Gina Rae La Cerva: Feasting wild: in search of the last untamed food
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Gina Rae La Cerva: Feasting wild: in search of the last untamed food Greystone Books, Vancouver, BC, 311 pp., ISBN 978-1-77164 (cloth), 978-1-534-8 (epub) F. E. Jack Putz1 Accepted: 24 June 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Feasting Wild by Gina Rae La Cerva takes readers on a delicious and thought-provoking gastronomic global tour, with emphasis on the social, political, and environmental histories and consequences of what we eat. Given the on-going turmoil about race and privilege, readers will note the author’s bare-knuckled approach to how hunting game by white folks is transmogrified into bushmeat poaching by anyone else. Her account is very personal from the get go—she seems like the kind of person many of us would enjoy encountering; self-effacing, knowledgeable, adventuresome, and fun. The first chapter of Feasting Wild skips lightly back and forth across the Atlantic as well as back to a time when all food was from the wild, to the present, when that fare struggles for recognition. Foraging for wild edibles in a cemetery in Copenhagen with a group of famous chefs, she explores why such expeditions fell out of favor for so long. Within the first few pages she reminisces about meeting Bill Murray in a bar, champions wild foods for their nutritional value, points out the dire health consequences of both domestication and urbanization, and quips, “Flavor is a map of our desires. But it is not the territory” (p. 16). From Copenhagen, the author takes us to Poland’s Białowieża Forest, the perfect setting to explore the history of hunting, especially how commoners were excluded by royalty from securing sustenance from formerly open-access lands. Throughout the very readable volume, La Cerva dives deeply into this sort of ethical, conservation-related issue particularly as related to food, with due attention to the gendered roles in foraging, hunting, and the culinary arts. The author’s insightful analyses are made in the light
* F. E. Jack Putz [email protected] 1
Department of Biology, University of Florida, P.O. Box 118526, Gainesville, FL 32641, USA
of her struggles with her own roles and responsibilities— she is aware of her privilege and ruthlessly explores its consequences. A traditional lobster bake on the coast of Maine is the setting for forays into the history of our plundering of wildlife, with an in depth analysis of turtle soup. I was unaware that when Europeans first started to venture outwards, explorers and colonists were warned to avoid foods from warmer climates because their consumption causes “creolean degeneracy” (p. 74) and inspires lust. Fortunately, cooking reportedly reduces the tendency of wild food to provoke barbaric behavior. In the next chapter, La Cerva takes us on a tour of an abandoned gun factory in New Haven. Between reflections on industrial decay, she describes the fate of the passenger pigeon, bounties on carnivores, and the growth of market hunting. The gradual re-wilding of the decaying factory provides a backdrop for consideration of the concepts of wilderness and wastelan
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