WildFed Podcast — Hunt Fish Forage Food (Daniel Vitalis)

Thanks for tuning in today! Every once and a while it's fun to take a break from interviewing and just have a conversation between Daniel and our producer and editor Grant — musing, rambling, and recounting our recent adventures and shenanigans.

If you’re new to the show, maybe go back an episode to hear our typical format. Otherwise, behold the obnoxious characters who bring you these shows each week, as they sound when not speaking to their betters.

Here in Maine, we are beginning the descent into winter. We're pretty excited about that. We're gonna get some much-needed catch-up time at home, the ice fishing season will start soon, and we can put the finishing touches on Season 3 of the WildFed TV show before it goes to air.

We still have a little bit of filming left for Season 3 of WildFed, and everything is on track for a Season 4 — so if all goes as planned we’ll jump right into filming again this coming spring! We still have time for your TV episode ideas, so please write us at info@wild-fed.com or on our social media to plant the seeds of future episodes you’d like to see, host, or even be a part of.

In the meantime, we just want to thank you again for all your support! It means the world to us to have such a wonderful audience for the content we produce. So thank you for tuning in here for the podcast, and on the Outdoor Channel or Amazon Prime for the TV show.

And of course, we’ll be back next week with another interview — covering the kinds of wild food and ecological literacy topics we love to feature here.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/162

In this interview, we learn about the complex world of lichens from Felicity Roberts — a rural Newfoundlander, lichen expert, certified herbalist, writer, and wild food advocate. "There's nothing simple about lichens," says Felicity, and she's not kidding. These extremophile organisms — often called "the lungs of the forest" — can be useful indicators of the health of an ecosystem. Felicity's enthusiasm for lichens is contagious as she guides us through the biology, folklore, and practical applications of these natural wonders.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/032

We're doing something a little different this episode — Dr. Matt Dawson of the Wild Health Podcast will be interviewing Daniel! Get a behind-the-scenes look into the philosophy that informs this show as Daniel takes us back to the very beginning of his health and wellness journey. He shares about his transition from strict veganism to a natural human diet and what his diet looks like today. He also discusses one of the main pillars of what it means to be WildFed — developing meaningful relationship with species and how important this is to fostering ecological awareness and stewardship. Enjoy!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/077

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/007

Well, it’s finally here. The last interview of the WildFed Podcast. We'll be back next week with our producer Grant to do a final wrap-up, but as far as guest appearances go, who better to take us out than Dan Flores, and on what better topic than his new book, Wild New World. The book is incredible, even, dare we say, required reading for anyone who’s been following the journey of this podcast. It’s not just a history of North America and the animals that live here now — the extant animals — and the ones that were here before — the extinct ones. It’s also the story of the human predator crossing through Beringia and being unleashed on a homonin-naive megafauna assemblage and the impacts that would have here over the proceeding 20,000 years or so. 

It traces its way through the Clovis and Folsom cultures, to the post-ice-age extinction events that led to the great mass of cultures we refer to as Native American, up to the point of contact with European explorers. Then, what follows, as we are all painfully aware, is the Great Dying, which led to the loss of some 80-90% of the indigenous peoples of the continent due to diseases that Europeans had developed significant immunity to but were novel to Native America. And of course, colonization and westward expansion. This then gives way to the most substantial human-induced biomass reduction in known history, the denuding of the land and the commodification of its wildlife — which comes with it several tragic, high-profile extinctions. This part of the book is both compelling and at the same time gruesome and loathsome to read about. It’s truly a blemish on the history of this country and something we are a long way from reconciling still.  

Eventually, this leads to the beginnings of the modern conservation movement, which carries us through to the present day, exploring both its sometimes less-than-savory origins, but also its tremendous wins, like the Endangered Species Act. 

The book walks us through to the very present with some speculation about the future.

When Daniel last spoke to Dan, he'd only read a few chapters, and those were some feel-good pages. He didn’t really understand what was to come or how it would shake him to the core. He didn’t expect it would cause him to reevaluate many of his assumptions or make him audit his own practices and how they relate to this bigger-picture history.

It’s so easy to forget that we live, not as isolated points in space and time, but rather in a continuum. Embedded in a fabric of living history. Without context for what has come before, we can inadvertently focus myopically on where we are now. Conservation is no different. While our methods for wildlife management are light-years ahead of where they were just a century ago, one thing we've learned making this show is there’s still a LONG way to go. It’s far from perfect.

All that said, humans are and always have been — as long as our genus has existed — predators. Not just dietarily, but behaviorally. Those of us that hunt and fish know this in a very intimate way. The idea of giving that up is not really an option for most of us — despite the hopes of the planet’s vegan contingent who believes we can just implement a species-wide dietary experiment on the human population without any malnourishment consequences to ourselves or children. Daniel has been down that road and it leads, in his opinion, off the rails and into nutritional bankruptcy. 

So, it seems to us that we need to learn to balance our needs, wants, and desires as a predatory animal with our needs, wants and desires for intact fauna and healthy ecosystems. No easy task. One that’s not just centuries, but millennia, in the making.

It seems to us that this decade could be characterized by a now hyper-connected and networked human race coming to terms with itself, its past, and its future. Those of us who champion a meaningful ecological trophic connection to wildlife are going to have to do the same. We hope, when the dust settles, we can still hunt, fish, and forage, since as Daniel has stated on this show dozens if not a hundred times — we think this is essentially human. 

Who knows where this all leads, but we're grateful to Dan for this book and the incredible work that must have gone into writing such a sweeping ecological and environmental history. We suspect this one is destined to be a classic. Dan is, no doubt, one of the most important environmental writers of our day, and it’s an honor to have him back on the show — and especially as our final interview. 

As we mentioned earlier, we'll be back next week for one final, more intimate episode of the show. Thank you so much for following along on this journey, for your support, and for your listenership. It has meant the world to us!

Now, here’s our second interview with Dan Flores on his newest book, Wild New World!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/173

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 its dietary needs, and few places in the world can boast as sophisticated a seafood culinary tradition. And like so many things Japanese, the techniques for dispatching fish reached a level of near-perfection there, not just eliminating as much suffering and stress as possible, but also producing the highest quality finished food product possible.

The method, while requiring some skill, is fairly simple. Once fish are brought onto the boat or onshore, they’re quickly killed with an ice-pick-like spike inserted into their brain. Then, their gills are cut, to induce exsanguination — which simply means they are bled out — and finally a long, flexible wire — known as a Shinke Jime wire — is run through the spinal canal, destroying their spinal cord and eliminating any residual nerve impulses that would keep muscles contracting spasmodically, resulting in tissue damage, metabolic waste products, and chemical stresses that would ultimately reduce the quality of the final food product.

Lastly, the fish is rapidly cooled, not just placed on ice, but in an ice slurry that completely surrounds the fish, ensuring quick and uniform cooling.

For those of us who fish, this may sound like a lot of extra logistical steps — especially when we’re used to pulling a fish over the gunwales and tossing them into the icebox — but it’s important to note that similar steps are taken for the USDA-certified domesticated meats we purchase in the supermarket. While fish, somehow, are still killed with unregulated and antiquated methods that produce inferior finished food products.

This, in turn, reduces the value of the fish we buy and eat, meaning that commercial fishermen must harvest larger numbers of fish to be profitable. It's a quantity over quality paradigm.

That’s where Andrew Tsui comes in. He’s working hard to make Ike Jime a part of our commercial fishing fleet's tool kit. Providing both equipment and education, and working on policy as well.

It’s a lot more work, it adds complexity, and a need for anatomical knowledge and keenly honed fine motor skills. It requires patience and consistency. But let’s face it, we would never treat mammals the way we treat fish. Can you imagine just leaving cows piled on top of each other in the sun to die, convulsing? It’s unthinkable. But that’s what we’ve been doing with fish. Then we wonder why they last just a few days before spoiling.

Chefs like Josh Niland, who we’ve had on the show before, are showing us that our fish culinary tradition is still in its infancy. Andrew Tsui is showing us that it’s not just how we cook fish, but how we dispatch them as well.

So, we’ll be heading out on the water this year armed with the tools of the Ike Jime Federation. Brain spikes, Shinke Jime wires, and, of course, the knowledge of how to implement these practices, all of which can be found on IkeJimeFederation.com.

With all the time and effort we put into feeding ourselves and our families with wild foods, why would we skip these steps that can reduce stress and suffering, increase the shelf life and quality of the meat we harvest, and culminate in an eating experience that surpasses anything we could get with conventional methods.

So, have a listen, and consider becoming a forward-thinking angler. Learning to humanely dispatch fish for their own sake and for a better final food product too. Like Andrew says… these are tools for the considered kill.

Maybe it's time we all started practicing Ike Jime!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/129

Mario Kalpou is the host of Man Eats Wild, a new show premiering on Outdoor Channel later this month.

Mario’s lifestyle is larger than life. He’s a self-professed adrenaline addict, who seeks thrills and big adventure, but he’s also a very thoughtful hunter, and his ethics, like ours here at WildFed, center around his approach to food.

A native of Australia, he made the first season of his show in the South Pacific — filming in Australia, but also in New Zealand.

As you’re listening to this, he’s headed off to Africa, where he formerly worked as a hunting guide — what they call a Professional Hunter there — to film the second season of his new show.

Man Eats Wild, like WildFed, airs on Mondays on the Outdoor Channel as part of their Taste of the Wild block, as both of our shows are food-focused. While our artistic styles are a bit different, we both view hunting, fishing, and foraging through a similar lens. We think it's an ancient — but still relevant and important — approach to acquiring quality food and that this food is healthier for us than anything we can purchase in the store.

This was a great conversation, and we're excited to have him as a friend and ally… and we're wishing Man Eats Wild huge success with its upcoming premier!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/099

Well, you’ve heard the buzz... maybe on the news, maybe in your social media feed, or if you live anywhere near Brood X, you’ve no doubt heard it in the trees these last few weeks! That’s right, it’s the return of the largest brood of 17 year cicadas — Brood X — and they're out in the billions, maybe even the trillions!

Here at WildFed, we're entomophagists — meaning we eat bugs — not entomologists — meaning those who study them. After a tasty meal of 17-year-old insects, we enlisted the help of Dr. Jonathan Larson, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky to bring us — and by extension you — up to speed on the incredible, bizarre, and uniquely American phenomenon of periodical cicada emergence. Meet us at the intersection of insect science and adventure gastronomy for a fascinating episode!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/085

Mansal Denton is the founder of Sacred Hunting and host of the Mansal Denton Podcast. Mansal has a fascinating past that ultimately led him to mentoring under a Muskogee/Creek medicine man in his pursuit of the art of sacred hunting. In this powerful conversation, Daniel and Mansal explore their own conscientious approaches to this ancestral practice, Mansal's unique experiences hunting with indigenous peoples, our death-phobic society, and becoming comfortable with mortality. At the heart of sacred hunting is connection — to food, to place, to the species you hunt, and, for many, to spirit.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/059

Mike Kimmel aka the Python Cowboy lives and works on the front lines of the Florida invasion of non-native species like pythons, iguanas, Muscovy ducks and many others. Cowboy is a great description for Mike as he's a bit of a renegade who enjoys the adrenalized rush of capturing dangerous exotic critters. He’s also a conservationist who is passionate about his role in removing these species from the landscape to give native species much-needed time to recalibrate to the biological novelty in their new world. In this episode, Mike gives us the rundown on the invasive species issue in Florida — the python invasion, in particular — and gives us a glimpse into his exciting and impactful work.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/082

Today’s episode is with our good friend Tony Seichrist. Daniel first met Tony at his restaurant, The Wyld, in Savannah, Georgia where he cooked Alligator for Season 1 of WildFed. Since then, he's been featured in two episodes of Season 2, and he was just with us for an episode of Season 3 — making him our most frequent guest on the WildFed TV show.

Tony is one of Daniel's favorite people. They share a lot of ideas, opinions and stances on things, yet both help one another to think in new and fresh ways too. He's one of those friends that inspires us to strive to be better.

He’s also an incredible chef and a passionate foodie — though he’d probably hate being called anything that clichè. So maybe epicurean would be better. Every time we're around him we learn something new about food — whether it's sourcing, cutting, or cooking, his experience working with food is tremendous.

