence.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/132
Tim Clemens, AKA @MNForager on Instagram, is the founder of Ironwood Foraging Co, a Minnesota-based wild food and foraging education company, and someone Daniel's been writing back and forth with on social media for some time now.
He was formerly the president of the Minnesota Mycological Society, which gives him deep expertise on edible fungi, and he also has a degree in anthropology and archeology, so his perspectives on foraging are firmly grounded in an understanding of big human history.
Daniel and Tim finally got a chance to meet up for a podcast and discuss their foraging philosophies. Over the years, his page is one of the places we've visited to keep our finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the wild food world and to get new ideas about species we might also want to chase down, harvest, and ultimately eat ourselves.
Like Daniel, he’s not afraid to get experimental, even playing with entomophagy, eating species like invasive Japanese beetles, or making unusual recipes for his blog, like black ant ice cream.
But bigger picture, he thinks we need more, not less, people out there foraging, and for very similar reasons as us. People only care about what they know. Like Tim says in this interview, food is a trojan horse for knowledge. And while both he and Daniel are passionate about teaching people to feed themselves on foods they harvest from the landscape, ultimately, they are both really reacquainting people with nature itself. And that, beyond food, has the power to create real, positive change.
People who aren’t acquainted with nature are never going to be able to live harmoniously with it. In other words, foraging is a practice with very real and important ecological implications — both in the short term, but also on the longer timeline too.
When Tim says that — despite the challenges we face with potential over harvest or pushback we receive for harvesting from wild lands and species — more people should be out there foraging, we… couldn’t agree more.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/131
We finally get to share this episode with you today! Daniel has been eagerly awaiting an opportunity to interview Robyn Cutright, PhD, author of The Story of Food in the Human Past.
If you listen to the show regularly, you’ve probably been hearing him reference this book a lot lately, and you know we like to geek out on big human history! In particular, that stretch of time before the advent of agriculture, but especially, before industrialized food systems.
We're fascinated by what we eat, or more specifically, who we eat, since our foods starts its journey towards our mouths as living creatures. Through time our dietary diversity has diminished precipitously, to levels that are almost hard to conceive. And in that diminishment, global dietary homogeneity has been reducing our food culture towards a bland, uniformity. Not everywhere of course, but the trend is obvious and becoming global.
Not so in the past, when food choices were vast, food cultures developed independently from one another, and people groups and their dietary choices were inextricably linked. In a sense, people were their diet in a way that few of us can really imagine today — with the remoteness the general population has from the origins of what they eat and the species that adorn their plates.
But one thing that remains — though, again we don’t often think much about it — is just how much we have our identities wrapped up in the food we eat. Food choices tell us a lot about who we are, just as archeological traces of food can help us understand who we’ve been.
Take class for instance. Today, there are probably foods you imagine to be beneath you. And, there are likely foods you think of as too pretentious for you too — in other words, above your perceived class status.
That's just one example, but as you’ll hear in this interview, throughout time, food has been about a lot more than just the calories and micronutrients we’ve needed. It’s defined us and our place in our culture's cosmology. Though times have changed, and foods certainly have too, maybe this one thing has stayed the same. Food, though different, still, in a lot of ways — defines us. It’s who we are… But of course, let’s see what Robyn Cutright has to say about it! After all… she wrote the book on the topic!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/130
Andrew Tsui is the founder of the Ike Jime Federation, and… he’s on a mission. He aims to change the way we, as commercial and recreational anglers, handle the fish we harvest. We’ll set euphemisms aside for a moment and say it clearly, Andrew wants to change the way we kill fish. In fact, he believes in what he calls A Considered Kill.
First, we should say, Ike Jime is a traditional Japanese technique for killing fish. As an island nation, Japan has always relied heavily on ocean fish for its dietary needs, and few places in the world can boast as sophisticated a seafood culinary tradition. And like so many things Japanese, the techniques for dispatching fish reached a level of near-perfection there, not just eliminating as much suffering and stress as possible, but also producing the highest quality finished food product possible.
The method, while requiring some skill, is fairly simple. Once fish are brought onto the boat or onshore, they’re quickly killed with an ice-pick-like spike inserted into their brain. Then, their gills are cut, to induce exsanguination — which simply means they are bled out — and finally a long, flexible wire — known as a Shinke Jime wire — is run through the spinal canal, destroying their spinal cord and eliminating any residual nerve impulses that would keep muscles contracting spasmodically, resulting in tissue damage, metabolic waste products, and chemical stresses that would ultimately reduce the quality of the final food product.
Lastly, the fish is rapidly cooled, not just placed on ice, but in an ice slurry that completely surrounds the fish, ensuring quick and uniform cooling.
For those of us who fish, this may sound like a lot of extra logistical steps — especially when we’re used to pulling a fish over the gunwales and tossing them into the icebox — but it’s important to note that similar steps are taken for the USDA-certified domesticated meats we purchase in the supermarket. While fish, somehow, are still killed with unregulated and antiquated methods that produce inferior finished food products.
This, in turn, reduces the value of the fish we buy and eat, meaning that commercial fishermen must harvest larger numbers of fish to be profitable. It's a quantity over quality paradigm.
That’s where Andrew Tsui comes in. He’s working hard to make Ike Jime a part of our commercial fishing fleet's tool kit. Providing both equipment and education, and working on policy as well.
It’s a lot more work, it adds complexity, and a need for anatomical knowledge and keenly honed fine motor skills. It requires patience and consistency. But let’s face it, we would never treat mammals the way we treat fish. Can you imagine just leaving cows piled on top of each other in the sun to die, convulsing? It’s unthinkable. But that’s what we’ve been doing with fish. Then we wonder why they last just a few days before spoiling.
Chefs like Josh Niland, who we’ve had on the show before, are showing us that our fish culinary tradition is still in its infancy. Andrew Tsui is showing us that it’s not just how we cook fish, but how we dispatch them as well.
So, we’ll be heading out on the water this year armed with the tools of the Ike Jime Federation. Brain spikes, Shinke Jime wires, and, of course, the knowledge of how to implement these practices, all of which can be found on IkeJimeFederation.com.
With all the time and effort we put into feeding ourselves and our families with wild foods, why would we skip these steps that can reduce stress and suffering, increase the shelf life and quality of the meat we harvest, and culminate in an eating experience that surpasses anything we could get with conventional methods.
So, have a listen, and consider becoming a forward-thinking angler. Learning to humanely dispatch fish for their own sake and for a better final food product too. Like Andrew says… these are tools for the considered kill.
Maybe it's time we all started practicing Ike Jime!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/129
Our guest today is Linda Black Elk, an ethnobotanist specializing in the traditional foods and medicines of the Great Plains and the Director of Food Sovereignty at United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, ND. She’s also the mother of three Lakota sons.
There's a lot of overlap in Linda and our philosophies around foraged foods and medicines, particular in how we see each species as more of a “who” than a “what,” since getting to know them is more like getting to know another person than it is like buying an inanimate product.
Linda and Daniel, of course, discuss food and medicine sovereignty as well as ethnobotany, but their discussion takes a turn towards some other rather interesting topics, like the euphemistic “zombie apocalypse." Now, of course, neither she nor Daniel thinks there are really zombies or some forthcoming zombie apocalypse, but it does give them a way to, in the spirit of jest, explore the idea of a temporary or long-term social, economic, industrial, technological, or medical systems collapse and their implications.
Though it’s become really cliché in recent years, the meme of the zombie apocalypse, we think, is born out of the collective psychology of a culture that knows its lifeway isn’t sustainable, its systems have become far too fragile, and its people have gotten a little too far away from the skills they’d need to care for themselves in the absence of a nanny-state. Recent events have certainly left many of us realizing we’d be wise to prepare our lives for hardships beyond toilet paper shortages. Hopefully, that preparedness never pays off — since it would mean challenging times — but just in case, many of us have decided to hedge our bets. Investing in small, or maybe big ways, in our skillsets, and in making ourselves more antifragile.
So get ready for something a little different today. Still on theme, but with a playful edge that is sure to make you smile. Get ready for the zombie thwarting powers of Linda Black Elk!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/128
Fishing the Wild Waters is the new book from today’s guest Conor Sullivan. He was one of our earliest podcast guests here on WildFed, and at that time he’d mentioned he was writing this book, but it was still an early manuscript. Well, the book is out, and we've had the pleasure of reading it. This book is certainly a proud addition to our fishing library, a genre that we haven’t always found very useful. But Conor’s book is different. It's part memoir, with really inspiring and informative fishing stories from some of the United States' more remote fisheries. It’s also part instructional manual, with several appendices that give detailed descriptions of fishing gear and angling strategies for specific species he writes about. In particular, we really appreciated the appendix called “how to fish like a local” which gives great tips on how to get started in a new fishery.
Conor’s career in the Coast Guard has taken him all over the wild waters of this incredible country, and he’s really taken advantage of that opportunity, honing his angling skills wherever duty has taken him. He’s here today to share with us a bit about how we too can become better, more effective anglers ourselves. And to encourage us to ply the wild waters wherever we live. Because there’s adventure, fulfillment, and food out there, just waiting for you!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/127
The early spring green foraging season is upon us — or at least it's drawing very close now — and who better to talk to than the Forager Chef himself, Alan Bergo.
Alan is a long time guest and friend of the show — both the WildFed podcast and TV show — and one of today’s most prolific wild food writers and recipe developers. His website — ForagerChef.com — is the web’s largest wild mushroom cookery resource, but it's so much more, with incredible recipes and musings on plants as well.
Alan is constantly experimenting with old and new ways of processing, cooking, fermenting, pickling, or preserving wild edibles and is always on the quest for bold new flavors too.
After a long, Northern Hemisphere winter, there’s nothing as cleansing and rejuvenating as those early spring greens, and Alan is gonna give us lots of tips and tricks on what to do with them. We also talk about the rise of wild foods and foraging in television media and get some teasers about a new mainstream tv project he’s recently become involved in, which will be coming out soon.
For those of us in the wild foods culture, this is an exciting time, both because of spring greens, but even more-so because many prominent wild food educators and personalities are producing media that has the potential to bring what we do to larger audiences — hopefully, helping to mainstream the idea that wild nature and humans have always had, and should have today, an intimate, reciprocal relationship based around food.
More people caring about what wild nature has to offer means more people caring for wild nature. And eventually, we all hope, that leads to more wild nature!
Alan is playing an instrumental part in that, and continues to be an innovative, curious, and perpetually inspiring voice on the topic.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/126
Our guest today is Carter Heath, Regional Director for the New England and New York chapters of the National Wild Turkey Federation and longtime guest and friend of the show. He’s also bi-lingual, speaking both English as well as wild turkey, in which he’s quite fluent. Not just at cutting and gobbling, but even in Jake calls and gentle hen purrs too. The man simply exudes wild turkey vibes as if he were wrapped in a turkey atmosphere. And he gets to share this passion as his profession, which is just a beautiful thing to witness in a person.
Today we thought it would be fun to talk about getting started turkey hunting — start to finish — so this interview focuses on everything you need to know to get going. From getting your hunting license to selecting a weapon and strategy, to turning your bird — or hopefully birds — into delicious meals.
The turkey rut is just about to kick off, and we couldn’t be more excited for a little spring thunder!
