Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food

by Gina Rae La Cerva

Overview

A New York Times Book Review Summer Reading Selection

“Delves into not only what we eat around the world, but what we once ate and what we have lost since then.”—The New York Times Book Review

Two centuries ago, nearly half the North American diet was foraged, hunted, or caught in the wild. Today, so-called “wild foods” are becoming expensive luxuries, served to the wealthy in top restaurants. Meanwhile, people who depend on wild foods for survival and sustenance find their lives forever changed as new markets and roads invade the world’s last untamed landscapes.

In Feasting Wild, geographer and anthropologist Gina Rae La Cerva embarks on a global culinary adventure to trace our relationship to wild foods. Throughout her travels, La Cerva reflects on how colonialism and the extinction crisis have impacted wild spaces, and reveals what we sacrifice when we domesticate our foods —including biodiversity, Indigenous and women’s knowledge, a vital connection to nature, and delicious flavors. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, La Cerva investigates the violent “bush meat” trade, tracking elicit delicacies from the rainforests of the Congo Basin to the dinner tables of Europe. In a Danish cemetery, she forages for wild onions with the esteemed staff of Noma. In Sweden––after saying goodbye to a man known only as The Hunter––La Cerva smuggles freshly-caught game meat home to New York in her suitcase, for a feast of “heartbreak moose.”

Thoughtful, ambitious, and wide-ranging, Feasting Wild challenges us to take a closer look at the way we eat today, and introduces an exciting new voice in food journalism.

“A memorable, genre-defying work that blends anthropology and adventure.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, New York Times-bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction

“A food book with a truly original take.”—Mark Kurlansky, New York Times bestselling author of Salt: A World History

“An intense and illuminating travelogue... offer[ing] a corrective to the patriarchal white gaze promoted by globetrotting eaters like Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern. La Cerva combines environmental history with feminist memoir to craft a narrative that's more in tune with recent works by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Helen Macdonald and Elizabeth Rush.”—The Wall Street Journal

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771649155
Publisher:	Greystone Books
Publication date:	10/12/2021
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	282,563
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Gina Rae La Cerv a is a geographer, environmental anthropologist, and award-winning writer who has traveled extensively to research a variety of environmental and food-related topics. A National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, La Cerva holds a Master of Environmental Science from Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a Master of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge. La Cerva lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Read an Excerpt

I am in the test kitchen of the “best restaurant in the world” and I’m on the verge of throwing up. Around the room, chefs are bent over their culinary investigations. A soundtrack of downbeat reggae plays overhead.

A tall, handsome Australian chef named Brad has just taken me on a tour of Noma’s four kitchens and the private dining room where Metallica ate the week before. At the back of the restaurant, we paused to watch a man in a small shed sweating over a nine-hundred-degree fire cooking charred fish, a bandana obscuring half his face, and I thought about him standing there all day, sixteen hours, full of pride and secret doubts that intensified with each tiring hour.

Noma only uses ingredients sourced within the Nordic region (Scandinavia, Finland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands). No lemons. No olive oil. It is a challenge to prepare a meal without such basic staples. The chefs must find similar flavors in wild ingredients. The menu changes about five times each month to keep up with the seasonal changes in ingredients, and the restaurant employs a full-time forager.

Now in the test kitchen, Brad and I stand next to shelves lined with jars of experimental foods. “These are the scallops. This is how we dry them,” Brad says as he opens a jar, “and then we emulsify them—with the wax of bees. And that’s how you get that fudge.” The things in the jar look of indeterminate origin and stink something like rancid, dirty laundry. The smell travels through my nose and into my brain, and there in the neocortex it meets signals from my stomach that say I am quite too full from the twenty-six-course lunch I’ve just eaten, and quite too nervous in the presence of this tall man, for such a smell. I start to retch. René Redzepi, the master artist himself, turns around from the photo shoot he is conducting and stares in horror. How dare I gag in his test kitchen. How dare I, indeed.

Table of Contents

Prologue Heartbreak Moose xiii

Part 1 On Memory and Forgetting

1 Herbs and Insects 3

2 Heavy Beasts with Mushrooms and Wild Honey 37

3 Fish, Fin, Shell, and Claw 61

4 Salmis of Roasted Fowl 85

Part 2 Subjects of Desire

5 Forest Flesh with Roots and Tubers 113

6 Stewed Antelope in Tomatoes and Spices 151

7 Smoked Game and Fake Caviar 201

Part 3 Seasons of Feast and Famine

8 Moose with Chanterelles in Cream Sauce 215

9 Nests and Blooms 243

10 Wild Grass 287

Acknowledgments 301

Notes 303

Selected Bibliography and Further Reading 307

Index 309

Editorial Reviews

An Amazon Best of June pick!

