Kevin Kossowan is the creator of From The Wild, a James Beard award nominated, culinary adventure series about wild foods that has elevated field cookery to a level not really seen before in a tv series. A film maker, he’s also the co-creator of Les Stroud’s Wild Harvest on PBS and Nat Geo.

One of the things we love about talking with Kevin is his willingness to get into some of the more taboo and uncomfortable nooks and crannies of the ethical and moral and ecological obligations of hunting, fishing, and foraging... especially into conversations we, as hunters, are often told we shouldn’t have.

While the first part of this conversation is some catch up, talk about recent harvests and the landscapes they happen in, the second part of this conversation really heats up, as Daniel and Kevin start talking about things like pollution in wild foods, ethics in killing, and the things that motivate or deter us from participating or not participating in harvests.

The terrain gets sticky, and that’s precisely why we think it's important to explore. Because what we do, harvesting organisms from the wild for food, needs to be clearly articulated for us to make quality decisions about life and death, and of course, for the public to understand — and hopefully support — our choices, and the system of laws that legally governs our actions. Some of these moral quandaries and ethical dilemmas aren’t solvable, they’re too nuanced and individual for that. Instead, each of us has to dig deep inside to determine where we land on these issues.

We hope you enjoy this conversation!

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Eugenia Bone is a nationally known food and science writer and the author of several books, including Mycophilia, Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms, and Microbia, a Journey into the Unseen World Around You. Most recently, she can be seen in Fantastic Fungi, a new documentary you can see on Netflix that looks at the healing properties of mushrooms, from the medicinal to the entheogenic. She’s featured alongside other greats like Michael Pollen and Paul Stamets. We highly recommend the film, and as you’ll hear in this episode, Eugenia has recently edited the Fantastic Fungi Community Cookbook — which is a companion to the film.

Eugenia was a real pleasure to talk to, with her lively style and excellent grasp of all things fungi, from foraging to the most recent science.

From cutting edge cuisine to modern building materials, from environmental clean-up to cancer treatment and even psychotherapy, mushrooms are finally myceliating the western mind and its formerly mycophobic culture. So here’s to mycophilia, the antidote to the anti-mushroom sentiment of bygone days. The future is bright, if not partially decomposing and covered in spores.

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Our guest today — Josh Niland — is changing the way the culinary world thinks about fish. From the way we handle it, to how we store it, to the way it’s cooked, Josh has single handedly created a new school of fish cuisine. Though part of it is a strong ethic of using more of the animal, that’s really just the beginning.

Imagine, at present, in restaurants and at home, only about 45% of a fish is utilized for food. Now imagine a James Beard award-winning chef who is getting 90% yield and creating dishes no one has ever conceived of before. Josh is dry-aging fish too, discovering that, with proper storing — and contrary to all convention — the flavor of fish flesh, like that of land animals, can be improved with hanging time, provided it’s kept dry and cold.

It’s hard to overstate the impact Josh’s work is going to have on the science and art of processing and cooking fish. If nothing else, it’ll change the way you see fish forever.

At WildFed, we're slowly shifting our approach to handling, processing, aging, cooking, and eating fish. There’s a lot of habit, convention, and institutional inertia to overcome. But the results Josh is getting make it clear… We can do more to honor the fish we eat, the people we feed, and the oceans, lakes, rivers, and ponds we harvest from. 45% is unacceptable. Let’s start eating scale to tail!

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This week's interview is with Brian Hammons, CEO and President of Hammons Black Walnuts — the country's largest commercial producer of finished black walnuts. Black walnuts, of course, are a wild food very different from the English Walnuts most of us are familiar with, and sourced from nut trees native to North America.

Each year Hammons buys millions of pounds of Black Walnuts from foragers all over the middle of the country, through an innovative network of buying and hulling stations they set up each harvest season.

Brian is passionate about Black Walnuts, just like his father, and his father’s father were. He and his company embody the noble, but not so common traits, of hard work and work ethic, good stewardship, family tradition, and transparent business practices. And all of that comes through in the way he talks about what they do at Hammons.

We often quote the writer and foraging icon Sam Thayer here on the show. He talks about what he calls “Ecoculture” as a more ancient and sustainable alternative to Agriculture. He’s quick to point out that with the right shifts in landscape management, viable wild food sheds are possible on a scale we can’t really imagine at present. To us, Hammons represents a company that’s been doing precisely that — creating a viable market for a wild food, sustainably, for decades. Not only that, but it’s a win-win-win, because as the customer gets a healthy, sustainable wild food, Hammons prospers and so do the foragers who supply them with their raw materials. Supporting companies like theirs moves us towards a new — or perhaps old — way of engaging the landscape for our food needs. It’s exciting to us, and it opens up a world of possibilities! Here’s to happy foraging!

