Gina Rae La Cerva self-identifies as a feral child, wandering around alone in the arroyos outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico. As she traveled worldwide to conduct research for her book “Feasting Wild,” she discovered that everyone from the poet Horace to Henry David Thoreau elevated wild foods and longed for a simpler way of life — in response to excessiveness of civilization and the industrialization of food.
Gina Rae La Cerva describes the fetish of scarcity, where food and ingredients are considered luxuries the more difficult they are to source. Photo courtesy of Greystone Books.