Feasting Wild

Gina Rae La Cerva

Description

• Included in the PNBA and CALIBA 2020 holiday catalogs

• Lots of buzz for this book: The hardcover was a New York Times Book Review Summer Reading Selection, and named one of "The Ten Best Books About Travel of 2020” by Smithsonian Magazine


• Critically acclaimed: It received praise from the Wall Street Journal, Outside Magazine, Kirkus, Booklist, Publishers Weekly (starred review), as well as from Ed Yong, Elizabeth Kolbert, Ben Goldfarb, and Mark Kurlansky. And a tweet from Michael Pollan! 


• Wild foods have become increasingly popular as people seek to reconnect to ancient diets and food traditions, “clean” eating, and natural health remedies. 


• Feminist food book: Explores wild food from a uniquely feminist perspective, focusing on the knowledge of women, especially Indigenous women, relating to wild foods and ancient food traditions.


• Inside Noma restaurant: La Cerva visits one of the most exclusive restaurants in the world, Noma, in Copenhagen, to learn about their foraging program first-hand. She even goes looking for ramps in a cemetery with the Noma staff.


• Foraging is an increasingly popular pastime in North America and the UK, especially during the pandemic.


• Activism and environmental protection: Wild foods are more threatened than ever before by economic expansion, climate change, and food tourism. Feasting Wild explores all aspects of the threats to wild foods, especially the impact of their disappearance on Indigenous peoples and women.


• Strong Covid-19 relevance: Feasting Wild explores the potential dangerous outcomes of humans encroaching on wild spaces, including a potential increase in zoonotic diseases like Covid-19.

I am in the test kitchen of the “best restaurant in the world” and I’m on the verge of throwing up. Around the room, chefs are bent over their culinary investigations. A soundtrack of downbeat reggae plays overhead.

A tall, handsome Australian chef named Brad has just taken me on a tour of Noma’s four kitchens and the private dining room where Metallica ate the week before. At the back of the restaurant, we paused to watch a man in a small shed sweating over a nine-hundred-degree fire cooking charred fish, a bandana obscuring half his face, and I thought about him standing there all day, sixteen hours, full of pride and secret doubts that intensified with each tiring hour.

Noma only uses ingredients sourced within the Nordic region (Scandinavia, Finland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands). No lemons. No olive oil. It is a challenge to prepare a meal without such basic staples. The chefs must find similar flavors in wild ingredients. The menu changes about five times each month to keep up with the seasonal changes in ingredients, and the restaurant employs a full-time forager.

Now in the test kitchen, Brad and I stand next to shelves lined with jars of experimental foods. “These are the scallops. This is how we dry them,” Brad says as he opens a jar, “and then we emulsify them—with the wax of bees. And that’s how you get that fudge.” The things in the jar look of indeterminate origin and stink something like rancid, dirty laundry. The smell travels through my nose and into my brain, and there in the neocortex it meets signals from my stomach that say I am quite too full from the twenty-six-course lunch I’ve just eaten, and quite too nervous in the presence of this tall man, for such a smell. I start to retch. René Redzepi, the master artist himself, turns around from the photo shoot he is conducting and stares in horror. How dare I gag in his test kitchen. How dare I, indeed.

Sujets

• Hábitat
• Food Rules
• Eating Animals
• Helen MacDonald
• Elizabeth Kolbert
• Mark Bittman
• Wet market
• Michael Pollan
• Alice Waters
• Foraging
• Zoonosis
• Holocene extinction
• Agriculture
• Jonathan Safran Foer

Informations

• Publié par: Greystone Books
• Date de parution: 26 mai 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 7
• EAN13: 9781771649582
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1688 Mo

Extrait