Nuts! Elspeth Hay’s New Book Delves Into Trees And The Future Of Food

 Back in 2019 Elspeth Hay, the WCAI reporter who hosts “The Local Food Report,” had an epiphany. You can eat acorns!

 Out in her driveway, she pried open an acorn shell and extracted the pale nut inside. “I put a bit of the nutmeat in my mouth and nibbled tentatively. Bitter, yes. But edible.” She soon found herself reading everything she could find about “humans eating tree nuts as staple foods.” Walking in the Wellfleet woods near her home, she now saw abundance. “Nothing about my landscape had changed. But suddenly, I saw food everywhere.”

 Hay has just released her first book, “Feed Us with Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food” (New Society Publishers, 2025). The intensely researched book is written in a chatty, personal tone.

 Hay’s acorn epiphany came after she heard a TEDx Talk by a woman named Marcie Mayer, a former Californian living in Greece and a so-called “acorn ambassador.” In the talk, Mayer “said that acorns are edible, and not just edible, but a superfood,” Hay said in an email interview last week. “I was shocked to learn that the forest around me was full of all this food.”

 Further, it turns out that acorns have been eaten for 12,000 years and “are still widely eaten by people of some cultures,” starting with Koreans.

 But what about that bitterness? Acorns must be treated just as olives are. Like olives, an acorn straight off the tree is loaded with bitter tannins. The acorns need to be soaked — cured — until they are sweet. Acorns can then be turned into flour in the same way hazelnuts and chestnuts can. They can also be turned into starches and oils. This seemingly mundane idea — that acorns are edible and useful -— can be a revolutionary and hopeful one. Maintaining vast tracts of farmland may not be necessary when staples can be produced from the trees around us. Hay notes that large-scale farming contributes to “species extinction, deforestation, water pollution, the death of countless insects” and global warming.

 Yet nut trees have dominated forests for 9,000 years — and indigenous peoples knew how to take advantage of the nuts, including acorns. Take the Karuk, an indigenous people of northern California. The Karuk have over 90 words related to acorns in their vocabulary, Hay tells us. Specific words mean “coarse acorn meal,” “mildewed acorns,” “acorn bread” and even a “type of worm that lives in acorns.”

 Hay grew up in coastal Maine on eight acres of farmland-turned-forest, and this perhaps helped form her views.

 “My parents taught me a lot about the ways birds are adapted to the ecosystems where they live, and I spent a lot of time outside with them as a kid,” she says. “They taught me about how sapsuckers used their chisel-like bills to drill neat rows of sap wells into birches and maples, how crossbills had mandibles perfectly adapted for extracting seeds from the cones of many conifers.

 “And then we’d go home and buy our food at the grocery store or the farmers’ market. And I knew the food in both these places came from land where we were carving out farmland from wild places.” She says she felt a sense of some type of wrongdoing by humans. “Why don't we have a habitat, a place in the world like all the other creatures?”

 Later, at Middlebury College, Hay studied environmental science and nonfiction writing. After she graduated in 2007, she moved to the Cape where, with her husband, Alex, she is raising their two daughters.

 Hay says her book was five years in the researching and writing. Initially, she had begun a pandemic-era cookbook project. During a conversation with a book agent, Hay mentioned her interest in acorns. “‘That’s the book you should be writing,’” the agent told Hay. “I didn’t take much convincing.”

 She wrote the proposal in 2020, sold the project in 2021, and later that year began her research travels around Cape Cod, and to Cape Ann, Wisconsin, California, Virginia and England.

 “I think a lot of us live with the message that humans are a negative presence in the living world,” Hay says. “I hope readers will walk away from the book knowing that doesn't have to be true; that for most of our time on earth we've been a really positive, important presence — and that in tending these nut trees we can play that role again.”

 As a child, Hay asked, “what’s wrong with our species?” 

 “Learning that we can eat acorns sort of cracked that question back open for me, and provided the first hint at an answer,” she says.

 Hay will join Kate Woodworth, author of the novel “Little Great Island,” in a conversation about humans and the environment moderated by Kristin Andres, director of education and outreach at the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, on Thursday, July 24 from 10 a.m. to noon at Brewster Book Store, 2648 Main St. in Brewster. Registration for the free event is encouraged through brewsterbookstore.com/events. Hay will also read from her book at Snow Library in Orleans on Wednesday, Aug. 13 from 6 to 7 p.m.