Fishing the Wild Waters is the new book from today’s guest Conor Sullivan. He was one of our earliest podcast guests here on WildFed, and at that time he’d mentioned he was writing this book, but it was still an early manuscript. Well, the book is out, and we've had the pleasure of reading it. This book is certainly a proud addition to our fishing library, a genre that we haven’t always found very useful. But Conor’s book is different. It's part memoir, with really inspiring and informative fishing stories from some of the United States' more remote fisheries. It’s also part instructional manual, with several appendices that give detailed descriptions of fishing gear and angling strategies for specific species he writes about. In particular, we really appreciated the appendix called “how to fish like a local” which gives great tips on how to get started in a new fishery.

Conor’s career in the Coast Guard has taken him all over the wild waters of this incredible country, and he’s really taken advantage of that opportunity, honing his angling skills wherever duty has taken him. He’s here today to share with us a bit about how we too can become better, more effective anglers ourselves. And to encourage us to ply the wild waters wherever we live. Because there’s adventure, fulfillment, and food out there, just waiting for you!

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The early spring green foraging season is upon us — or at least it's drawing very close now — and who better to talk to than the Forager Chef himself, Alan Bergo.

Alan is a longtime guest and friend of the show — both the WildFed podcast and TV show — and one of today’s most prolific wild food writers and recipe developers. His website — ForagerChef.com — is the web’s largest wild mushroom cookery resource, but it's so much more, with incredible recipes and musings on plants as well.

Alan is constantly experimenting with old and new ways of processing, cooking, fermenting, pickling, or preserving wild edibles and is always on the quest for bold new flavors too.

After a long, Northern Hemisphere winter, there’s nothing as cleansing and rejuvenating as those early spring greens, and Alan is gonna give us lots of tips and tricks on what to do with them. We also talk about the rise of wild foods and foraging in television media and get some teasers about a new mainstream tv project he’s recently become involved in, which will be coming out soon.

For those of us in the wild foods culture, this is an exciting time, both because of spring greens, but even more so because many prominent wild food educators and personalities are producing media that has the potential to bring what we do to larger audiences — hopefully, helping to mainstream the idea that wild nature and humans have always had, and should have today, an intimate, reciprocal relationship based around food.

More people caring about what wild nature has to offer means more people caring for wild nature. And eventually, we all hope, that leads to more wild nature!

Alan is playing an instrumental part in that, and continues to be an innovative, curious, and perpetually inspiring voice on the topic.

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Our guest today is Carter Heath, Regional Director for the New England and New York chapters of the National Wild Turkey Federation and longtime guest and friend of the show. He’s also bi-lingual, speaking both English as well as wild turkey, in which he’s quite fluent. Not just at cutting and gobbling, but even in Jake calls and gentle hen purrs too. The man simply exudes wild turkey vibes as if he were wrapped in a turkey atmosphere. And he gets to share this passion as his profession, which is just a beautiful thing to witness in a person.

Today we thought it would be fun to talk about getting started turkey hunting — start to finish — so this interview focuses on everything you need to know to get going. From getting your hunting license to selecting a weapon and strategy, to turning your bird — or hopefully birds — into delicious meals.

The turkey rut is just about to kick off, and we couldn’t be more excited for a little spring thunder!

For now, enjoy the gobbling, cutting, and gentle purrs of Carter Heath. He’s been a significant part of the incredible interest we’ve been experiencing around the spring turkey hunt in recent years, with its rapidly expanding hunter participation and especially the growing interest we’ve seen from new hunters.

We hope he’ll inspire you to get involved if you aren’t already and to join the National Wild Turkey Federation this year. It’s just $35 a year, comes with a great magazine subscription, and your money goes to support very real and tangible habitat restoration projects and wild turkey conservation efforts. Join us in becoming a member, whether you hunt or not, because we need all hands on deck to preserve our hunting heritage and to conserve the wild turkey!

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Today's guest is Chris Morasky, and when it comes to off-grid, primitive living, this guy has put in the dirt time. He’s also something of an existentialist philosopher, and our conversation today takes place at what we see as a pivotal moment in human history.