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It’s our pleasure to share a conversation with Sunny Savage of Maui, Hawaii — a modern-day wild food pioneer and incredible asset to our community of foragers. Sunny teaches wild food internships, created a foraging and cooking television series, ran a food truck featuring foraged ingredients, and has even created a foraging app.

While most of us think of Hawaii as a kind of tropical paradise, there are — in some parts of the archipelago — darker forces at work there than just the endless golf courses. Villainous bioengineering companies test their toxic wares there, and invasive species — otherwise balanced into their own native ecology — wreak havoc on the native floral and faunal assemblages of the Hawaiian islands. While the typical response of conservation groups has been to reach for pesticides — very often from those same bioengineering companies we just mentioned — Sunny has been presenting a different approach. Making them, when we can, into foods.

Sunny shares some powerful insights in this interview that are very important to the ongoing conversation we’ve had here on this show about deleterious, non-native plants, and this is just a compliment to her otherwise wonderful wild food wisdom. So, enjoy this conversation with the one and only Sunny Savage!

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We're on our way back from North and South Dakota as this podcast comes out. Instead of flying, we drove out, so we could bring our coolers, which, to our delight and gratitude, are now brimming with buffalo meat. Our harvest was enough to share with our host, the many hands that helped us, and our production team too. As he always has, the buffalo provides.

Now, of course, we know they’re properly called bison today — scientific name Bison bison — but after a week on the Standing Rock Reservation, it's hard to call them that. There, the people — Lakota and Dakota — say buffalo. And who knows better than a people whose life way and history has been so inextricably linked to this animal. So, for now, we'll call them what they call them.

Travis 'Good Bull Man' Condon — our host — invited us out to harvest a buffalo on the prairie and to share a traditional meal with some elders from the community. He put in a tremendous amount of work with us, gutting, butchering, and packing our buffalo. He shared meals with us — and ceremony, language, stories and songs. It’s hard to describe all the magic we experienced during our stay there, and most is probably best kept close to the heart anyway, but suffice it to say that we are leaving there with more than full coolers. Our hearts are full too, with joy and love, and appreciation for our new friends. We’re already planning our trip back to what was some of the most beautiful country we’d ever visited and some of the most gracious folks we’ve ever met.

Our hunt, our chokecherry harvest, and of course the incredible meal we shared after, will be featured in Season 2 of WildFed on the Outdoor Channel. We’ve already reviewed the footage and can hardly wait for you to see it.

So, Wóphila — thanks — and gratitude. Your listenership, as always, is appreciated.

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Jess Starwood is an herbalist, forager, chef, and the author of the new book, Mushroom Wanderland. Being on opposite coasts, we've only known Jess through the exquisite photography and ecologically inspired writing featured on her beautifully curated social media pages. With her new book getting the attention of the foraging community, and with so many requests to have her on the show, this seemed like a great time to finally connect with her to learn more about the important impact she's having on modern wild food culture.

In this interview, Jess and Daniel chat about the wild world of mushrooms, herbalism, the sustainability of wild food, the complex tastes of wild food and so much more. Enjoy!

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Today’s podcast is with Jenna Rozelle, a longtime friend of the podcast and someone who has been very involved — if not from a bit behind the scenes — in the modern wild food culture. She was one of our first guests, and we recently sat down with her to catch up and talk about the state of the wild food scene — both here where we live and around the country.

Jenna, our producer Grant, and Daniel have a fun and lively discussion ranging all over the map as they discuss foraging, hunting, fishing, and general wild food ecology, as well as some thoughts about the future of wild food culture in North America. The conversation is filled with a lot of useful info and some good laughs too. Enjoy!

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Mario Kalpou is the host of Man Eats Wild, a new show premiering on Outdoor Channel later this month.

Mario’s lifestyle is larger than life. He’s a self-professed adrenaline addict, who seeks thrills and big adventure, but he’s also a very thoughtful hunter, and his ethics, like ours here at WildFed, center around his approach to food.

A native of Australia, he made the first season of his show in the South Pacific — filming in Australia, but also in New Zealand.

As you’re listening to this, he’s headed off to Africa, where he formerly worked as a hunting guide — what they call a Professional Hunter there — to film the second season of his new show.

Man Eats Wild, like WildFed, airs on Mondays on the Outdoor Channel as part of their Taste of the Wild block, as both of our shows are food-focused. While our artistic styles are a bit different, we both view hunting, fishing, and foraging through a similar lens. We think it's an ancient — but still relevant and important — approach to acquiring quality food and that this food is healthier for us than anything we can purchase in the store.

This was a great conversation, and we're excited to have him as a friend and ally… and we're wishing Man Eats Wild huge success with its upcoming premier!

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We've just returned from a week in the beautiful Hill Country of Texas, filming an episode for Season 2 of WildFed TV show on the Outdoor Channel.

