Or maybe more accurately, a question.

A question about food.
A question about ecology.
A question about human health.
A question about memory.

A question about whether we had somehow drifted too far from the systems that once connected us intimately to the landscapes around us — and whether reconnecting to those systems might help heal something much larger than our dinner plates.

This June, Wild Foods officially premieres in national syndication on Create TV.

And to say I’m grateful would be an enormous understatement.

For those unfamiliar, Create TV is a nationally distributed public television network focused on food, travel, crafts, nature, gardening, home, and lifelong learning programming. In many ways, it is the perfect home for this series and the conversations we hoped it would spark.

But what makes this moment especially meaningful is not simply that the show is airing nationally.

It’s that people are actually watching.

Not casually. Not passively.

They’re connecting to it.

Our first season achieved over a 90% saturation rate across PBS stations nationwide — an extraordinary milestone for an independently produced first-season series. That means stations believed in the show enough to carry it widely, and audiences responded strongly enough for it to continue growing.

And none of that happens without viewers.

It happens because people are hungry for stories that feel real again.

And yes — pun intended.

Eight Years of Building Something We Hoped Would Matter

People often see the finished product and understandably assume a television show comes together in a few months.

But Wild Foods was built over nearly a decade.

Eight years of research and development.
Eight years of filming in forests, mountains, rivers, coastlines, ranches, farms, kitchens, fisheries, and communities.
Eight years of editing, rewriting, traveling, failing, recalibrating, and trying again.

There were moments when the project felt impossible.

Moments where funding disappeared.
Moments where logistics collapsed.
Moments where the sheer scale of independent production felt overwhelming.

But there was always something undeniable underneath it all:

These stories mattered.

Because beneath every conversation about food is really a conversation about relationship.

Relationship to place.
Relationship to ancestry.
Relationship to community.
Relationship to health.
Relationship to stewardship.
Relationship to the future.

And increasingly, people feel that absence.

We Haven’t Lived This Way for Very Long

One of the ideas that quietly sits underneath Wild Foods is this:

Industrial food systems are actually very new.

For the overwhelming majority of human history, people lived in much closer relationship with seasonal ecosystems, regional biodiversity, local agriculture, and wild food systems.

That doesn’t mean the past was perfect. It wasn’t.

But it does mean that many of the chronic environmental and health crises we face today emerged extraordinarily quickly when viewed through the lens of human history.

In just a relatively short period of time, we transformed food from something relational into something industrial.

And we’re now living with the consequences:

Declining biodiversity.
Nutrient depletion.
Ultra-processed diets.
Loss of traditional knowledge.
Disconnection from landscapes.
Isolation from community.

The encouraging part is this:

If these systems were created relatively quickly, they can also be changed relatively quickly.

Not overnight.
Not magically.
Not by one show.

But by culture shifting.

By conversations shifting.

By people becoming curious again.

By supporting local producers.
By protecting ecosystems.
By teaching children where food comes from.
By valuing quality over convenience.
By rebuilding community around meals and landscapes and traditions.

And maybe most importantly:

By remembering that we are still part of nature, not separate from it.

Why This Response Gives Me Hope

When we first started this project, I honestly didn’t know how audiences would respond.

I knew I wanted to watch this show.

But you never know whether something deeply personal and mission-driven will resonate broadly.

The fact that it has — with viewers, stations, program directors, chefs, farmers, conservationists, scientists, foragers, and communities across the country — gives me tremendous hope.

Because it suggests something important:

People are ready.

Ready for deeper stories.
Ready for authenticity.
Ready for grounded conversations.
Ready for solutions.
Ready for reconnection.

And perhaps ready to believe that meaningful cultural change is still possible.

That matters enormously right now.

This Is Only the Beginning

The most exciting part of all of this is that we are just getting started.

A strong launch gives independent projects like ours a chance to continue creating.

To expand.
To travel further.
To tell more stories.
To spotlight more voices.
To protect more landscapes.
To inspire more people.

That’s the reality of public media and independent storytelling: audience support matters.

Every viewer matters.
Every station matters.
Every share matters.

You helped make this possible.

And I hope you’ll continue this journey with us as we move into the next phase of Wild Foods.

Because maybe — collectively — we still have time to build healthier systems.

Healthier food systems.
Healthier communities.
Healthier ecosystems.
Healthier relationships with the natural world.

And maybe if enough of us participate, future generations will inherit not only a healthier planet, but also a deeper understanding of how to belong to it.

That possibility is worth fighting for.

WILD FOODS on CREATE TV — National Premiere Schedule

(All times local)

Episode 101
Mon, June 8 at 6:30 / 8:30 / Midnight
Encore: Thu, June 18 at 6:30 / 8:30 / Midnight

Episode 102
Tue, June 9 at 6:30 / 8:30 / Midnight
Encore: Fri, June 19 at 6:30 / 8:30 / 2:30 AM

Episode 103
Wed, June 10 at 6:30 / 8:30 / Midnight
Encore: Mon, June 22 at 6:30 / 8:30 / Midnight

Episode 104
Thu, June 11 at 6:30 / 8:30 / Midnight
Encore: Tue, June 23 at 6:30 / 8:30 / Midnight

Episode 105
Fri, June 12 at 6:30 / 8:30 / 2:30 AM
Encore: Wed, June 24 at 6:30 / 8:30 / Midnight

Episode 106
Mon, June 15 at 6:30 / 8:30 / Midnight
Encore: Thu, June 25 at 6:30 / 8:30 / Midnight

Episode 107
Tue, June 16 at 6:30 / 8:30 / Midnight
Encore: Fri, June 26 at 6:30 / 8:30 / 2:30 AM

Episode 108
Wed, June 17 at 6:30 / 8:30 / Midnight
Encore: Mon, June 29 at 6:30 / 8:30 / Midnight

Thank you for being part of this.