Where do we — lovers of the natural world — fit into an increasingly fast-paced, distracted, digital and, dare we say, artificial world?

We know it’s on our minds, and we're guessing it's on yours too. After all, we don’t imagine we’ll be hunting and gathering wild foods in the metaverse, or experiencing the rich and meaningful relationships and experiences we currently get to curate here on the… well… natural earth.

Barring the catastrophic or unforeseeable, we are headed for an increasingly artificial experience of reality. We choose that word, “artificial,” carefully. It shares a common root with the word artifact, and of course, the word art itself. Meaning shaped by human will or human hands, it stands in contrast to the word “natural" — something that has not been shaped by human will or human hands.

The metaverse, as it has come to be called, or the various forms of augmented reality that have been proposed, all take us further from the natural experience into the artificial. That’s not a value statement, just an observation of reality. These worlds, digital extensions of our built environment, unlike the kind of “hybrid” world we inhabit now — made of both the natural and artificial — will be purely the work of human imagination. For those with a more transhumanist leaning, this is the ultimate dream fulfilled. Like the singularity itself, the idea of a metaverse is a kind of technotopia. But for many of us who love nature, and particularly for those of us who draw resources directly from nature, i.e. hunters and gatherers, it’s a kind of nightmare scenario, a techno dystopia. But, it’s unfolding before our very eyes and with no signs of slowing down. To the contrary, it’s speeding up.

So, how do we navigate this rapidly approaching world. How do we relate to it, stay sane, and stay connected to the natural world? That’s the question that’s on our minds, in this conversation with Chris Morasky.

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Everett Headley is back on the show today, this time, to discuss a topic we’ve been wanting to learn about for ages… Falconry. That’s right, hunting with a bird of prey.

Each year, when we go through our own state's hunting regulations, we're always transfixed by the “grey squirrel falconry season.” We think, just what is this anyway, and who is doing it?

Well, Everett is here today to give us a primer on what falconry is, who does it, and how. Of course, we’ll learn a lot about these incredible birds too.

One of the big takeaways for us is that, prior to shotguns being widely available, this was a really efficient way to bird hunt. Of course, today, it’s more of an art form, being kept alive by folks who want to maintain this ancient hunting relationship with wild raptors.

A lot of hunters, upon first learning about falconry think “I’d like to try that” — and Daniel is one of them — so in many ways, this interview gives us a real glimpse into just what it takes. Spoiler alert, it's a lot of work and not for everybody!

But we bet it’s for some of you, and even if it's not, this is a fascinating and engrossing topic you won’t want to miss.

So, special thanks to Everett for coming back on the show. He was just on for episode 118, A Hunting Dialectic, which was a great show too. We don’t think we've ever had a guest on for two episodes so close together, but Everett has so much to offer the hunting world, and Daniel just couldn’t wait to talk about these incredible birds and the lifestyle of hunting with them.

There’s only about 4,000 falconers in the US today. We're hoping, after hearing this episode, that there might just be a few more added to the ranks.

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In today's episode, Daniel is speaking to Jack and Andy of Foraged.Market, a website dedicated to high-quality specialty and wild foods from around the world. Not only is it a place where you can find and purchase wild foods from vetted, sustainable foragers, but it's also a place where you can sell your own foraged foods or products you forage! Of course, you’ve always had the ability to sell what you forage, but it's not been easy to find buyers interested in your goods. But Foraged brings buyers, looking for your products, to you. Think Etsy for wild foods. Linking sellers and buyers to one another.

Imagine that you are a chef or a home cook, and you’re looking for American Matsutake mushrooms. You could simply order them on Foraged.Marketplace, trusting that they’ve come from a forager who’s been evaluated by the Foraged team, to ensure they’re using sustainable foraging practices.

Or, let’s say you’ve been making birch syrup at home, and you’ve got a surplus. You could sell your product on Foraged too, with your own online store front — assuming you’ve first gone through their sustainable forging practices verification process.

