Elspeth Hay
Host, The Local Food ReportElspeth Hay is the creator and host of the Local Food Report, a weekly feature that has aired on CAI since 2008, and the author of the forthcoming book Feed Us with Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food. Deeply immersed in her own local-food system, she writes and reports for print, radio, and online media with a focus on food, the environment, and the people, places, and ideas that feed us. You can learn more about her work at elspethhay.com.
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Every gardener’s been there. You go away for a day, peer under the leaves, and are alarmed to find that the small, reasonable little squashes from yesterday have doubled in size. But I hate to see zucchini go to waste. So after talking with David, I roamed the market, asking vendors and customers for their best zucchini ideas. -
The bananas were a hit and he ended up building an entire banana industry — starting plantations in Jamaica and shipping the fruit to the United States. -
I grew up in farm country, in Maine. Like most of us, I associate food with farms—big cultivated fields, animals grazing in pasture, aquaculture racks in the sea. But recently I’ve been thinking a lot more about wild foods. What would the world look like if more wild places filled our bellies? -
Have you ever had a black raspberry? Until about ten years ago, I thought they were made up—a way to describe a commercial flavor, like a blue raspberry Jolly Rancher. I know, it’s a little embarrassing. -
This week on the Local Food Report, black trumpet mushrooms. -
My friend Drew Locke is a seventh-generation farmer in Truro. He’s always trying new things — partly because he’s curious and partly because even though he comes from a long line of farmers, a lot of intergenerational knowledge has been lost in recent decades and he’s focused on relearning the old ways. -
All over eastern North America right now, chestnut breeders are pollinating tree flowers. -
Our native forests are full of food. The understories are packed with blueberries and huckleberries and for thousands of years, local overstories have been full of nut trees: hickories and chestnuts and walnuts and oaks. -
Mob grazing is a strategy Dan Athearn is working with to try to control what’s growing on this unique stretch of grassland. His family took over managing the land with a group of other local growers and cattle farmers in 2021.
