Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food

Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of June 2020: Feasting Wild is both a complex look at the history of food cultivation and also a personal story of La Cerva’s relationship to wild food. The book opens at NOMA, the restaurant at the heart of Copenhagen’s wild food scene. In this first vignette, La Cerva weaves together a description of visiting a local graveyard with a cadre of hipster chefs in search of ramson flowers and a discussion of flavor and how we acquire tastes for things. The strength of Feasting Wild is its ability to defy genres: it is both travelogue and food history, memoir and meditation. From loving descriptions of feral food in New Mexico and Poland to an incisive look at the bushmeat markets in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the reader can’t help but gain a new perspective on the ethical questions involved. It is this pendulum swing between personal experiences and the science and history of food cultivation that makes La Cerva’s meandering narrative a veritable feast for the hungry reader. —Alison Walker
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