We recorded this early in the morning before heading to the airport, just after a 3-day snowshoe hare hunt. Our hunt was great, but our visit was far too short. Tony, we're looking forward to our next session!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/168

"Humanity is more comfortable but less happy and healthy than we've ever been before," says today's podcast guest Michael Easter — author of the new book The Comfort Crisis, Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self. On assignment for Men’s Health Magazine, Michael went on a trip following the modern hunter and filmmaker Donnie Vincent on a hunt to the arctic. That trip changed the trajectory of Michael’s life, and led to him writing The Comfort Crisis. In this fantastic interview, he shares about the impact of this hunt, along with some really valuable takeaways, like how we can approach discomfort, how we relate to death, and how our own success can sometimes — if we aren’t careful — be our undoing.  So, take this one to heart. With so many voices out there suggesting we take the easy road, sometimes we need a reminder the easy way isn’t always — if ever — the fulfilling one.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/081

Dr. Laura Brandt is a Wildlife Biologist with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in South Florida and has been studying the ecological role of alligators and other wetlands species in the Everglades region for almost 40 years. In this episode, Laura shares her passion for alligators and the Everglades as she takes us on a guided tour of the River of Grass. You'll learn about Everglades restoration, alligator ecology, where alligator & crocodile habitats overlap, the surprising gentleness of alligators in parenting and so much more.

Moose! They’re the largest member of the deer family, and no one knows them better than our guest today, Lee Kantar, Maine’s State Moose biologist and head of its Moose Management Program.

Here in Maine we have a thriving population — the largest in the lower 48 — but our tags are coveted, released each summer after a much-anticipated lottery drawing.

While moose are majestic, if not a bit goofy on those long spindly legs, they’re also facing several threats, not the least of which is the winter tick, an ectoparasite that’s literally been bleeding our moose population to death. Add to that the threat of brain worm and chronic wasting disease, and it soon becomes apparent why the work of Lee Kantar and his colleagues is so important.

It’s also important for us to understand what helps them thrive and what leads to their ultimate demise. That’s why Lee is flying around in helicopters counting moose, wrangling them for the tagging program, and racing to the scene when a collar shows a mortality to perform a necropsy on the spot. All that data is fed back into a management program that’s goal is ensuring moose have a future here with us. Not just for the hunt, but for their own intrinsic value on the landscape.

Tune in for a fascinating conversation on moose, their ecology and effective moose management.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/096

We've got a really important episode for you today. At least, important to us, and probably to you too if you’ve been listening to this show for a while. In fact, in some ways, it feels like it helps to make sense of a couple of important themes we’ve explored again and again here over the last 160 episodes. Most notably, those of wild game conservation — who funds it and where its efforts have been focused, as well as invasive species — and in particular, how significant the threat from them is, how we could or should be dealing with them, and what feedback loops we may be creating through our attempted conservation efforts.

The interview is with Dr. Bernd Blossey, who specializes in the intersection between whitetail deer and their high populations, invasive earthworms in North America, and invasive plant species and how the three of these factors intersect, overlap, and exacerbate the issues that each, individually, creates on the landscape.

Basically, it's like the title says. Too many deer, too many earthworms. Specifically, too many whitetail deer on our landscape, far more than can be sustainably supported by our ecosystems. And the invasion of earthworms beneath our feet in North America, most of which are not native here, since the last glaciation pushed all the worms back to the deep Southern United States. There were, after all, 2 miles of ice covering the land that now is home to now our northern forests. When those forests regrew, they did so in the absence of earthworms, and the worms that are here now are not just exotic but extremely deleterious to those forests and many of the native plant species that live there. These two factors — over-populated whitetail deer from above and exotic earthworms from below — might be influencing the spread of invasive plant species in ways that aren’t readily apparent to the untrained observer.

But Dr. Blossey — a professor who heads up the Ecology and Management of Invasive Plants Program at Cornell University — is going to pick that apart for us today, helping to make sense of the data. He’s also a hunter himself, so his view of conservation is informed from an inside perspective.

The conclusion we've walked away with is that a lot of what we’ve been calling conservation in the hunting community has really been about creating sufficient deer hunting opportunities. This makes sense since it’s been hunters footing the conservation bill over the years, but high deer numbers aren’t synonymous with healthy ecology, and we may have reached, and exceeded the ecological carrying capacity for whitetail deer in much of the country. This might be a welcomed problem were it not for the devastating consequences this is having on our flora, and in particular how it might contribute to the spread of deleterious exotic species. Like a lot of us, Dr. Blossey likes to hunt and eat whitetails, so he’s sympathetic to our desire to have ample opportunities, but after listening, one can’t help thinking we need a more holistic approach to conservation in North America. And one that, and we say this a little begrudgingly, brings more than just hunter's voices to the table.

After several years of actively exploring these issues, we feel that this conversation has been a missing piece of the puzzle. Certain things just weren’t adding up for us. It’s already changing the way we look at the landscape and our role as hunters.

We hope you find it as eye-opening as we have.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/161

Our guest today — Josh Niland — is changing the way the culinary world thinks about fish. From the way we handle it, to how we store it, to the way it’s cooked, Josh has single handedly created a new school of fish cuisine. Though part of it is a strong ethic of using more of the animal, that’s really just the beginning.

Imagine, at present, in restaurants and at home, only about 45% of a fish is utilized for food. Now imagine a James Beard award-winning chef who is getting 90% yield and creating dishes no one has ever conceived of before. Josh is dry-aging fish too, discovering that, with proper storing — and contrary to all convention — the flavor of fish flesh, like that of land animals, can be improved with hanging time, provided it’s kept dry and cold.

It’s hard to overstate the impact Josh’s work is going to have on the science and art of processing and cooking fish. If nothing else, it’ll change the way you see fish forever.

At WildFed, we're slowly shifting our approach to handling, processing, aging, cooking, and eating fish. There’s a lot of habit, convention, and institutional inertia to overcome. But the results Josh is getting make it clear… We can do more to honor the fish we eat, the people we feed, and the oceans, lakes, rivers, and ponds we harvest from. 45% is unacceptable. Let’s start eating scale to tail!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/105

Donnie Vincent — explorer, biologist, conservationist, and sportsman — uses cinematography to share intimate stories and adventures from the field that beautifully represent his conscientious approach to hunting. In this thoughtful conversation, Daniel and Donnie explore why the struggle and hardship in hunting is well worth the reward. They discuss how connection to land and participation in the cycle of life fuels what they do, and they also unpack why being present in the hunt matters. A must-listen and inspiring conversation for all who value procuring their own food from the wild!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/065

Daniel set out to interview today’s guest — Everett Headley — on the topic of falconry… cooperative hunting with a bird of prey. He’s a Montana resident that, amongst other things, hunted with a red tail hawk and is now training a peregrine falcon. All very interesting stuff that we've wanted to learn more about for years. But from the moment we started speaking, it was obvious that the natural flow of their conversation was going in a different direction. Both Everett and Daniel take a very philosophical approach to hunting and to understanding their relationship to the outdoors and the wild things that live there, and this, being their initial conversation, quickly took a turn towards the big picture.

What they landed on was a conversation about the journey a hunter takes over the course of their lifetime and how they think we can best preserve our hunting heritage in perpetuity. It’s an important topic, because, despite the renewed cultural interest we’re seeing in hunting right now, there are many forces still aligned against it. And while, in recent years, many new hunters are embracing the lifestyle, we have a long way to go to win over the non-hunting public.

Everett is a really thoughtful person, and it comes through in how he communicates about the lifestyle he passionately lives. He really takes his time in exploring these ideas and has a deep grasp on the topic of hunting. Not just the how-to, but the why, and when. And by "when" we mean where we are, currently, in the timeline of modern hunting and its relationship to conservation.

We love conversations like this, true dialectics, where many questions are asked, but neither of us has an answer to the questions we’re posing. Instead we explore them with a sincere desire to arrive at sound conclusions.

Whether you agree or not with the conclusions we are reaching is less important than that these ideas get explored. Because, as we're always wanting to point out, hunting isn’t just some other hobby, like building model cars or playing racket ball. It’s the natural, fundamental human food acquisition strategy and it’s formative to how we came to be in relationship to the rest of the ecosystem and the other-than-human beings that inhabit them alongside us. Therefore, while many fads will come and go, some in the course of our lifetime, hunting must — in my opinion — remain. It’s too important to who we are to see it lost or forgotten, or tread beneath the wheels of the engine of so-called progress.

So, it’s in that spirit that Everett and Daniel have this conversation. It’s a desire to see something fundamentally human, preserved.

And we promise to bring him back to talk about falconry soon. We're as interested to learn about that as you are. In the meantime, get to know Everett a bit, and take some time to consider these questions yourself. We need all hands on deck!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/118

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 experience.

While we were there we were particularly taken by two other species, both traditional foods of the prairie. One that we ate, the prairie turnip, or what the Dakota and Lakota call Tinpsila, a tuber that can be eaten raw or cooked, and that when dried lasts nearly indefinitely. Folks there keep long braids of it they make by peeling the tuber itself — which looks something like a small, white potato — but leaving the tap roots on which they plate into beautiful braids that make these vegetables easy to store, transport, and hang up as decorations until they’re ready to be used.

We had them cooked into a buffalo stew, and we were so impressed by their flavor, texture and nutritional composition that we knew we'd have to come back to experience the harvest myself.

The other species was the Prairie Dog, a very gregarious ground squirrel that lives in enormous colonies called “towns” that dot the prairie’s landscape. These subterranean dwellers are always popping out of their burrows and standing tall on their mounds, surveying the surrounding grassy plains, which they keep mowed short to prevent hidden avenues of approach for predators that might like to dine on the prairie's most iconic small game species.

Both having the prefix “prairie” in their common name was a coincidence that we couldn’t overlook, and we spent the winter daydreaming about going back to harvest both for a meal that would become an episode of the third season of WildFed.

Well, it happened, which brings us to today’s podcast — a conversation with Travis “Good Bull Man” Condon, Daniel, and WildFed producers Grant and Oliver who were there filming and directing the episode. Just as before, our time on the plains was inspiring and refreshing, as the beauty of the reservation lands is almost indescribable. Big sky, tall grass undulating in the wind like waves in the sea, and vistas that stretch on for a hundred miles. It was also a little poignant too, as it's all too easy to see and feel what’s been lost in the last few hundred years of Westward expansion, industrialization, agricultural and urban development, and of course, the denuding of the landscape's native flora and fauna. Still, despite these insults to the land and the people, the prairie still radiates a power and strength, as if it is ready to rise again, restoring itself to its former glory.

Whatever the future holds, we hope the journey and adventure of life keep bringing us back to this incredible place and the incredible people who live there.

Also, before we go, we wanted to give a quick shout-out to Linda and Luke Black Elk who prepared the incredible meal for the show at their annual tinpsila camp, along with their son Wawikiya, Linda’s sister Lisa, and Luke’s mom Candice. It was a real pleasure working with you all and learning about Tinpsila and the harvest and preparation of this incredible plant.

Wophila — thank you.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/138

In this episode, Daniel chats with Hank Shaw — award-winning food writer, hunter, angler, forager & chef. Hank started his wild foods website — one of the largest sources of wild food recipes on the internet — in 2007, and he shares how he's seen wild food culture change over the years. Always on the quest for new terrain, Hank gives us an inside look into how he learns about wild foods when he's in a new eco-region. Daniel and Hank also discuss foraging regulations, the hunter-forager divide and more!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/029

We had a great time sitting down to talk with William Altman — fellow Mainer and the Director of Photography for Donnie Vincent.

As someone who’s entered into the world of hunting media, with this podcast and, of course, the WildFed TV show on Outdoor Channel, Daniel was excited to talk to William about the cinematography he’s doing in the hunting industry, helping to reshape the way hunting media looks and making it more palatable to folks who don’t hunt.  But he was also excited to talk hunting in general, since William is a very accomplished and committed hunter.

So, you’re about to get a glimpse behind the scenes — to hear from the shooter behind the shooter — and also into the state of the hunting media industry, where it’s headed, and a lot more.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/091

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 time, since it's present in plants like sheep and wood sorrel — sour plants that are often one of the first that new foragers learn. But we've also experienced the damage that oxalate crystal macrostructures can do when they are present in plants like jack-in-the-pulpit, which burn the delicate mucous membranes of our mouth and throat if you are daring enough to try ingesting them.

We were surprised when we started hearing from some folks, usually those associated with the ancestral health community, and in particular, the carnivore diet proponents, that oxalates might be a hidden culprit undermining human health in many profound ways.

Now, to be fair, we’ve seen this kind of thing before. Compounds in foods — and by that we mean compounds that have always been in our foods, like cholesterol for example, or saturated fat — being touted as incredibly dangerous for your health in one decade, only to see a reversal, where they are considered healthy in the next.

So, when we first heard about the supposed dangers of oxalates, we were pretty dismissive, since these compounds and associated structures are common and were most certainly part of our diet for a very long time, being present in traditional and wild foods. Add to that the way carnivore diet proponents sometimes cherry-pick data to confirm their preexisting bias against plants — the very same way vegans do about animal foods — let’s just say, we were skeptical.

