Two centuries ago, nearly half the North American diet was foraged, hunted, or caught in the wild. Today, so-called wild foods” are becoming expensive luxuries, served to the wealthy in top restaurants. Meanwhile, people who depend on wild foods for survival and sustenance find their lives forever changed as new markets and roads invade the worlds last untamed landscapes.

InFeasting Wild, geographer and anthropologist Gina Rae La Cerva embarks on a global culinary adventure to trace our relationship to wild foods. Throughout her travels, La Cerva reflects on how colonialism and the extinction crisis have impacted wild spaces, and reveals what we sacrifice when we domesticate our foods including biodiversity, Indigenous and womens knowledge, a vital connection to nature, and delicious flavors. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, La Cerva investigates the violent bush meat trade, tracking elicit delicacies from the rainforests of the Congo Basin to the dinner tables of Europe. In a Danish cemetery, she forages for wild onions with the esteemed staff of Noma. In Swedenafter saying goodbye to a man known only as The HunterLa Cerva smuggles freshly-caught game meat home to New York in her suitcase, for a feast of heartbreak moose.

Thoughtful, ambitious, and wide-ranging,Feasting Wildchallenges us to take a closer look at the way we eat today, and introducesan exciting new voice in food journalism.

A food book with a truly original take. Mark Kurlansky,New York Timesbestselling author ofSalt: A World History