For now, enjoy the gobbling, cutting, and gentle purrs of Carter Heath. He’s been a significant part of the incredible interest we’ve been experiencing around the spring turkey hunt in recent years, with its rapidly expanding hunter participation and especially the growing interest we’ve seen from new hunters.
We hope he’ll inspire you to get involved if you aren’t already and to join the National Wild Turkey Federation this year. It’s just $35 a year, comes with a great magazine subscription, and your money goes to support very real and tangible habitat restoration projects and wild turkey conservation efforts. Join us in becoming a member, whether you hunt or not, because we need all hands on deck to preserve our hunting heritage and to conserve the wild turkey!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/125
Today's guest is Chris Morasky, and when it comes to off-grid, primitive living, this guy has put in the dirt time. He’s also something of an existentialist philosopher, and our conversation today takes place at what we see as a pivotal moment in human history.
Where do we — lovers of the natural world — fit into an increasingly fast-paced, distracted, digital and, dare we say, artificial world?
We know it’s on our minds, and we're guessing it's on yours too. After all, we don’t imagine we’ll be hunting and gathering wild foods in the metaverse, or experiencing the rich and meaningful relationships and experiences we currently get to curate here on the… well… natural earth.
Barring the catastrophic or unforeseeable, we are headed for an increasingly artificial experience of reality. We choose that word, “artificial,” carefully. It shares a common root with the word artifact, and of course, the word art itself. Meaning shaped by human will or human hands, it stands in contrast to the word “natural" — something that has not been shaped by human will or human hands.
The metaverse, as it has come to be called, or the various forms of augmented reality that have been proposed, all take us further from the natural experience into the artificial. That’s not a value statement, just an observation of reality. These worlds, digital extensions of our built environment, unlike the kind of “hybrid” world we inhabit now — made of both the natural and artificial — will be purely the work of human imagination. For those with a more transhumanist leaning, this is the ultimate dream fulfilled. Like the singularity itself, the idea of a metaverse is a kind of technotopia. But for many of us who love nature, and particularly for those of us who draw resources directly from nature, i.e. hunters and gatherers, it’s a kind of nightmare scenario, a techno dystopia. But, it’s unfolding before our very eyes and with no signs of slowing down. To the contrary, it’s speeding up.
So, how do we navigate this rapidly approaching world. How do we relate to it, stay sane, and stay connected to the natural world? That’s the question that’s on our minds, in this conversation with Chris Morasky.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/124
Everett Headley is back on the show today, this time, to discuss a topic we’ve been wanting to learn about for ages… Falconry. That’s right, hunting with a bird of prey.
Each year, when we go through our own state's hunting regulations, we're always transfixed by the “grey squirrel falconry season.” We think, just what is this anyway, and who is doing it?
Well, Everett is here today to give us a primer on what falconry is, who does it, and how. Of course, we’ll learn a lot about these incredible birds too.
One of the big takeaways for us is that, prior to shotguns being widely available, this was a really efficient way to bird hunt. Of course, today, it’s more of an art form, being kept alive by folks who want to maintain this ancient hunting relationship with wild raptors.
A lot of hunters, upon first learning about falconry think “I’d like to try that” — and Daniel is one of them — so in many ways, this interview gives us a real glimpse into just what it takes. Spoiler alert, it's a lot of work and not for everybody!
But we bet it’s for some of you, and even if it's not, this is a fascinating and engrossing topic you won’t want to miss.
So, special thanks to Everett for coming back on the show. He was just on for episode 118, A Hunting Dialectic, which was a great show too. We don’t think we've ever had a guest on for two episodes so close together, but Everett has so much to offer the hunting world, and Daniel just couldn’t wait to talk about these incredible birds and the lifestyle of hunting with them.
There’s only about 4,000 falconers in the US today. We're hoping, after hearing this episode, that there might just be a few more added to the ranks.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/123
In today's episode, Daniel is speaking to Jack and Andy of Foraged.Market, a website dedicated to high-quality specialty and wild foods from around the world. Not only is it a place where you can find and purchase wild foods from vetted, sustainable foragers, but it's also a place where you can sell your own foraged foods or products you forage! Of course, you’ve always had the ability to sell what you forage, but it's not been easy to find buyers interested in your goods. But Foraged brings buyers, looking for your products, to you. Think Etsy for wild foods. Linking sellers and buyers to one another.
Imagine that you are a chef or a home cook, and you’re looking for American Matsutake mushrooms. You could simply order them on Foraged.Marketplace, trusting that they’ve come from a forager who’s been evaluated by the Foraged team, to ensure they’re using sustainable foraging practices.
Or, let’s say you’ve been making birch syrup at home, and you’ve got a surplus. You could sell your product on Foraged too, with your own online store front — assuming you’ve first gone through their sustainable forging practices verification process.
This is a huge leap forward for the wild foods and foraging community. Opening up avenues for the flow of these incredible, sustainable products into our food systems and empowering those who tend the wild to become more self-sufficient practicing their craft as an income source.
It means chefs can more easily access the incredible ingredients that we foragers have been enjoying for years, broadening the public's palette and perception of what the wild world produces, and thereby placing value on species that might otherwise be forgotten, ensuring that at least some of these species get the attention and eventual protection they need to exist in perpetuity!
It also opens up pathways for more scrutiny into the sustainability of our practices and to subtly shift the foraging world away from a taking model to more of a tending model.
We've got really high hopes for what Jack and Andy are doing at Foraged and are really looking forward to the way this could positively impact the foraging world! And also to see how it might benefit you, the listener, in either accessing wild foods you’re interested in, or in sharing wild foods you love with others.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/122
Our guest today is Bob Krumm — author of several wonderful books on berry foraging that span the Pacific Northwest to New England and a fly fishing guide on the Bighorn River since the 1980s. In fact, still guiding clients today, Bob's now the eldest guide on the river — quite a distinction. We love this conversation because Bob's got qualities that we really want to cultivate in this life. He's so kind and good-hearted, and his outlook on life is so beautifully positive.
Bob's been gathering berries for jams and jellies for decades, and he sent Daniel several bottles, which he and Avani have readily devoured. He's convinced some of Bob's good vibes have made it into each bottle. Anyway, it's always great to get the perspective of folks who've been on the path and the planet a bit longer. It's such an important reminder of what's really most important in life.
Bob sent Daniel his books, and in each one where he signed them, he wrote a little message. They kind of sum up the philosophy that we're talking about.
One says: Remember, life's just a bowl of berries. Sweet ones at that.
Another reads: May all of your endeavors turn out berry good.
And the third: May your berry bucket be full of joy, love, blessings, and lots of luscious berries.
We think Bob collecting berries along the Bighorn River has gathered more than just ripe fruits — he's found a lot of what life is really all about.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/121
We’ve got a great show for you today with Kelly Kindscher, PhD. He’s the author of Edible Wild Plants of the Prairie, a senior scientist at the Kansas Biological Survey and a Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Kansas.
His research specialties are plant community ecology, conservation biology, restoration ecology, botany, and ethnobotany. His passion is for wild prairies, wild plants, and wild landscapes.
If you’ve got questions about the ecology of the prairie, Kelly Kindscher is your guy. And, we've got questions about the prairie!
We love interviews like this, deep dives on specific topics — especially getting to explore the big history of landscapes and their ecology. In our short lifetimes, we get such a brief glimpse into the places we live or visit, so drawing upon the incredible history and science to piece together a big-picture story, to us, is both revelatory and thrilling.
Today, of course, we’re talking about the prairie, how it was formed — which, most interestingly, had strong anthropogenic influence — and what happened from the first settlement there, up to European contact, and right up to the present.
Having visited the prairie last year, not for the first time, but for the first time with intentionality, Daniel is keenly interested in this ecological treasure. And, having eaten from what it provides, in the form of bison, chokecherries, and prairie turnips, we really value the message that Dr. Kelly is sharing. That our prairie restoration efforts must include edible and medicinal plants if we hope to make a lasting change in how modern Americans relate to this crucial ecotype. Trying to rebuild it, exclusive of people just means people forget about it. Out of site, out of mind. But creating landscapes that humans can interact with, particularly at the gustatory level — which incidentally is likely the reason the prairies were built by humans in the first place — means that people, rather than forgetting, will instead be interacting. What we care about we protect.
It’s a beautiful and timely message about a place whose importance can’t be overstated. And of course, this same thinking can be applied to any and all landscapes. Like Kelly, we think tending wild landscapes for food and medicine is the missing component that gives modern people a reason to care. The answers are already there, they just need to be implemented.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/120
We've got a fascinating interview for you today. Our guest Mike Robinson is a restaurateur in the UK, specializing in bringing wild game meat to the market and table — something we can’t really do here in the US but is legal in England. More specifically, he and his restaurants specialize in wild venison. In fact, Mike is playing a significant role in how wild venison reaches British diners. He’s also a television personality, who currently has four different shows airing on Outdoor Channel. You read that right, four shows.
One of which, Farming the Wild — which airs in the same block as WildFed — often features him hunting deer in ways that frankly, we’d just never seen. Stalking through the English countryside with dogs, head shooting deer off of shooting sticks, letting his dogs find the deer, and then field dressing those deer to enter the restaurant market.
If you’ve never seen a man in a tweed golf hat field dress a deer in 70 seconds, you need to see his show! Mike has a method of cleaning deer that is faster, more hygienic, and more efficient than any we've ever seen. It comes from having harvested thousands — yes, thousands — of deer. And he’ll describe his method for us in this interview.
There’s a lot of really useful takeaways in this conversation, things that’ll make your field care and final cooking product even better. It’s also a very intriguing contrast — the differences between British and American hunting culture.
Here with our vast public lands, huge wilderness areas, and relatively short history as a domesticated landscape, our hunting culture has been shaped by a rugged, survivalist mentality. There in the UK, where there’s been thousands of years of domestication and farming, their hunting culture is more akin to animal husbandry, which is why Mike’s show is called Farming The Wild.
And while the differences are fascinating, between the old world and the new — we're even more interested in what we can learn from each other!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/119
Daniel set out to interview today’s guest — Everett Headley — on the topic of falconry… cooperative hunting with a bird of prey. He’s a Montana resident that, amongst other things, hunted with a red tail hawk and is now training a peregrine falcon. All very interesting stuff that we've wanted to learn more about for years. But from the moment we started speaking, it was obvious that the natural flow of their conversation was going in a different direction. Both Everett and Daniel take a very philosophical approach to hunting and to understanding their relationship to the outdoors and the wild things that live there, and this, being their initial conversation, quickly took a turn towards the big picture.
What they landed on was a conversation about the journey a hunter takes over the course of their lifetime and how they think we can best preserve our hunting heritage in perpetuity. It’s an important topic, because, despite the renewed cultural interest we’re seeing in hunting right now, there are many forces still aligned against it. And while, in recent years, many new hunters are embracing the lifestyle, we have a long way to go to win over the non-hunting public.
Everett is a really thoughtful person, and it comes through in how he communicates about the lifestyle he passionately lives. He really takes his time in exploring these ideas and has a deep grasp on the topic of hunting. Not just the how-to, but the why, and when. And by "when" we mean where we are, currently, in the timeline of modern hunting and its relationship to conservation.
We love conversations like this, true dialectics, where many questions are asked, but neither of us has an answer to the questions we’re posing. Instead we explore them with a sincere desire to arrive at sound conclusions.
