Feasting wild
Eating wild food is expensive. You’ll pay a lot more for wild salmon than farmed salmon; wild mushrooms cost a fortune; and have you seen the price of seaweed these days? Throughout most of human history, foraging has been practised by the poorest and least developed societies. So how come wild foods are suddenly the preserve of the priciest, swankiest restaurants? That is the paradox which anthropologist Gina Rae La Cerva sets out to answer in her new book Feasting Wild, in which she traverses the planet in search of wild food.
Or at least it was the paradox which set the hare – one of the few things she doesn’t eat on the journey – running. “What was once sustenance is now becoming a luxury,” she explains in the prologue to her wanderings. “The top restaurants in the world serve gathered weeds to their elite clientele … and the most desirable wild foods – like game meat from tropical rainforests and edible bird’s nests from south-east Asia – are becoming globally traded commodities associated with black markets, counterfeit products and violence.”
As the world’s wild places disappear, the taste for wild foods – rather than the over-processed, bland stuff we are fed by big business – grows among those who can afford them. La Cerva set out to eat her way round the world, but also to look at what is happening to the disappearing wilderness. The result is a curious hybrid of food book, memoir, travelogue and anthropological treatise, with a bit of understated environmental campaigning – she sees herself as an objective observer rather than an out-and-out green activist – and an unexpected love story thrown in.
The book is at times a little self-indulgently written – her quest for the poetic image can get rather wearing – but as she chews on crocodile, gobbles down sautéed caterpillars, enjoys stewed antelope, disembowels a moose and searches in Borneo for the increasingly rare bird’s nests that go into bird’s nest soup, you have to admire her pluck and ambition.
“It was a labour of love,” she tells me on the phone from Santa Fe in New Mexico, where she grew up and has returned for lockdown – a strange period of stasis after years spent travelling. “I decided when I was 30 that I wanted to write a book. I was in graduate school [doing a master’s degree in environmental science at Yale] and saved as much money as I could to fund myself. I did all kinds of odd jobs, rented out a room in my apartment, and then lived with my family for the last couple of years so I wouldn’t have to pay rent.”
The book took her six years, and for most of that time she had no publishing deal so was in effect doing the research on spec. “Every day,” she tells me, “I had to get up and say ‘This is something that I must put out into the world regardless of money or even anybody caring.’ “ The book’s many-sidedness proved a problem in getting a deal. “Publishers said ‘We love the idea and we love the writing, but we’re not sure whether it’s a food book or a science book,’ “ she says. “That ended up as a strength and a challenge.”
The colourful cover suggests it’s a cookbook, but don’t be fooled. There are no recipes for foraged food or wild game. Indeed, once La Cerva gets to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she travels in search of bushmeat (meat from wild animals), it becomes something radically different as she falls in love with a man she refers to only as the Hunter. “I’ve had a few haters,” she admits. “Readers who really didn’t appreciate the personal aspect. But there are a lot more who found that having that story drew them into the material even more. People who might not want to read something so academic found it had suddenly turned into a page turner.”
She also believes this is one instance where the personal really is political. “I felt the personal relationship was a reflection of the larger themes of wildness, wild food, nature and heartbreak,” she says. “Part of what the book is about and part of what the Hunter storyline is about is a sort of metaphor for the environmental grief that we all feel, whether we acknowledge it or not. We are all experiencing this mass extinction and climate change – all these things that on a daily basis you don’t really think about but which I truly believe are in the background for all of us and are part of the collective grief and trauma we’re all wrestling with right now.”
La Cerva doesn’t, though, want the book to be seen primarily as an Eat Pray Love-type rite of passage. She thinks that would be too solipsistic – another aspect of the colonialism that has been at the heart of the destruction of wild places in north America, Africa and Asia. “It wasn’t about going out and finding myself,” she says. “I wanted to look at the history of environmental knowledge and explore how wild foods were embedded in the culture of the places I was going.” She treats eating crocodile, elephant and antelope not as something exotic – her descriptions of the meals are remarkably matter of fact – but as a long-established way of life in the countries in which those species are indigenous.
