A New York Times Book Review Summer Reading Selection

"An intense and illuminating travelogue... offering a corrective to the patriarchal white gaze promoted by globetrotting eaters like Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern. La Cerva combines environmental history with feminist memoir to craft a narrative that's more in tune with recent works by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Helen Macdonald and Elizabeth Rush." — The Wall Street Journal

Two centuries ago, nearly half the North American diet was foraged, hunted or caught in the wild. Today, "wild foods" are becoming expensive luxuries served to the wealthy in top restaurants, while the people who depend on them for survival watch their lives upended as new markets and roads push into the world's last untamed landscapes.

In Feasting Wild, geographer and anthropologist Gina Rae La Cerva traces our relationship to wild food across the globe, reflecting on how colonialism and the extinction crisis have reshaped wild spaces, and on what we lose when we domesticate what we eat: biodiversity, Indigenous and women's knowledge, a vital connection to nature, and flavour itself. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she investigates the violent bushmeat trade, tracing illicit delicacies from the rainforests of the Congo Basin to dinner tables in Europe. In a Danish cemetery, she forages wild onions with the staff of Noma. In Sweden, after saying goodbye to a man known only as The Hunter, she smuggles freshly caught game meat home to New York for a feast of "heartbreak moose."

Thoughtful, ambitious and wide-ranging, Feasting Wild challenges how we think about the way we eat, and introduces a striking new voice in food journalism.

"A memorable, genre-defying work that blends anthropology and adventure." — Elizabeth Kolbert, New York Times–bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction

"A food book with a truly original take." — Mark Kurlansky, New York Times–bestselling author of Salt: A World History

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