Whether you agree or not with the conclusions we are reaching is less important than that these ideas get explored. Because, as we're always wanting to point out, hunting isn’t just some other hobby, like building model cars or playing racket ball. It’s the natural, fundamental human food acquisition strategy and it’s formative to how we came to be in relationship to the rest of the ecosystem and the other-than-human beings that inhabit them alongside us. Therefore, while many fads will come and go, some in the course of our lifetime, hunting must — in my opinion — remain. It’s too important to who we are to see it lost or forgotten, or tread beneath the wheels of the engine of so-called progress.
So, it’s in that spirit that Everett and Daniel have this conversation. It’s a desire to see something fundamentally human, preserved.
And we promise to bring him back to talk about falconry soon. We're as interested to learn about that as you are. In the meantime, get to know Everett a bit, and take some time to consider these questions yourself. We need all hands on deck!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/118
Is camouflage necessary for hunting? How much of it is gimmick and hype? If it does work, to what degree does it make sense to be employing it?
Join Daniel for a solo edition of the podcast as he takes a deep dive into the art and practicality of camouflage. Nature regularly employs camouflage for deception — both for predators and for prey — and it's important that we, as hunters, consider our visibility in the landscapes we're moving through.
In this episode, Daniel explains how camouflage works and gives an overview of the myriad of different camouflage options available — patterns, colors, brands and more. He explores the effectiveness of these options in the field and shares his own experiences, as well as some of his favorites.
We hope this gives you some food for thought as you consider your hunting, fishing and foraging wardrobe into the future!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/117
One of our favorite repeat guests, Lori McCarthy, is back today to talk about her new book, Food, Culture, Place: Stories, Traditions, and Recipes of Newfoundland.
Lori is, of course, from Newfoundland, Canada — which, by the way, should not be confused with the rest of Canada — as it really is its own place entirely, having only become a Canadian province in 1949! With a timezone 30 minutes ahead of Eastern Standard, they really do march to the beat of their own drum, and speak a dialect all their own. Of all the places we've visited in the US and Canada, nowhere is the food culture still as intimately tied to the landscape as it is there.
Lori’s new book, while we'd categorize it as a cookbook, is also a deep dive into the foodways and cultural heritage of the island they call “The Rock”, which is exemplified in the title — Food, Culture, Place.
Lori and Daniel have always had a great rapport, so this interview is full of stories, laughs, and of course, interesting anecdotes from the world of wild foods.
Oh, one more thing, we spoke with Lori this morning, and there’s been some shipping delays that have postponed the official launch of her book, but she’ll have them very soon. She wanted us to let you know, if you want to pre-order a copy you can do that on Amazon, or by emailing her directly at foodcultureplace.ca. She’ll get one out to you as soon as they arrive.
In the meantime, enjoy the very unique insights, stories, and of course, accent of the one and only, Lori McCarthy.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/116
Today's guest is Kathy Yerich. She's the co-author of Mushrooms of the Upper Midwest, a field guide for lay folks in that area to use identifying fungi around them. Created specifically for the mushroom beginner — it's organized by what the mushroom looks like in order to teach people to look at all of the mushroom's features and get to know the best and easiest to identify edibles, as well as the most poisonous species.
Kathy's been part of the Minnesota Mycological Society for 15 years and the North American Mycological Association for about 12 years. She's also very enthusiastic — like so many of you — about wild foods. Mushrooms for her are more than an academic interest — they're a food source.
We really hope this encourages you to set some mushroom foraging goals for the coming year. Unless you're lucky enough to live in a place where mycelia fruit this time of year — in which case, get out there! Us, we're feeling committed to putting more time into mushrooming this coming season. But until then, we'll do some winter Chaga hunting and keep making Chaga tea until the snow melts away, the weather warms up and new flushes of mushrooms start pushing their way up through the forest floor again.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/115
Today’s guest is Senior Cyber Tracker Kersey Lawrence.
If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you’ve heard Daniel speak to a few skilled trackers in past episodes. This skill, of studying, identifying, and ultimately tracking and trailing animals was — most likely — fundamental to the development of the modern human brain and perhaps even to language itself.
At one time, this skill would have been nearly universal amongst humans, but of course, in our more modern era, it’s atrophied to the point that most of us can’t identify the tracks of the native wildlife around us, no less interpret them.
Now, modern hunters are a bit of an exception. Most of us are aware of the track patterns of the animals we pursue, and use these tracks, albeit in a rudimentary way, to locate our quarry. That kind of tracking is a bit like learning an alphabet, or maybe even reading a few monosyllabic words. What Daniel's talking with Kersey about today is different. It’s more akin to reading sentences, paragraphs, and ultimately books of knowledge about how animals have used the landscape in the recent past and potentially might use it in the future too.
There are places and peoples in the world where this skill is still alive, part of an unbroken lineage that stretches back into the deepest recesses of human antiquity. And there are also folks, for whom this field of study came later in life but who have developed it into a contemporary art-form and culture — who’ve codified it and who are ensuring it doesn’t blink out of existence the way so much of our ancestral skills and technologies have.
Kersey has a foot in both worlds. She lives part time and works alongside trackers in Africa, who come from communities where tracking is still practiced the way it always has been. Places where the practice of this art was never generationally interrupted. But she also lives part time here in the US where she teaches tracking to folks whose lineage forgot the art of tracking long ago.
Kersey is the first woman to ever earn the title of Senior Tracker in the internationally renowned CyberTracker system. Today she’s going to tell us what CyberTracker is, and about the art of tracking. She’s done the deep dive, and she’s going to introduce us to something our ancestors forgot long ago, and maybe even invite us to pick it up where those distant relatives left off.
To not just follow in their footsteps, but to follow their footsteps themselves.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/114
Today's episode is with our good friend Randy Huntley. This guy is a hoot. He’s a hunter, a registered Maine guide who leads bear and moose hunts, an Animal Damage Control trapper, a maple sap tapper, an avid fiddleheader, and all-around outdoorsman. He’s got one of the best beards in his field, and he’s also Daniel's beaver tapping mentor.
One of the things we like the most about him, he’s as into eating wild game as we are, and for him, eating beaver is no exception.
As you probably know, for most of modern beaver trapping history, it was the pelts that motivated trappers to wade into the beaver's watery world. But today, with the price of pelts so low, it's scarcely worth your time to trap for furs alone. Even when selling the Castor glands into the market, it’s hard to imagine breaking even as a money-motivated beaver trapper. But when you start considering the incredible food value, and the fact that they can weigh 20-60 pounds apiece, trapping as a wild food strategy starts looking really enticing. Furs and glands become a secondary consideration.
So, with eating beaver on our mind — insert laugh track here — we've been setting off to the stream banks with Randy to “lay some steel” as they say. The result, some of the best eating game meat the wild world provides. Beautiful red meat for steaks and braises, and lots of succulent fat. Not what you normally associate with rodents, but then again, these are the continent's largest, and they’re in a culinary category all their own.
We think beaver is one of North America's most underutilized game meats, so if you're looking to fill the freezer without needing to fire a single shot, consider a beaver trapline. After all, it hunts while you sleep. But you’ll need to go find yourself a mentor like Randy Huntley first because there’s no substitute for a great teacher.
And if he comes with a highly polished Maine accent, just consider that a bonus!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/113
Today’s guest is John McGannon — chef, author, television host, a true pioneer in wild game cookery and a veteran of the wild-game cookery television space that we at WildFed are still fledgling to.
We really appreciate the opportunity to talk to someone like him, since he’s already tread much of the landscape we're now exploring, and also because he can give valuable context to what the last couple of decades in the space has been like.
Probably most valuable is hearing his key take aways about game cookery. After many years of trial and error, he’s distilled down a few key strategies for making every cut of game shine in the kitchen and on the plate. Most significant — John says they’ll probably put it on his epitaph — is his emphasis on dry-aging. So, if you're looking for take-aways from this episode, listen to how he suggests you age game meats at home.
You’ll want to work these ideas into your field-care and kitchen.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/112
We’re joined today by Zach Elfers, aka @woodlandrambler of the Nomad Seed project.
Zach has a unique suite of skills and knowledge base that centers around the intersection of botany, horticulture, foraging, wild-tending and traditional ecological knowledge. As a member of the foraging community, Zach is going a lot deeper than mere plant identification or gathering. He’s looking at creating large scale, reciprocal ecological relationships between people, the plants, the land, and the rest of the non-human beings that we share the landscape with. And while this was a get-to-know-you kind of conversation, Daniel left it feeling like "this is the kind of thinking he hopes can start to infuse North American foraging culture over the next decade."
Our conversation quickly veered away from merely foraging and went into some of the challenging-to-traverse terrain of the socio-political aspects of our cultural relationship to the land and each other. Of particular interest to us is the juxtaposition of top-down vs bottom-up approaches to implementation. We look at indigenous vs colonial land management paradigms, and discuss possible roads back to a more long-term sustainable path of nature integration.
This interview gets into some of the high-level, big-picture thinking that we really enjoy. It’s a reminder that wild foods are about a lot more than what’s on your plate. It’s about how we relate to the landscape, to the creatures we share the planet with, and how we relate to each other too. Because food is so much more than calories. It’s a representation of how we choose to walk in the world.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/111
Rebugging The Planet?
We spend a lot of time and energy considering the role that charismatic animals play in our ecosystems and why we should conserve them. But what about less charismatic critters? The ones that aren’t so pretty.
Vicki Hird is here to speak on behalf of the bugs — not just insects — but invertebrates in general. Throughout this interview, we’ll use the term bug loosely to encompass insects, arachnids, plankton, and just about any other invertebrate too, because, as it turns out, in many cases, their populations are in decline. The culprits are many. Some obvious — like habitat loss and deliberate or unintended chemical assault. But there are some surprises too — like the impact that high-energy communications systems like 5G technology may have on invertebrate populations.
It’s easy to muster the public will to conserve the polar bear, the blue whale, and the bald eagle. But what of bugs? Are our unconscious biases keeping us incognizant of their decline?
We’ve all been inculcated, not intentionally, but subconsciously, with a cultural bias — disdain might be a better word — for bugs. Squash them, spray them with pesticide, avoid them at all costs. But in an era that, looking back a few hundred years from now, will likely be defined by ecological crisis and the measures taken to confront it — what we need most is a reframing of the way we view our fellow life forms. Because we can’t sustainably change the way we act without changing the way we think.
Many of us received a miseducation on what Vicki calls bugs. We learned they're dirty, they’re dangerous, they’re vectors for disease. Vicki is here to correct the record and offer us the opportunity to reframe our relationship with these all-important creatures. And she’s sharing things we can each do, individually, to promote the return of their numbers.
She’s here to help re-bug the planet! But first, we have to re-bug our minds.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/110
David Meltzer is Professor of Prehistory at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, an archeologist who has conducted research throughout North America, and the author of over 200 scientific studies, and 10 books, including First Peoples In A New World.
His primary interest is the first peopling of the continent — a subject that, for whatever reason, has always captivated us. It’s not just the idea of Asiatic people venturing across Beringia and into an unpeopled world, which is interesting enough on its own, but it’s the world they entered into — an ice age landscape full of now extinct animals, like elephantine mammoths, deadly saber tooth cats, giant short faced bears, enormous ground sloths, and gargantuan primitive bison.
But what do we really know about these so called “paleo-indian” peoples and their migration here? And what role, if any, might they have played in the extinction of so much of the ice age megafauna they encountered — and in many cases, hunted?