In the book, she is open about the ups and downs of her at times long-distance love affair – one of the romantic high spots is the disembowelling of the moose on a visit to Sweden. She is also honest about the doubts she occasionally has about her mission – notably during an almost existential meltdown when she is travelling alone in Borneo.
“I am tired of looking for wild birds,” she writes. “If there is a deeper mystery or meaning, it has eluded me. I am tired of searching in general. The quest has become much like what the nests represent [eating bird’s nest soup is supposed to have health benefits]: a fountain of youth, a utopian dream, a paradox without solution, a romantic mirage just beyond the grasp of my persistence.” She goes to stay in a B&B where she is revived by a combination of soup made from old bird’s nests that the owner happens to have and Dolly Parton records. The soup is “chewy, slippery, almost leathery”; the Dolly Parton is less demanding.
La Cerva says the book is not an eco-manifesto. “Some of the publisher rejections I got in the beginning wanted more of that,” she says. “Ten things you can do to save the planet! But there are a lot of wonderful books out there that already outline the things we should be doing, and for me it’s not about individual actions – it’s about systemic changes that need to be made. I wanted the book to feel more like a novel or like a story of this moment in time in our world.”
She portrays the UN agencies and NGOs she rubs up against in a far from flattering light, despite the fact the Hunter is employed by a conservation organisation in DRC. Some of the staff she encounters are living privileged existences in state-of-the-art compounds far removed from the societies they serve; she does not give the impression that she thinks they are part of the solution. Nor is she greatly taken with eco-tourism, which “allows us to believe in the pristine even while destruction occurs just over the next hillside.”
“Part of what I’m trying to do is show how complicated conservation is around the world and how difficult it is,” she tells me. The academic in her is forever questioning her perspective. “Was my desire for a transcendent escape into the wilderness and an encounter with the locals rooted in a colonial mindset?” she asks herself.
She sees colonialism and environmental destruction as inextricably linked. The obliteration of Native Americans was both a cultural and an ecological genocide. A whole society was destroyed and with it went thousands of years of environmental practice and knowledge about wild foods and medicinal plants.
In New Mexico, statues of Spanish conquistadors are among those being pulled down, and she doesn’t sound too disappointed about it. When I ask her whether her book will change anything, it is the colonialist dimension that she emphasises. “It’s really interesting that it’s come out at this moment when we’re going through this massive crisis of realising that our society was built on racist roots,” she says. “How do we unpack that? How do we move forward? I do think it will contribute to that larger conversation.”
As a good anthropologist, she is keen to experience societies from the inside and not be judgmental about them. Many people see bushmeat as either environmentally damaging in its own right or as a vector of diseases such as ebola. But she wants to understand its place in the culture – it is eaten both as subsistence and on ceremonial occasions – and says the kneejerk association with disease is often a racist trope.
She isn’t in favour of blaming coronavirus on a random bat, and thinks we should look at the growth of Chinese megacities and other environmental factors instead. People in Asia have been happily eating bats for thousands of years, so what’s changed? “I don’t want to use culture as a way to excuse things,” she says, “but we need to understand the culture from a non-judgmental perspective in order to then help change the things that are perhaps dangerous.”
Plenty of diseases come from domesticated animals, and she says bushmeat is not of itself any more dangerous. She doesn’t eat chimpanzee during her stay in Africa, but not because of any association with disease; it just feels a bit too close to home genetically. Bonobos share almost 99% of their DNA with humans and are “sensitive and gentle creatures”. Everything else, though, is fair game, including the civet she says she ate somewhat reluctantly in Borneo – an unpleasantly “oily” meal that doesn’t make it into the book. She doesn’t recommend sea lion soup either.
La Cerva writes that her journey “can be read in two ways: as a tragedy or a story of hope”. She is wary of easy generalisation and instant resolution, but I try to pin her down. Is she optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the natural world and the possibility of rewilding? “I’m an optimistic nihilist,” she says. “I tend towards optimism with bouts of depression in between. We have to be hopeful because that’s the only way to move forward, but we have to acknowledge how deeply in the shit we are.”
Feasting Wild is published by Greystone Books (£18.99)
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