“Delves into not only what we eat around the world, but what we once ate and what we have lost since then.”
—A New York Times Book Review Summer Reading Selection

“La Cerva’s beautifully written narrative is as tantalizing as it is edifying.”
—Publishers Weekly STARRED review

“It is rare these days to find a food book with a truly original take on food. Feasting Wild gives you a great deal to think about and at the same time is a pleasure to read.”
—Mark Kurlansky, New York Times bestselling author of Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of Their Common Fate and Salt: A World History

“An extraordinary book. My mouth watered, my mind expanded, and my heart broke and was remade through this superb writing.”
—David George Haskell, author of Pulitzer finalist The Forest Unseen

“This is the food book I’ve always wanted to read—a witty, illuminating, and beautifully written travelogue that rightly centers the historical role of women and the importance of Indigenous knowledge. Throw away the trite faux-wisdom of dietitians and gorge yourself instead on the charming platter that Gina Rae La Cerva has served up.”
—Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes

“A delightful culinary travel book.”
—Outside Magazine

“La Cerva reveals the landscape in brightly lit detail and gives generously of herself, and the result makes for a suitably satisfying feast.”
—Science Magazine

“By turns lyrical, melancholy, and invigorating, Feasting Wild is an enthralling and necessary meditation on what it means to love the feral in a world increasingly of our making.”
—Taras Grescoe, author of Possess the Air, Straphanger, and Bottomfeeder

“Eloquent and utterly original. Page after page I savored the thrill of a sentence driving home a surprising new way to think about the world.”
—George Johnson, author of The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

“Feasting Wild is a rich literary banquet, its pages a smorgasbord of intrepid travelogue, unflinching memoir, and keen ecological history. Where the worldviews of Cheryl Strayed and Michael Pollan converge, you’ll find this perspective, big-hearted, beautifully crafted book.”
—Ben Goldfarb, author of Eager: The surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

“La Cerva demonstrates her ability for diligent observation, and […] offers glimpses of human activities that have grown increasingly rare.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A curious, passionate, and beautifully poetic book. La Cerva uncovers something essential about our enduring desire for wildness in a world where it is rapidly vanishing.”
—James Prosek, artist and author of Trout: An Illustarted History

“Gina Rae La Cerva is a modern-day hunter-gatherer, scouring the planet to bring us delicious stories and lessons about our world. Her writing is original and thought-provoking, and even though it's not always palatable how we've transformed our native flora and fauna, her adventurous storytelling is endlessly satisfying.”
—Daniel Stone, author of The Food Explorer

“Gina Rae La Cerva’s engrossing book celebrates wild-harvested food but also mourns it, showing how plentiful staples have dwindled time and again to overexploited luxuries. Mixing memoir, travelogue, and environmental history, Feasting Wild is a lyrical and lucid exploration of hunger and fulfillment, richly detailed and beautifully told.”
—Thor Hanson, author of Buzz and The Triumph of Seeds

“[La Cerva's] writing pulls together personal narrative and research in a way that is not only accessible, but intensely revealing, taking us back through time, across oceans and land, and impressing upon us all that is lost when we forgo or commodify wildness.”
—Madison Cruz, Literati Bookstore, Ann Arbor, MI

From the Publisher

★ 03/23/2020

La Cerva, a geographer and environmental anthropologist, explores in her impressive debut humans’ relationship to wild food and the disappearing places and animals that provide it. Starting at Noma, the Michelin-starred Danish restaurant that relies exclusively on local and wild ingredients, La Cerva explores how “the seemingly archaic practice of gathering wild plants is having a resurgence.” She travels to several continents to explore the landscapes that once provided a natural abundance of food but have been dramatically impacted by development, climate change, and shifting values. She recalls her “feral” upbringing in New Mexico (where she picked “the fuzzy hairs of prickly pears out of my fingers, the tips stained red from the peeling of the fleshy fruit”); travels to Poland to explore her ancestral roots (“I withdrew toward the wilderness to strip away the superficialities—to regain contact with the essential”) as she wanders through “grasslands filled with rare birds”; and meets folks living off the land, such as “The Hunter,” a Swede living in the Congo who also heads an anti-poaching patrol in local national parks. La Cerva’s beautifully written narrative is as tantalizing as it is edifying. (May)

Publishers Weekly

2020-03-01
A geographer and environmental anthropologist travels the globe in search of those who hunt and gather in the midst of civilization.

Although La Cerva pays some attention to those who pick mushrooms and weeds for food and medicine, she focuses mostly on those who kill animals—often illegally, though in line with historical and cultural traditions—chronicling her time in Maine, Scandinavia, Poland, Borneo, and, particularly, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Eating at the world-famous Copenhagen restaurant Noma, the author ruminates on how the act of serving tiny portions of wild foods—including “caramel made from sourdough bread yeast served with Icelandic yogurt and sea buckthorn flower marmalade”—is in some ways a “fetishization of need.” La Cerva prefers the fried grasshoppers she and her friends ate as children in New Mexico, which “tasted like some kind of discordant freedom.” In chapters that bounce precipitously from topic to topic, the author manages to keep a steady eye on her central concern: the contradictions inherent in eating “wild” meat at this point in human history. She shows sympathy for those who hunt and sell “bushmeat,” including monkeys and elephants, but not for the rich at home and abroad who use this meat as a sign of status. A narrative strand about her romantic entanglement with a Swedish conservationist—who coordinates anti-poaching efforts at a rainforest reserve and whose “narrow lips arch into two perfect mountains at the center, surrounded by deep smile lines, like the walls of a canyon valley”—follows a fairly predictable path and contributes little to the story. Throughout, La Cerva demonstrates her ability for diligent observation, and if her prose is sometimes overwrought, it also offers glimpses of human activities that have grown increasingly rare—e.g., butchering a moose or gathering birds' nests for soup.

For armchair adventurers, a competent examination of the pros and cons of living off the land.

Kirkus Reviews