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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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!

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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.

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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!

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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 'awa 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.

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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!

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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!

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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.

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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!

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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!

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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, 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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