Today we’ll get the big picture overview of what we know about the first peopling of North and South America and what the world was like just 15,000 years ago. It might sound like a long time, but in the scheme of human history, it’s really quite recent. So recent in fact, that conversations like this leave us feeling like that world is almost within reach. It’s exciting and energizing to imagine that world, in all its contrast to the modern one we find ourselves in today.
And while we’re now safer, more affluent, and less inclined to be eaten, there’s a feeling we can’t shake that there was also something essential about that time that’s now missing. Perhaps that’s naive nostalgia talking, but we're gonna indulge it, just for today.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/109
Today’s show really harkens back to Daniel's roots! His earliest work was focused on nutrition, which has been a primary interest of his for more than two and a half decades. He eventually landed on a wild foods lifestyle by following that thread of interest wherever it led. After becoming very dissatisfied with modern dietary dogma and popular fad diets, he started looking into our ancestral past for clues about what the human animal needs for nutritional inputs, and at what worked historically.
Today's guest — Dr. Bill Schindler — is author of the new book Eat Like A Human. The book lays out simply and clearly, the foundations of a zoologically appropriate human diet, based on both medical and nutritional science, but also on several hundred thousand years of evolutionary history.
Bill and Daniel, while coming from really different origin stories, have landed on really similar conclusions about food and how we relate to it. It's concepts like those he explores in his book that have led to Daniel hunting, fishing, foraging, and making this podcast and the WildFed TV show.
In other words, it was the desire to integrate ancestral practices into a modern life that led to this show. But you don’t have to harvest your own food to start putting these kinds of dietary practices into place. You can learn to forage the produce section and hunt the deli area of your local grocer. Bill’s book will show you how. Follow that path long enough, and you might just find yourself in the woods, or on the sea, chasing the most nutritious and ancestrally coherent food you can find.. so you can, like Bill says…. Eat Like A Human.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/108
Kevin Kossowan is the creator of From The Wild, a James Beard award nominated, culinary adventure series about wild foods that has elevated field cookery to a level not really seen before in a tv series. A film maker, he’s also the co-creator of Les Stroud’s Wild Harvest on PBS and Nat Geo.
One of the things we love about talking with Kevin is his willingness to get into some of the more taboo and uncomfortable nooks and crannies of the ethical and moral and ecological obligations of hunting, fishing, and foraging... especially into conversations we, as hunters, are often told we shouldn’t have.
While the first part of this conversation is some catch up, talk about recent harvests and the landscapes they happen in, the second part of this conversation really heats up, as Daniel and Kevin start talking about things like pollution in wild foods, ethics in killing, and the things that motivate or deter us from participating or not participating in harvests.
The terrain gets sticky, and that’s precisely why we think it's important to explore. Because what we do, harvesting organisms from the wild for food, needs to be clearly articulated for us to make quality decisions about life and death, and of course, for the public to understand — and hopefully support — our choices, and the system of laws that legally governs our actions. Some of these moral quandaries and ethical dilemmas aren’t solvable, they’re too nuanced and individual for that. Instead, each of us has to dig deep inside to determine where we land on these issues.
We hope you enjoy this conversation!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/107
Eugenia Bone is a nationally known food and science writer and the author of several books, including Mycophilia, Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms, and Microbia, a Journey into the Unseen World Around You. Most recently, she can be seen in Fantastic Fungi, a new documentary you can see on Netflix that looks at the healing properties of mushrooms, from the medicinal to the entheogenic. She’s featured alongside other greats like Michael Pollen and Paul Stamets. We highly recommend the film, and as you’ll hear in this episode, Eugenia has recently edited the Fantastic Fungi Community Cookbook — which is a companion to the film.
Eugenia was a real pleasure to talk to, with her lively style and excellent grasp of all things fungi, from foraging to the most recent science.
From cutting edge cuisine to modern building materials, from environmental clean-up to cancer treatment and even psychotherapy, mushrooms are finally myceliating the western mind and its formerly mycophobic culture. So here’s to mycophilia, the antidote to the anti-mushroom sentiment of bygone days. The future is bright, if not partially decomposing and covered in spores.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/106
Our guest today — Josh Niland — is changing the way the culinary world thinks about fish. From the way we handle it, to how we store it, to the way it’s cooked, Josh has single handedly created a new school of fish cuisine. Though part of it is a strong ethic of using more of the animal, that’s really just the beginning.
Imagine, at present, in restaurants and at home, only about 45% of a fish is utilized for food. Now imagine a James Beard award-winning chef who is getting 90% yield and creating dishes no one has ever conceived of before. Josh is dry-aging fish too, discovering that, with proper storing — and contrary to all convention — the flavor of fish flesh, like that of land animals, can be improved with hanging time, provided it’s kept dry and cold.
It’s hard to overstate the impact Josh’s work is going to have on the science and art of processing and cooking fish. If nothing else, it’ll change the way you see fish forever.
At WildFed, we're slowly shifting our approach to handling, processing, aging, cooking, and eating fish. There’s a lot of habit, convention, and institutional inertia to overcome. But the results Josh is getting make it clear… We can do more to honor the fish we eat, the people we feed, and the oceans, lakes, rivers, and ponds we harvest from. 45% is unacceptable. Let’s start eating scale to tail!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/105
This week's interview is with Brian Hammons, CEO and President of Hammons Black Walnuts — the country's largest commercial producer of finished black walnuts. Black walnuts, of course, are a wild food very different from the English Walnuts most of us are familiar with, and sourced from nut trees native to North America.
Each year Hammons buys millions of pounds of Black Walnuts from foragers all over the middle of the country, through an innovative network of buying and hulling stations they set up each harvest season.
Brian is passionate about Black Walnuts, just like his father, and his father’s father were. He and his company embody the noble, but not so common traits, of hard work and work ethic, good stewardship, family tradition, and transparent business practices. And all of that comes through in the way he talks about what they do at Hammons.
We often quote the writer and foraging icon Sam Thayer here on the show. He talks about what he calls “Ecoculture” as a more ancient and sustainable alternative to Agriculture. He’s quick to point out that with the right shifts in landscape management, viable wild food sheds are possible on a scale we can’t really imagine at present. To us, Hammons represents a company that’s been doing precisely that — creating a viable market for a wild food, sustainably, for decades. Not only that, but it’s a win-win-win, because as the customer gets a healthy, sustainable wild food, Hammons prospers and so do the foragers who supply them with their raw materials. Supporting companies like theirs moves us towards a new — or perhaps old — way of engaging the landscape for our food needs. It’s exciting to us, and it opens up a world of possibilities! Here’s to happy foraging!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/104
It’s our pleasure to share a conversation with Sunny Savage of Maui, Hawaii — a modern-day wild food pioneer and incredible asset to our community of foragers. Sunny teaches wild food internships, created a foraging and cooking television series, ran a food truck featuring foraged ingredients, and has even created a foraging app.
While most of us think of Hawaii as a kind of tropical paradise, there are — in some parts of the archipelago — darker forces at work there than just the endless golf courses. Villainous bioengineering companies test their toxic wares there, and invasive species — otherwise balanced into their own native ecology — wreak havoc on the native floral and faunal assemblages of the Hawaiian islands. While the typical response of conservation groups has been to reach for pesticides — very often from those same bioengineering companies we just mentioned — Sunny has been presenting a different approach. Making them, when we can, into foods.
Sunny shares some powerful insights in this interview that are very important to the ongoing conversation we’ve had here on this show about deleterious, non-native plants, and this is just a compliment to her otherwise wonderful wild food wisdom. So, enjoy this conversation with the one and only Sunny Savage!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/103
We're on our way back from North and South Dakota as this podcast comes out. Instead of flying, we drove out, so we could bring our coolers, which, to our delight and gratitude, are now brimming with buffalo meat. Our harvest was enough to share with our host, the many hands that helped us, and our production team too. As he always has, the buffalo provides.
Now, of course, we know they’re properly called bison today — scientific name Bison bison — but after a week on the Standing Rock Reservation, it's hard to call them that. There, the people — Lakota and Dakota — say buffalo. And who knows better than a people whose life way and history has been so inextricably linked to this animal. So, for now, we'll call them what they call them.
Travis 'Good Bull Man' Condon — our host — invited us out to harvest a buffalo on the prairie and to share a traditional meal with some elders from the community. He put in a tremendous amount of work with us, gutting, butchering, and packing our buffalo. He shared meals with us — and ceremony, language, stories and songs. It’s hard to describe all the magic we experienced during our stay there, and most is probably best kept close to the heart anyway, but suffice it to say that we are leaving there with more than full coolers. Our hearts are full too, with joy and love, and appreciation for our new friends. We’re already planning our trip back to what was some of the most beautiful country we’d ever visited and some of the most gracious folks we’ve ever met.
Our hunt, our chokecherry harvest, and of course the incredible meal we shared after, will be featured in Season 2 of WildFed on the Outdoor Channel. We’ve already reviewed the footage and can hardly wait for you to see it.
So, Wóphila — thanks — and gratitude. Your listenership, as always, is appreciated.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/102
Jess Starwood is an herbalist, forager, chef, and the author of the new book, Mushroom Wanderland. Being on opposite coasts, we've only known Jess through the exquisite photography and ecologically inspired writing featured on her beautifully curated social media pages. With her new book getting the attention of the foraging community, and with so many requests to have her on the show, this seemed like a great time to finally connect with her to learn more about the important impact she's having on modern wild food culture.
In this interview, Jess and Daniel chat about the wild world of mushrooms, herbalism, the sustainability of wild food, the complex tastes of wild food and so much more. Enjoy!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/101
Today’s podcast is with Jenna Rozelle, a longtime friend of the podcast and someone who has been very involved — if not from a bit behind the scenes — in the modern wild food culture. She was one of our first guests, and we recently sat down with her to catch up and talk about the state of the wild food scene — both here where we live and around the country.
Jenna, our producer Grant, and Daniel have a fun and lively discussion ranging all over the map as they discuss foraging, hunting, fishing, and general wild food ecology, as well as some thoughts about the future of wild food culture in North America. The conversation is filled with a lot of useful info and some good laughs too. Enjoy!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/100
Mario Kalpou is the host of Man Eats Wild, a new show premiering on Outdoor Channel later this month.
Mario’s lifestyle is larger than life. He’s a self-professed adrenaline addict, who seeks thrills and big adventure, but he’s also a very thoughtful hunter, and his ethics, like ours here at WildFed, center around his approach to food.
A native of Australia, he made the first season of his show in the South Pacific — filming in Australia, but also in New Zealand.
As you’re listening to this, he’s headed off to Africa, where he formerly worked as a hunting guide — what they call a Professional Hunter there — to film the second season of his new show.
Man Eats Wild, like WildFed, airs on Mondays on the Outdoor Channel as part of their Taste of the Wild block, as both of our shows are food-focused. While our artistic styles are a bit different, we both view hunting, fishing, and foraging through a similar lens. We think it's an ancient — but still relevant and important — approach to acquiring quality food and that this food is healthier for us than anything we can purchase in the store.
This was a great conversation, and we're excited to have him as a friend and ally… and we're wishing Man Eats Wild huge success with its upcoming premier!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/099
We've just returned from a week in the beautiful Hill Country of Texas, filming an episode for Season 2 of WildFed TV show on the Outdoor Channel.
