WILD FOOD RESEARCH
Jonathan carrying a doe harvested in Lost Creek, WV. Photo by Mike Costello
For the overwhelming majority of the history of Homo sapien’s history, our species has relied on food that is produced with minimal human input. The wild vegetables, fruits, meats, and fish we consume has come to us as matter of being in good relation with the species who lived on this planet far longer than the brief 250,000 years we have been around.
WVU undergrad students, Claire Griffith and Kaleb Peitkoski, presenting wild food research at SEDAAG meeting in Starkville, MS in 2017. Photo by J.C. Hall
Over the last 15,000 years however, the advent of industrial agriculture and the subsequent evolution of such into colonialism and settler colonialism has dramatically transformed the planet, all species, and the predominant diets of human beings.
Our research on wild foods focuses on the role wild food provisioning in the Global North or so called “developed countries”. There is a lack of research on wild food provisioning practices in mainstream food literature that, as our latest paper indicates, overlooks a substantial amount of food that goes unaccounted for in modern food systems.
publications
Hall, J.C. (2021). Food security in the era of COVID-19: wild food provisioning during a global pandemic. Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment, 43(2): 114-122.
Hall, J.C., Gum, H., and Pietkoski, K. (2020). Wild alternatives: accounting for and rethinking the relationship between wild game and food security in Appalachian food systems. Applied Geography. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2020.102329