This is a huge leap forward for the wild foods and foraging community. Opening up avenues for the flow of these incredible, sustainable products into our food systems and empowering those who tend the wild to become more self-sufficient practicing their craft as an income source.

It means chefs can more easily access the incredible ingredients that we foragers have been enjoying for years, broadening the public's palette and perception of what the wild world produces, and thereby placing value on species that might otherwise be forgotten, ensuring that at least some of these species get the attention and eventual protection they need to exist in perpetuity!

It also opens up pathways for more scrutiny into the sustainability of our practices and to subtly shift the foraging world away from a taking model to more of a tending model.

We've got really high hopes for what Jack and Andy are doing at Foraged and are really looking forward to the way this could positively impact the foraging world! And also to see how it might benefit you, the listener, in either accessing wild foods you’re interested in, or in sharing wild foods you love with others.

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Our guest today is Bob Krumm — author of several wonderful books on berry foraging that span the Pacific Northwest to New England and a fly fishing guide on the Bighorn River since the 1980s. In fact, still guiding clients today, Bob's now the eldest guide on the river — quite a distinction. We love this conversation because Bob's got qualities that we really want to cultivate in this life. He's so kind and good-hearted, and his outlook on life is so beautifully positive.

Bob's been gathering berries for jams and jellies for decades, and he sent Daniel several bottles, which he and Avani have readily devoured. He's convinced some of Bob's good vibes have made it into each bottle. Anyway, it's always great to get the perspective of folks who've been on the path and the planet a bit longer. It's such an important reminder of what's really most important in life.

Bob sent Daniel his books, and in each one where he signed them, he wrote a little message. They kind of sum up the philosophy that we're talking about.

One says: Remember, life's just a bowl of berries. Sweet ones at that.

Another reads: May all of your endeavors turn out berry good.

And the third: May your berry bucket be full of joy, love, blessings, and lots of luscious berries.

We think Bob collecting berries along the Bighorn River has gathered more than just ripe fruits — he's found a lot of what life is really all about.

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We’ve got a great show for you today with Kelly Kindscher, PhD. He’s the author of Edible Wild Plants of the Prairie, a senior scientist at the Kansas Biological Survey and a Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Kansas.

His research specialties are plant community ecology, conservation biology, restoration ecology, botany, and ethnobotany. His passion is for wild prairies, wild plants, and wild landscapes.

If you’ve got questions about the ecology of the prairie, Kelly Kindscher is your guy. And, we've got questions about the prairie!

We love interviews like this, deep dives on specific topics — especially getting to explore the big history of landscapes and their ecology. In our short lifetimes we get such a brief glimpse into the places we live or visit, so drawing upon the incredible history and science to piece together a big-picture story, to us is both revelatory and thrilling.

Today, of course, we’re talking about the prairie, how it was formed — which, most interestingly, had strong anthropogenic influence — and what happened from the first settlement there, up to European contact, and right up to the present.

Having visited the prairie last year, not for the first time, but for the first time with intentionality, Daniel is keenly interested in this ecological treasure. And, having eaten from what it provides, in the form of bison, chokecherries, and prairie turnips, we really value the message that Dr. Kelly is sharing. That our prairie restoration efforts must include edible and medicinal plants if we hope to make a lasting change in how modern Americans relate to this crucial ecotype. Trying to rebuild it, exclusive of people just means people forget about it. Out of site, out of mind. But creating landscapes that humans can interact with, particularly at the gustatory level — which incidentally is likely the reason the prairies were built by humans in the first place — means that people, rather than forgetting, will instead be interacting. What we care about we protect.

It’s a beautiful and timely message about a place whose importance can’t be overstated. And of course, this same thinking can be applied to any and all landscapes. Like Kelly, we think tending wild landscapes for food and medicine is the missing component that gives modern people a reason to care. The answers are already there, they just need to be implemented.

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We've got a fascinating interview for you today. Our guest Mike Robinson is a restaurateur in the UK, specializing in bringing wild game meat to the market and table — something we can’t really do here in the US but is legal in England. More specifically, he and his restaurants specialize in wild venison. In fact, Mike is playing a significant role in how wild venison reaches British diners. He’s also a television personality, who currently has four different shows airing on Outdoor Channel. You read that right, four shows.