Our host and guide to the incredible property we visited — Bamberger Ranch Preserve — was Jared Holmes, a zoologist, herpatologist, hunter, butcher, ecological steward and landscape regeneration specialist. Bamberger Ranch serves as a model of what is possible with good stewardship, despite the incredible insults to the land that have been perpetrated here over the last several hundred years.
We came home from the ranch with feral hog meat, and braised one of the hams a few nights ago. We were simply blown away by the quality of the meat. We’ve had wild hog before, and have enjoyed it, but not like this. These hogs have been living in an intact eco-community, with mineralized soil, clean spring water, and feeding on a diversity of healthy, wild foods. They’re simply healthier hogs, and their meat reflects that.
Jared’s living, working, and raising a family in this little slice of paradise. But the thing is, the whole earth is ready for this kind of regeneration. We just have to get to work.
We’ll leave it to Jared to tell you how.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/098
Today’s episode was a lot of fun to record, since it's rare that Grant Guiliano — co-producer of this podcast and co-creator of the WildFed television series — and Daniel sit down to just record a show together. There’s so many fun stories and interesting reflections on the things we learn and encounter during — and outside of — those productions — and we thought it would be fun to share some of that with you today!
If you’re just tuning in for the first time, this episode isn’t our typical content, since we’re usually interviewing wild food experts, wildlife biologists, ecologists, authors, chefs, or noteworthy hunters, anglers, and foragers. And we’ll be back to that content next week.
But for now, we hope you’ll enjoy this more candid, behind the scenes conversation between Daniel and Grant.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/097
Moose! They’re the largest member of the deer family, and no one knows them better than our guest today, Lee Kantar, Maine’s State Moose biologist and head of its Moose Management Program.
Here in Maine we have a thriving population — the largest in the lower 48 — but our tags are coveted, released each summer after a much-anticipated lottery drawing.
While moose are majestic, if not a bit goofy on those long spindly legs, they’re also facing several threats, not the least of which is the winter tick, an ectoparasite that’s literally been bleeding our moose population to death. Add to that the threat of brain worm and chronic wasting disease, and it soon becomes apparent why the work of Lee Kantar and his colleagues is so important.
It’s also important for us to understand what helps them thrive and what leads to their ultimate demise. That’s why Lee is flying around in helicopters counting moose, wrangling them for the tagging program, and racing to the scene when a collar shows a mortality to perform a necropsy on the spot. All that data is fed back into a management program that’s goal is ensuring moose have a future here with us. Not just for the hunt, but for their own intrinsic value on the landscape.
Tune in for a fascinating conversation on moose, their ecology and effective moose management.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/096
Never buy fish from a stranger. That’s the motto of our guests Tim and Kayla, AKA the New England Fishmongers. The Fishmongers of New England have created a model that is changing the way consumers get their fish. From the boat where it's well-cared for, to the Fishmongers who cut and package it, direct to you at the farmers market or restaurant. We're hopeful that this and similar models become the norm, not only bringing the fishermen and the retail buyer closer together, but shortening the supply chain, ensuring that less of the quality, and just as important, the story, is lost in the exchange. Seafood is, in our opinion, one of the healthiest, most nutrient dense, and physiologically most important food sources we can access. But it can also be some of the most ecologically unsustainable and, frankly, bad tasting if it’s not done right. If you don’t hunt or raise animals, you need a good butcher. If you don’t fish or get offshore you need a good fishmonger. Fish sticks be dammed! View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/095
Today we're talking to Paul Saladino — the Carnivore MD — one of the most vocal proponents of the very in-vogue carnivore diet. Now, if you listen to this show, it’s no mystery that we at WildFed are as much plant people as we are hunters. We believe in both hunting and gathering, as well as the long tradition of human omnivory. So, you won’t hear of us giving up plants anytime soon. However, we appreciate Paul’s perspective and the work he’s done to combat the anti-meat sentiment — you could almost say “propaganda” — that has become so commonplace in the last decade or so.
In this conversation, we discuss meat and why it's so much more than just protein, Paul’s time with the Hadza in Tanzania and what he learned about their dietary preferences, and the politics of censorship and medical freedom. This is a really useful discussion, especially in a time when our fundamental, biologically appropriate foods are under constant attack by a well-intentioned, and sometimes not-so-well-intentioned, media and medical institution.
Paul is a radical. He’s a rebel. He’s a pioneer, and he’s fearlessly sharing a message that deserves to be heard. We don’t agree with all of his conclusions, but we certainly appreciate what he has to say, and we hope you do too.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/094
May You Feel Every Tick. It’s a salutation and a toast. It’s a farewell, and adieu. It’s an admonition in tick country to stay tuned into your senses, a reminder to feel. So, for those of you who spend any time in the outdoors, we say it to you now as well… May You Feel Every Tick.
We’ve got a special edition of the podcast for you today, because our guest is none other than Avani Vitalis — Daniel's wife, teammate, and very best friend.
Daniel and Avani get asked a lot how they deal with the constant threat of ticks. They live in the Northeast of the US where the tick problem is epidemic. There’s a few months of every year — prime foraging and hunting time — when the threat of Lyme disease, babesiosis, anaplasmosis, Powasson virus, relapsing fever, tularemia, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and even the alpha-gal allergy which causes severe allergic reactions to eating red meat, are all a very real and present danger.
Should you avoid the outdoors? Should you be using permethrin or other bug sprays on your clothing or body? Should you be tucking your pants into your socks, or saturating yourself in essential oil formulas? Do you need a tick key or tweezers to remove an embedded tick? What do you do if you are bitten? What about your pets?
Well, Avani and Daniel are going to cover all of that today. Not as experts reporting on the science but rather as two individuals living at ground zero, deep in the heart of tick country. This is their experience. It’s not medical advice, rather it’s just some insight into their personal approach. You may choose a different path, and we support that, but this is how they're doing it. Their method is a bit unorthodox by today’s standards, but it works well for them as it has for many years now.
We think the biggest take away is this; if you spend time in the outdoors where ticks are endemic, you need a strategy for living with them. Yours may be different, but you’ll need one. The threat of tick borne illness is real, and the consequences are high.
They’ve chosen to live their lives with awareness but not fear, and they're about to share with you, just how they do that.
But, with all that said, this is Avani’s first time on the show, so they thought they'd take some time first to talk about how they met and to give you a little background on their relationship.
So if you’re just here for the tick report, you can jump ahead to the creepy crawly part. But we hope you’ll stick around for the whole conversation, since it's a lot of fun and pretty insightful too.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/093
Scott Leysath — The Sporting Chef — has been in outdoor television for 2 decades now. He joins us today to talk about a topic that’s near and dear to us — eating species that many others perceive as inedible or at least unpalatable. His show “Dead Meat” on the Outdoor Channel is about cooking the weird and wild species that most don’t consider food, or at least, that they’ve come to regard as somehow less than appetizing.
This is a fun conversation, and we think it’ll inspire you to think outside the box about potential protein sources on your landscape. And there’s some good leads in here for intrepid wild food adventurers that just might lead to your next meal. A meal that might surprise the folks around you who said “you can’t eat that”…
So, go prove them wrong — try an iguana, or a pigeon, or a raccoon, or a groundhog. Done right all four are delicious and deserve just as much respect as a deer or a dove or a duck.
In other words, it’s time to develop a sophisticated meat palate!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/092
We had a great time sitting down to talk with William Altman — fellow Mainer and the Director of Photography for Donnie Vincent.
As someone who’s entered into the world of hunting media, with this podcast and, of course, the WildFed TV show on Outdoor Channel, Daniel was excited to talk to William about the cinematography he’s doing in the hunting industry, helping to reshape the way hunting media looks and making it more palatable to folks who don’t hunt. But he was also excited to talk hunting in general, since William is a very accomplished and committed hunter.
So, you’re about to get a glimpse behind the scenes — to hear from the shooter behind the shooter — and also into the state of the hunting media industry, where it’s headed, and a lot more.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/091
It’s our honor and great pleasure to have Sam Thayer on the show. Sam is probably North America’s most well-known and respected voice in foraging today. Anyone who’s serious about foraging in the US or Canada likely has, and prizes, his three-book series in their library. Sam is an extremely well-rounded ecologist too — in possession of tremendous place-based knowledge and experience that goes well beyond just hunting and gathering. In our opinion, he’s truly one of the great ecological minds of our time.
In this interview, we discuss the way our enculturated minds — with what he calls an agrocentric worldview — have prevented us from understanding the original wild foodists, the hunting and gathering peoples of the world. In particular, the way their incredible, functional, and sophisticated ecological management strategies created food abundance on their landscape.
So, today we’ll be discussing agrocentrism. What it is, where it comes from, and how it keeps us from a truly intimate and sustainable relationship with the natural world.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/090
Our guest today is Eduardo Garcia. He’s a chef, hunter, angler, athlete, and a lover of the outdoors. He’s also the feature of a documentary called Charged: The Eduardo Garcia story, which we highly recommend you watch. It details a rather dramatic, unanticipated, and quite nearly fatal injury that Eduardo sustained on a backcountry hunt, and his inspiring recovery story. It’s an emotional ride that leaves you remembering what’s really important in life. Things like love, a healthy, positive outlook, friends, family, and — maybe most vital — what we give back to the world.
Today, Eduardo lives in Montana, where he’s an avid outdoorsman, fisherman, hunter, triathlete and motivational speaker, and we’re honored to have him here to share a bit of his story.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/089
Today’s guest is Alan Bergo — the Forager Chef, who you may remember from past episodes of this podcast and from our pigeon episode of the WildFed TV show on the Outdoor Channel. Alan is one of the most talented and intrepid chefs in the wild food world today, and he's just released a new book — The Forager Chef’s Book of Flora: Recipes and Techniques for Edible Plants from Garden, Field, and Forest.
Daniel often comments on this show that we're all descended from hunters — good ones too — or else we wouldn’t be here. But Alan is here today to remind us that we are also descended from foragers. Most likely, that’s a relationship that predates our species' hunting prowess. And unlike hunting, foraging is accessible to almost everyone. Even most cities have foraging groups, enthusiasts, and even classes happening right there in the parks around you. We can all get to know plants. And if you want to know what to do with them, have a listen to Alan. He’s certainly one of the plant pioneers of our generation. That’s why they call him the Forager Chef.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/088
Get ready for a great episode on wild plants and the thrill of discovery that is foraging! Ellen Zachos is the author of the new book The Forager's Pantry as well as several other titles like The Wildcrafted Cocktail, and Backyard Foraging, 65 Familiar Plants You Didn’t Know You Could Eat. Ellen’s a wealth of knowledge on botany and foraging, but she also happens to be a great conversationalist too, which makes this a very upbeat and inspirational interview. Ellen and Daniel discuss the forager's pantry, foraging vs. gardening, Ellen's #1 tip to get started in plant identification, the plants they're both interested in finding and working with this season, and much more. You'll walk away from this conversation with a renewed sense of botanical purpose!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/087
Arthur Haines, a recurring guest of the WildFed Podcast and TV show, is back today, and he’s here to talk about hunter attitudes and relationships to animals and the landscape, and how that influences the non-hunting public's perception of hunting as a lifestyle. Hunting is a tremendous responsibility, especially today when such a small part of the public participates. The way we hunt, talk about hunting, write and post about it, and behave on and off of wild landscapes all influences how hunting is perceived and, therefore, how it will be — or won’t be — carried into the future world. This is part of an ongoing conversation that Arthur and Daniel have been having for a while personally, and they wanted to share some of that with you today.
