The pawpaw is a North American native, growing wild in 26 States! But you wouldn’t know it by seeing or tasting it. About the size of a small to medium-sized mango, with a custardy flesh that ranges from creamy white to pumpkin pie orange, you’d swear it's a tropical fruit. But, you’d be wrong, since it is, in fact, a temperate species. Despite its more mild climatic preference, it still boasts quintessential tropical flavor notes. Mango and papaya, pineapple and banana, caramel and some...

We’re back today with our good friend Molly Lutcavage, Oceanographer, Bluefin Tuna and Sea Turtle Physiologist, and the Director of Large Pelagics Research at the University of Massachusetts. Her last appearance on the show was back on episode 16 of this podcast, The Truth About Bluefin Tuna, making her one of our earliest podcast guests! She was also featured in Season 2 of the WildFed TV show on Outdoor Channel, in our Atlantic Bluefin Tuna episode. Her ground-breaking work on Atlantic...

We’re back today with internationally-known archaeologist, primitive technologist, and chef, Bill Schindler. Bill’s been on the show once before to discuss his book, Eat Like A Human, and he’s back today to talk about the human diet, through the lens of his professional focus of ancestral human foods, food acquisition, and the traditional processing techniques we once used to make our food edible or more nutritious. After our recent episode with Sally Norton, which was episode #142 “Are...

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,...

Dr. James Agee knows fire and is one of the nation's leading minds, voices, and advocates for its ecological use on the landscape. He’s an emeritus professor of forest ecology at the College of Forest Resources at the University of Washington, Seattle. Before that, he was a forest ecologist and research biologist for the National Park Service in Seattle and San Francisco. Agee received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973. He is the author of more than 100 technical...

10 days on Molokai, hunting, gathering, and connecting with local people to learn a bit about their culture and life there. We couldn’t be more grateful to have had this kind of experience! Unlike Waikiki Beach in Oahu’s Honolulu, Molokai isn't cluttered with high-rise hotels and high-end shopping centers. You have the distinct impression you're on people's home turf. The infrastructure that’s there is for the people who live there. The island is small, just 10x38 miles, and it’s been...

Welcome to today’s episode with Nat Bletter, PhD, which we’re jokingly calling “episode 1 of the KavaCast”, since Nat, an ethnobotanist, prepared kava kava, or what the Hawaiians call 'awa for Daniel and Grant just prior to recording. Kava is the root of Piper methysticum, a member of the black pepper family, with mildly intoxicating properties that have been used deep into antiquity by Polynesian people throughout the South Pacific. Since it’s often used to facilitate conversations,...

Arizona is one of Daniel's favorite places on earth. He first started going while he was in his 20’s visiting a hot spring there several times a year, which was once the healing grounds for Geronimo and the Apache who rode and raided with him. Over the years he's gone often, from the Mexican border up to the Grand Canyon, from the high-altitude, forest canopies of the Sky Islands to the arid low-lying Sonoran desert. He's even spent a couple of winters in Sedona, which has to be one of the...

Today’s show is a bit of a departure from our typical conversation here on the podcast, but it's one we've been wanting to have for quite some time. Our guest is Sally Norton, and she’s become really well known for talks she’s given on Oxalic Acid and Oxalates — compounds and even crystalline structures frequently found in plant foods, and often present in some of our most cherished wild plants and commercially available superfoods. We've been aware of oxalates and oxalic acid for a long...

Our guest today, back now for his second time, is Adam Haritan of LearnYourLand.com. He’s probably best known for his fantastic YouTube channel by the same name. He’s got over 175 videos there that teach folks how to identify and use the wild species all around them. Recently he launched a tree identification course that caught Daniel's eye, and we thought it would be fun to talk with him about trees from a wild food perspective. Trees provide us with so much, and it’s easy to take that for...

Today Daniel's sitting down with his good friend, WildFed Cinematographer and Producer Grant Guiliano to talk a bit about what we've been up to this year and to give you a behind-the-scenes look at our upcoming third season of the WildFed TV show on Outdoor Channel. We’re currently filming ten new episodes that’ll debut this coming winter, so we’ve been in the woods and on the water, but also in the air and on the road too. Grant and Daniel don’t get to do too many shows like this one, just...

Our guest today is Tama Matsuoka Wong, AKA the Meadow Doctor. She’s a commercial forager, weed eater, lawyer and mother of three, as well as the developer of a commercial wild food-beverage made with staghorn sumac — which we’ll discuss in the episode. She’s also the author of the backyard field guide and cookbook Foraged Flavor, which was nominated for a James Beard award back in 2013. Her story is really unique in that prior to her life as a commercial forager she was a Harvard Law School...

You may remember that last September we had the honor and privilege of going out to the Standing Rock Reservation to harvest a buffalo — or bison for those who prefer the scientific name — for the second season of the WildFed TV show. Our friend Travis hosted us, showed us around, and introduced us not only to the buffalo, but to the people and the Dakota culture too. He was with us for the hunt, and he and Daniel broke that buffalo down together on the prairie too. It was an incredible...

