In her new book, Feed Us with Trees, author, food writer, and environmental advocate Elspeth Hay invites readers to rediscover the nourishing relationship between people and the trees that sustain us. Blending lyrical storytelling with practical wisdom, Hay explores how tree-based foods and traditional ecological knowledge can guide us toward a more resilient and regenerative future. We sat down with her to discuss the inspiration behind the book, the role of trees in our food systems, and how reconnecting with these ancient sources of nourishment can change the way we eat—and live.

Where are you based?
I’m based in Wellfleet, MA, in the middle of Cape Cod National Seashore.

What inspired you to start writing?
I’ve always been a writer. I loved writing as a kid, went on to study English and non-fiction writing in college, and then started a career in radio and print journalism. It’s only really been in the past few years, though, that I’ve come to understand the full power of stories in shaping our culture and our actions, and that’s been a huge part of the journey of writing this book.

The story behind your new book Feed Us With Trees: Nuts and The Future of Food started with you learning that humans can eat acorns. Can you tell us more about this?
I live in an oak forest in Cape Cod National Seashore—acres and acres of mixed oak and pitch pine woods. Prior to learning that we can eat acorns, I’d always seen these woods as an impediment to food production. But then a friend sent me a link to a TEDx talk by a woman named Marcie Mayer. Mayer claimed that acorns are edible, and not just edible but a superfood, and one of our oldest human foods. This completely changed the way I looked at the woods around my home and our human role in my local ecosystem.

What do you hope the people reading your book take away from it?
When I started digging into the human history of acorn eating, I learned that oak trees have long had a reciprocal relationship with people. In the northeast where I live, oaks have been the dominant tree for 9,000 years, despite some pretty dramatic changes in climate, and that’s thanks to human tending. I’d always seen oaks as natural and wild—words that by definition exclude human tending—so I found this pretty surprising. As I examined this belief, I realized I’ve always thought the “natural” world would be better off without us—a view that getting to know oaks as a food plant has turned on its head. I don’t really believe in the idea of the “natural” world as a space separate from humans anymore—there’s a living world, and we’re a part of it. I hope that readers walk away with a changed understanding of our role in our ecosystems, and a belief that not only can we be part a positive presence on the landscape, but that in fact in many places our actions can be vital to the survival of other species.

When writing your book, you met with dozens of nut growers, scientists, indigenous knowledge keepers, researchers, and food pros. What was your favorite thing you learned on that journey?
I love history—as a kid I read tons of historical fiction—and talking to people from different cultures in different places about the history of their peoples’ relationship with our keystone nut trees was really fun. I got to know two women who keep ponies on the oldest continually managed commons in England, a place called the New Forest. I got to know a Karuk medicine man and biologist in present-day Northern California and a farm family switching from corn and soy to chestnuts in Iowa. I got to know hazelnut breeders working to create new hybrid species, people who remembered the economic and social impact of the chestnut blight on their part of Appalachia, and so many others. At every stop, my favorite part of the work was getting to know the people involved and learning about the social and ecological history that led to where they are now and what they’re working on today—I found all of these conversations fascinating.

You speak of Americans not eating acorns or knowing they’re edible. Is this because there’s been a long war on this way of eating, and in particular on the indigenous cultures in North America? Can you tell us more about this and the concept of forced farming?
The history of forced farming in dominant Euro-American culture was new to me when I started my research. Often we talk about our current farm system as both über-productive and inevitable, but neither of these descriptions is true. Our culture and our systems have been at war with Indigenous cultures and Indigenous food systems for more than three hundred years, and our government since its inception has pursued a double-pronged policy of both intentionally destroying the abundance of Indigenous food systems and incentivizing and even forcing row crop farming.

Many of us don’t learn this history in school, or at least not in a comprehensive way that really puts the full picture together. But if you look back at American laws and land use policies and political speeches from the 18th-early 20th centuries, our leaders were quite open about what they were doing. President Ulysses Grant for instance, refused to sign a bill that would have protected the remaining American bison in 1873, after populations were decimated by a Euro-American killing spree. “I would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western prairies, in the effect upon the Indians, “he wrote to his Secretary of the Interior. “I would regard it rather as a means of hastening their sense of dependence upon the products of the soil.” A little over a decade later Congress passed the Dawes Act to nationalize a program of forced farming on Indigenous and Tribal lands all over the country.

In Feed Us With Tree: Nuts and The Future of Food, the main idea you focus on is the connection between tending nut trees and historical patterns of land ownership. You even said this led to a discovery in your ancestry. Can you tell us more about this?
When I first learned that we can eat acorns, I found so many examples of European and Mediterranean cultures eating acorns, hazelnuts, and chestnuts as staple foods, and in many cases also worshipping these trees as sacred. I wanted to understand how my people had made the leap from this intimacy with the trees to our present disconnect, and somewhere along the way I found an amazing book called Why We Left: Stories and Songs of America’s First Immigrants. It’s by a woman named Joanna Brooks, who traced her own Euro-American lineage back across the Atlantic through a series of folk ballads. The songs are incredibly sad and tell a very different story of why the first English and European immigrants came across the Atlantic than the one most of us have heard about leaving for a “land of opportunity.” In reality, England (where many of my ancestors are from) and other western European countries went through an internal colonization that criminalized traditional land use patterns and converted many woodlands from public to private spaces. The majority of early immigrants to North America were refugees of this process, called Enclosure. Some tried to create the relationships they’d lost, while others went on to perpetuate the same trauma in Indigenous communities. I think understanding and reckoning with this history is key to any kind of meaningful agricultural and cultural change.