In this episode, Daniel and Arthur also catch up on a lot of other topics, like their Maple syrup seasons, their recent hog hunts, Arthur's experience at Buffalo Bridge (a program that assists North American indigenous bison hunters with their processing efforts after their harvests), and the story of a Moose hunt Arthur guided last season in Maine. Enjoy!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/086
Well, you’ve heard the buzz... maybe on the news, maybe in your social media feed, or if you live anywhere near Brood X, you’ve no doubt heard it in the trees these last few weeks! That’s right, it’s the return of the largest brood of 17 year cicadas — Brood X — and they're out in the billions, maybe even the trillions!
Here at WildFed, we're entomophagists — meaning we eat bugs — not entomologists — meaning those who study them. After a tasty meal of 17-year-old insects, we enlisted the help of Dr. Jonathan Larson, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky to bring us — and by extension you — up to speed on the incredible, bizarre, and uniquely American phenomenon of periodical cicada emergence. Meet us at the intersection of insect science and adventure gastronomy for a fascinating episode!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/085
There are few things in life as important to humanity as salt. It’s been a strong force shaping historical events, and it will likely shape many future events too. At WildFed, we have a strong interest in natural salts — whole, unrefined sea salt in particular — so we were excited when Lauren and Cathy from Slack Tide in York, Maine invited us over to see how they produce their small-batch pure sea salt. Just before recording this interview, we boated from their headquarters on the York river out into the open ocean to gather some sea water and brought it back to start the salt making process. Then we sat down over a glass of Lambrusco and did a salt tasting as we recorded. Enjoy our conversation, and remember to stay salty! View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/084
Luke Storey — host of The Life Stylist Podcast — joins us to share a "first hunt" story like you've never heard before. Luke and Daniel have been friends for over a decade, originally connecting in the health and nutrition space. Luke recently went on his first hog hunt in Texas, as part of a weekend with past podcast guest Mansal Denton of Sacred Hunting, and this interview centers around his experience. Not just any hog hunt — this hunt was book ended by ceremony, entheogenic medicine, and a particularly deep and nuanced reflection on what it means to hunt, kill, and eat your quarry. We promise — you’ve never heard someone break down their first hunting experience with so much subtlety and emotional intelligence. This episode is not to be missed!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/083
Mike Kimmel aka the Python Cowboy lives and works on the front lines of the Florida invasion of non-native species like pythons, iguanas, Muscovy ducks and many others. Cowboy is a great description for Mike as he's a bit of a renegade who enjoys the adrenalized rush of capturing dangerous exotic critters. He’s also a conservationist who is passionate about his role in removing these species from the landscape to give native species much-needed time to recalibrate to the biological novelty in their new world. In this episode, Mike gives us the rundown on the invasive species issue in Florida — the python invasion, in particular — and gives us a glimpse into his exciting and impactful work.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/082
"Humanity is more comfortable but less happy and healthy than we've ever been before," says today's podcast guest Michael Easter — author of the new book The Comfort Crisis, Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self. On assignment for Men’s Health Magazine, Michael went on a trip following the modern hunter and filmmaker Donnie Vincent on a hunt to the arctic. That trip changed the trajectory of Michael’s life, and led to him writing The Comfort Crisis. In this fantastic interview, he shares about the impact of this hunt, along with some really valuable takeaways, like how we can approach discomfort, how we relate to death, and how our own success can sometimes — if we aren’t careful — be our undoing. So, take this one to heart. With so many voices out there suggesting we take the easy road, sometimes we need a reminder the easy way isn’t always — if ever — the fulfilling one.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/081
It’s always great to catch up with friends and colleagues, especially when that friend is our returning guest Lori McCarthy of Newfoundland, Canada. Lori is one of Canada’s most celebrated wild food enthusiasts, the creator of Cod Sounds — a cultural education and culinary excursion company — the author of the upcoming book Food Culture Place and the host of a new television series called The East Coast Forager. Lori and Daniel chat about the many benefits of rural and self-sufficient living, the controversial seal hunt, Lori's very first upcoming bear hunt, stories of "the good old days" and the importance of keeping the rich cultural heritage of Newfoundland alive.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/080
In this episode, we chat with Danny Christensen aka the Urban Huntsman about the future of hunting and what it's like to be a hunter in Europe. Originally from Denmark, Danny launched the Urban Huntsman project while living in New York City, and is now residing in Italy — so, he has a pretty unique and comprehensive understanding of the dramatically different modern hunting systems in the United States and Europe. He shares his perspectives and experiences hunting in both places, which are fascinating and highlight how things could change here in North America if we don’t participate in and protect the incredible North American conservation model. Enjoy, and take his advice to heart!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/079
Doug Duren — passionate hunter, farmer, land manager and conservationist — is a national voice in the conservation movement, and in particular, in the conversation around Chronic Wasting Disease in the North American deer herd. His guiding principle is simple: It's not ours, it's just our turn. We cover a lot of ground in this interview — from the impacts of big ag on the wild game we harvest to getting new hunters access to good hunting grounds, how chronic wasting disease is changing the hunting space and what we can do about it, and, ultimately, what it really means to be stewards of the landscapes we care for during our short visit here on earth.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/078
We're doing something a little different this episode — Dr. Matt Dawson of the Wild Health Podcast will be interviewing Daniel! Get a behind-the-scenes look into the philosophy that informs this show as Daniel takes us back to the very beginning of his health and wellness journey. He shares about his transition from strict veganism to a natural human diet and what his diet looks like today. He also discusses one of the main pillars of what it means to be WildFed — developing meaningful relationship with species and how important this is to fostering ecological awareness and stewardship. Enjoy!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/077
Dr. Matt Dawson is a physician and the founder and CEO of Wild Health, a genomics-based precision medicine company. If you live a nature-immersed lifestyle, you've likely felt the physical and mental benefits of this firsthand. Matt is here to share how he integrates nature immersion into his genetic medicine practice and the scientific results he's seeing from prescribing this lifestyle to his patients. Daniel and Matt have a thoughtful discussion on bringing mindfulness and intention to what you do, why your DNA is not your destiny, and how you can improve your vitality with a personalized and nature-based approach to your health.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/076
Black bears are elusive and often very timid around humans. But occasionally, they aren’t. Black bears sometimes attack, and when they do, the attack is usually of a very different nature than the more common brown bear attack. When black bears attack, they’ve most often decided you are on the menu — and this requires a very different approach to how you handle an attack, and really, how you think of black bears in general. Now, it’s rare… but that said, it’s actually far more common than you think. Today's guest Carl Semencic has written a book called Encounter, which deals with just this topic. In this interview, he shares a handful of accounts that might give you a more realistic appreciation of these beautiful, powerful, and sometimes predatory animals.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/075
Tyler Sharp — CEO & Editor in Chief of Modern Huntsman — joins us for a fascinating conversation on his time in Africa, his thoughts on the rebranding of modern hunting, and how we can take control of the hunting narrative before we lose it forever. Tyler shares about his immersive experiences living and hunting in the African bush that were formative to his balanced outlook on modern hunting culture, and we also get to dig in on one of the most controversial hunts on earth — the African elephant. Tyler is passionate about elevating the hunting narrative, and we discuss his thoughts on the North American model of conservation, the hunter's paradox, and how we can make hunting more inclusive for all who want to participate.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/074
Dr. Karl Malcolm is an ecologist and hunter who leads the Renewable Resources department for the Eastern Region of the US Forest Service. With his inclusive, boundary-pushing, and thoughtful ethos on conservation, he's a model of the hunter/conservationist of the future. In this episode, Karl shares about his experiences working with Moon Bears in China and the contrast between hunting and conservation here versus there. We also discuss his fresh perspectives on bringing other stakeholders outside of the hunting and angling community into the conservation funding model and how we can build bridges between hunters and non-hunters. Karl encourages us to push the conservation conversation into a new arena, and this thought-provoking interview will give you a lot to think about!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/073
In today's episode, our host Daniel Vitalis shares an incredible experience he had fishing for a blacktip shark in the Florida Keys. Despite strong, well-managed populations here in the US, fishing for sharks has become somewhat controversial — largely due to unregulated and unethical practices in other parts of the world — and Daniel's story leads this episode into a much bigger conversation about the complexities of fisheries, regulations, hunting predators and the emotional charge around charismatic species, and the future of hunting and fishing in the US. Enjoy!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/072
Today's guest is Dr. Susan Crockford — zoologist, author, and the polar bear expert that’s rocking the boat on the climate change narrative that these bears have become — through very manipulated data and media talking points — enmeshed in. To be clear, this podcast isn’t countering the theory of climate change, but rather the way polar bears have been misused as the charismatic mega-faunal poster children for climate change. Susan is here to share her research and set the record straight on polar bears, what’s really going on with the arctic ice, and what can happen when you step out of line in the scientific community. This eye-opening interview is a must-listen!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/071
In his book, The Fifth Beginning, archeologist and anthropologist Dr. Robert Kelly proposes a way of looking at the human saga that divides our history up into five distinct turning points — what he calls Beginnings — times of radical transition that fundamentally alter the way we live on the planet and with one another. In this conversation, Dr. Kelly walks us through the history of humanity, using the first four Beginnings as a framework that leads us to what he proposes is our current major stage of the human journey — the Fifth Beginning. This is a fascinating conversation, and we range across both time and geological space as we review human antiquity and speculate about our future too.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/070
Barb Barton — author of Manoomin: The Story of Wild Rice in Michigan, endangered species biologist, and leader of a local women's circle that teaches traditional wild food knowledge — joins us to share about wild rice, wild foods, and relationship to place from her unique perspective as someone with experience in both indigenous and modern approaches. Daniel and Barb discuss the history of wild rice, appreciating wild foods as gifts, the importance of restoring traditional knowledge, how speaking the English language vs North American indigenous languages can shape our worldview, and how to create ecological change on an individual level.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/069
It's always a pleasure to have Arthur Haines — botanist, forager & Maine Guide — back on the show! In this episode, Daniel and Arthur go in-depth on maple syrup, maple trees, and their own home sugar bushes. An iconic wild food of the Northeast, maple syrup is an important staple in both Daniel and Arthur's homes. Tune in to gain an understanding of the process of harvesting maple syrup, its indigenous history, health benefits and nutrient profile, along with simple strategies for a beginner's maple sugaring set-up. If you're interested in getting started harvesting maple syrup, this conversation will give you invaluable insights from two seasoned harvesters to get you going this spring!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/068
"Hunting teaches a person to think with his heart instead of his head. That is the secret of hunting," says Dr. Randall Eaton — internationally-recognized authority in animal behavior, wildlife conservation and human evolution — in his book The Sacred Hunt. Dr. Eaton has dedicated his life to promoting hunting as a healthy expression of humanity, and it was a great honor to have him join us for a conversation about the more spiritual side of hunting. In this episode, Dr. Eaton shares his perspectives on the importance of connection and respect in hunting, the origins of trophy hunting, and recounts some of his incredible experiences with whales. We even get into some fun and subjective side tangents, including his thoughts on metaphysics and psychic communication with other species!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/067