One of which, Farming the Wild — which airs in the same block as WildFed — often features him hunting deer in ways that frankly, we’d just never seen. Stalking through the English countryside with dogs, head shooting deer off of shooting sticks, letting his dogs find the deer, and then field dressing those deer to enter the restaurant market.

If you’ve never seen a man in a tweed golf hat field dress a deer in 70 seconds, you need to see his show! Mike has a method of cleaning deer that is faster, more hygienic, and more efficient than any we've ever seen. It comes from having harvested thousands — yes, thousands — of deer. And he’ll describe his method for us in this interview.

There’s a lot of really useful takeaways in this conversation, things that’ll make your field care and final cooking product even better. It’s also a very intriguing contrast — the differences between British and American hunting culture.

Here with our vast public lands, huge wilderness areas, and relatively short history as a domesticated landscape, our hunting culture has been shaped by a rugged, survivalist mentality. There in the UK, where there’s been thousands of years of domestication and farming, their hunting culture is more akin to animal husbandry, which is why Mike’s show is called Farming The Wild.

And while the differences are fascinating, between the old world and the new — we're even more interested in what we can learn from each other!

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Daniel set out to interview today’s guest — Everett Headley — on the topic of falconry… cooperative hunting with a bird of prey. He’s a Montana resident that, amongst other things, hunted with a red tail hawk and is now training a peregrine falcon. All very interesting stuff that we've wanted to learn more about for years. But from the moment we started speaking, it was obvious that the natural flow of their conversation was going in a different direction. Both Everett and Daniel take a very philosophical approach to hunting and to understanding their relationship to the outdoors and the wild things that live there, and this, being their initial conversation, quickly took a turn towards the big picture.

What they landed on was a conversation about the journey a hunter takes over the course of their lifetime and how they think we can best preserve our hunting heritage in perpetuity. It’s an important topic, because, despite the renewed cultural interest we’re seeing in hunting right now, there are many forces still aligned against it. And while, in recent years, many new hunters are embracing the lifestyle, we have a long way to go to win over the non-hunting public.

Everett is a really thoughtful person, and it comes through in how he communicates about the lifestyle he passionately lives. He really takes his time in exploring these ideas and has a deep grasp on the topic of hunting. Not just the how-to, but the why, and when. And by "when" we mean where we are, currently, in the timeline of modern hunting and its relationship to conservation.

We love conversations like this, true dialectics, where many questions are asked, but neither of us has an answer to the questions we’re posing. Instead we explore them with a sincere desire to arrive at sound conclusions.

Whether you agree or not with the conclusions we are reaching is less important than that these ideas get explored. Because, as we're always wanting to point out, hunting isn’t just some other hobby, like building model cars or playing racket ball. It’s the natural, fundamental human food acquisition strategy and it’s formative to how we came to be in relationship to the rest of the ecosystem and the other-than-human beings that inhabit them alongside us. Therefore, while many fads will come and go, some in the course of our lifetime, hunting must — in my opinion — remain. It’s too important to who we are to see it lost or forgotten, or tread beneath the wheels of the engine of so-called progress.

So, it’s in that spirit that Everett and Daniel have this conversation. It’s a desire to see something fundamentally human, preserved.

And we promise to bring him back to talk about falconry soon. We're as interested to learn about that as you are. In the meantime, get to know Everett a bit, and take some time to consider these questions yourself. We need all hands on deck!

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Is camouflage necessary for hunting? How much of it is gimmick and hype? If it does work, to what degree does it make sense to be employing it?

Join Daniel for a solo edition of the podcast as he takes a deep dive into the art and practicality of camouflage. Nature regularly employs camouflage for deception — both for predators and for prey — and it's important that we, as hunters, consider our visibility in the landscapes we're moving through.

In this episode, Daniel explains how camouflage works and gives an overview of the myriad of different camouflage options available — patterns, colors, brands and more. He explores the effectiveness of these options in the field and shares his own experiences, as well as some of his favorites.