But, in the spirit of keeping an open mind, and because we knew that oxalates can be damaging and dangerous in strong concentration, we thought we'd give this idea its day, and hear the argument.

We present it here today, not as an endorsement of the idea, but rather to let you hear it too, if you haven’t already. As plant eaters and foragers, we remain skeptical, but we're going to sit with it for a while. If it is in fact true, it would mean, for us at least, a bit of a dietary redesign would be necessary.

Who knows, maybe in a decade it’ll be common household knowledge, with oxalate content being — as Sally hopes — labeled on packaged foods. Or, maybe, like saturated fats — something we’ve always eaten, but by the 80s were being blamed for heart disease and heart attacks, only to reverse course a few decades later — we’ll decide that no, oxalates are not the culprit we thought they were.

Whatever the case, oxalates are real and they probably deserve our attention. Whether we should be cutting them out of our diet to the extent that we can is up to you.

It’s a fun interview, and we learned a lot. It’s certainly got Daniel reassessing the chia seed, cacao nib, and nut butter in his smoothie each day… That said, he drank one this morning. The verdict, we're afraid, is still out on this one!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/142

It was such a pleasure to chat all things wild food with Jenna Rozelle — Maine-based wild food educator & board member of the New England chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. Jenna is passionate about fostering relationships between people and their local landscapes. An active and conscientious hunter, fisher & forager, she’s a true ambassador for this lifestyle. In this interview, we cover a wide range of topics — and have a lot of laughs along the way — including the future of foraging, plant people vs. animal people, veganism, hunter's orange, following the rules, posting land and so much more.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/005

Black bears are elusive and often very timid around humans. But occasionally, they aren’t. Black bears sometimes attack, and when they do, the attack is usually of a very different nature than the more common brown bear attack. When black bears attack, they’ve most often decided you are on the menu — and this requires a very different approach to how you handle an attack, and really, how you think of black bears in general. Now, it’s rare… but that said, it’s actually far more common than you think. Today's guest Carl Semencic has written a book called Encounter, which deals with just this topic. In this interview, he shares a handful of accounts that might give you a more realistic appreciation of these beautiful, powerful, and sometimes predatory animals.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/075

Our guest today is Andrew Zimmern, who you may know from the long-running cable TV series Bizarre Foods or most recently on Outdoor Channel, Andrew Zimmern’s Wild Game Kitchen (which you can watch free on outdoorchannel.com).

Daniel has been a fan of Andrew's shows for a lot of years. In fact, they were some of his early inspiration for creating the WildFed TV show. Aside from his television work, Daniel didn’t know much about Andrew, and this was his first time talking with him.

Like Daniel, he wants to reframe the way we handle and cook wild foods.

But, Daniel quickly realized that Andrew's work, though centered around food, is for him, a lot deeper. In fact, it’s inseparable from his perspectives on politics and sociology. Though they have some differing opinions about all of this, he, like Daniel, describes what he does as a trojan horse. So, while they might not share the same perspectives on current events or what constitutes the existential threats to our species, Daniel certainly relates to having a deeper “why” for what we do.

One thing they definitely agree on is the way that the food IQ of Americans has grown in recent years, that food can bring disparate parties together, and that we can — regardless of how we view the world — break bread together. In fact, we should.

That’s an important and timely message.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/169

Our guest today is Eduardo Garcia. He’s a chef, hunter, angler, athlete, and a lover of the outdoors. He’s also the feature of a documentary called Charged: The Eduardo Garcia story, which we highly recommend you watch. It details a rather dramatic, unanticipated, and quite nearly fatal injury that Eduardo sustained on a backcountry hunt, and his inspiring recovery story. It’s an emotional ride that leaves you remembering what’s really important in life. Things like love, a healthy, positive outlook, friends, family, and — maybe most vital — what we give back to the world.

Today, Eduardo lives in Montana, where he’s an avid outdoorsman, fisherman, hunter, triathlete and motivational speaker, and we’re honored to have him here to share a bit of his story.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/089

Best-selling author and lifelong fisherman Paul Greenberg gives us a briefing on the health of our world’s fisheries and their sustainability into the future. Paul wrote a trio of books — Four Fish, American Catch and most recently, The Omega Principle — that take an investigative look at healthy, sustainable seafood and our relationship to the fish on our plate. We delve into each of Paul's books, get to the root of fish flavor perceptions, take an in-depth look at the sushi fish, get the lowdown on the science and startling truths of Omega-3s and get Paul's big picture outlook on the sustainability of our ocean's ecosystem into the future. This is an important listen for those who care about the state of our oceans and the conservation of our wild fisheries.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/006

Our guest today is Carter Heath, Regional Director for the New England and New York chapters of the National Wild Turkey Federation and longtime guest and friend of the show. He’s also bi-lingual, speaking both English as well as wild turkey, in which he’s quite fluent. Not just at cutting and gobbling, but even in Jake calls and gentle hen purrs too. The man simply exudes wild turkey vibes as if he were wrapped in a turkey atmosphere. And he gets to share this passion as his profession, which is just a beautiful thing to witness in a person.

Today we thought it would be fun to talk about getting started turkey hunting — start to finish — so this interview focuses on everything you need to know to get going. From getting your hunting license to selecting a weapon and strategy, to turning your bird — or hopefully birds — into delicious meals.

The turkey rut is just about to kick off, and we couldn’t be more excited for a little spring thunder!

For now, enjoy the gobbling, cutting, and gentle purrs of Carter Heath. He’s been a significant part of the incredible interest we’ve been experiencing around the spring turkey hunt in recent years, with its rapidly expanding hunter participation and especially the growing interest we’ve seen from new hunters.

We hope he’ll inspire you to get involved if you aren’t already and to join the National Wild Turkey Federation this year. It’s just $35 a year, comes with a great magazine subscription, and your money goes to support very real and tangible habitat restoration projects and wild turkey conservation efforts. Join us in becoming a member, whether you hunt or not, because we need all hands on deck to preserve our hunting heritage and to conserve the wild turkey!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/125

Jess Starwood is an herbalist, forager, chef, and the author of the new book, Mushroom Wanderland. Being on opposite coasts, we've only known Jess through the exquisite photography and ecologically inspired writing featured on her beautifully curated social media pages. With her new book getting the attention of the foraging community, and with so many requests to have her on the show, this seemed like a great time to finally connect with her to learn more about the important impact she's having on modern wild food culture.

In this interview, Jess and Daniel chat about the wild world of mushrooms, herbalism, the sustainability of wild food, the complex tastes of wild food and so much more. Enjoy!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/101

Lori McCarthy — Newfoundland-based wild food expert — is back on The WildFed Podcast! Lori gives us a look inside what life looks like for a forager, angler & hunter in Newfoundland during this pandemic. We discuss the value in developing food security right now and how we'll be building our own wild food and herbal medicine stores in the coming months. Passionate about cultural heritage, Lori shares the importance of honoring our elders by preserving their generation's wisdom — the stories of the old ways of food.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/027

Barb Barton — author of Manoomin: The Story of Wild Rice in Michigan, endangered species biologist, and leader of a local women's circle that teaches traditional wild food knowledge — joins us to share about wild rice, wild foods, and relationship to place from her unique perspective as someone with experience in both indigenous and modern approaches. Daniel and Barb discuss the history of wild rice, appreciating wild foods as gifts, the importance of restoring traditional knowledge, how speaking the English language vs North American indigenous languages can shape our worldview, and how to create ecological change on an individual level.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/069

After an afternoon of tasting wild apples, we sat down to talk with apple enthusiast, author, forager and arborist Matt Kaminsky, aka Gnarly Pippins. Matt teaches us about the apple’s “extreme heterozygosity,” a trait that leads to the incredible genetic variation we see in their wild fruits. We recorded this conversation at Red Kill Mountain — the largest wild apple savanna in New York. In this episode, Matt will guide you through the world of wild apples — from pippins to prohibition and everything in between. And there’s some good tips for foragers too. With apple season fast approaching, now’s the perfect time to get up to speed before you get out on the land!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/046

Dr. Matt Dawson is a physician and the founder and CEO of Wild Health, a genomics-based precision medicine company. If you live a nature-immersed lifestyle, you've likely felt the physical and mental benefits of this firsthand. Matt is here to share how he integrates nature immersion into his genetic medicine practice and the scientific results he's seeing from prescribing this lifestyle to his patients. Daniel and Matt have a thoughtful discussion on bringing mindfulness and intention to what you do, why your DNA is not your destiny, and how you can improve your vitality with a personalized and nature-based approach to your health.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/076

Our guest today is Lisa Rose, author of the new book: Urban Foraging, Find, Gather, and Cook 50 Wild Plants, as well as a few other titles on foraging and food.

Though urban foraging doesn’t come up much on this show, it's always been important to Daniel. It was how he first started foraging, finding plants that grew in his backyard, snacks that grew up through the cracks in his sidewalk, or most importantly, harvesting fruits from neighborhood trees and abandoned lots around town. So we were glad to see that Lisa took this topic on, as it's a great way to introduce someone new to foraging, without having to simultaneously immerse them in wild places that might otherwise add to the complexity of what they’re experiencing or learning.

Of course, urban foraging poses some unique challenges outside of just land use issues, and that has to do with contamination by pollution. But then again, we face similar threats at the supermarket, where much of the food has also been contaminated by dangerous and pervasive chemicals like pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. We say that, just to point out that, in 2022 we have to be thoughtful about anything and everything we eat, no matter the source.

Daniel's conversation with Lisa also gets pretty philosophical, because foraging, though intensely practical, is today, something we usually do for reasons beyond the pragmatic. We take it on because it holds meaning to us. At least, that — in addition to foods we can’t get anywhere else — is what keeps us going out there to encounter species that live on the margins of our nearly ubiquitous human settlements.

Though we, as a species, are swimming in excess calories today, relegating foraging to something of an anachronism, we would argue that it’s more important now than ever before. Not because we need to do it for food, but because food is the primary way we interact with other species. Because that's what food is after all. Other species. And when we interact only with each other and the suite of domesticated species that we typically live amongst or eat, it becomes easy to forget we share this planet with other creatures. Creatures much older than us or our way of life, creatures that have been here all along. Food is our doorway to ecological literacy. And without that, our planet, we fear, is doomed to be simplified into — eventually — one giant dystopian factory farm, with humans as much the farmer as the farmed.

So, while much of the world sees foraging as a throwback to a time long passed, we see it as a doorway to a better, more integrated, and more ecologically diverse future.

That makes Urban Foraging a significant act. More than a hobby. It’s an investment in a better world.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/157

Catherine Schmitt — science writer and author of The President's Salmon — joins us to share the rich cultural and natural history of the Atlantic salmon. From the days when Maine's Penobscot River ran thick with migrating salmon to the current grim status of under 1,000 salmon returning to the river annually, the Atlantic salmon's conservation story is still in progress. Catherine takes us through the history of the salmon fishery and gives us the current status update on the health of this still-recovering species. An important listen for anglers, conservation-minded folks and anyone who cares about Earth’s ecology and the plight of one of our planet’s most celebrated species!

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 prettiest places in North America.

All the while, he's been passionate about wild foods — foraging there and experimenting with the unique ingredients found on that landscape. Yet somehow had never met Chef Brett Vibber of Wild Arizona Cuisine.

While we've known many casual foragers in Arizona, none of them have been professional chefs — so this interview was a treat, getting to talk with someone who not only forages these desert ingredients, but also cooks with them for a dining room full of guests. You learn a lot from folks who have to think about ingredients at scale, and in particular, efficient ways to harvest and process these foods. As well as ways of using them you just wouldn’t normally consider.

Though on different career paths, Brett and Daniel have a lot of overlap in their food philosophy, and this interview sounds a bit like two friends excitedly conversing about a hobby they both share.

Next time we're on that desert landscape, we'll be visiting with Brett. Learning about what’s in season and how he uses it. Far from the empty landscape that many people assume it is, he’s carved out a wild food niche in a place where water is the limiting factor, where the summer sun can rob you of your body's moisture, and where the dry nighttime air can kill you with hypothermia. In other words, Brett’s cuisine is forged in the fires of Arizona’s extreme climate. And that makes it all the more exciting.

It’s a place of sharp spines and venomous animals, of strongly psychedelic plants and even amphibians, a place where, not long ago, battles were waged to defend territory from invaders and to establish nation-states. Historic and also harsh in the extreme but also incredibly beautiful, giving rise to flavors found nowhere else.