Tony Seichrist — owner and head chef at The Wyld and past podcast + WildFed TV show guest — just hosted us for a week of hog hunting outside Savannah, Georgia, and we sat down to talk wild hogs, recap a successful hunt, and to discuss our wild pork preparation. Wild hogs are invasive to the area and can be particularly destructive to native habitat and agricultural land, so hunting them is not just encouraged, but rather, management agencies are seeking total eradication of this deleterious, non-native species. In this episode, we discuss the wild hog conundrum — hunting with reverence and respect, yet also with a goal of eliminating the species from the landscape. There’s plenty of side tangents on utilizing meat from older animals, what it means to self-identify as a hunter and more!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/066
Donnie Vincent — explorer, biologist, conservationist, and sportsman — uses cinematography to share intimate stories and adventures from the field that beautifully represent his conscientious approach to hunting. In this thoughtful conversation, Daniel and Donnie explore why the struggle and hardship in hunting is well worth the reward. They discuss how connection to land and participation in the cycle of life fuels what they do, and they also unpack why being present in the hunt matters. A must-listen and inspiring conversation for all who value procuring their own food from the wild!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/065
Dr. Greg Skomal — senior fisheries biologist with Massachusetts Marine Fisheries — is one of the world's leading shark experts and is the foremost authority on great white sharks in the Northeast. Join us for a glimpse into a typical day at "the office" for Greg — from harpooning great whites for research off the coast of Cape Cod to an adrenalizing encounter with a shark while out on the boat’s pulpit. In this riveting conversation, Greg sheds light on this often misunderstood species and shares a bit about their evolutionary biology, life history, intelligence, attacks on humans, and the current science that informs white shark management and conservation.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/064
Dr. Mark Elbroch — mountain lion biologist, tracker, writer & Puma Program Director for Panthera — joins us to discuss his latest book, The Cougar Conundrum, where he unpacks the relationship between humans and mountain lions, as well as challenges the North American model of wildlife conservation. Mark gives us a brief history of hunting and conservation, and we explore his thought-provoking — and sometimes controversial — views on our current wildlife management policies. A must-listen for anyone interested in wildlife conservation, hunters and non-hunters alike!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/063
We sat down with wild game cookbook author Kate Gooding at her home in Maine to chat about our shared love of preparing and eating wild game. A self-trained chef, the secret ingredient in Kate's flavorful dishes is the eclectic range of spices she utilizes. Kate shares some of her favorite ways to prepare wild game, including two of our favorite meats — bear and beaver. She also shares the basics of making a delicious stock, her essential kitchen equipment recommendations, and her top spice tips. Kate's enthusiasm about wild game cookery is sure to inspire you to experiment in the kitchen in the new year!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/062
Ben Greenfield — host of the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast and New York Times Bestselling author — is perhaps best known for his contributions to the world of biohacking and human body/brain performance. He's also an avid outdoorsman who hunts, fishes, forages and cooks wild food meals alongside his wife and twin sons. In this interview, we delve into how Ben incorporates wild food into his daily life and the creative ways in which he includes his boys in the pursuit of wild food. We also get into some illuminating conversation on spiritualism and how scientific reductionism has disconnected us from nature. View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/061
Dr. Krysten Schuler — wildlife disease ecologist at the Cornell Wildlife Health Lab — joins us for a briefing on Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), a highly contagious prion disease that affects deer species. We learn some facts that may surprise you about prions, best processing practices for deer hunters in CWD-affected areas, and Krysten's thoughts on the future of deer hunting in the US. We also get into Krysten's research on lead ammunitions' impacts on wildlife and how she and other researchers are working to get more hunters to make the switch to non-toxic ammo.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/060
Mansal Denton is the founder of Sacred Hunting and host of the Mansal Denton Podcast. Mansal has a fascinating past that ultimately led him to mentoring under a Muskogee/Creek medicine man in his pursuit of the art of sacred hunting. In this powerful conversation, Daniel and Mansal explore their own conscientious approaches to this ancestral practice, Mansal's unique experiences hunting with indigenous peoples, our death-phobic society, and becoming comfortable with mortality. At the heart of sacred hunting is connection — to food, to place, to the species you hunt, and, for many, to spirit.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/059
"Whether your interest is harvesting wild plants for food and medicine, hunting to feed your family, or being better prepared for the potentially challenging times ahead, cultivating natural awareness and a deep understanding of ecology will give you a serious edge."
Chris Gilmour — forager, tracker and wilderness survival guide — joins us to share how cultivating awareness can increase your competency and resilience in the field and beyond. We discuss how you can use tools like tracking and bird language to hone your senses and build awareness in all aspects of your life. We also chat about how tracking has shaped our development over time, fascinating micro-nuances in tracking, counter tracking, and Chris even gives us some simple awareness exercises you can get started with right now.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/058
Judy Camuso is Commissioner of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and is the first woman ever to lead MDIFW. A wildlife biologist, avid birder, hunter and outdoor enthusiast, Judy's world is rooted in the outdoors, and she's ardent about preserving access to hunting and fishing for all. It was great fun getting to ask Judy some of our most pressing questions regarding state management of wildlife and wild places. We also chat about getting women involved in hunting, Maine's unique access laws, and so much more!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/057
It was a great time getting together with wild food enthusiast, author, and foraging instructor Langdon Cook. Daniel and Langdon had a wide-ranging conversation focused on the wild foods of the Pacific Northwest but with an overarching theme of stewardship of wild species and places that's applicable to any ecoregion. Tune in to hear about x-rated clams, the fascinating underground world of mushroom hunters, how the plight of wild salmon impacts us all, and so much more!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/056
Natalie Bogwalker is the founder and director of Wild Abundance, a permaculture and homesteading school nestled in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Natalie is passionate about preserving ancestral primitive skills, and we had a lively conversation about the importance of keeping these skills alive in modern times with a focus on wild food, hide tanning, and community involvement. We also get into the ins and outs of hide tanning, including the history, science and practical applications of this lost art. View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/055
Dan Gardoqui — nature-based mentor and bird language expert — joins us to share how bird language and tracking can not only make you a better hunter but also improve the richness of your experience in the field. Talking with birds is being in conversation with the wild, Dan says, and it will make you more conscious of how you move through the woods. In this fascinating conversation — complete with Dan's bird calls and squirrel alarm sounds — he shares how birds can reveal nature's secrets and provides actionable tips to get you started in learning bird language and tracking.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/054
We hosted new hunters Martissa Williams and Rod Coleman in Maine to guide them on their inaugural hunt. During their visit, we explored how race can create unique barriers to entry when starting out in hunting. Hunting is a shared evolutionary and ecological food acquisition pattern of all of humankind, and we hope this conversation can open dialogue on how we as hunters can make sure that everyone who wants it can easily find a pathway to this ancient but relevant practice.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/053
Ed Butler aka the Working Class Woodsman is a skilled woodsman with a lifetime of knowledge from time spent in the woods. He's a native of rural New Hampshire and is passionate about all things hunting, harvesting, foraging, and fishing in the Northeast. We had a great time sitting down to talk with Ed about what his wild food year looks like — an impressive array of species, including black bears, bass, beavers, and more. We also chat about the value in processing your own game, persisting through failure in the field, specializing vs generalizing in hunting, and pro-tips on cooking squirrel and beaver. Enjoy!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/052
Emma Teal Laukitis and Claire Neaton — the Salmon Sisters — grew up on the Aleutian Islands of Alaska where they've worked on their family's commercial fishing boats since they were young. In this episode, Emma and Claire give us a glimpse into their inspiring and unique seafaring lifestyle. They share about the Alaskan salmon fishery, the role of women in commercial fisheries today, and the ins and outs of the industry. At the heart of their message is a deep appreciation for their coastal heritage and creating meaningful relationships to wild places through fishing and food.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/051
The close bond between humans and dogs is undeniable. But how did our stories become so intertwined? David Ian Howe — anthropologist, archaeologist & science educator — studies the relationship between dogs and humans, and he joins us to share how dogs became domesticated. Tune in to hear how this story unfolds from the early human-wolf relationship all the way up to our modern times with hundreds of breeds of the domestic dog. Daniel also shares about his unique experiences hunting with dogs, including his own Plott Hound, Ellie.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/050
Arthur Haines — botanist, forager & Maine Guide — is back on The WildFed Podcast! "We are pieces of a complex web," says Arthur in this intimate and powerful conversation. From describing their stories of miscarriage and the loss of a newborn to recounting their experiences hunting black bear, Daniel and Arthur cover some pretty personal and thought-provoking territory on the topics of birth, life, death, and the ethics of killing.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/049
While filming with our friend Lori McCarthy in Newfoundland, we sat down for a roundtable discussion with Lori and local artisan Clare Dawn Fowler. Lori has dedicated her life to preserving the cultural food heritage of Newfoundland, and Clare creates sustainably beautiful designs using Newfoundland harp seal leather and fur. In this episode, we explore Newfoundland's cultural heritage, specifically the long-standing tradition of seal hunting. Quite controversial in some parts of the world, in Newfoundland, seal hunting is an integral part of who they are. Clare and Lori share the story of the local seal hunt, the many uses of seal throughout their culture, and the importance of traditions like this one being preserved for future generations.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/048
Ben Goldfarb is an award-winning environmental writer and the author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. Ben's expansive knowledge on the deeply misunderstood beaver, their profound positive impacts on ecosystems, and how they've shaped our history will re-orient your view of North America, and with any luck, convert you into a Beaver Believer. In this episode, Ben takes us through the captivating history of beavers from their Pleistocene roots to their near extirpation during the "fur-pocalypse" to modern restoration efforts — with lots of fascinating facts about the industrious beaver along the way.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/047
After an afternoon of tasting wild apples, we sat down to talk with apple enthusiast, author, forager and arborist Matt Kaminsky, aka Gnarly Pippins. Matt teaches us about the apple’s “extreme heterozygosity,” a trait that leads to the incredible genetic variation we see in their wild fruits. We recorded this conversation at Red Kill Mountain — the largest wild apple savanna in New York. In this episode, Matt will guide you through the world of wild apples — from pippins to prohibition and everything in between. And there’s some good tips for foragers too. With apple season fast approaching, now’s the perfect time to get up to speed before you get out on the land!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/046
"As foragers, we need to be gardeners," says Ben Falk — regenerative ecosystem architect and founder of Whole Systems Design. In this insightful conversation, Ben shares how we in the wild food world can be agents for good on the landscape. He discusses strategies for creating habitat for wildlife right where you live — building resilient living systems that attract wildlife and allow wild plant populations to flourish. We also discuss sustainable foraging, our responsibility to tend the wild, Ben's essential daily tools, and why beaver should really be a verb.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/045
Clay Bowers is a foraging instructor and wild food generalist based in Northern Michigan. He aims to inspire people to become integrated with their local ecology through foraging and leads foraging classes locally. In this conversation, Clay and Daniel reflect on some of their favorite wild food endeavors, including sucker fishing, squirrel hunting, and trapping. Clay also has some thought-provoking ideas on how foragers can infuse a bit more soul and story-telling into their writing. Enjoy!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/044
