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What is “wild food” anyway?
I once had a colleague criticize my use of the term “wilderness” in a graduate student intro class. Allegedly, they off-handedly derided the name of my lab’s name — The Wilderness Lab — as absurd given academic discussions around the term. A year after the alleged comment, a graduate student who I was advising mentioned the incident to me. I’ve written about this saga in detail, but suffice it to say, the colleague was not held accountable by the department or university. It still pisses me off that the colleague essentially got away with this slander, but the incident did start me thinking about what the term wilderness means for me and the work I do.
The terms “wild” and “wilderness” are loaded, problematic, and contested. In USian society the term is both pejorative and lauded depending on the context. Wild can mean out of control, unruly, or even insane, or it can mean pure, unsullied, and native.
In academic circles, wilderness is heavily critiqued as setting up a false dichotomy between human activities and things separate from nature. The built environment — cities for example — are separate from the wilderness of a national forest, but that separation is imaginary because the built environment is deeply connected to the spaces and processes outside of its borders.
Historically, academia has weaponized the term wilderness to talk about societies and cultures that are more primitive and thus inferior from the more “civilized”, advanced, and thus better societies and cultures. The field of anthropology is famous for using wilderness in this way, which many cultures including USian culture, has yet to dismantle and remove from colloquial understanding.
I think my former colleague was leveling some measure of academic critique on my use of the term to describe my lab. But like much of their thinking and relating, they failed to see the nuance that comes when a textbook term is translated in the real world. Or, they could have just been hating, who knows.
In the mainstream food world however, “wildness” and “wilderness” is something heavily sought after. “Wild-caught” or “wild-harvested” foods cost a premium over “farm-raised” foods as people are seeking sustenance and relations that are less heavily influenced by the ills of dominant human culture.
There is a growing consciousness within this dominant culture — what I’ve called Anti-Indigenous Civilizations — of the benefits of harvesting and consuming relatives that live, grow, and produce with little to not direct cultivation. The farm-raised salmon is often times less expensive than wild-caught salmon because of the time and financial subsidies poured into industrial food production. But as many are discovering, those financial advantages are often false and not worth it.
WHAT I MEAN BY “WILD”
When I use the term “wild” or “wilderness”, I’m talking about the best of what we as human beings and all our planetary relatives can be. We exist in a web of relations that have been co-constructed over billions of years. We didn’t create that system and, as humans, are one of the newest members of this community. Over the last ten or so millennia, many cultures have developed the insane idea that controlling as much of this web of relations is not only possible, but something they should drag all relatives — human and non-human— into in order to realize an absurd level of material wealth for themselves.
Over the years of my learning from Black and Indigenous scholars, activists, and thinkers, the term “civilized” has taken on a deeply negative connotation, while the term “wild” has been the state of existence to work towards.
Being wild is about deeply respecting the autonomy of others, which means recognizing the personhood of individual relatives and their collectives of immediate relatives.
To be wild is to be anchored in reciprocity, with a fierce loyalty to building good relations in the spaces that you live.
I suppose I could write an academic paper on how I’ve been conceptualizing this transformation of thinking and practice, but putting my energy towards convincing academics of something their livelihood depends on not understanding is not how I want to spend my time and energy. Indeed, I’m building a business around working through these ideas and cultivating a community of folks open to living by similar principles. Transforming wilderness theory within the ivory tower is not at all on my to-do list.
WILDERNESS AND FOOD
Nothing about what humans do — our cultures, our conflicts, our dreams, our societies — makes sense outside the context of the food we consume. Everything we do is anchored by the sustenance we need to survive and how we express that practice with others.
Our biology demands we eat frequently and our creativity and ingenuity is fed by the quality of our cultural expressions through food.
Anti-Indigenous civilizations treat food acquisition with an industrial mindset, transforming food into a commodity that’s first and foremost about making money and less so, if at all, about nourishing consumers. So it’s no wonder that modern food is linked to so many negative health outcomes for so many people.
Meanwhile, wild foods remain an alternative option, for some, to maintain and/or regain a set of relations that have allowed our species to thrive for a quarter of a million years.
But we can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. There are things we know, things we’ve created, ways of seeing the world that we cannot forget or abandon. Like any way of knowing, how that knowledge is used is guided by the stories the users believe about themselves.