This is foraging Arizona!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/143

If you haven’t been already, we're thrilled to introduce you to Dr. Mike Chamberlain. Somehow, over our years of making this show, we weren't aware of this man or his incredible work on turkeys. Now we feel like we've been stumbling around in the dark. Ok, that’s probably an overstatement, since we’ve had some great mentors, and we’ve had several excellent and very informed turkey hunters and biologists on the show over the years. But Mike seems to possess a meta-knowledge of these birds, seamlessly combining the science of their biology and ecology with the experience of a seasoned hunter.  

As a relatively new hunter himself, one who grew up with little of the ecological knowledge needed to be successful in the pursuit, Daniel has relied heavily on his adult learning skills, and that's included finding mentors that can accelerate his learning curve. He started out in his mid-30s, which means he didn’t get those crucial couple of decades of watching, listening, learning, and making mistakes. At his age, being successful early on was pretty important if he was going to stick with it and feed himself off the landscape.

Without that early life on-ramp to guide him through the typical hunter's journey, he's had to rely on friends, books, videos, podcasts, and of course, many mistakes in the field as his main educational inputs. It’s also meant getting occasionally waylaid by the “hunter science”. You know — those often repeated but ill-informed tropes that stick around in hunting camps, subtly leading us astray and speaking to the disconnect that often exists between the work of field biologists and the hunters that pursue the quarry. If he had known about Mike’s work several years ago he would have relied heavily on it to inform his knowledge of the species and his hunting strategies.

Our goal with making the WildFed Podcast has been to curate voices from the world of hunting, fishing, foraging and wild foods cooking, in order to make the road a little easier and the education more concise for those who — like Daniel — are embarking on this journey later in life or in a non-traditional way. So, in that sense, Mike represents just the kind of guest we're looking for. Someone who can rapidly accelerate what you understand about a specific species to make up for the lack of ecological, place-based knowledge many of us suffer from as a result of being raised in a nature-divorced culture.

We need Mike Chamberlains for every species — folks that can guide our learning, distilling the scientific knowledge into simple to absorb, useful lessons that help to deepen our connection to our wildlife neighbors.

So if you love wild turkeys, and particularly if you love — or hope to love — hunting them, here is an authoritative voice on the topic. Just talking to him has us very excited about next spring!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/159

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 reports and professional papers in forest and fire ecology, and he’s got extensive experience with fire research and management in the Pacific Coast states.

Today Dr. Agee makes a cogent argument for why — despite the incredible wildfires we’ve experienced in recent years — we are actually suffering from an under-sufficiency of fire on the North American landscape. Though these wildfires have taken many lives and caused unprecedented damage to people's homes, work, and health, they’re caused, in part, by many decades of intentional fire suppression. While fire suppression, at first glance, seems like an obvious choice, counter-intuitively, it's actually out of synch with North American ecology, which developed in tandem with both wildfire and intentionally set and managed fires used by the continent’s indigenous population for everything from warfare, to forest management to improving harvest and hunting grounds. The evidence is written into the life history of fire-adapted plants native to North America, and the evidence of these managed fires is a part of our ethnographic and archeological record.

But, the Eurocentric mind, set loose upon this continent had other designs, and wild or intentionally set fire wasn’t part of that. So, for decades, fires were suppressed even as fuel, once routinely burned off in large-scale fires, or gathered for use in campfires, has been allowed to accumulate. The result has been changes to the landscape that have diminished ecological productivity while at the same time becoming a recipe for disaster-level fires once they exceed our ability to suppress them.

Experts like James Agee see fire as integral to a healthy, well-managed landscape, though — unfortunately — the public, policymakers, and the circumstances created by our modern culture of land ownership and use are slow to accept or allow this time-proven method.

When we think about what really makes human beings different from other animals, we inevitably arrive at the domestication of fire. Ironic then, that we are destroying our own ecosystems, in part, by depriving them of it.

Yet, this is the very situation we find ourselves in. And it’s a topic we'd like to continue exploring here on this podcast. And who better to lead us into this conversation than Dr. James Agee. Someone who’s spent their career studying fire ecology.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/146

It was a great time getting together with wild food enthusiast, author, and foraging instructor Langdon Cook. Daniel and Langdon had a wide-ranging conversation focused on the wild foods of the Pacific Northwest but with an overarching theme of stewardship of wild species and places that's applicable to any ecoregion. Tune in to hear about x-rated clams, the fascinating underground world of mushroom hunters, how the plight of wild salmon impacts us all, and so much more!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/056

Tyler Sharp — CEO & Editor in Chief of Modern Huntsman — joins us for a fascinating conversation on his time in Africa, his thoughts on the rebranding of modern hunting, and how we can take control of the hunting narrative before we lose it forever. Tyler shares about his immersive experiences living and hunting in the African bush that were formative to his balanced outlook on modern hunting culture, and we also get to dig in on one of the most controversial hunts on earth — the African elephant. Tyler is passionate about elevating the hunting narrative, and we discuss his thoughts on the North American model of conservation, the hunter's paradox, and how we can make hunting more inclusive for all who want to participate.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/074

Tune into this special edition of The WildFed Podcast for a spring turkey hunt recap from six hunters — some seasoned turkey hunters and some just starting out — including a few familiar voices. From the calls and the shots to missed opportunities and amusing predicaments to a young boy's first turkey hunt and the hunt from a perspective of a state turkey biologist — this episode is packed with insights! Our guests include Carter Heath, Christi Holmes, Justin King, Kevin Merrow, Kelsey Sullivan, and our podcast host Daniel Vitalis. An enjoyable and informative listen for avid turkey hunters and beginners alike!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/040

We're on our way back from North and South Dakota as this podcast comes out. Instead of flying, we drove out, so we could bring our coolers, which, to our delight and gratitude, are now brimming with buffalo meat. Our harvest was enough to share with our host, the many hands that helped us, and our production team too. As he always has, the buffalo provides.

Now, of course, we know they’re properly called bison today — scientific name Bison bison — but after a week on the Standing Rock Reservation, it's hard to call them that. There, the people — Lakota and Dakota — say buffalo. And who knows better than a people whose life way and history has been so inextricably linked to this animal. So, for now, we'll call them what they call them.

Travis 'Good Bull Man' Condon — our host — invited us out to harvest a buffalo on the prairie and to share a traditional meal with some elders from the community. He put in a tremendous amount of work with us,  gutting, butchering, and packing our buffalo. He shared meals with us — and ceremony, language, stories and songs. It’s hard to describe all the magic we experienced during our stay there, and most is probably best kept close to the heart anyway, but suffice it to say that we are leaving there with more than full coolers. Our hearts are full too, with joy and love, and appreciation for our new friends. We’re already planning our trip back to what was some of the most beautiful country we’d ever visited and some of the most gracious folks we’ve ever met.

Our hunt, our chokecherry harvest, and of course the incredible meal we shared after, will be featured in Season 2 of WildFed on the Outdoor Channel. We’ve already reviewed the footage and can hardly wait for you to see it.

So, Wóphila — thanks — and gratitude. Your listenership, as always, is appreciated.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/102

We sat down with wild game cookbook author Kate Gooding at her home in Maine to chat about our shared love of preparing and eating wild game. A self-trained chef, the secret ingredient in Kate's flavorful dishes is the eclectic range of spices she utilizes. Kate shares some of her favorite ways to prepare wild game, including two of our favorite meats — bear and beaver. She also shares the basics of making a delicious stock, her essential kitchen equipment recommendations, and her top spice tips. Kate's enthusiasm about wild game cookery is sure to inspire you to experiment in the kitchen in the new year!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/062

Luke Storey — host of The Life Stylist Podcast — joins us to share a "first hunt" story like you've never heard before. Luke and Daniel have been friends for over a decade, originally connecting in the health and nutrition space. Luke recently went on his first hog hunt in Texas, as part of a weekend with past podcast guest Mansal Denton of Sacred Hunting, and this interview centers around his experience. Not just any hog hunt — this hunt was book ended by ceremony, entheogenic medicine, and a particularly deep and nuanced reflection on what it means to hunt, kill, and eat your quarry. We promise — you’ve never heard someone break down their first hunting experience with so much subtlety and emotional intelligence. This episode is not to be missed!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/083

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 works for a lot of people, so we don’t say it to take away from the pursuits of others. Rather, we say it to highlight the need many folks feel for a more connected and holistic approach to the hunt, the land, and the animals they harvest.

We believe history will record this decade as a pivotal transitional moment in the way humans relate to the land, ecology, and the species we cohabitate with. We suspect, for hunting to have a secure place in our future, we’ll need to fundamentally re-order the way we approach it, since many folks today and probably many more tomorrow will struggle to understand hunting culture as it exists right now. We need to be sure that hunting isn’t legislated away like some relic of the past but instead remains a living tradition with a place in our new, increasingly complex society.

This show has been a small part of a greater shift back towards a more food-centric view of hunting. And of course, in bringing a more holistic ecological perspective too. Mansal’s work goes a bit further, reimagining our modern spiritual relationship to the hunt and the animals we pursue. This spiritual approach was, throughout most of human history, inextricable from the hunt itself, which means that today’s more secular approach is kind of a radical new experiment in some regards. And we think that has left many would-be-hunters feeling alienated from this really foundational human pursuit.

So, while Mansal’s approach to hunting might not be for everyone, we think it’s a crucial slice of the pie chart that is modern hunting. It’s certainly recruiting, retaining, and reactivating certain individuals who’ve become jaded towards what they perceive as a spiritless hunt.

And many of us, even if we don’t choose to express it so openly, know, deep down, hunting isn’t just a physical experience, it truly is an expression of the spirit.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/135

Doug Duren — passionate hunter, farmer, land manager and conservationist — is a national voice in the conservation movement, and in particular, in the conversation around Chronic Wasting Disease in the North American deer herd. His guiding principle is simple: It's not ours, it's just our turn. We cover a lot of ground in this interview — from the impacts of big ag on the wild game we harvest to getting new hunters access to good hunting grounds, how chronic wasting disease is changing the hunting space and what we can do about it, and, ultimately, what it really means to be stewards of the landscapes we care for during our short visit here on earth.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/078

Emma Teal Laukitis and Claire Neaton — the Salmon Sisters — grew up on the Aleutian Islands of Alaska where they've worked on their family's commercial fishing boats since they were young. In this episode, Emma and Claire give us a glimpse into their inspiring and unique seafaring lifestyle. They share about the Alaskan salmon fishery, the role of women in commercial fisheries today, and the ins and outs of the industry. At the heart of their message is a deep appreciation for their coastal heritage and creating meaningful relationships to wild places through fishing and food.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/051

Alan Bergo — The Forager Chef — is back on the show! A surgeon on the plate, Alan's speciality is creative and innovative wild food cuisine. If you're looking for ways to move from store-bought food to more wild harvested food during this pandemic, tune in for Alan's unique culinary solutions that will increase your self-sufficiency and foraged culinary prowess simultaneously. A must-listen that's peppered with golden nuggets of wild cuisine wisdom! Alan also shares his newly released video-show — The Wild Harvest — which is guaranteed to inspire you to get out on the landscape to forage, fish, hunt & cook this spring!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/031

Dr. Stephen Rich is a Professor of Microbiology and Director of the Laboratory of Medical Zoology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he researches zoonotic diseases. He's particularly focused on the tick-borne illness Lyme disease and runs a lab called TickReport where you can send in ticks to test for pathogens. In this interview, Dr. Rich gives us a comprehensive overview of ticks & their life cycles, tick-borne disease, how to prevent tick bites and more. It's the beginning of tick season in many areas — now is the time to educate yourself on strategies to minimize your risk of tick-borne illness!

Dylan Stewart is a Maine-based spearfisherman, freediver, and the talented artist behind Bold Coast Burns. In this episode, Dylan gives us a glimpse into what it's like freediving and spearfishing off the coast of Maine, sharing some of his incredible experiences along the way. We discuss the species Dylan targets when spearfishing, freediving safety and breathing tips, the unique firsthand perspective of fish behavior that diving offers, the evolution of Dylan's fish artwork, and so much more. Enjoy!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/034

Kathryn Hopkins — director of the International Maple Syrup Institute and statewide resource for the Maine maple syrup industry — shares the ins and outs of modern maple syrup production. We discuss how the sap flow process works, where maple syrup is produced, best practices for the syrup harvester and the sugarbush, how the grading system works and so much more. If you're interested in getting started with harvesting your own maple syrup this year, you won't want to miss this comprehensive guide! Enjoy, and as Kathy says, if you're going to eat sugar, make it maple...

Our guest today is Tim Clemens of Ironwood Foraging, back for his second appearance. And this one is a lot of fun. In fact, Daniel was enjoying this conversation so much that he had to pull himself away to make his next appointment. They kind of range all over a pretty broad topic set just having fun and seeing where the conversation led them. We think you’ll appreciate the outcome.