Jennifer Frazer is a prolific freelance science writer and ardent Under-Loved Lifeform Enthusiast. Join us as we unpack some of our world's lesser-known — but truly fascinating — organisms. Jennifer has dedicated her life to sharing her excitement about the amazing creatures that share this planet with us. In this episode, you'll learn about the lichen fungal co-op, the complexities of classifying organisms, the amazing abilities of slime molds, immortal bacteria, and why you might not want to eat brains. View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/043
Bruce McGlenn is a third generation hunter-gatherer of the Northwest and founder of Human Nature Hunting — a Washington-based school dedicated to healing the connection between humans and nature through hunting and gathering. In this episode, we get to the heart of the ancestral practice of hunting and take a look at where it's going into the future. Bruce and I have a thoughtful conversation on perceptions of hunting, diligence in butchering, newcomers to the hunting world, and the importance of being a good steward of life and death. Bruce is an incredible resource for those just getting started on their hunting journeys!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/042
John Slattery — bioregional herbalist, forager, educator, and author — is passionate about helping people develop deep and meaningful relationships with wild plants. In this episode, we delve into the medicinal side of wild plants and hear about John’s personal journey along the plant medicine path in the desert southwest. His approach is grounded in traditional indigenous knowledge and years of hands-on experience. This conversation will leave you inspired to deepen your connection to your local flora... and, perhaps, view plants with a bit more wonder.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/041
Tune into this special edition of The WildFed Podcast for a spring turkey hunt recap from six hunters — some seasoned turkey hunters and some just starting out — including a few familiar voices. From the calls and the shots to missed opportunities and amusing predicaments to a young boy's first turkey hunt and the hunt from a perspective of a state turkey biologist — this episode is packed with insights! Our guests include Carter Heath, Christi Holmes, Justin King, Kevin Merrow, Kelsey Sullivan, and our podcast host Daniel Vitalis. An enjoyable and informative listen for avid turkey hunters and beginners alike!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/040
Adam Haritan is the nature enthusiast behind Learn Your Land — a media channel dedicated to plant and mushroom ID, wild food harvesting, and the benefits of nature connection. Daniel and Adam have a lively conversation on all things wild food, including why you should get to know non-edible wild species, understanding wild mushrooms, the future of foraging regulations, why so many mushroom foragers are "psychedelic people," how hunting changes nature interaction, and more. Adam's enthusiasm is sure to inspire you to deepen your connection to your local landscape!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/039
We had the serendipitous opportunity to sit down with local Maine legend and State Bear Biologist Randy Cross just as he was ending an illustrious 37-year career leading the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife black bear management and monitoring program. A guide and mentor at heart, Randy shares his profound wisdom and insights into black bear history, behavior, ecology, and his forecast for bear-human coexistence into the future. A must-listen for anyone interested in bear ecology and the conservation of all wild species, especially this incredible omnivore.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/038
Daniel had a great time chatting with Wade Truong and Rachel Owen — the charismatic duo behind Elevated Wild, a brand dedicated to hunting, fishing, foraging and exploring the untamed table. Rachel and Wade are based in Virginia, where, they say, "it's a great place to be a wild foods generalist." We take a walk through their wild food year and hear about the many different species these two get after — Snakehead, Sika Deer & Cobia to name a few. Their innovative culinary creations and cooking tips are sure to inspire you to take your wild food cooking game to the next level!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/037
Micah Woodcock is a wild seaweed harvester and the owner of Atlantic Holdfast Seaweed Company. His life is intimately intertwined with the marine ecosystem where he sustainably hand-harvests these nutritious sea vegetables. Tune into this interview for Micah's sustainable harvesting techniques, the wild world of seaweed politics, a fascinating discussion on developing a relationship to place, and much more. If you eat seaweed, want to, or best of all, are interested in procuring your own supply, this interview is not to be missed!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/036
After a week spent offshore fishing and wild hog hunting in Georgia, we sat down with our gracious host Tony Seichrist — lifelong fisherman and chef at The Wyld — for a wide-ranging conversation you do not want to miss. Tony is something of a renaissance man, and his journey to becoming a chef is both fascinating and inspiring. We also get into the local sheepshead fishery, Tony's pro fish cooking tips, knife skills, being a generalist, and a recap of our memorable Georgia hunting and fishing adventures.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/035
Dylan Stewart is a Maine-based spearfisherman, freediver, and the talented artist behind Bold Coast Burns. In this episode, Dylan gives us a glimpse into what it's like freediving and spearfishing off the coast of Maine, sharing some of his incredible experiences along the way. We discuss the species Dylan targets when spearfishing, freediving safety and breathing tips, the unique firsthand perspective of fish behavior that diving offers, the evolution of Dylan's fish artwork, and so much more. Enjoy!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/034
Renowned botanist Arthur Haines joins us for a conversation that ranges from deep, philosophical ideas about early human beings to extremely practical tips on harvesting wild blueberries. With a low barrier to entry, wild blueberries are an excellent pursuit for the novice and experienced forager alike! In this comprehensive guide, you'll learn about the wild blueberry's range and its important function in the diet, along with harvesting and processing best practices to get you started in the field this summer.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/033
In this interview, we learn about the complex world of lichens from Felicity Roberts — a rural Newfoundlander, lichen expert, certified herbalist, writer, and wild food advocate. "There's nothing simple about lichens," says Felicity, and she's not kidding. These extremophile organisms — often called "the lungs of the forest" — can be useful indicators of the health of an ecosystem. Felicity's enthusiasm for lichens is contagious as she guides us through the biology, folklore, and practical applications of these natural wonders.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/032
Alan Bergo — The Forager Chef — is back on the show! A surgeon on the plate, Alan's speciality is creative and innovative wild food cuisine. If you're looking for ways to move from store-bought food to more wild harvested food during this pandemic, tune in for Alan's unique culinary solutions that will increase your self-sufficiency and foraged culinary prowess simultaneously. A must-listen that's peppered with golden nuggets of wild cuisine wisdom! Alan also shares his newly released video-show — The Wild Harvest — which is guaranteed to inspire you to get out on the landscape to forage, fish, hunt & cook this spring!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/031
If you're living in an urban environment and feeling overwhelmed about getting started in hunting, Fisher Neal is your guide to breaking down the barriers to entry and getting out into the field. A lifelong hunter based in New Jersey, Fisher is the owner and head guide of Learn to Hunt NYC where he introduces city-dwellers to the joy and satisfaction of harvesting wild game to fill their freezers. Fisher is passionate about new hunter recruitment and mentorship, and he's got some innovative ideas on how we can engage the next generation of hunters. If you live in a city or suburb and are wanting to get into hunting, fishing & foraging, this interview is for you!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/030
In this episode, Daniel chats with Hank Shaw — award-winning food writer, hunter, angler, forager & chef. Hank started his wild foods website — one of the largest sources of wild food recipes on the internet — in 2007, and he shares how he's seen wild food culture change over the years. Always on the quest for new terrain, Hank gives us an inside look into how he learns about wild foods when he's in a new eco-region. Daniel and Hank also discuss foraging regulations, the hunter-forager divide and more!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/029
Despite the crises at hand, viruses themselves are incredible “creatures”. With all of us using the language of virology lately (without always knowing what it is we’re really talking about) we decided now was the time to learn how they fit into the ecology of our planet. We were fascinated by what we learned. “Earth's Virology Professor” Vincent Racaniello, PhD is a Higgins Professor of Microbiology & Immunology at Columbia University and host of the popular podcast This Week in Virology. Vincent joins us on The WildFed Podcast to give us a crash course in viral ecology and the virome. "We live and prosper in a cloud of viruses," he says, and most viruses are actually beneficial, not harmful. Tune in to learn some fascinating facts on viruses, as well as hear Vincent's expert insights on COVID-19 and our global response.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/028
Lori McCarthy — Newfoundland-based wild food expert — is back on The WildFed Podcast! Lori gives us a look inside what life looks like for a forager, angler & hunter in Newfoundland during this pandemic. We discuss the value in developing food security right now and how we'll be building our own wild food and herbal medicine stores in the coming months. Passionate about cultural heritage, Lori shares the importance of honoring our elders by preserving their generation's wisdom — the stories of the old ways of food.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/027
Live from quarantine! We chat with our friend Kevin Kossowan — creator of James Beard Award twice-nominated web-series FROM THE WILD. Kevin and Daniel share how they've been getting out on the landscape to hunt, fish & forage in their respective eco-regions during quarantine. They also discuss the implications of the global pandemic on our food supply chain and the restaurant industry with advice on how to stay nimble and adaptable during this uncertain time. Enjoy!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/026
Tim Knedler is the Fish Culture Supervisor at the New Gloucester State Fish Hatchery of Maine's Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife where he oversees the facility's annual production of 60,000 catchable salmonids. Tim hosted us at the New Gloucester Hatchery where we got an in-depth overview of their operation and how the fish are raised. We even got to stock some brook trout ourselves! While we at WildFed prefer to chase and eat genetically-wild fish, our interview with Tim — a fisherman himself whose very passionate about his work at the hatchery — changed our perspective on hatcheries for the better. If you want to learn more about the inner-workings of the hatchery system, find yourself on the fence about stocked fish, or just want to know if these fish are worth catching and eating, this show's for you!
Tune into the intro of this episode for Daniel’s thoughts on fishing for hatchery-raised fish vs. their genetically-wild counterparts.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/025
Dr. Stephen Rich is a Professor of Microbiology and Director of the Laboratory of Medical Zoology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he researches zoonotic diseases. He's particularly focused on the tick-borne illness Lyme disease and runs a lab called TickReport where you can send in ticks to test for pathogens. In this interview, Dr. Rich gives us a comprehensive overview of ticks & their life cycles, tick-borne disease, how to prevent tick bites and more. It's the beginning of tick season in many areas — now is the time to educate yourself on strategies to minimize your risk of tick-borne illness!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/024
Nikaline Iacono is the owner and visionary behind Vessel & Vine — an eclectic bar and bistro in Maine with a focus on locally-sourced cocktails and cuisine. We sat down with Nikaline at "The Vine" for a wide-ranging conversation over foraged cocktails. Be warned: We traverse a lot of territory in this interview — some of it taboo — including the complex horse-human relationship, how to make a Chaga Toddy, invasive species, and even eugenics. Enjoy & cheers!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/023
Robert Steneck, Ph.D is a professor of Oceanography, Marine Biology and Marine Policy in the School of Marine Sciences at the University of Maine. He's a marine ecologist whose laboratories include coastal zones in the Gulf of Maine and the Caribbean, and his lifetime of marine research is prolific, with topics ranging from coral reefs to lobsters to marine ecosystem dynamics and more. We sat down with Bob on the front porch of his seaside cottage for this conversation on ocean ecology, the management of ocean fisheries, and his hope for a community-based fisheries management model in the future.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/022
Learn about becoming a modern-day hunter-gatherer with Arthur Haines — hunter, forager, renowned botanist and Maine Guide. Arthur is an incredible resource on both the philosophical and practical aspects of all things wild food. This episode provides a useful framework for getting started in foraging, choosing your weapon, having a good relationship with your local game warden, developing marksmanship, and more.
Tune into the intro for Daniel's thoughts on the novel coronavirus and how it relates to the modern-day hunting & gathering lifestyle.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/021
Carter Heath is a lifelong turkey hunter, turkey hunting mentor and Regional Director of the National Wild Turkey Federation for New England. In this episode, Carter walks us through turkey hunting basics — from turkey terminology to in-the-field hunting calls, equipment and best practices. If you're new to turkey hunting or looking to pick up some tips from a seasoned expert, this podcast will give you a good handle on how to get started. Carter's enthusiasm is contagious and is sure to inspire you to get out in pursuit of wild turkeys this spring!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/020