Herbicide, Habitat & Edibility with Sam Thayer — WildFed Podcast #147

WildFed Podcast — Hunt Fish Forage Food

Our guest today is none other than Sam Thayer.

If you’re serious about wild foods, you’ve probably read Sam’s incredible books — The Forager's Harvest, Nature's Garden, and Incredible Wild Edibles. They’ve become the gold standard in plant foraging by setting a new benchmark for what readers should expect from authors on the topic.

Sam set the record straight on several plants but also chose to only write about plants with which he had lots of real world experience. These aren’t simple, one-paragraph entries saying such-and-such plant is edible, rather, these were in-depth monograph-type chapters that gave foragers tools for finding, identifying, and really eating these species. Up until then, most foraging literature was more about trail nibbling or novelty than it was about making these foods a serious part of your diet.

We were recently in Sam’s home state of Wisconsin filming with him for an episode of Season 3 of the WildFed TV show, and we got to sit down and talk about our time together, about wild foods and foraging, but also, about another academic interest of his: the shocking origins of anthropology and why something he calls agrocentrism was perhaps the most important underlying belief that allowed for the marginalization of hunter-gatherer peoples by the agents of colonialism. This is essentially the belief that farming is what makes us human, and that foraging peoples — hunter-gatherers — were a primitive form of human or even subhuman. Now, of course, this sounds pretty repugnant today, and biologically untrue, but it was a well-accepted belief amongst the European intellectual elite at the time when anthropology was first becoming a credible field of science. It not only permeated the field but is recorded, as will be shown in a forthcoming book that Sam is working on, in the writings of many of the foundational thinkers of that time.

While these ideas seem outmoded today, one doesn’t have to look far to see that the shadow of these ideas is still very present in our world, as folks interested in wild foods well know. After all, it's no mystery that the general public thinks of hunting and gathering as something from the past, for the poorest peoples of the world, or something you do in a survival situation. Certainly, it’s not a viable way to live anymore. Agrocentrism is an implicit bias, and those that hold it aren’t usually aware of it, rather, it's something that they just assume to be true without any conscious thought. But, rethinking what we believe about human food acquisition could be critical to finding truly ecologically-sound, sustainable, and human-healthy food systems in the future.

Sam has presented the idea of ecoculture as an alternative approach to agriculture, and there’s a great essay about that in his book, Incredible Wild Edibles. We highly recommend reading that if you haven’t already.

Lastly, we'll just say that Sam is a man of many talents, and this goes beyond mere plant identification, writing, teaching, and philosophizing on the origins of agriculture. It turns out, he also has a knack for song — as anyone who has spent an evening around the campfire with him already knows. It took some convincing, but he performed a great piece for us, rather impromptu, at the end of the interview, so stick around cuz you won’t want to miss that!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/147