Feed us with trees. Elspeth Hay and Morag Gamble

What if the forest you walk through is already a food garden, and the real work is remembering how to see it that way?

In this episode of Sense Making in a Changing World I am in conversation with writer and public radio host Elspeth Hay about her beautiful new book Feed Us with Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food. Elspeth calls in from her home on Cape Cod and shares how one simple realisation changed everything for her: acorns ARE food.

From that moment she began following nut trees back through time and across continents, uncovering oak, chestnut and hazel commons, stories of enclosure and colonisation, and the quiet resilience of people who never stopped tending tree foods. Together we explore how this different way of seeing opens a path toward food systems that feed people and whole ecosystems at the same time.

We talk about:

•  How nut trees like oak, chestnut and hazel can sit at the centre of generous food systems
•  Why perennial tree based polycultures can out produce industrial monocultures once we count the full costs
•  Humans as potential keystone species rather than ecological mistakes
•  Cultural burning, oak woodlands and remembering that our presence can be beneficial
•  Commons, local economies and finding belonging by staying rooted in a place

Elspeth invites us to see ourselves as “radical regenerators” who are not just analysing the old story of agriculture, but actively weaving new ones in our own communities.

ABOUT ELSPETH HAY
 Elspeth Hay is a writer and public radio host based on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. She created The Local Food Report, a weekly program on CAI, the Cape and Islands NPR station, and her work on food and ecology has appeared in places such as the Boston Globe, NPR and Heated with Mark Bittman. Her book Feed Us with Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food explores how nut trees and tree centred cultures can help us reimagine food, history and our ecological role as humans. You can learn more about Elspeth and her work at: elspethhay.com

I hope this episode encourages you to look again at the trees around you, the stories you have inherited about food and farming, and the quiet possibilities for belonging that are already rooted in your ow