Otherwise, we're going to be brief today, and let this conversation speak for itself because the grid is down here, and we’ve been without power for a few days now. Daniel had to shut the generator down to record the podcast intro due to the incessant grumbling noise it makes, so had to record on battery power. There’s a thick blanket of heavy wet snow bending all the gray birches and young poplars over pressing their canopies to the frozen ground. They say we won’t get power restored for another 36 hours or so, which is just part of living in rural Mane. It’s a bit of fun having this disruption to modernity, but it also makes things like podcasting a bit more challenging.

Oh, and one quick bit of housekeeping, we’re going to take next week off from the show to focus on the Holidays, so there won’t be a podcast next Tuesday. But of course, we’ll be back the following week.

Until then, we hope you have an incredible winter solstice and Christmas. As the Crooners say “It’s the most wonderful time… of the year!”

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/164

Today’s show really harkens back to Daniel's roots! His earliest work was focused on nutrition, which has been a primary interest of his for more than two and a half decades. He eventually landed on a wild foods lifestyle by following that thread of interest wherever it led. After becoming very dissatisfied with modern dietary dogma and popular fad diets, he started looking into our ancestral past for clues about what the human animal needs for nutritional inputs, and at what worked historically.

Today's guest — Dr. Bill Schindler — is author of the new book Eat Like A Human. The book lays out simply and clearly, the foundations of a zoologically appropriate human diet, based on both medical and nutritional science, but also on several hundred thousand years of evolutionary history.

Bill and Daniel, while coming from really different origin stories, have landed on really similar conclusions about food and how we relate to it. It's concepts like those he explores in his book that have led to Daniel hunting, fishing, foraging, and making this podcast and the WildFed TV show.

In other words, it was the desire to integrate ancestral practices into a modern life that led to this show. But you don’t have to harvest your own food to start putting these kinds of dietary practices into place. You can learn to forage the produce section and hunt the deli area of your local grocer. Bill’s book will show you how. Follow that path long enough, and you might just find yourself in the woods, or on the sea, chasing the most nutritious and ancestrally coherent food you can find.. so you can, like Bill says…. Eat Like A Human.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/108

In today's episode, Daniel is speaking to Jack and Andy of Foraged.Market, a website dedicated to high-quality specialty and wild foods from around the world. Not only is it a place where you can find and purchase wild foods from vetted, sustainable foragers, but it's also a place where you can sell your own foraged foods or products you forage! Of course, you’ve always had the ability to sell what you forage, but it's not been easy to find buyers interested in your goods. But Foraged brings buyers, looking for your products, to you. Think Etsy for wild foods. Linking sellers and buyers to one another.

Imagine that you are a chef or a home cook, and you’re looking for American Matsutake mushrooms. You could simply order them on Foraged.Marketplace, trusting that they’ve come from a forager who’s been evaluated by the Foraged team, to ensure they’re using sustainable foraging practices.

Or, let’s say you’ve been making birch syrup at home, and you’ve got a surplus. You could sell your product on Foraged too, with your own online store front — assuming you’ve first gone through their sustainable forging practices verification process.

This is a huge leap forward for the wild foods and foraging community. Opening up avenues for the flow of these incredible, sustainable products into our food systems and empowering those who tend the wild to become more self-sufficient practicing their craft as an income source.

It means chefs can more easily access the incredible ingredients that we foragers have been enjoying for years, broadening the public's palette and perception of what the wild world produces, and thereby placing value on species that might otherwise be forgotten, ensuring that at least some of these species get the attention and eventual protection they need to exist in perpetuity!

It also opens up pathways for more scrutiny into the sustainability of our practices and to subtly shift the foraging world away from a taking model to more of a tending model.

We've got really high hopes for what Jack and Andy are doing at Foraged and are really looking forward to the way this could positively impact the foraging world! And also to see how it might benefit you, the listener, in either accessing wild foods you’re interested in, or in sharing wild foods you love with others.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/122

Rebugging The Planet?

We spend a lot of time and energy considering the role that charismatic animals play in our ecosystems and why we should conserve them. But what about less charismatic critters? The ones that aren’t so pretty.

Vicki Hird is here to speak on behalf of the bugs — not just insects — but invertebrates in general. Throughout this interview, we’ll use the term bug loosely to encompass insects, arachnids, plankton, and just about any other invertebrate too, because, as it turns out, in many cases, their populations are in decline. The culprits are many. Some obvious — like habitat loss and deliberate or unintended chemical assault. But there are some surprises too — like the impact that high-energy communications systems like 5G technology may have on invertebrate populations.

It’s easy to muster the public will to conserve the polar bear, the blue whale, and the bald eagle. But what of bugs? Are our unconscious biases keeping us incognizant of their decline?

We’ve all been inculcated, not intentionally, but subconsciously, with a cultural bias — disdain might be a better word — for bugs. Squash them, spray them with pesticide, avoid them at all costs. But in an era that, looking back a few hundred years from now, will likely be defined by ecological crisis and the measures taken to confront it — what we need most is a reframing of the way we view our fellow life forms. Because we can’t sustainably change the way we act without changing the way we think.

Many of us received a miseducation on what Vicki calls bugs. We learned they're dirty, they’re dangerous, they’re vectors for disease. Vicki is here to correct the record and offer us the opportunity to reframe our relationship with these all-important creatures. And she’s sharing things we can each do, individually, to promote the return of their numbers.

She’s here to help re-bug the planet! But first, we have to re-bug our minds.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/110

Who doesn’t love Marine Biology? Daniel recently had the opportunity to give a talk at the celebrated Maine Maritime Academy, addressing a class of marine biology and oceanography students. While he was there he met today’s guest, Dr. Alan Verde. Alan is a biologist and diver who specializes in corals, anemones, jellyfish, sea cucumbers and octopus.

Alan, along with the school where he teaches, is training the future generations of young people who will eventually contribute to the stewardship of our seas. It’s a big responsibility, given the precarious situation we now find ourselves in on planet earth.

Beyond the classroom curriculum, Alan leads multi-week dive trips with his student base to spend time with the organisms they’re studying in their natural habitats. It’s so important, because it’s all too easy to study a topic from afar, or from an ivory tower, not realizing you only know the thing superficially, rather than intimately. But Alan makes sure his students are getting below sea level to interact in ways that are more meaningful than just turning the page in a textbook or turning in a paper.

It’s why we promote participating in hunting, fishing, and foraging for food. We worry that without an intimate relationship, one that's up close and personal, we’ll just slowly forget the organisms we share this planet with. So whenever possible, whether it's through eating, like we promote so much here, or it's through biological work like Alan teaches, we need to get hands-on. Once you know a creature it's hard not to factor its needs into your decision matrix.

That’s the kind of experiential knowledge we’ll need the policymakers of the future to have.

Of course, the biology, physiology, and ecology of the particular organisms that Alan focuses on are fascinating all on their own, so there’s plenty to learn here today too. The underwater world is so physiologically alien to our own as to make it, effectively, another world. Yet we do share this planet with these creatures, as well as, ultimately, a common ancestor. So, foreign as they seem, they are our relations. And while it’s important to remember who we share the planet with, it’s also easy to forget if we have no contact with them. That’s why Alan and Daniel both, in their own ways, recommend you get out there. There’s still a whole world populated by incredible and unique organisms just waiting to be remembered and factored in by us. All we have to do is go meet them!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/160

Is camouflage necessary for hunting? How much of it is gimmick and hype? If it does work, to what degree does it make sense to be employing it?

Join Daniel for a solo edition of the podcast as he takes a deep dive into the art and practicality of camouflage. Nature regularly employs camouflage for deception — both for predators and for prey — and it's important that we, as hunters, consider our visibility in the landscapes we're moving through.

In this episode, Daniel explains how camouflage works and gives an overview of the myriad of different camouflage options available — patterns, colors, brands and more. He explores the effectiveness of these options in the field and shares his own experiences, as well as some of his favorites.

We hope this gives you some food for thought as you consider your hunting, fishing and foraging wardrobe into the future!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/117

It's the final episode of The WildFed Podcast, and Daniel and our show producer Grant Guiliano get together to reflect on the last few years of podcasting together, tie a bow on some of the recurring themes we've discussed on the show, as well as look to the future of WildFed.

They chat about the value in reconnecting with the species in your landscape, their thoughts on the future regulations of hunting and foraging, imposter syndrome, plans for a future podcast + a few teasers for Season 4 of the WildFed TV show, and more.

We're so incredibly grateful for your listenership and support over the years! Stay tuned for what's to come...

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/174

Micah Woodcock is a wild seaweed harvester and the owner of Atlantic Holdfast Seaweed Company. His life is intimately intertwined with the marine ecosystem where he sustainably hand-harvests these nutritious sea vegetables. Tune into this interview for Micah's sustainable harvesting techniques, the wild world of seaweed politics, a fascinating discussion on developing a relationship to place, and much more. If you eat seaweed, want to, or best of all, are interested in procuring your own supply, this interview is not to be missed!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/036

Dan Gardoqui — nature-based mentor and bird language expert — joins us to share how bird language and tracking can not only make you a better hunter but also improve the richness of your experience in the field. Talking with birds is being in conversation with the wild, Dan says, and it will make you more conscious of how you move through the woods. In this fascinating conversation — complete with Dan's bird calls and squirrel alarm sounds — he shares how birds can reveal nature's secrets and provides actionable tips to get you started in learning bird language and tracking.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/054

Well, it was bound to happen eventually. But we'll admit, we weren't expecting it to be in this interview. Our guest today is hunter, conservationist, naturalist and filmmaker Donnie Vincent. Someone Daniel was tremendously inspired by — and still is today — when he first set out to get involved in hunting and outdoor media.

Donnie is an iconoclast, standing out amongst successful hunting personalities in the way he hunts, looks, speaks, and for his uniquely thoughtful and artistic approach to outdoor media.

Daniel and Donnie have podcasted together a few times now, and they've always found an easy synergy in their conversations, but this time things went in a direction Daniel simply wasn’t expecting.

We've never given a trigger warning on our shows before, but we feel compelled to give one today. This conversation will be the cause for celebration for some and outrage for others. If you find yourself in the latter category, we hope you’ll, out of respect for both Daniel and Donnie, give their words a fair chance. It’s far too common and easy today to disregard people you don’t agree with, without giving their arguments a fair chance.

Donnie and Daniel, it seems, both see a dystopia unfolding in front of us, and its implications for the future of what we do as hunters and foragers are hard to ignore. Not to mention its impact on our personal liberties and basic freedoms.

That said, it was refreshing for Daniel to be honest and forthright about topics he's danced around for years, since it’s felt rather stifling for him to remain silent. But he did because these things weren’t really part of the brand or the focus of this podcast. It’s ironic then, that as we approach the final episodes of this show, that it would come up in this way.

So, in this interview, Daniel and Donnie will be talking at length about things that you’re not really supposed to talk about publicly. We suspect many of you will feel similarly, but of course, some of you will feel very differently. If you disagree, we do hope that — in the spirit of dialectic — you’ll support their inherent right to have this conversation. And understand how challenging it’s been to feel like they haven’t been able to for years.

So, when Daniel promised last week that this week's guest would express some really different ideas than last week's, now you’ll see what he meant. Here goes…

This is Daniel's most recent conversation with Donnie Vincent.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/170

Daniel had a great time chatting with Wade Truong and Rachel Owen — the charismatic duo behind Elevated Wild, a brand dedicated to hunting, fishing, foraging and exploring the untamed table. Rachel and Wade are based in Virginia, where, they say, "it's a great place to be a wild foods generalist." We take a walk through their wild food year and hear about the many different species these two get after — Snakehead, Sika Deer & Cobia to name a few. Their innovative culinary creations and cooking tips are sure to inspire you to take your wild food cooking game to the next level!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/037

Ben Goldfarb is an award-winning environmental writer and the author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. Ben's expansive knowledge on the deeply misunderstood beaver, their profound positive impacts on ecosystems, and how they've shaped our history will re-orient your view of North America, and with any luck, convert you into a Beaver Believer. In this episode, Ben takes us through the captivating history of beavers from their Pleistocene roots to their near extirpation during the "fur-pocalypse" to modern restoration efforts — with lots of fascinating facts about the industrious beaver along the way.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/047

Today’s guest is Senior Cyber Tracker Kersey Lawrence.

If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you’ve heard Daniel speak to a few skilled trackers in past episodes. This skill, of studying, identifying, and ultimately tracking and trailing animals was — most likely — fundamental to the development of the modern human brain and perhaps even to language itself.

At one time, this skill would have been nearly universal amongst humans, but of course, in our more modern era, it’s atrophied to the point that most of us can’t identify the tracks of the native wildlife around us, no less interpret them.