You realized as you were writing your book that not that long ago, tending to trees as vital food resources, but were also briefly considered by the U.S government as an up-and-coming solution to some of our more significant environmental and economic challenges. Can you tell us what led you to discover this and what impact it ultimately had at the federal level?
At the beginning of my research for the book, I took a trip to Downingtown, Pennsylvania to visit a stand of trees I’d seen billed as the oldest food forest in North America. My guides were a local group who showed me huge old chestnuts, hazelnuts, persimmons, and a whole host of other fruit and nut trees planted by a Depression-era nurseryman named John Hershey. In the wake of the Depression, Hershey convinced the Roosevelt administration to grow out fruit and nut trees for Appalachian communities to boost both environmental and economic repair. The trees were very well received and thousands went out in the early years, but unfortunately the experiment collapsed in the late 1930s/early 1940s when Hershey got cancer and World War II started up. Today, though, Hershey trees are still thriving in many communities across the Tennessee River Valley and are a remarkable testament to Hershey’s vision.

You have gotten involved with tending nut trees with fire. How did you get interested in fire and its connection to nut tending?
I took a trip to present-day northern California to meet an Indigenous medicine man and biologist named Ron Reed. He explained to me that traditionally Karuk people have used prescribed fire as medicine on the land, to keep the local oak grassland ecosystem healthy. When I started digging into the connection between oaks, humans, and fire, I learned that this has been true in communities all over North America—and that human fire has helped oaks stay dominant on the landscape in the east where I live for the past 9,000 years. Today in many ecosystems oaks are having trouble regenerating because of fire suppression, and when I found out that in fact there is a prescribed fire plan aimed at part in boosting oak habitat on Mass Wildlife and National Park lands around my house, I decided to get certified. It’s been really fun getting to know the fire practitioners in my area and learning how to conduct a successful burn.

What does it mean that humans, like a nut tree, can be a keystone species?
Historically human fire has shaped ecosystems all over the world. I had no idea this was true when I first started researching the book, but as I began to learn about the connections between ecosystem creation and human fire, I remembered learning about keystone species in school when I was studying environmental science. Keystone species are called that because they’re as important to their ecosystems as the keystone in a Roman arch. There are different types of keystone species—some, like sharks, are predators—critical for controlling prey populations. Others, like bees, are mutualists. They take nectar, but they also provide crucial pollination services. Then there are plants like oaks that keep the food web humming. Finally, there’s are “ecosystem engineers.” These are keystone species that create, significantly change, maintain, or destroy a habitat. Beavers are a prime example—they clear-cut and dam. Prairie dogs burrow and turn soil. Elephants uproot, trample, fertilize, and plant. This is the category humans and our fire falls into. Fire is critical to maintaining countless ecosystems, including oak woodlands and oak savannas, and historically its human fire that’s kept these landscapes healthy. As fire historian Stephen Pyne has written “the study of fire ecology without people is a hypothetical exercise.” He calls us the “fire animal”—historically, burning has long been our major niche ecologically, and there are a lot of good arguments for increasing prescribed fire on the land again today.

What does your job as the host of The Local Food Report entail?
I get to talk with interesting people about food! I have a little handheld Marantz recorder and I go all over my local region of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket visiting farms, fishermen, foragers, cooks, policy makers, and whoever else has an interesting food story to tell. In the past month I’ve visited a cattle farming family working to improve conservation grassland through rotational grazing, a scientist interested in what makes quahog shells purple, and a forager who showed me how (and why) to gather pine pollen. It’s an endlessly interesting gig!

With the new tariffs making local food even more critical for our pocketbooks, how can these nut trees help us?
Our keystone nut trees are abundant, and in many cases overlooked. So many are planted in public spaces and dropping nuts on sidewalks and parks. In many places, a little supplemental foraging could help round out a family’s food supply. But perhaps more importantly, the history of these trees gives us a roadmap for how to create communities where food is equitable and abundant.

Is there anything we should be on the lookout for in the future, whether that be another book or just with your work as the host of The Local Food Report?
I’m not sure yet what my next steps will be. I’ve gotten into prescribed fire and basket making through my research for this book, and now that the book is finished I’ve had more time to experiment with processing and cooking the nuts I’ve been writing about for so many years. Who knows, maybe a nut-themed cookbook is next!

It’s been a rough few years, and we expect at least four more. How have you been staying positive?
I get joy from being outside and taking care of the people and places I love. Anything that combines these elements is gold!

To learn more about Elspeth Hay and her nut journey please check out the links below:
My website is www.elspethhay.com and my Instagram is @elspethhay

Branching Out: Rethinking Our Diets with Elspeth Hay