Our host and guide to the incredible property we visited — Bamberger Ranch Preserve — was Jared Holmes, a zoologist, herpatologist, hunter, butcher, ecological steward and landscape regeneration specialist. Bamberger Ranch serves as a model of what is possible with good stewardship, despite the incredible insults to the land that have been perpetrated here over the last several hundred years.

We came home from the ranch with feral hog meat, and braised one of the hams a few nights ago. We were simply blown away by the quality of the meat. We’ve had wild hog before, and have enjoyed it, but not like this. These hogs have been living in an intact eco-community, with mineralized soil, clean spring water, and feeding on a diversity of healthy, wild foods. They’re simply healthier hogs, and their meat reflects that.

Jared’s living, working, and raising a family in this little slice of paradise. But the thing is, the whole earth is ready for this kind of regeneration. We just have to get to work.

We’ll leave it to Jared to tell you how.

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Today’s episode was a lot of fun to record, since it's rare that Grant Guiliano — co-producer of this podcast and co-creator of the WildFed television series — and Daniel sit down to just record a show together. There’s so many fun stories and interesting reflections on the things we learn and encounter during — and outside of — those productions — and we thought it would be fun to share some of that with you today!

If you’re just tuning in for the first time, this episode isn’t our typical content, since we’re usually interviewing wild food experts, wildlife biologists, ecologists, authors, chefs, or noteworthy hunters, anglers, and foragers. And we’ll be back to that content next week.

But for now, we hope you’ll enjoy this more candid, behind the scenes conversation between Daniel and Grant.

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Moose! They’re the largest member of the deer family, and no one knows them better than our guest today, Lee Kantar, Maine’s State Moose biologist and head of its Moose Management Program.

Here in Maine we have a thriving population — the largest in the lower 48 — but our tags are coveted, released each summer after a much-anticipated lottery drawing.

While moose are majestic, if not a bit goofy on those long spindly legs, they’re also facing several threats, not the least of which is the winter tick, an ectoparasite that’s literally been bleeding our moose population to death. Add to that the threat of brain worm and chronic wasting disease, and it soon becomes apparent why the work of Lee Kantar and his colleagues is so important.

It’s also important for us to understand what helps them thrive and what leads to their ultimate demise. That’s why Lee is flying around in helicopters counting moose, wrangling them for the tagging program, and racing to the scene when a collar shows a mortality to perform a necropsy on the spot. All that data is fed back into a management program that’s goal is ensuring moose have a future here with us. Not just for the hunt, but for their own intrinsic value on the landscape.

Tune in for a fascinating conversation on moose, their ecology and effective moose management.

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Never buy fish from a stranger. That’s the motto of our guests Tim and Kayla, AKA the New England Fish Mongers.

The Fishmongers of New England have created a model that is changing the way consumers get their fish. From the boat where it's well-cared for, to the Fishmongers who cut and package it, direct to you at the farmers market or restaurant. We're hopeful that this and similar models become the norm, not only bringing the fishermen and the retail buyer closer together, but shortening the supply chain, ensuring that less of the quality, and just as important, the story, is lost in the exchange.

Seafood is, in our opinion, one of the healthiest, most nutrient dense, and physiologically most important food sources we can access. But it can also be some of the most ecologically unsustainable and, frankly, bad tasting if it’s not done right.

If you don’t hunt or raise animals, you need a good butcher. If you don’t fish or get offshore you need a good fishmonger. Fish sticks be dammed!

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Today we're talking to Paul Saladino — the Carnivore MD — one of the most vocal proponents of the very in-vogue carnivore diet. Now, if you listen to this show, it’s no mystery that we at WildFed are as much plant people as we are hunters. We believe in both hunting and gathering, as well as the long tradition of human omnivory. So, you won’t hear of us giving up plants anytime soon. However, we appreciate Paul’s perspective and the work he’s done to combat the anti-meat sentiment — you could almost say “propaganda” — that has become so commonplace in the last decade or so.

In this conversation, we discuss meat and why it's so much more than just protein, Paul’s time with the Hadza in Tanzania and what he learned about their dietary preferences, and the politics of censorship and medical freedom. This is a really useful discussion, especially in a time when our fundamental, biologically appropriate foods are under constant attack by a well-intentioned, and sometimes not-so-well-intentioned, media and medical institution.

Paul is a radical. He’s a rebel. He’s a pioneer, and he’s fearlessly sharing a message that deserves to be heard. We don’t agree with all of his conclusions, but we certainly appreciate what he has to say, and we hope you do too.

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We’ve got a special edition of the podcast for you today, because our guest is none other than Avani Vitalis — Daniel's wife, teammate, and very best friend. Daniel and Avani get asked a lot how they deal with the constant threat of ticks. They live in the Northeast of the US where the tick problem is epidemic.