We've got a great show for you today, but first, we think a little context is important. Please listen to Daniel's monologue in the introduction to this podcast. 
As a podcaster, Daniel's always been interested in topics that flirt around the edges of the taboo. And today’s episode certainly qualifies. Hunting itself has become controversial in our modern era, which, given that this was our primary food acquisition method for something like 300,000 years — in other words, our entire...

Michael Judd is a really cool guy. He lives, and has lived, a very inspiring life. Today his focus is on, as he calls it, “designing for neglect.” That is, creating living food systems that function like natural ecosystems, providing long-term food security with very little input. Many of the species he works with are cultivars of plants we mostly think of as wild species, like America’s iconic and only tropical fruit, the Paw Paw. While governments are busy trying to regulate cow farts...

Our guest, here for his second appearance, is Mansal Denton. Mansal is a very unique voice in today's hunting culture, working at the intersection of trans-cultural ceremonial shamanism and hunting, seamlessly blending the two in a program — and brand — he calls Sacred Hunting. Of course, it's not that other hunting isn’t sacred, but rather, that often this ancient and fundamentally human part of the hunt is forgotten by our modern culture, in favor of more gear, tech, or trophies. And that...

Our guest today is Clay Bowers of NoMiForager.com — Clay is a wild food enthusiast and educator in Northern Michigan, who teaches foraging classes and workshops, and writes about foraging on his blog and social media. He’s come on the show today to discuss the increasingly contentious issue of ramp foraging, or wild leeks as we like to say in our neck of the woods. This plant is probably one of the best-known wild edibles in the US, for both foragers but also culinary professionals, who pay...

Today’s episode is a very special one for Daniel. Not just because our guest is his brilliant and beautiful wife Avani Vitalis, but also because they're talking about her very first hunt. Until this spring turkey season, Avani never really imagined herself hunting. She’s been incredibly supportive of Daniel as a hunter, not just cheering him on, but helping with both practical and logistical aspects. Whether it’s been paddling the canoe on his squirrel hunts or cleaning the grinder and...

If you’ve been listening in lately, you’ve no doubt heard Daniel and a few of our guests mention Cahokia, an ancient North American city near present-day St Louis, that, at its peak habitation, may have been home to some 14-18K thousand people. The largest, and believed to be the most influential city of the Mississippian culture, it was first inhabited around 1050 and eventually disbanded by 1350 CE, something like 142 years before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the so-called “New...

Tim Clemens, AKA @MNForager on Instagram, is the founder of Ironwood Foraging Co, a Minnesota-based wild food and foraging education company, and someone Daniel's been writing back and forth with on social media for some time now. He was formerly the president of the Minnesota Mycological Society, which gives him deep expertise on edible fungi, and he also has a degree in anthropology and archeology, so his perspectives on foraging are firmly grounded in an understanding of big human...

We finally get to share this episode with you today! Daniel has been eagerly awaiting an opportunity to interview Robyn Cutright, PhD, author of The Story of Food in the Human Past. If you listen to the show regularly, you’ve probably been hearing him reference this book a lot lately, and you know we like to geek out on big human history! In particular, that stretch of time before the advent of agriculture, but especially, before industrialized food systems. We're fascinated by what we eat,...

Andrew Tsui is the founder of the Ike Jime Federation, and… he’s on a mission. He aims to change the way we, as commercial and recreational anglers, handle the fish we harvest. We’ll set euphemisms aside for a moment and say it clearly, Andrew wants to change the way we kill fish. In fact, he believes in what he calls A Considered Kill. First, we should say, Ike Jime is a traditional Japanese technique for killing fish. As an island nation, Japan has always relied heavily on ocean fish for...

Our guest today is Linda Black Elk, an ethnobotanist specializing in the traditional foods and medicines of the Great Plains and the Director of Food Sovereignty at United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, ND. She’s also the mother of three Lakota sons. There's a lot of overlap in Linda and our philosophies around foraged foods and medicines, particular in how we see each species as more of a “who” than a “what,” since getting to know them is more like getting to know another person than...

Fishing the Wild Waters is the new book from today’s guest Conor Sullivan. He was one of our earliest podcast guests here on WildFed, and at that time he’d mentioned he was writing this book, but it was still an early manuscript. Well, the book is out, and we've had the pleasure of reading it. This book is certainly a proud addition to our fishing library, a genre that we haven’t always found very useful. But Conor’s book is different. It's part memoir, with really inspiring and informative...

The early spring green foraging season is upon us — or at least it's drawing very close now — and who better to talk to than the Forager Chef himself, Alan Bergo. Alan is a long time guest and friend of the show — both the WildFed podcast and TV show — and one of today’s most prolific wild food writers and recipe developers. His website — ForagerChef.com — is the web’s largest wild mushroom cookery resource, but it's so much more, with incredible recipes and musings on plants as well. Alan...