A writer and anthropologist searches for wild foods―and reveals what we lose in a world where wildness itself is misunderstood, commodified, and hotly pursued.
FEASTING WILD:
In Search of the Last Untamed Food
by GinaRae LaCerva
Greystone Books, May 2020
Anthropologist and geographer GinaRae LaCerva’s fascination with hunting and gathering quickly exploded into a personal obsession that sent her on a quest to taste the wild foods we still eat and the ones we have forgotten: from wild boar in Borneo, to a lobster bake on an island in Maine, to gathering herbs near Kierkegaard’s grave in Copenhagen. She didn’t expect to find something much more profound—an untamable love affair and the elusive pleasure of simple sustenance. Along the way, she illuminates that the history of food is also the history of environmental conservation, examines the rapid transformation of wild food from nutritional necessity to luxury good, explores how this shift reflects our attempts to tame and commodify “natures” of all kinds, and ultimately finds that her own sense of adventure is just as unruly as the natural places she explores.
This impeccably researched narrative history uncovers something essential about what it means to love the planet in the age of extinction. Equal parts environmental history and adventure narrative, FEASTING WILD weaves together extensive field research and personal narrative to interrogate our concept of nature, investigate how our insatiable appetites have contributed to the current landscape of environmental crisis, and question what we might do about it now.
GinaRae LaCerva is a geographer, environmental anthropologist, and award-winning writer who has traveled extensively to research a variety of environmental and food-related topics. A National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, La Cerva holds a Master of Environmental Science from Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a Master of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge. Originally from New Mexico, she lives in New York.



Munich 1950. Karl Wieners, previously a writer, returns to his hometown Munich – a city where smugglers are successful in doing their business, where old Nazis sees new chances coming up, and where the lost finally lose all their hopes. Karl‘s last hope is a career as a journalist. If only he found out where the Nazis had hidden the works of art they had accumulated in the “Führerbau” (Hitler’s palace) during the war – this would be the very sensation he needs! He begins his research, together with his niece, Magda, who is also his secret love. They find out that the paintings, worth millions of dollars, are supposed to be sold secretly to an unknown buyer. During their investigations, however, Karl and Magda are not only disturbing the activities of inspector Ludwig Gruber, who is at his wits’ end in finding a murderer. They also get into the focus of some dubious people doing their business on the black market, and find themselves being trapped in a dangerous net of deception that seems not to let them go.