Now, modern hunters are a bit of an exception. Most of us are aware of the track patterns of the animals we pursue, and use these tracks, albeit in a rudimentary way, to locate our quarry. That kind of tracking is a bit like learning an alphabet, or maybe even reading a few monosyllabic words. What Daniel's talking with Kersey about today is different. It’s more akin to reading sentences, paragraphs, and ultimately books of knowledge about how animals have used the landscape in the recent past and potentially might use it in the future too.

There are places and peoples in the world where this skill is still alive, part of an unbroken lineage that stretches back into the deepest recesses of human antiquity. And there are also folks, for whom this field of study came later in life but who have developed it into a contemporary art-form and culture — who’ve codified it and who are ensuring it doesn’t blink out of existence the way so much of our ancestral skills and technologies have.

Kersey has a foot in both worlds. She lives part time and works alongside trackers in Africa, who come from communities where tracking is still practiced the way it always has been. Places where the practice of this art was never generationally interrupted. But she also lives part time here in the US where she teaches tracking to folks whose lineage forgot the art of tracking long ago.

Kersey is the first woman to ever earn the title of Senior Tracker in the internationally renowned CyberTracker system. Today she’s going to tell us what CyberTracker is, and about the art of tracking. She’s done the deep dive, and she’s going to introduce us to something our ancestors forgot long ago, and maybe even invite us to pick it up where those distant relatives left off.

To not just follow in their footsteps, but to follow their footsteps themselves.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/114

"Hunting teaches a person to think with his heart instead of his head. That is the secret of hunting," says Dr. Randall Eaton — internationally-recognized authority in animal behavior, wildlife conservation and human evolution — in his book The Sacred Hunt. Dr. Eaton has dedicated his life to promoting hunting as a healthy expression of humanity, and it was a great honor to have him join us for a conversation about the more spiritual side of hunting. In this episode, Dr. Eaton shares his perspectives on the importance of connection and respect in hunting, the origins of trophy hunting, and recounts some of his incredible experiences with whales. We even get into some fun and subjective side tangents, including his thoughts on metaphysics and psychic communication with other species!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/067

Arthur Haines — botanist, forager & Maine Guide — is back on The WildFed Podcast! "We are pieces of a complex web," says Arthur in this intimate and powerful conversation. From describing their stories of miscarriage and the loss of a newborn to recounting their experiences hunting black bear, Daniel and Arthur cover some pretty personal and thought-provoking territory on the topics of birth, life, death, and the ethics of killing.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/049

Renowned botanist Arthur Haines joins us for a conversation that ranges from deep, philosophical ideas about early human beings to extremely practical tips on harvesting wild blueberries. With a low barrier to entry, wild blueberries are an excellent pursuit for the novice and experienced forager alike! In this comprehensive guide, you'll learn about the wild blueberry's range and its important function in the diet, along with harvesting and processing best practices to get you started in the field this summer.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/033

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/055

Today's episode is with our good friend Randy Huntley. This guy is a hoot. He’s a hunter, a registered Maine guide who leads bear and moose hunts, an Animal Damage Control trapper, a maple sap tapper, an avid fiddleheader, and all-around outdoorsman. He’s got one of the best beards in his field, and he’s also Daniel's beaver tapping mentor.

One of the things we like the most about him, he’s as into eating wild game as we are, and for him, eating beaver is no exception.

As you probably know, for most of modern beaver trapping history, it was the pelts that motivated trappers to wade into the beaver's watery world. But today, with the price of pelts so low, it's scarcely worth your time to trap for furs alone. Even when selling the Castor glands into the market, it’s hard to imagine breaking even as a money-motivated beaver trapper. But when you start considering the incredible food value, and the fact that they can weigh 20-60 pounds apiece, trapping as a wild food strategy starts looking really enticing. Furs and glands become a secondary consideration.

So, with eating beaver on our mind — insert laugh track here — we've been setting off to the stream banks with Randy to “lay some steel” as they say. The result, some of the best eating game meat the wild world provides. Beautiful red meat for steaks and braises, and lots of succulent fat. Not what you normally associate with rodents, but then again, these are the continent's largest, and they’re in a culinary category all their own.

We think beaver is one of North America's most underutilized game meats, so if you're looking to fill the freezer without needing to fire a single shot, consider a beaver trapline. After all, it hunts while you sleep. But you’ll need to go find yourself a mentor like Randy Huntley first because there’s no substitute for a great teacher.

And if he comes with a highly polished Maine accent, just consider that a bonus!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/113

It’s always fun for Daniel to sit down with his good friend — WildFed producer and cinematographer Grant Guiliano — to podcast without a guest. Just them, talking behind the scenes. Daniel and Grant are currently filming Season 3 of the WildFed TV show for Outdoor Channel, which means they're on the road a lot — flying, driving, boating, hunting, fishing, and foraging, and, of course, filming it all. It’s a lot of hotels, AirBnBs, and time away from home. One constant is the time they end up spending together, so there’s always a lot to talk about when they sit down to record a show like this one.

Our team has just come off of a really exciting trip out to Maryland, where we did some offshore fishing and some inland pawpaw foraging, and so it was fun to recap those experiences.

Currently, we’re in the midst of filming an archery deer hunt on an island off the coast of Maine, and then we’ll have 2 more episodes to make to finish out our season! Those episodes will all go live in just a few more months, so stay tuned for that!
In the meantime, if there are any topics you’d like to hear us discuss or guests you’d like to hear on the show, write us at info@wild-fed.com or hit us up on any of our social media feeds. We always love hearing from you!

Thanks for all your incredible support and know we are hard at work creating another great season of the WildFed TV show for you!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/151

Kevin Kossowan is the creator of From The Wild, a James Beard award nominated, culinary adventure series about wild foods that has elevated field cookery to a level not really seen before in a tv series. A film maker, he’s also the co-creator of Les Stroud’s Wild Harvest on PBS and Nat Geo.

One of the things we love about talking with Kevin is his willingness to get into some of the more taboo and uncomfortable nooks and crannies of the ethical and moral and ecological obligations of hunting, fishing, and foraging... especially into conversations we, as hunters, are often told we shouldn’t have.

While the first part of this conversation is some catch up, talk about recent harvests and the landscapes they happen in, the second part of this conversation really heats up, as Daniel and Kevin start talking about things like pollution in wild foods, ethics in killing, and the things that motivate or deter us from participating or not participating in harvests.

The terrain gets sticky, and that’s precisely why we think it's important to explore. Because what we do, harvesting organisms from the wild for food, needs to be clearly articulated for us to make quality decisions about life and death, and of course, for the public to understand — and hopefully support — our choices, and the system of laws that legally governs our actions. Some of these moral quandaries and ethical dilemmas aren’t solvable, they’re too nuanced and individual for that. Instead, each of us has to dig deep inside to determine where we land on these issues.

We hope you enjoy this conversation!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/107

Lori McCarthy - founder of CodSounds - is a wild food forager who has dedicated her life to preserving the cultural food heritage of Newfoundland and Labrador. Lori invited us up to Newfoundland to share a bit of what makes the place she calls home so special. We recorded this interview at the end of an incredible week of unique wild food adventures with Lori as our guide. Tune in to hear what it's like living in a region so interwoven with its cultural wild food traditions, the history of the Newfoundland cod fishery, and a recap of some of the highlights from the wild food trip of a lifetime.

Adam Haritan is the nature enthusiast behind Learn Your Land — a media channel dedicated to plant and mushroom ID, wild food harvesting,  and the benefits of nature connection. Daniel and Adam have a lively conversation on all things wild food, including why you should get to know non-edible wild species, understanding wild mushrooms, the future of foraging regulations, why so many mushroom foragers are "psychedelic people," how hunting changes nature interaction, and more. Adam's enthusiasm is sure to inspire you to deepen your connection to your local landscape!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/039

Kelsey Sullivan is the Migratory and Upland Game Bird biologist for Maine's Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife (MDIFW). Kelsey oversees the MDIFW game bird management program and has been an integral part of the continued success of Maine's wild turkey recovery and management. In this interview, Kelsey shares the inspiring story of the recovery of Maine's wild turkey and the work he does with MDIFW to conserve this population for generations to come. In addition, you'll hear about Kelsey's work in Alaska on the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the wide range of opinions on Maine's turkey population, and Kelsey's best tips for successful and conscientious turkey hunting.

We're talking today with Paul McCarney, PhD. Paul’s an environmental social scientist, hunter, and conservationist that lives in Canada’s remote Yukon. You could think of it as our northern neighbor’s Alaska. He’s in Whitehorse, which is north of Juneau but east of Anchorage.

Most recently, Paul hosted the HuntToEat Podcast, where he covered topics that, until recently, haven’t been part of the typical hunting or conservation conversation. Like Daniel, Paul’s an adult-onset hunter.

Coming to it later in life — like so many people today — has given him some unique perspectives that differ a lot from those typically held by folks raised in North American hunting culture.

Now, Paul and Daniel have some very different socio-political views, which will become apparent in this interview, yet they approach this conversation as a dialectic. Neither of them are interested in playing gotcha, but rather wanted to hear from one another on issues that can be contentious, or even taboo in the world of conservation. We think this approach is needed now more than ever, since we’re allowing these cultural issues to divide us to a degree we haven’t witnessed before in our lifetime. Hopefully this conversation inspires more dialectic and a little less pointless debate.

That said, Paul and Daniel are both very intrigued by the rapidly changing demographics in hunting, though Paul’s interests lie more in the intersection of race, gender, and culture. Issues that have become significant talking points in most other arenas in recent years, but that have only just started to become issues in the realms of hunting and conservation. So it’s really interesting to get his take on this. We've seen a lot of changes happening in this area recently, but of course, there's still a lot of work to be done.

Like Paul, we want to see the world of hunting be a place that all people feel welcome, since we see it as a fundamentally human pursuit. Not one that belongs to specific race or gender or ideology. It’s a heritage that belongs to all the peoples of the world. So while Paul and Daniel might approach the conversation differently, Daniel doesn't see them as being on different teams, rather more like the two different wings on a plane. You need both to get where you’re going safely. It would be a very bad idea for folks on one side of a plane to try to actively dismantle the other side’s aisle and wing. But, unfortunately, that’s just become the norm in our — as Mike Judge would say — Idiocracy.

So, it's in the spirit of dialectic we present this conversation with Paul McCarney. We're looking forward to your thoughts and feedback. We don’t touch on these topics often here, so we honestly don’t know where you, as a listener, stand. So please don’t hesitate to comment on the post associated with this interview on Instagram and Facebook. We'll keep an eye out for your thoughts.

Until then, let’s continue the dialectic. We can all learn a lot from each other. We just have to be open and listen.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/158

We hosted new hunters Martissa Williams and Rod Coleman in Maine to guide them on their inaugural hunt. During their visit, we explored how race can create unique barriers to entry when starting out in hunting. Hunting is a shared evolutionary and ecological food acquisition pattern of all of humankind, and we hope this conversation can open dialogue on how we as hunters can make sure that everyone who wants it can easily find a pathway to this ancient but relevant practice.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/053

Our guest today is Bob Krumm — author of several wonderful books on berry foraging that span the Pacific Northwest to New England and a fly fishing guide on the Bighorn River since the 1980s. In fact, still guiding clients today, Bob's now the eldest guide on the river — quite a distinction. We love this conversation because Bob's got qualities that we really want to cultivate in this life. He's so kind and good-hearted, and his outlook on life is so beautifully positive.

Bob's been gathering berries for jams and jellies for decades, and he sent Daniel several bottles, which he and Avani have readily devoured. He's convinced some of Bob's good vibes have made it into each bottle. Anyway, it's always great to get the perspective of folks who've been on the path and the planet a bit longer. It's such an important reminder of what's really most important in life.

Bob sent Daniel his books, and in each one where he signed them, he wrote a little message. They kind of sum up the philosophy that we're talking about.

One says: Remember, life's just a bowl of berries. Sweet ones at that.

Another reads: May all of your endeavors turn out berry good.

And the third: May your berry bucket be full of joy, love, blessings, and lots of luscious berries.

We think Bob collecting berries along the Bighorn River has gathered more than just ripe fruits — he's found a lot of what life is really all about.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/121

It's always a pleasure to have Arthur Haines — botanist, forager & Maine Guide — back on the show! In this episode, Daniel and Arthur go in-depth on maple syrup, maple trees, and their own home sugar bushes. An iconic wild food of the Northeast, maple syrup is an important staple in both Daniel and Arthur's homes. Tune in to gain an understanding of the process of harvesting maple syrup, its indigenous history, health benefits and nutrient profile, along with simple strategies for a beginner's maple sugaring set-up. If you're interested in getting started harvesting maple syrup, this conversation will give you invaluable insights from two seasoned harvesters to get you going this spring!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/068

It’s our honor and great pleasure to have Sam Thayer on the show. Sam is probably North America’s most well-known and respected voice in foraging today. Anyone who’s serious about foraging in the US or Canada likely has, and prizes, his three-book series in their library. Sam is an extremely well-rounded ecologist too — in possession of tremendous place-based knowledge and experience that goes well beyond just hunting and gathering. In our opinion, he’s truly one of the great ecological minds of our time.