We hope this gives you some food for thought as you consider your hunting, fishing and foraging wardrobe into the future!

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One of our favorite repeat guests, Lori McCarthy, is back today to talk about her new book, Food, Culture, Place: Stories, Traditions, and Recipes of Newfoundland.

Lori is, of course, from Newfoundland, Canada — which, by the way, should not be confused with the rest of Canada — as it really is its own place entirely, having only become a Canadian province in 1949! With a timezone 30 minutes ahead of Eastern Standard, they really do march to the beat of their own drum, and speak a dialect all their own. Of all the places we've visited in the US and Canada, nowhere is the food culture still as intimately tied to the landscape as it is there.

Lori’s new book, while we'd categorize it as a cookbook, is also a deep dive into the foodways and cultural heritage of the island they call “The Rock”, which is exemplified in the title — Food, Culture, Place.

Lori and Daniel have always had a great rapport, so this interview is full of stories, laughs, and of course, interesting anecdotes from the world of wild foods.

Oh, one more thing, we spoke with Lori this morning, and there’s been some shipping delays that have postponed the official launch of her book, but she’ll have them very soon. She wanted us to let you know, if you want to pre-order a copy you can do that on Amazon, or by emailing her directly at foodcultureplace.ca. She’ll get one out to you as soon as they arrive.

In the meantime, enjoy the very unique insights, stories, and of course, accent of the one and only, Lori McCarthy.

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Today's guest is Kathy Yerich. She's the co-author of Mushrooms of the Upper Midwest, a field guide for lay folks in that area to use identifying fungi around them. Created specifically for the mushroom beginner — it's organized by what the mushroom looks like in order to teach people to look at all of the mushroom's features and get to know the best and easiest to identify edibles, as well as the most poisonous species.

Kathy's been part of the Minnesota Mycological Society for 15 years and the North American Mycological Association for about 12 years. She's also very enthusiastic — like so many of you — about wild foods. Mushrooms for her are more than an academic interest — they're a food source.

We really hope this encourages you to set some mushroom foraging goals for the coming year. Unless you're lucky enough to live in a place where mycelia fruit this time of year — in which case, get out there! Us, we're feeling committed to putting more time into mushrooming this coming season. But until then, we'll do some winter Chaga hunting and keep making Chaga tea until the snow melts away, the weather warms up and new flushes of mushrooms start pushing their way up through the forest floor again.

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Today’s guest is Senior Cyber Tracker Kersey Lawrence.

If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you’ve heard Daniel speak to a few skilled trackers in past episodes. This skill, of studying, identifying, and ultimately tracking and trailing animals was — most likely — fundamental to the development of the modern human brain and perhaps even to language itself.

At one time, this skill would have been nearly universal amongst humans, but of course, in our more modern era, it’s atrophied to the point that most of us can’t identify the tracks of the native wildlife around us, no less interpret them.

Now, modern hunters are a bit of an exception. Most of us are aware of the track patterns of the animals we pursue, and use these tracks, albeit in a rudimentary way, to locate our quarry. That kind of tracking is a bit like learning an alphabet, or maybe even reading a few monosyllabic words. What Daniel's talking with Kersey about today is different. It’s more akin to reading sentences, paragraphs, and ultimately books of knowledge about how animals have used the landscape in the recent past and potentially might use it in the future too.

There are places and peoples in the world where this skill is still alive, part of an unbroken lineage that stretches back into the deepest recesses of human antiquity. And there are also folks, for whom this field of study came later in life but who have developed it into a contemporary art-form and culture — who’ve codified it and who are ensuring it doesn’t blink out of existence the way so much of our ancestral skills and technologies have.

Kersey has a foot in both worlds. She lives part time and works alongside trackers in Africa, who come from communities where tracking is still practiced the way it always has been. Places where the practice of this art was never generationally interrupted. But she also lives part time here in the US where she teaches tracking to folks whose lineage forgot the art of tracking long ago.

