Ep. 40: Nut Trees and Connection with Elspeth Hay

Feeding humanity doesn’t need to come at the Earth’s expense.

Author

Plants Always Win
December 02, 2025

Elspeth Hay is here to talk nut trees, ecosystems, and humans as keystone species.

In 2019, Elspeth was a local food writer who felt despondent about humans’ need to tear up nature in order to feed ourselves. When she discovered that acorns are edible—that they had, in fact, once been a central pillar of an abundant North American food system—she was electrified. This week she joins Erin to talk about the book that resulted from her all-consuming research into that subject: Feed Us with Trees: Nut Trees and the Future of Food.

If you have ever felt like human beings are rootless and adrift without our own habitat or wild food that can sustain us, this conversation will open your eyes and seize your heart. Erin and Elspeth discuss the oak savannas and chestnut trees that, managed by Indigenous peoples’ understanding of succession ecology, once fed the human and more-than-human life of a continent. They look at the still-living food culture of chestnuts in Switzerland, grieve over the politics that deliberately erased abundance, and embrace hope at the re-emergence of traditional land management practices in agroforestry and restoration agriculture. 

Join us in re-discovering our habitat and home. Who knows—maybe acorns will change your life, too.

Find Elspeth Hay Online

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Credits

Website Design and Illustration by Sophia Alladin

Intro and Outro Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/soundroll/when-my-ukulele-plays
License code: GWOIMMBAS15FG6PH

Timestamps

00:14 Introduction
01:00 Feed Us with Trees: Nut Trees and The Future of Food 
01:48 Elspeth's Career in Food and the Environment
02:41 The Lightbulb Moment: Humans Can Eat Acorns
03:27 It Never Made Sense to Me That We Didn't Have a Habitat
07:39 The Chestnut Huts of Switzerland: A Living Food Culture
09:46 Our Grief and Homesickness for Connection to Place and Species
10:43 The Land of Opportunity Myth
13:07 Oak Savannas and Chestnut Groves: Pillars of an Indigenous Food System
14:39 Food is Politics: The Deliberate Dismantling of Abundance in North America
19:40 Trespass Laws Were Created to Control Formerly Enslaved Foragers
22:00 How Capitalism Makes Food Political
23:47 The Movement to Revive Perennial Food Ecosystems
26:50 Ecological Succession and Embracing Traditional Land Management
30:41 Oaks as the Tree of Life, Biodiversity Champions
32:00 Nature Preserves Are the Wrong Approach. The Land Needs Us.
34:17 Hazelnut Basketry and Kuruk Culture to Elspeth and Erin's Willow Basketry
37:42 The New Forest in England: An Unenclosed English Farm
40:20 Elspeth's Recommended Resources
41:50 Elspeth's Shout-Outs
44:26 Parting Words of Wisdom
45:12 Outro and Contact Us