In this interview, we discuss the way our enculturated minds — with what he calls an agrocentric worldview — have prevented us from understanding the original wild foodists, the hunting and gathering peoples of the world. In particular, the way their incredible, functional, and sophisticated ecological management strategies created food abundance on their landscape.

So, today we’ll be discussing agrocentrism. What it is, where it comes from, and how it keeps us from a truly intimate and sustainable relationship with the natural world.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/090

Today's guest, Richard Zane — lead biologist with USFWS Northeast Region’s Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Program — sheds light on how the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation works and why it's been so successful. Through the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act that’s been around for nearly a century, the Federal Government uses funds collected as excise taxes on hunting and fishing equipment to support wildlife field research, habitat restoration and programs that help to restore and maintain healthy wildlife populations in the US. Gain a better understanding of the role hunting and fishing have on preserving North American wildlife and wild places now and for generations to come!

A.J. DeRosa is the founder of Project Upland — a multi-media operation that produces, in addition to video and web-based content, a quarterly, subscription-based premium print magazine. He’s also the author of the deer hunting cult-classic, The Urban Deer Complex. An accomplished hunter, rabid conservationist, and success in the hunting industry, he is not your typical hunter.

Whether it's his politics, which are woven as a through-line throughout his unique positions, or his insistence on activism as a key component of conservation, he occupies a space adjacent — and sometimes quite antithetical — to those typified by what could be seen as an often monolithic mindset amongst those that hunt or fish.

Daniel is someone who’s often felt like an outsider in the world of hunting, frequently expressing views that run counter to those of his fellow outdoorsman, and A.J. is altogether more revolutionary in his approach. 

When we first met and heard him speak, it was a surprisingly refreshing, if not sometimes challenging, stream of consciousness we hadn’t heard expressed in hunting circles before.

Being some 6% or less of the American public, those of us that hunt, understandably, have more often than not, chosen to silo ourselves and as a result, have suffered from a kind of slow progress with respect to the rest of the public at large.

But A.J. is different. Different than any hunter or conservationist Daniel has sat down with yet. Don’t expect a rehashing of the same old talking points here. He’s not that guy. But, he might just be the foreshadowing of the voice of the future hunter. As a new generation inherits the 3 million-year-old tradition, they bring to it new ideas, paradigms, ways of viewing the world, ecology, our predatory presence in it, and our place in the grand scheme of ecological diversity.

Change is scary, and often easier to resist than embrace. A lot of us behave like a dog on a leash. Pull back too much, and the dog feels the urge to push forward against the pressure. That’s the knee-jerk response a lot of the hunting world has taken to the changing cultural, economic, scientific, and ecological landscape we are encountering in this rapidly evolving decade and the ones preceding it. We dig in and resist change.

But this is, in our opinion, the wrong approach. At least, it’s an approach that always seems to — eventually — give way to progress regardless. So, if you hear ideas expressed here today that run counter to those you hear at the range, hunting box store, or in hunting camp, know you are, most likely, hearing the voice of the future. However threatening to status quo it might be.

Resistance is, after all, futile. We’ll all be assimilated. Seriously though, change is coming, it’s inevitable. And what is most important isn’t the way we have been doing it, but rather, preserving our relationship to the natural world. Let’s welcome all ideas, even the radical ones. Even the ones that scare us. Even the ones that challenge our most closely held illusions. If we don’t, the world will surely pass us by. If we can’t thread the needle of holding onto what we cherish and allowing ourselves to adapt to change, we — as hunters — might just go the way of the passenger pigeon.

Change is coming. How will we adapt?

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/172

Dr. Karl Malcolm is an ecologist and hunter who leads the Renewable Resources department for the Eastern Region of the US Forest Service. With his inclusive, boundary-pushing, and thoughtful ethos on conservation, he's a model of the hunter/conservationist of the future. In this episode,  Karl shares about his experiences working with Moon Bears in China and the contrast between hunting and conservation here versus there. We also discuss his fresh perspectives on bringing other stakeholders outside of the hunting and angling community into the conservation funding model and how we can build bridges between hunters and non-hunters. Karl encourages us to push the conservation conversation into a new arena, and this thought-provoking interview will give you a lot to think about!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/073

Learn about becoming a modern-day hunter-gatherer with Arthur Haines — hunter, forager, renowned botanist and Maine Guide. Arthur is an incredible resource on both the philosophical and practical aspects of all things wild food. This episode provides a useful framework for getting started in foraging, choosing your weapon, having a good relationship with your local game warden, developing marksmanship, and more.

Tune into the intro for Daniel's thoughts on the novel coronavirus and how it relates to the modern-day hunting & gathering lifestyle.

Tony Seichrist — owner and head chef at The Wyld and past podcast + WildFed TV show guest — just hosted us for a week of hog hunting outside Savannah, Georgia, and we sat down to talk wild hogs, recap a successful hunt, and to discuss our wild pork preparation. Wild hogs are invasive to the area and can be particularly destructive to native habitat and agricultural land, so hunting them is not just encouraged, but rather, management agencies are seeking total eradication of this deleterious, non-native species. In this episode, we discuss the wild hog conundrum — hunting with reverence and respect, yet also with a goal of eliminating the species from the landscape. There’s plenty of side tangents on utilizing meat from older animals, what it means to self-identify as a hunter and more!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/066

Our interview today is with Philippe Grenade-Willis, someone Daniel's been working with for a few years now on various art projects for both WildFed and Surthrival. Philippe is an incredible illustrator with a passion for the outdoors and the creatures that live there.

In a nod to Daniel's former podcast, ReWild Yourself, today’s episode is a bit more esoteric than most of the content we curate here, but it’s also a LOT of fun. Daniel and Philippe talk about art, dreams and archetypes. About the metaverse, transhumanism, and how quickly we are headed into artificial worlds at the expense of the natural one. And they discuss the journey that those of us who didn’t grow up as hunters must embark on to embrace our new roles as ecological predators. It's a fascinating conversation that we didn’t want to end.

Philippe is currently working on the art for the packaging on a new and very exciting Surthrival product and just finished up a t-shirt design that we are launching today — our Antidote to the Metaverse shirt. We highly recommend you check out his art on his instagram page — @OurNuminousNature. It’ll give you some insight into the things we talk about in this episode.

As we discuss here today, our world is changing fast. Soon, it just might be unrecognizable from the one you were born into. But nature is a compass that is true, one you can trust to keep you grounded in reality. It’s something more complex and beautiful than anything humans can create themselves, and as captured as we may be by the glitz and bright lights of our technology, it doesn’t take much more than a walk in the woods to prove it. We suspect you already know and believe that, and that’s why you listen to a show like this one.

Nature truly is an antidote to the metaverse. One, we suspect, we’re all going to desperately need in the years ahead.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/153

Daniel met Dr. Ann Cleveland back on Halloween of this year, when he was invited to give a guest lecture at the Maine Maritime Academy where she’s a Marine Biology Professor. Her husband, Dr. Alan Verde, who is also a professor there, was a guest on our show back on episode #160.

While they were there, Ann gave Daniel and his wife a tour of the campus, and they had the opportunity to talk a bit about her work there, and he thought it would be great to get her on the show to discuss it. We didn’t expect for them to take such a deep detour into the big picture of our precarious situation here on earth, but we're glad they did. Daniel and Ann go deep on topics of climate, fisheries, and our future here on this beautiful planet.

We always imagine that those in marine biology must have a front-row seat from which to view the severity of our pollution crisis, habitat and biodiversity loss, and the rapid climate-induced ecological changes that are taking place in a way that most of us — especially if we aren’t engaged ecologically with nature — are only intellectually aware of at best or oblivious to at worst.

So, in this conversation, Daniel quickly found himself parting with ichthyology and focusing more on the existential. It’s hard not to, since the more time we spend hunting, fishing, and foraging, the more concerned we grow for the planet’s ecology. Not because of hunting, fishing, or foraging themselves, but because — like we just mentioned for marine biologists — these food pursuits bring you face to face with the reality of what is happening in the “environment” that everyone loves talking about but so few really go out and experience.

In particular, we wrestle with the population-wide reliance on commercial fisheries. We always cringe to say that out loud. We have several friends that make their living as fishermen. We love what they do, love to eat their harvest, and love to go out fishing with them when we have the opportunity. We deeply respect the trade, profession, and ancient lifestyle of those who work the sea. We recognize its important place in our heritage and that it's a lot more than just a job.

We also feel that ending the market hunt was one of the best things we could have done for conservation and it's the reason that contemporary folks like you or me get to hunt in North America. If we had continued on, harvesting our game for the market, it’s unlikely they’d be much of anything to hunt today. Many now recovered expirations would have, no doubt, become extinctions. We'd be remiss not to mention the passenger pigeon as a perfect example of what we mean.
Things in our sea are more complex. First, they are far more productive than our terrestrial ecosystems, giving the false impression that they can supply our population with protein limitlessly. Due to the water’s obfuscation, the ocean’s reserves can seem bottomless. But of course, they aren’t. With so much of the modern world still dependent on the sea for its food, we don’t think it's alarmist to be concerned about the sustainability of this approach. But unlike landmasses with sovereign borders, the seas are a shared resource. Who can regulate them? Who would we trust to regulate them?

And while we here in the US have made tremendous strides towards sustainable regulation, much of the world is far too concerned with immediate subsistence to trifle with such concerns. People need to eat.

We believe in wild foods — of course — it's why we make this show. In particular, we think the wild foods of the sea are critical to our health and can help foster an important relationship to planetary ecology when approached with that intention. But, like a good old case of cognitive dissonance, we simultaneously fear we are taking too much, too fast, with technologies that are too disruptive or too effective.

Want to know the solution? Yea, us too. But until then, we appreciate being able to have the conversation. So a big thanks to Dr. Ann Cleveland, who came on to talk about ichthyology, and found herself in a conversation about the sustainability of the human lifeway on planet earth. Ann, we really appreciate your input and perspectives here. We hope this conversation inspires some deeper thought and inquiry into the topic. It certainly is becoming a pressing one. And we can’t help but think things are just getting started!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/163

Robert Steneck, Ph.D is a professor of Oceanography, Marine Biology and Marine Policy in the School of Marine Sciences at the University of Maine. He's a marine ecologist whose laboratories include coastal zones in the Gulf of Maine and the Caribbean, and his lifetime of marine research is prolific, with topics ranging from coral reefs to lobsters to marine ecosystem dynamics and more. We sat down with Bob on the front porch of his seaside cottage for this conversation on ocean ecology, the management of ocean fisheries, and his hope for a community-based fisheries management model in the future.

As someone that came to hunting late in life, someone that wasn’t raised understanding the intricacies and nuance of the North American conservation model or how our wildlife resources are allocated and ultimately utilized, Daniel was very impressed with the scope and breadth of our opportunities here in the United States as he started to take advantage of them. The more he participated, the more clearly he saw just how blessed we are here to have the ability to participate in this imperfect but extremely functional system.

While it can always and should always be improved upon, when we hunt we do so with the knowledge that biological, ecological, and even social concerns have been addressed and that the system is, for the most part, sound.

State and Federal wildlife management ensures that population dynamics are strong amongst game species, that there is sufficient opportunity for everyone to participate, and that science is conducted rigorously so that the hunt can be pursued in perpetuity.

But what about our right to hunt and fish. Do we really have one? One that is enshrined at the constitutional level? Well, no, not really. At least, not in the way that, say, the 1st amendment protects free speech and peaceable assembly or that the 2nd amendment guarantees citizens the right to keep and bear arms. But can our right to hunt and fish be protected in similar ways? At least at the State Constitutional level?

Our guest today is Ellary TuckerWilliams, from the Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation — and they are working on that very thing. They’re at it around the clock, behind the scenes, protecting our ability to hunt and fish in ways that we’d not heard about before, but now that we have, seem indispensable. They work at the political level, not only to enshrine our rights but also to protect the heritage of hunting against what is a constant onslaught from groups that would, if they could, slowly erode our legal ability to hunt until nothing remains.

For the most part, we at WildFed are simply interacting at the resource level, so we're glad to know folks like Ellary are out there — communicating with people in our Federal and State Governments, educating them on the issues that matter to those of us who utilize the resources on our landscape. We need that kind of representation in those places that most nature lovers won’t or don’t go. Namely, into the halls of government.