If you believe that mountains are living beings and elders then you don’t blow off their heads, scoop out their guts, and use the entrails to power your homes. If you believe that you were put on this earth by a divine power to have dominion over all things then you think mountain top removal mining is worth doing.
What the dominant culture has embraced, the source of the seemingly endless stream of unsustainable entanglements, is the later narrative. And because that narrative encourages exploitation as the best and/or only means of survival, virtually everything a society of people who accept that narrative does results in high levels of suffering.
Food rooted in an exploitative narrative can only lead to the unsustainable food system that dominates the planet. But we can do better, and I think the key is in a narrative and practice rooted in the elder wisdom of our species.
One of my most important videos where you can hear the beginning conceptualization of The Wild Kitchen.
MY KITCHEN
When I graduated from Morehouse and entered graduate school I was determined to earn my PhD, but I was also determined to learn to cook. I wanted to develop cooking skills to impress women, but it quickly turned into a pursuit for my own sake.
I became fascinated with all of the different things one could learn about where food came from, how it was prepared, and what skills a person needs to acquire their food. I love ravioli with wild mushrooms, but where do wild mushrooms come from? What makes some mushrooms “wild” and others not?
Learning to cook is like a never ending experiment that you get to eat, and if you do it right, the end results are transformative.
My emerging food world changed dramatically when I met my PhD advisor — a man who long ago decided to give up driving a car, became a vegetarian, and who grew his own food in his front yard. What?! My mind was blown. “You mean I can grow the raw ingredients for some of my favorite foods myself?!”
I understood the concept of farming, but the concept of putting in a garden to feed myself consistently was something I had never considered; certainly not as a graduate student with no experience doing so. But Tom showed me that such a thing was possible, and so I put in a small garden in pots on the front porch of my apartment.
From that act of claiming a small sliver of food soverignty, my interest in food grew by leaps and bounds. I quickly built a learning relationship with cultivated plants, but what about the foods I didn’t need to, plant, grow, and look after? What about the berries and greens that were just out there living their lives, but that could sustain me? I could go out and harvest fish relatively easily, but what about other animals? What about hunting? Could I do that?
THE WILD KITCHEN
Reflecting on this person journey in food, I’ve come to realize that wild food is what I do. More than anything else I’ve done professionally, working in, on, and around wild food has been the thing that drives me. And wild food needs a wild kitchen. But what is that exactly?
The Wild Kitchen is a food space that’s anchored in reciprocity and good relations. It is a way of sensing and interacting with the world that recognizes the inherent autonomy and personhood of the beings we consume. Yes, we heterotrophs (beings that cannot create our own food) have to cause bodily harm to other beings to survive. Even if we are vegan, the plant relatives that we consume are harmed and the land to grow those relatives is changed (thousands of invertebrates die for your Tofurky sandwich). There’s no escaping the harm we cause to stay alive.
Rather than try to convince ourselves that some relatives are more worthy of that necessary harm, the Wild Kitchen is a space where the inevitability of that harm is embraced through a web of reciprocity and responsibility that holds us accountable to the individuals and communities that give up their lives so that we may live.
The Wild Kitchen is a concept for folks, like me, living in Anti-Indigenous Civilizations who recognize that the dominant food systems are unsustainable and who seek to live in better relation with how we feed ourselves. Yes, you’ve probably heard something like this before as there are many movements and epistemologies that mirror this principle.
I’m not seeking to establish a completely new philosophy of being, but rather to coalesce my personal food journey into a cohesive way of being that I think can have an impact. There are lots of people out there who are looking for a better way to relate to their food at a fundamental relational level, but many folks, particularly non-white folks, feel alienated from similar oriented mainstream movements because those movements and communities remain staunchly resistant to examining and dismantling racial capitalism and patriarchy.
The Wild Kitchen explicitly recognizes that some facts of settler-colonial history in North America that seem to not be related — for example, The Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the regular occurrence of large fish die-offs due to anoxia in Gulf of Mexico today — are in fact inextricably linked and a part of what the Wild Kitchen is seeking to reconcile, however incrementally, in practice.
Learning that history and understanding the context of historical events, the practices of power-over, and what motivates those who seek power is key to dismantling the many ways Anti-Indigenous Civilizations oppress so many beings on this planet. And just like a meal lovingly prepared and shared can express complex cultural ideology, so does my kitchen, an aspirational Wild Kitchen, express my desire to live in better relations with all beings around me.
