Review by Robert Graham
In September 2025, I was sitting in a quiet campground in Crawford Notch, New Hampshire reading. As the acorns of red oak (Quercus rubra) bounced off my head, I realized how fitting it was that the book was Elspeth Hay’s recently released Feed Us with Trees. Acorns and their suitability as a food crop was the starting point that launched Elspeth, writer and host of The Local Food Report—a weekly feature that has aired on Cape Cod’s NPR Station since 2008—into researching the fading history of a time when humans harvested food in synergy with the land, rather than in competition with it.
Elspeth’s introduction to acorns as a food crop started in 2019 when she watched “Acorn Ambassador” Marcie Mayer’s TEDx Talk on eating acorns. To her surprise, she learned something as abundant as oak (Quercus spp.), which can be found everywhere from forests to parking lots, could provide nutrition. Acorns have been valued for centuries. With proper preparation to reduce bitterness and enhance flavor, they are now considered a source of antioxidants and are even used as a gluten free flour. For many of us in the Northeastern United States, oaks are abundant. They can be found across many of our distinct forest types, and are a keystone species that the entire ecosystem relies on.
Throughout Feed Us With Trees, Elspeth connects with individuals who not only still eat acorns, but have a deep-rooted cultural history with them as a food crop. People like Ron Reed, a medicine man in the Karuk tribe of what is now known as the Klamath Mountains in northern California. As readers, we learn about the Karuk tribe’s cultural history attached to acorns and how culturally prescribed fire shaped the forest for both their dietary needs as humans and the ecosystem as a whole.
Soon after learning about trees being able to produce viable food crops, Elspeth learned of another ecologically-minded farming practice—agroforestry. Agroforestry, or permaculture, is becoming an increasingly popular growing style as more people look for ways to grow food sustainably and in partnership with nature. There is plenty of evidence now to show that “intensive agriculture” has downstream effects on the ecosystem, including fertilizer runoff into waterways, soil erosion, and pesticide use that degrades the landscape. In the early chapters of Feed Us With Trees, Elspeth has the opportunity to meet legendary permaculture farmer, Mark Sheppard. A Massachusetts native and author of Restoration Agriculture, Mark’s book is an inspiration for many. His nursery, New Forest Farm, LLC located in the driftless area of Southwestern Wisconsin, provides many other farms with cultivated varieties of species—like chestnut (Castanea spp.) and hazelnut (Corylus spp.)—that the farm has researched over the past 20 years. Mark is one of the modern-day leaders of tree focused agriculture. The concept of restoration agriculture, a term he coined, is really just a way to grow food crops that mimics the natural ecological process seen in nature. For Mark, this was primarily the “Oak Savanna” ecosystem.
As she learned about oak savanna through Mark and the Karuk tribe, Elspeth was introduced to yet another important ecological concept. This time it was cultural fire. Fire has been used for thousands of years to help manage ecosystems, to better suit humans and their needs, and the ecosystem as a whole. For the Karuk, cultural fire in the oak savannas would help reduce the amount of weevil damaged acorns and increase regeneration. In addition to the weevil benefit, there was an ecological impact as well. Oak savanna is a globally rare fire adapted ecosystem, meaning that the species present require fire in order to thrive. Suppression of cultural fire, and natural fire events has caused many of these specially adapted ecosystems to fade away
For us in the Northeast, we have our own version of special fire adapted communities. In Massachusetts, we have Pitch Pine-Scrub Oak Communities, an S2 imperiled community. As a Massachusetts outer cape native, Elspeth had rare fire adapted ecosystems right in her backyard. As she concludes the book, Elspeth talks of her time learning about prescribed fire with Dave Crary, the long-serving Fire Management Officer of the Cape Cod National Seashore, and goes through the process of passing all of the classes required to participate in prescribed burns in Massachusetts.
Interwoven throughout the book we get to experience the learning process with Elspeth. From learning the acorns are a viable food crop and the history of intensive cereal grain farming, to how we arrived at “modern” agriculture and all the way to when she was wielding a drip torch and helping preserve rare fire adapted ecosystems. In her final words, Elspeth reflects on the state of agriculture and ecosystems today, leaving us with something to consider, “the world is on fire, yes. But we are the fire animal…we are not a plague, we are a keystone species.”