Environmental, Nutritional and Moral Case for Eating Wild Foods Gabriel Popkin - Washington Post Magazine
go to original August 18, 2022

On a crisp fall day in 2019, I found myself on my hands and knees in a dreary office parking lot, feeling somewhat self-conscious, picking up acorns. The person responsible for this strange turn in my life was a lanky, gregarious landscape architect gone rogue named Lincoln Smith — who is one of the very few people in the Washington area making a full-time living growing, selling and teaching people about wild and native foods. I had joined him on this quixotic scavenger hunt to understand what it means to eat wild in the 21st century.

Over a couple of mostly pleasant hours, Smith, one of his colleagues and I partially filled three plastic bins with meaty nuts of red oaks that lined the nondescript commercial strip. The haul was auspicious — but acorns don’t give up their goods easily. Sometime later, I met Smith at his home, where, over several hours, he painstakingly shelled the nuts, ground them, poured water over them again and again to leach out bitter chemicals called tannins, and eventually produced an actual food: acorn flour. “I could sell as much acorn flour as I can make for $25 a pound to chefs and curious bakers,” he told me.

I realize this whole exercise may come off as strange. For much of human history, however, acorns have been a major food source for people; at least one book has argued that oaks gave rise to modern civilization. Every year, oak trees shower us with a nutritious, tasty and completely free feast — a feast that now, with the exception of a few groups of people such as Koreans and Native Americans of Northern California, we almost entirely spurn.

“We were born to eat wild,” writes journalist Dan Saladino in his recent book “Eating to Extinction.” Our bodies are built to consume nature’s bounty and turn it into more of ourselves. According to researchers at Kew Gardens in Britain, humans are capable of finding sustenance in more than 7,000 species of plants, each packaging its own unique amalgam of flavors and nutrients.

Yet if you are American — or, increasingly, a resident of any other country — you probably subsist on a tiny fraction of those: corn, wheat, soy, rice, potatoes and a few dozen standardized supermarket vegetables. The rejection of 99 percent of the world’s edible plant biodiversity is part and parcel of much of humanity’s recent rise to extraordinary wealth. While much of the tropics still consumes a diverse, partly wild diet, eating wild has become “taboo” in the so-called developed world, where parents have “taught their kids that this is poor people’s food,” says Alex McAlvay, an ethnobotanist at the New York Botanical Garden. In short, we convinced ourselves that the more we could separate, physically and psychically, from trees, weeds and soil, the better off we would be.

But are we really better off? Industrial food, while amply feeding us, is not exactly nourishing. Only 10 percent of Americans eat enough fruits and vegetables, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported. More than two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese; diabetes is at epidemic levels. As the so-called Western diet colonizes the world, such Western diseases spread with it.

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