YOUR ROLE IN THE WILD KITCHEN
Learning to be in direct relationship with my food, to strive to be as involved as possible in what it takes to feed myself and my loved ones, is one of the greatest loves of my life. It is a never-ending journey that feeds my soul and enriches the web of relations that make life such a joy.
Since starting this newsletter and my YouTube channel, I’ve come to realize that the Wild Kitchen is what I want my life — besides being a good father and partner — to be governed by. It’s what I love to learn about, teach about, think about.
Your role in the Wild Kitchen is simple: walk with me, how ever you want, for as long as you want. Know that I am beyond thankful for your attention, your feedback, your critique, your support, and your sincerity.
It’s taken me 41 years to figure this out, but I think I’m finally beginning to see what my talents, experiences, and training is pointing towards. The Wild Kitchen will evolve and change, diversify and shift over the years, as it has in years past, but the work of building will continue.
I have a name for my life’s work and that feels great.
Now, let’s build Wild Kitchen together!
New Video Content
I cannot tell you how much it would have meant for me to have a video series like this when I decided learning to cook was going to be a life-long project of mine. I wasted so much money on products that I didn’t need or didn’t fit what I wanted to do, and this series is my way of passing that learning on to someone who’s thinking about becoming a competent home cook.
Pots and pans are the workhorses of kitchen, so it’s important to get them right. Most of what I recommend in this video are things you buy once in a lifetime, so make sure that if you’re in the market for any of these tools, you heed my advice and avoid multiple iterations of mistakes so many, including myself, make in setting up their kitchen for success.
So when I talk about the Wild Kitchen and recipes I like to use and learn from (I’m not talking about Sandra Lee’s Kwanzaa cake), I’m talking about books like this. Humans are story telling animals and part of why I think food nourishes us on multiple levels — biological, emotional, spiritual — is because of the stories associated with said food.
I typically don’t like to follow recipes exactly, but I’ve realized it is because so many cookbooks don’t have stories that speak to me the way the stories in these books do. Check them out and see what I mean.
Wild Food Update
CAN YOU EAT TREE RATS?
Fox squirrel harvested from my backyard in 2023
I’ve started working on the edits to the squirrel hunting video I shot last year and I couldn’t be more excited to share it with you this month. There’s not a lot a won’t eat, but I had no idea how much I would love squirrel! Not just the taste, but the entire web of relations that is the practice of harvesting squirrels. I’ll explain more in the video and how hunting squirrels is foundational work of a Wild Kitchen.
Recommendation
If I could only own one pot in my kitchen, it would be this one, mainly because there are only a couple of jobs this thing can’t do. You don’t have to buy this particular brand, but I must insist on this size and a fully clad saucepan for your kitchen. If you want to know what “fully clad” means, check out Part 3 of the Do Everything Kitchen.
Business Update
My own internalized white patriarchy often frustrates and shames me. This weekend I awoke from a nightmare about being attacked by zombies and couldn’t get back to sleep. So, I started thinking about my business and about the nagging frustration that the books I had been reading, while offering ideas that I find useful, were not devoid of problematic concepts rooted in racial capitalism and white patriarchy.
Deeply embarrassed that I hadn’t thought to do this before, I decided to search for books on entrepreneurship by Black people, and Black women specifically. The number one search result was Katheryn Finney’s book and one of the first quotes from the book almost had me waking up my sleeping wife with a Black church style “I know that’s right!” handclap. Listen to this!
“How many times have you opened a book on business and read something you know is true, but you also know it’s not true for you” (paraphrased quote).
Like so much of navigating this world as a Black person, all I want is to be understood in my Blackness, to be seen as bring that unique set of experiences and insights to a space and making it better. And here Kathryn was putting voice to that desire and affirming that there was a space in this new world of entrepreneurship I’m exploring to show up as my full self.
I’m ashamed that it’s taken me this long, that I was seduced by the convenience of whiteness and patriarchy, to put aside my Blackness as something not necessary for understanding my business goals. I’ve learned a lot from Ali Abdaal, the YouTuber who recommended the business books I talked about two weeks ago, but it’s always bothered me how the overwhelming majority of his peers and mentors are white guys. I feel the same about MKBHD and I have to keep reminding myself that I don’t want to be that kind of non-white entrepreneur.
Kathryn Finney’s book is giving me life and I’m so excited to read and learn from other Black women entrepreneurs who are making an impact in ways that I want to emulate.
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