Should you avoid the outdoors? Should you be using permethrin or other bug sprays on your clothing or body? Should you be tucking your pants into your socks, or saturating yourself in essential oil formulas? Do you need a tick key or tweezers to remove an embedded tick? What do you do if you are bitten? What about your pets?

Well, Avani and Daniel are going to cover all of that today. Not as experts reporting on the science but rather as two individuals living at ground zero, deep in the heart of tick country. This is their experience. It’s not medical advice, rather it’s just some insight into their personal approach.

We think the biggest take away is this; if you spend time in the outdoors where ticks are endemic, you need a strategy for living with them. Yours may be different, but you’ll need one. The threat of tick borne illness is real, and the consequences are high.

They’ve chosen to live their lives with awareness but not fear, and they're about to share with you, just how they do that.

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Scott Leysath — The Sporting Chef — has been in outdoor television for 2 decades now. He joins us today to talk about a topic that’s near and dear to us — eating species that many others perceive as inedible or at least unpalatable. His show “Dead Meat” on the Outdoor Channel is about cooking the weird and wild species that most don’t consider food, or at least, that they’ve come to regard as somehow less than appetizing.

This is a fun conversation, and we think it’ll inspire you to think outside the box about potential protein sources on your landscape. And there’s some good leads in here for intrepid wild food adventurers that just might lead to your next meal. A meal that might surprise the folks around you who said “you can’t eat that”…

So, go prove them wrong — try an iguana, or a pigeon, or a raccoon, or a groundhog. Done right all four are delicious and deserve just as much respect as a deer or a dove or a duck.

In other words, it’s time to develop a sophisticated meat palate!

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We had a great time sitting down to talk with William Altman — fellow Mainer and the Director of Photography for Donnie Vincent.

As someone who’s entered into the world of hunting media, with this podcast and, of course, the WildFed TV show on Outdoor Channel, Daniel was excited to talk to William about the cinematography he’s doing in the hunting industry, helping to reshape the way hunting media looks and making it more palatable to folks who don’t hunt. But he was also excited to talk hunting in general, since William is a very accomplished and committed hunter.

So, you’re about to get a glimpse behind the scenes — to hear from the shooter behind the shooter — and also into the state of the hunting media industry, where it’s headed, and a lot more.

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It’s our honor and great pleasure to have Sam Thayer on the show. Sam is probably North America’s most well-known and respected voice in foraging today. Anyone who’s serious about foraging in the US or Canada likely has, and prizes, his three-book series in their library. Sam is an extremely well-rounded ecologist too — in possession of tremendous place-based knowledge and experience that goes well beyond just hunting and gathering. In our opinion, he’s truly one of the great ecological minds of our time.

In this interview, we discuss the way our enculturated minds — with what he calls an agrocentric worldview — have prevented us from understanding the original wild foodists, the hunting and gathering peoples of the world. In particular, the way their incredible, functional, and sophisticated ecological management strategies created food abundance on their landscape.

So, today we’ll be discussing agrocentrism. What it is, where it comes from, and how it keeps us from a truly intimate and sustainable relationship with the natural world.

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Our guest today is Eduardo Garcia. He’s a chef, hunter, angler, athlete, and a lover of the outdoors. He’s also the feature of a documentary called Charged: The Eduardo Garcia story, which we highly recommend you watch. It details a rather dramatic, unanticipated, and quite nearly fatal injury that Eduardo sustained on a backcountry hunt, and his inspiring recovery story. It’s an emotional ride that leaves you remembering what’s really important in life. Things like love, a healthy, positive outlook, friends, family, and — maybe most vital — what we give back to the world.

Today, Eduardo lives in Montana, where he’s an avid outdoorsman, fisherman, hunter, triathlete and motivational speaker, and we’re honored to have him here to share a bit of his story.

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Today’s guest is Alan Bergo — the Forager Chef, who you may remember from past episodes of this podcast and from our pigeon episode of the WildFed TV show on the Outdoor Channel. Alan is one of the most talented and intrepid chefs in the wild food world today, and he's just released a new book — The Forager Chef’s Book of Flora: Recipes and Techniques for Edible Plants from Garden, Field, and Forest.

Daniel often comments on this show that we're all descended from hunters — good ones too — or else we wouldn’t be here. But Alan is here today to remind us that we are also descended from foragers. Most likely, that’s a relationship that predates our species' hunting prowess. And unlike hunting, foraging is accessible to almost everyone. Even most cities have foraging groups, enthusiasts, and even classes happening right there in the parks around you. We can all get to know plants. And if you want to know what to do with them, have a listen to Alan. He’s certainly one of the plant pioneers of our generation. That’s why they call him the Forager Chef.

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