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Page Count:296
Images:Black & White Images
Dimensions: 6 × 9 × 0.066 in
Publication Date:July 08, 2025
ISBN:9780865719729
Author:
Sustainability:Printed on 100% recycled paper
Printed in:Canada

Feed Us with Trees

Nuts and the Future of Food

The day Elspeth Hay learned we can eat acorns, stories she’d believed her whole life began to unravel. We’re thinking about agriculture all wrong, she realized. Feed Us with Trees is her hopeful manifesto about a new and ancient food system centered on our keystone perennial nut trees: oaks, chestnuts, and hazelnuts.

Book Awards

GOLD | 2026 Nautilus Book Award: Restorative Earth Practices
SILVER | 2025 Living Now Book Awards: Green Living – Alternative Energy, Conservation, Gardening

Earn up to 25 Points.

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 future—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 holistic, nutrient-dense diet rooted in wild foods and ancient knowledge.

Praise for the book

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!

Whatever are we going to eat on this cramped, ever-hotter planet of ours? The trees just might have our backs.

PAUL GREENBERG, bestselling author, Four Fish and A Third Term

Elspeth Hay’s compulsively readable book reveals just how deeply entangled we humans have always been with commoning the earth, and why we need to rediscover this lost way of life.

DAVID BOLLIER, author, Think Like a Commoner, Second Edition

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Part I: Stuck Inside a Story
    • Chapter 1: The Myth of Scarcity
    • Chapter 2: A World of Abundance
    • Chapter 3: Crafting Wilderness
  • Part II: The Myth Unravels
    • Chapter 4: Why We Left
    • Chapter 5: Two Fundamentally Different Types of Culture
    • Chapter 6: Tragedies of the Commons
  • Part III: Emerging Narratives
    • Chapter 7: A Real Tree-Crops Farm
    • Chapter 8: Leaps in Productivity
    • Chapter 9: Remembering the Art of Tending
    • Chapter 10: Adventures in Eating
    • Chapter 11: The Science of Nutrition
    • Chapter 12: Moral Complications
  • Conclusion: A Field Guide to Being Human

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Blank Page Removal: Unnecessary blank pages are completely eliminated to ensure a streamlined, smooth reading flow.

Book Extras and Resources

Meet the Author

author Elspeth Hay

Elspeth Hay is a writer, public radio host, and creator of the Local Food Report, a weekly feature that has aired on CAI, the Cape & Islands 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 and the environment. Elspeth’s work has been featured in the Boston Globe, NPR’s Kitchen WindowHeated with Mark BittmanThe Provincetown Independent, and numerous other publications. Through her conversations with growers, harvesters, processors, cooks, policy makers, Indigenous knowledge-keepers, scientists, researchers, and visionaries, she aims to rebuild our cultural store of culinary knowledge—and to reconnect us with the people, places, and ideas that feed us. Elspeth lives with her family on Cape Cod, MA.

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About the Publisher

New Society Publishers has been a leader in sustainable living books since 1980. Our books are printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper to support the health of the planet.

B Corporation, SDG, and FSC Mixed Paper.
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