So big thanks to Ellary and the Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation — many of us have benefited greatly from the work they do, likely, without ever knowing it.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/167

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 top dollar to get them on their menus each spring.

In the commercial market, a ramp — a member of the alliums, or onion family — is a pungent bulb with two or three green leaf blades attached that when cooked are surprisingly sweet. They're wonderful sautéed, roasted, or grilled, and make incredible pesto-like oil preserves.

But their popularity has come at a cost, with the ever-present concern of over-harvest looming over this delicious spring ephemeral. As a result, a new ramp foraging ethic has emerged, which suggests harvesters take only “one leaf per plant” and leave the bulbs in the ground. This leaves another leaf or two for the plant to continue to photosynthesize, and the bulb to continue living in the ground.

But Clay — along with some other prominent foragers in the densest part of leek country — has been challenging this “only one leaf per plant” conservation ethic, suggesting that it's unnecessarily restrictive and might even be stymying the productiveness of ramp colonies.

Now, we want to say upfront, living in a place where ramps are scarce and colonies are small, we subscribe to — and even promote — the “one-leaf” idea. We take one leaf per plant because the stands of wild leeks we harvest from could easily and quickly be denuded by overzealous harvesters. And when they're found by commercial harvesters they are often over-exploited.

But not everyone lives at the extreme ends of this plant's range, and so for those in areas of greatest ramp density, this “rule” is not only unnecessary, it can seem like a pretentious encumbrance dreamt up by hall-monitoring ecological do-gooders.

Of course, like most conservation issues, there are a lot of nuances here to be unraveled.

So, as a “one leaf guy” Daniel thought it would be fun to talk to Clay, who’s more of a “bulb and all” kind of guy.

Not to determine who is right and who is wrong, because it's not that simple, but more to get a sense of when a one-leaf approach might be warranted, and also when taking the bulb-and-all might be more beneficial to a stand of plants.

Perhaps too, it’s worth mentioning that we are still foraging in a very unregulated environment. Hunting, by contrast, has become — and born out of necessity — a very controlled harvest, with each legally hunted species getting its own harvest regulations based on its unique life-cycle and population dynamics.

And while we suspect, we’ll see foraging regulated more broadly in our own lifetimes, at present we, as harvesters, are currently responsible for regulating our own harvests. It’s a big responsibility, and because personality types differ wildly, it’s unlikely that we will all reach a consensus about best practices.

So, for that reason, hearing all the sides of an argument in a dialectic manner, in other words, searching for what’s most true, vs what we want to be true, is a wise approach. While we won’t all arrive at the same conclusions, hopefully, our individual assessments will contribute not just to conservation, but to increasing our botanical resources.

One day we’ll tell the kids how we used to forage without a license and they’ll have a hard time imagining it, just like when we read about the unregulated days of the market hunts. For now, though, let’s all make wise decisions. The future of our unique — and ancient — passion depends on it.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/134

John Slattery — bioregional herbalist, forager, educator, and author — is passionate about helping people develop deep and meaningful relationships with wild plants. In this episode, we delve into the medicinal side of wild plants and hear about John’s personal journey along the plant medicine path in the desert southwest. His approach is grounded in traditional indigenous knowledge and years of hands-on experience. This conversation will leave you inspired to deepen your connection to your local flora... and, perhaps, view plants with a bit more wonder.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/041

Pascal Baudar is a legend in the world of wild foods, constantly advancing the practice of foraging into new and unexplored terrain. While many of us focus on calories or medicinal plants, Pascal is uncovering the terroir hidden in places most of us just don’t think to look.

Sure, there’s been a lot of work done on fermentation in the last decade, but nothing quite like what Pascal has been doing. He marches to the beat of his own drum, and if he’s drawing off of other influences, we certainly can’t tell. He seems to be inspired from some mysterious, unseen source. Just take a look at his social media, and you’ll see things that you just won’t find anywhere else.

When we set out to start this podcast, we wanted to curate the voices of the most influential characters in the world of wild food. It wouldn’t be complete without Pascal.

We really enjoyed the interview, because, aside from discussing his new book, and the work he’s been doing on vinegars and ferments, we go beyond food and get into the philosophy that underlies the “why” of what he does.

Pascal, thanks for all your original and groundbreaking work, and thanks for the reminder about what’s really important in life.

This interview was an inspiration.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/155

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 through its share of hardships.

Bombed by the US military for ordinance testing, exploited for cash crops by the pineapple industry, overgrazed by the cattle industry, and currently, a test site for GMO crops, this island and its people have a reason not to want the steady stream of outsiders that have turned some of the other Hawaiian islands into popular tourist destinations.

That said, it's still something of a paradise, protected as it is on three sides by its sister islands, and by the world's highest sea cliffs that stand sentinel on its Northern shores — there’s a reason it's considered the piko, or navel, of the Hawaiian Archipelago. With its incredible lush Eastern half, complete with enormous cascading tropical waterfalls, its beautiful beaches, abundant and productive ocean, and of course the spirit of Aloha which infuses everything as a kind of constant ambiance that sets the tone for a more relaxed and chilled out way of living than mainlanders like ourselves are used to.

But, Molokai has a serious exotic animal issue, and at a level like nothing we've ever witnessed before. We've heard, many times during our hunting years, about animal populations that exceed carrying capacity and require intensive management, specifically where hunting is the primary tool for doing so. But wow, we just weren't prepared for the level of axis deer overpopulation that we witnessed there. On any given day of hunting, our team would find dozens of shed antlers, and several deadheads too, the skeletal remains of animals that have died due to drought and competition for the limited nutritional resources they need to survive.

Now, it’s important to mention, that many of the residents there we met subsist on Axis deer, which most agree is amongst the finest venison in the world, so as far as problems go, there’s at least this incredible culinary opportunity. But, despite the significant hunting pressure the locals exert, and the mortality induced by the drought, the animal numbers remain staggeringly high. So, outfitters like Ku, our guest today, guide visiting clients on incredible hunts.

As you can imagine, hunting there — especially for does and ewes — feels like a valuable conservation effort. And, as far as hunts go, we're not sure it gets better! Just imagine glassing for, and spot and stalking animals — western big game style — while looking out over the Pacific Ocean on three sides of you, with Oahu, Lanai and Maui in the distance, rising up out of the turquoise and jelly-blue inter-island channels that separate these tropical land masses.

And while the island and its inhabitants might be initially skeptical of visitors from away — particularly from the mainland — they are also incredibly generous and warm once you’ve demonstrated a willingness to tread lightly, listen, and not interfere with the vibes of a place that has had enough meddling by outsiders. While our experience there was unique, we quickly felt welcomed and looked after. We'll never forget the hospitality we experienced there.

So despite being from away, we were lucky enough to be let in on some incredible opportunities, like foraging fruit near some majestic ancient ruins, harvesting abundant pools of dried sea salt from the rocky coast, crabbing with grandma at a new moon low tide, or eating fresh, raw limpets and urchins from the tidal pools overlooking the islands western coast.

If you're listening to this, thinking you’d like to do some hunting on Molokai too, reach out to Ku. He’s definitely your guy. Just be cool, and leave the intensity of the Mainland life at home. Trust us, you’ll be glad you did.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/145

Arthur Haines, a recurring guest of the WildFed Podcast and TV show, is back today, and he’s here to talk about hunter attitudes and relationships to animals and the landscape, and how that influences the non-hunting public's perception of hunting as a lifestyle. Hunting is a tremendous responsibility, especially today when such a small part of the public participates. The way we hunt, talk about hunting, write and post about it, and behave on and off of wild landscapes all influences how hunting is perceived and, therefore, how it will be — or won’t be — carried into the future world. This is part of an ongoing conversation that Arthur and Daniel have been having for a while personally, and they wanted to share some of that with you today.

In this episode, Daniel and Arthur also catch up on a lot of other topics, like their Maple syrup seasons, their recent hog hunts, Arthur's experience at Buffalo Bridge (a program that assists North American indigenous bison hunters with their processing efforts after their harvests), and the story of a Moose hunt Arthur guided last season in Maine. Enjoy!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/086

We’re joined today by Zach Elfers, aka @woodlandrambler of the Nomad Seed project.

Zach has a unique suite of skills and knowledge base that centers around the intersection of botany, horticulture, foraging, wild-tending and traditional ecological knowledge. As a member of the foraging community, Zach is going a lot deeper than mere plant identification or gathering. He’s looking at creating large scale, reciprocal ecological relationships between people, the plants, the land, and the rest of the non-human beings that we share the landscape with. And while this was a get-to-know-you kind of conversation, Daniel left it feeling like "this is the kind of thinking he hopes can start to infuse North American foraging culture over the next decade."

Our conversation quickly veered away from merely foraging and went into some of the challenging-to-traverse terrain of the socio-political aspects of our cultural relationship to the land and each other. Of particular interest to us is the juxtaposition of top-down vs bottom-up approaches to implementation. We look at indigenous vs colonial land management paradigms, and discuss possible roads back to a more long-term sustainable path of nature integration.

This interview gets into some of the high-level, big-picture thinking that we really enjoy. It’s a reminder that wild foods are about a lot more than what’s on your plate. It’s about how we relate to the landscape, to the creatures we share the planet with, and how we relate to each other too. Because food is so much more than calories. It’s a representation of how we choose to walk in the world.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/111

Today’s guest is Alan Bergo — the Forager Chef, who you may remember from past episodes of this podcast and from our pigeon episode of the WildFed TV show on the Outdoor Channel. Alan is one of the most talented and intrepid chefs in the wild food world today, and he's just released a new book — The Forager Chef’s Book of Flora: Recipes and Techniques for Edible Plants from Garden, Field, and Forest.

Daniel often comments on this show that we're all descended from hunters — good ones too — or else we wouldn’t be here. But Alan is here today to remind us that we are also descended from foragers. Most likely, that’s a relationship that predates our species' hunting prowess. And unlike hunting, foraging is accessible to almost everyone. Even most cities have foraging groups, enthusiasts, and even classes happening right there in the parks around you. We can all get to know plants. And if you want to know what to do with them, have a listen to Alan. He’s certainly one of the plant pioneers of our generation. That’s why they call him the Forager Chef.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/088

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 fishing stories from some of the United States' more remote fisheries. It’s also part instructional manual, with several appendices that give detailed descriptions of fishing gear and angling strategies for specific species he writes about. In particular, we really appreciated the appendix called “how to fish like a local” which gives great tips on how to get started in a new fishery.

Conor’s career in the Coast Guard has taken him all over the wild waters of this incredible country, and he’s really taken advantage of that opportunity, honing his angling skills wherever duty has taken him. He’s here today to share with us a bit about how we too can become better, more effective anglers ourselves. And to encourage us to ply the wild waters wherever we live. Because there’s adventure, fulfillment, and food out there, just waiting for you!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/127

Jim Knutson — owner of Reel Identity Fishing Charters in the Florida Keys — is an avid and lifelong hunter and fisherman. Jim and Daniel met by chance in a tackle shop in Marathon Key talking iguana hunting, and they now enjoy offshore fishing & iguana wrangling together every year. Jim is full of riveting and hilarious stories from a lifetime of hunting and fishing, and he shares some of them with us in this interview — from tickling trout to freediving for abalone to a story about learning to hunt deer you have to hear to believe.

We've just returned from a week in the beautiful Hill Country of Texas, filming an episode for Season 2 of WildFed TV show on the Outdoor Channel.

Our host and guide to the incredible property we visited — Bamberger Ranch Preserve — was Jared Holmes, a zoologist, herpatologist, hunter, butcher, ecological steward and landscape regeneration specialist. Bamberger Ranch serves as a model of what is possible with good stewardship, despite the incredible insults to the land that have been perpetrated here over the last several hundred years.

We came home from the ranch with feral hog meat, and braised one of the hams a few nights ago. We were simply blown away by the quality of the meat. We’ve had wild hog before, and have enjoyed it, but not like this. These hogs have been living in an intact eco-community, with mineralized soil, clean spring water, and feeding on a diversity of healthy, wild foods. They’re simply healthier hogs, and their meat reflects that.

Jared’s living, working, and raising a family in this little slice of paradise. But the thing is, the whole earth is ready for this kind of regeneration. We just have to get to work.

We’ll leave it to Jared to tell you how.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/098

A lively fireside chat with Arthur Haines, Sara Moore, William Orne and Daniel Vitalis after a weekend spent fishing for lake whitefish in Northern Maine. Topics discussed include what’s changed over the years in the North Maine Woods, fishing regulations and staying legal, the history of whitefish and Bill’s moose calls.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/002