Kersey is the first woman to ever earn the title of Senior Tracker in the internationally renowned CyberTracker system. Today she’s going to tell us what CyberTracker is, and about the art of tracking. She’s done the deep dive, and she’s going to introduce us to something our ancestors forgot long ago, and maybe even invite us to pick it up where those distant relatives left off.

To not just follow in their footsteps, but to follow their footsteps themselves.

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Today's episode is with our good friend Randy Huntley. This guy is a hoot. He’s a hunter, a registered Maine guide who leads bear and moose hunts, an Animal Damage Control trapper, a maple sap tapper, an avid fiddleheader, and all-around outdoorsman. He’s got one of the best beards in his field, and he’s also Daniel's beaver tapping mentor.

One of the things we like the most about him, he’s as into eating wild game as we are, and for him, eating beaver is no exception.

As you probably know, for most of modern beaver trapping history, it was the pelts that motivated trappers to wade into the beaver's watery world. But today, with the price of pelts so low, it's scarcely worth your time to trap for furs alone. Even when selling the Castor glands into the market, it’s hard to imagine breaking even as a money-motivated beaver trapper. But when you start considering the incredible food value, and the fact that they can weigh 20-60 pounds apiece, trapping as a wild food strategy starts looking really enticing. Furs and glands become a secondary consideration.

So, with eating beaver on our mind — insert laugh track here — we've been setting off to the stream banks with Randy to “lay some steel” as they say. The result, some of the best eating game meat the wild world provides. Beautiful red meat for steaks and braises, and lots of succulent fat. Not what you normally associate with rodents, but then again, these are the continent's largest, and they’re in a culinary category all their own.

We think beaver is one of North America's most underutilized game meats, so if you're looking to fill the freezer without needing to fire a single shot, consider a beaver trapline. After all, it hunts while you sleep. But you’ll need to go find yourself a mentor like Randy Huntley first because there’s no substitute for a great teacher.

And if he comes with a highly polished Maine accent, just consider that a bonus!

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Today’s guest is John McGannon — chef, author, television host, a true pioneer in wild game cookery and a veteran of the wild-game cookery television space that we at WildFed are still fledgling to.

We really appreciate the opportunity to talk to someone like him, since he’s already tread much of the landscape we're now exploring, and also because he can give valuable context to what the last couple of decades in the space has been like.

Probably most valuable is hearing his key take aways about game cookery. After many years of trial and error, he’s distilled down a few key strategies for making every cut of game shine in the kitchen and on the plate. Most significant — John says they’ll probably put it on his epitaph — is his emphasis on dry-aging. So, if you're looking for take-aways from this episode, listen to how he suggests you age game meats at home.

You’ll want to work these ideas into your field-care and kitchen.

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We’re joined today by Zach Elfers, aka @woodlandrambler of the Nomad Seed project.

Zach has a unique suite of skills and knowledge base that centers around the intersection of botany, horticulture, foraging, wild-tending and traditional ecological knowledge. As a member of the foraging community, Zach is going a lot deeper than mere plant identification or gathering. He’s looking at creating large scale, reciprocal ecological relationships between people, the plants, the land, and the rest of the non-human beings that we share the landscape with. And while this was a get-to-know-you kind of conversation, Daniel left it feeling like "this is the kind of thinking he hopes can start to infuse North American foraging culture over the next decade."

Our conversation quickly veered away from merely foraging and went into some of the challenging-to-traverse terrain of the socio-political aspects of our cultural relationship to the land and each other. Of particular interest to us is the juxtaposition of top-down vs bottom-up approaches to implementation. We look at indigenous vs colonial land management paradigms, and discuss possible roads back to a more long-term sustainable path of nature integration.

This interview gets into some of the high-level, big-picture thinking that we really enjoy. It’s a reminder that wild foods are about a lot more than what’s on your plate. It’s about how we relate to the landscape, to the creatures we share the planet with, and how we relate to each other too. Because food is so much more than calories. It’s a representation of how we choose to walk in the world.

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Rebugging The Planet?

We spend a lot of time and energy considering the role that charismatic animals play in our ecosystems and why we should conserve them. But what about less charismatic critters? The ones that aren’t so pretty.

