by Elspeth Hay
New Society Publishers
7/15/2025, paperback
SKU: 9780865719729
A new and ancient story about perennial nut trees, our ecological role as humans, and the future of food
The day Elspeth Hay learned that we can eat acorns, stories she'd believed her whole life began to unravel.
Until then she'd always believed we must grow our staple foods in farmed fields--the same fields wreaking havoc on our land, air, and water. But all over the Northern Hemisphere, Hay learned, humans once grew our staple foods in forest gardens centered on perennial nut trees: oaks, chestnuts, and hazelnuts. In Feed Us with Trees, Hay brings us along as she gets to know dozens of nut growers, scientists, Indigenous knowledge-keepers, researchers, and food professionals--and discovers that in tending these staple trees, we once played a vital environmental role as one of Earth's keystone species.
Feed Us with Trees is Hay's hopeful manifesto about a brighter, more abundant world-- and a critical look at the long-held stories we'll need to rewrite to build it. It will appeal to environmentalists, regenerative farmers, permaculture enthusiasts, agroforesters, locavores, and anyone hungry for a more vibrant future.
Reviews:
"This book--I guarantee it--will blow your mind. Twenty pages in and you'll be looking at the world in different ways." -- Bill McKibben, author, Here Comes the Sun!
"How would you like to live in a world where biodiversity is increasing rather than disappearing, where more carbon is being stored in the ground than is being pumped out of the ground, where ocean dead-zones and topsoil loss are things of the past, and where diet-related health problems are exceptions, rather than the norm? With irrefutable logic, excellent prose, and meticulous research, Elspeth Hay describes such a world. It is not fantasy; it is the future!" -- Douglas Tallamy, author, Nature's Best Hope
About the Author:
Elspeth Hay is a writer and the creator and host of the Local Food Report, a weekly feature that has aired on Cape Cod's NPR station since 2008. Deeply immersed in her own local-food system, she writes and reports for print, radio, and online media with a focus on food, the environment, and the people, places, and ideas that feed us. She lives in Wellfleet, MA.