We decided to stock Elspeth’s book because it is a very clear and readable introduction to many of the ideas behind our work at Breadtree.

Feed Us With Trees follows the deep history of nut trees — chestnuts, oaks, hazelnuts — as staple human foods, and makes a case for why a food system built around perennial trees is more resilient, more regenerative, and more in keeping with how humans actually fed themselves for most of our history than the annual monocultures we rely on today.

Here’s a quote from Elspeth about the process of writing this book:

“I was part of a culture, I began to recognize as I dug deeper, that has become so disconnected from our ecological place on the land that we no longer recognize ourselves as part of it. I’d  always thought of our presence on any given landscape as largely negative. We felled forests and polluted streams and mined mountaintops and emitted loads of greenhouse gases. But as I got to know the nut trees and Indigenous Knowledge Keepers and tree breeders who had held  onto the connection with these keystone trees, I kept hearing the same thing again and again: without our stewardship, these trees were having trouble regenerating. For millennia we’ve  played a key role in their tending—through fire and coppice and pollard and other ancient  techniques—and without us, they and countless other dependent species were disappearing. I  thought of all the post-apocalyptic movies I’d ever seen with humans finally thrown off the land  and the natural world thriving. Humans instead as vital? It was the ultimate narrative shift.” (If you’d like to read more about her process of writing the book you can do so here.)