Vicki Hird is here to speak on behalf of the bugs — not just insects — but invertebrates in general. Throughout this interview, we’ll use the term bug loosely to encompass insects, arachnids, plankton, and just about any other invertebrate too, because, as it turns out, in many cases, their populations are in decline. The culprits are many. Some obvious — like habitat loss and deliberate or unintended chemical assault. But there are some surprises too — like the impact that high-energy communications systems like 5G technology may have on invertebrate populations.

It’s easy to muster the public will to conserve the polar bear, the blue whale, and the bald eagle. But what of bugs? Are our unconscious biases keeping us incognizant of their decline?

We’ve all been inculcated, not intentionally, but subconsciously, with a cultural bias — disdain might be a better word — for bugs. Squash them, spray them with pesticide, avoid them at all costs. But in an era that, looking back a few hundred years from now, will likely be defined by ecological crisis and the measures taken to confront it — what we need most is a reframing of the way we view our fellow life forms. Because we can’t sustainably change the way we act without changing the way we think.

Many of us received a miseducation on what Vicki calls bugs. We learned they're dirty, they’re dangerous, they’re vectors for disease. Vicki is here to correct the record and offer us the opportunity to reframe our relationship with these all-important creatures. And she’s sharing things we can each do, individually, to promote the return of their numbers.

She’s here to help re-bug the planet! But first, we have to re-bug our minds.

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David Meltzer is Professor of Prehistory at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, an archeologist who has conducted research throughout North America, and the author of over 200 scientific studies, and 10 books, including First Peoples In A New World.

His primary interest is the first peopling of the continent — a subject that, for whatever reason, has always captivated us. It’s not just the idea of Asiatic people venturing across Beringia and into an unpeopled world, which is interesting enough on its own, but it’s the world they entered into — an ice age landscape full of now extinct animals, like elephantine mammoths, deadly saber tooth cats, giant short faced bears, enormous ground sloths, and gargantuan primitive bison.

But what do we really know about these so called “paleo-indian” peoples and their migration here? And what role, if any, might they have played in the extinction of so much of the ice age megafauna they encountered — and in many cases, hunted?

Today we’ll get the big picture overview of what we know about the first peopling of North and South America and what the world was like just 15,000 years ago. It might sound like a long time, but in the scheme of human history, it’s really quite recent. So recent in fact, that conversations like this leave us feeling like that world is almost within reach. It’s exciting and energizing to imagine that world, in all its contrast to the modern one we find ourselves in today.

And while we’re now safer, more affluent, and less inclined to be eaten, there’s a feeling we can’t shake that there was also something essential about that time that’s now missing. Perhaps that’s naive nostalgia talking, but we're gonna indulge it, just for today.

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Today’s show really harkens back to Daniel's roots! His earliest work was focused on nutrition, which has been a primary interest of his for more than two and a half decades. He eventually landed on a wild foods lifestyle by following that thread of interest wherever it led. After becoming very dissatisfied with modern dietary dogma and popular fad diets, he started looking into our ancestral past for clues about what the human animal needs for nutritional inputs, and at what worked historically.

Today's guest — Dr. Bill Schindler — is author of the new book Eat Like A Human. The book lays out simply and clearly, the foundations of a zoologically appropriate human diet, based on both medical and nutritional science, but also on several hundred thousand years of evolutionary history.

Bill and Daniel, while coming from really different origin stories, have landed on really similar conclusions about food and how we relate to it. It's concepts like those he explores in his book that have led to Daniel hunting, fishing, foraging, and making this podcast and the WildFed TV show.

In other words, it was the desire to integrate ancestral practices into a modern life that led to this show. But you don’t have to harvest your own food to start putting these kinds of dietary practices into place. You can learn to forage the produce section and hunt the deli area of your local grocer. Bill’s book will show you how. Follow that path long enough, and you might just find yourself in the woods, or on the sea, chasing the most nutritious and ancestrally coherent food you can find.. so you can, like Bill says…. Eat Like A Human.

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