Incredible kids, and edible acorns!
Except as noted, photos: Juno Lamb
We had a wonderful multi-age crew for The Incredible, Edible Oak with Kyle Ball of New England Wildlife Tracking. Kyle shared information about how to identify our local oaks, and walked us through the multi-step process of processing acorns into edible and tasty acorn meal (detailed in Samuel Thayer’s book Nature’s Garden, linked below). As Kyle says, if you skip any steps, you won’t like the product! Check out some of the steps in the slideshow above, and download two handouts below. The acorn treats were DELICIOUS!
One wonderful thing was watching some of the young kids figure out their own strategy for one part of the process. We talked during the w0rkshop about how the kinds of knowledge we were sharing would have been naturally passed along by our ancestors as part of day-to-day life. Seeing the kids in action was a reminder that these practices are still in our bones.
Learn more and ethical foraging:
The book Kyle recommends for clear and thorough information about every step of harvesting and preparing acorns and many other wild foods is Nature’s Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Foods, by Samuel Thayer.
We discussed ethical foraging, reciprocity with the other-than-human world, why the “take no more than a third” rule can cause as much eventual destruction as taking nearly everything all at once, why it makes good sense to forage abundant or “invasive” plants, and why foraging has to go hand in hand with care for the health and sustainability of the plants being harvested. You can read a guide to ethical foraging HERE.
We also talked about Robin Wall Kimmerer, who has taught so many of us about reciprocity and the “honorable harvest.” These ideas occur often in her writing and teaching, including in the most-read-ever essay in Emergence Magazine, “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance” (read or listen). This essay has now become a book that Robin returned to Emergence recently to speak about. You can find the interview HERE (read or listen!).
Learn more with Kyle:
If you’d like to join Kyle and Hillary Behr for free wildlife tracking outings with Bearcamp Trackers, a wildlife tracking club that meets once a month from September to March, EMAIL to get on the mailing list or learn more HERE.