Feed Us with Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food by Elspeth Hay

A new and ancient story about perennial nut trees, our ecological role as humans, and the future of food.

The day Elspeth Hay learned that we can eat acorns, stories she’d believed her whole life began to unravel.

Until then she'd always believed we must grow our staple foods in farmed fields―the same fields wreaking havoc on our land, air, and water. But all over the Northern Hemisphere, Hay learned, humans once grew our staple foods in forest gardens centered on perennial nut trees: oaks, chestnuts, and hazelnuts. In Feed Us with Trees, Hay brings us along as she gets to know dozens of nut growers, scientists, Indigenous knowledge-keepers, researchers, and food professionals―and discovers that in tending these staple trees, we once played a vital environmental role as one of Earth’s keystone species.

Feed Us with Trees is Hay’s hopeful manifesto about a brighter, more abundant future―and a critical look at the long-held stories we’ll need to rewrite to build it. It will appeal to environmentalists, regenerative farmers, permaculture enthusiasts, agroforesters, locavores, and anyone hungry for a more holistic, nutrient-dense diet rooted in wild foods and ancient knowledge.

Advance Praise:

“How would you like to live in a world where biodiversity is increasing rather than disappearing, where more carbon is being stored in the ground than is being pumped out of the ground, where ocean dead-zones and topsoil loss are things of the past, and where diet- related health problems are exceptions, rather than the norm? With irrefutable logic, excellent prose, and meticulous research, Elspeth Hay describes such a world. It is not fantasy; it is the future!” —Douglas Tallamy, author, Nature's Best Hope

"This book—I guarantee it—will blow your mind. Twenty pages in and you'll be looking at the world in different ways." —Bill McKibben, author, Here Comes the Sun!

"The nut tree is the king of the forest. This is the 'bush food,' eaten by the First Nations for millennia. The nut meat supplies folded sugars, essential fatty acids, and first class proteins. To understand the importance of this in our food stream would make anyone's life unravel. Thank you Elspeth Hay and Feed Us with Trees." —Dr. Diana Beresford-Kroeger, author of Our Green Heart, the Soul and Science of Forests

"Elspeth Hay's compulsively readable book reveals just how deeply entangled we humans have always been with commoning the earth, and why we need to rediscover this lost way of life. Let us re-learn how to steward trees with loving care and subtle intelligence, and they will gift us many times over with untold treasures!" —David Bollier, author, Think Like a Commoner

"Beautiful and compelling." —Nina Planck, author, Real Food: What to Eat and Why

“This book gives me hope.” —Mikaela Cannon, author, Foraging as a Way of Life

About the Author:

Elspeth Hay is a writer and the creator and host of the Local Food Report, a weekly feature that has aired on Cape Cod’s NPR station since 2008. Deeply immersed in her own local-food system, she writes and reports for print, radio, and online media with a focus on food, the environment, and the people, places, and ideas that feed us. She lives in Wellfleet, MA.

She is the author of Feed Us with Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food (published by New Society Publishers, July 15, 2025).

Readers can connect with Elspeth Hay on Instagram and Goodreads. To learn more, visit https://elspethhay.com