See you in the Wild!

And every year, when the ground softens enough for the first shoots to push through, I am reminded of something that modern America seems determined to forget:

We do not live on the land. We live within it.

Nature is not scenery surrounding human life. Nature is the original infrastructure of human life. The first economy. The first pharmacy. The first teacher. The first cathedral.

And somewhere along the way, we stopped acting like we remembered that.

As another Farm Bill moves quietly through Washington, I cannot help but think about all the small decisions that slowly shape the future of the living world. Not dramatic decisions. Not headlines. Tiny line items. Earmarks. Subsidies. Quiet removals buried deep in thousand-page documents most Americans will never read.

Several years ago, during Organic Week in Washington, I sat in a room full of farmers, researchers, educators, and food advocates as then-Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced what was being celebrated as a historic investment in organic expansion — $75 million earmarked in the developing Farm Bill.

The room erupted in applause. And I remember doing the math in my head. Seventy-five million dollars. In a multi-trillion-dollar federal budget, it amounted to almost nothing. A rounding error. A fraction so small most people could barely conceptualize it.

And yet even that was apparently too much. Now much of that support has quietly disappeared from current proposals, alongside cuts to programs that helped schools purchase food directly from local farmers through Farm to School initiatives.

Programs that worked. Programs that fed children fresh food instead of ultra-processed substitutes shipped from across the continent. Programs that kept money circulating in rural communities instead of funneling endlessly upward into massive corporate supply chains. Programs that helped children understand that carrots come from soil instead of plastic packaging.

And now many of those programs are being dismantled or reduced under the current administration in the name of “efficiency,” while billions continue flowing toward industrial agricultural systems that are depleting topsoil, poisoning waterways, consolidating land ownership, and making it nearly impossible for small and midsized farmers to survive.

We are told this is modernization. But standing in a dying river is not progress. Watching family farms disappear is not efficiency. Raising children disconnected from the source of their nourishment is not advancement. It is amnesia.

When I was a boy, I did not realize I was growing up inside a worldview that was already disappearing. I thought everyone knew how to identify mushrooms after rain. I thought everyone had an uncle who could read weather in the trees. I thought everyone understood that if you cared for soil properly, it would care for you in return.

My family never called themselves environmentalists. They were simply people in relationship with land. They were farmers. There were gardens, chickens, pigs, root cellars, trout streams, canning jars stacked in basements, wood smoke in winter, mud season roads, and always some unfinished chore waiting at the edge of the day.

And there was dignity in that life. Not because it was easy. Farming is not romantic work. It is exhausting, uncertain, often heartbreaking labor. It demands your back, your hands, your time, your sleep, your faith.

But hidden inside that labor was another kind of wealth entirely. Attention. Humility. Patience. Reciprocity. The understanding that nature is not a warehouse of resources for human extraction, but a living conversation we are privileged to participate in.

Wendell Berry has spent a lifetime trying to remind us of this truth. He writes not about conquering the land but belonging to it. About stewardship over ownership. Community over consumption. And thinkers like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Diana Beresford-Kroeger continue carrying that same ancient understanding into modern language: that the living world functions through relationship, reciprocity, and mutual flourishing. Nature survives through cooperation far more often than conquest. And so, do we.

My aunt Rozo McLaughlin understood this deeply. Long before “local food” became fashionable branding for upscale grocery stores, she was helping develop Farm to School programs that connected local farms directly with school meal systems.

Simple ideas. Radical outcomes. Fresh food for children. Reliable income for farmers. Stronger regional economies. Kids learning what actual food tastes like. Kids learning that nourishment comes from soil, water, pollinators, sunlight, and human hands. That food is not manufactured. It is grown.

Those programs helped restore relationship — between children and land, between schools and communities, between farming and public health. And now many of those same initiatives are being cut, defunded, or quietly abandoned at the federal level precisely when we need them most.

At a time of skyrocketing chronic illness. At a time when farmers are disappearing. At a time when loneliness, ecological collapse, and food insecurity are all accelerating simultaneously.

We are starving in the middle of abundance because we have severed ourselves from source.

Filming Wild Foods across America only deepened this realization for me.

Everywhere we traveled, we met people trying to repair relationship with nature in deeply practical ways. Fishermen restoring damaged watersheds. Farmers rebuilding depleted soil. Indigenous seed keepers protecting biodiversity. Chefs reconnecting cuisine to place. Teachers growing gardens behind schools. Families learning how to forage. Young people planting orchards whose fruit they may never personally harvest.

The mainstream narrative would have you believe collapse is inevitable. That ordinary people are powerless against systems too large to challenge.

But nature teaches something very different. Nature teaches that small actions compound. A single seed cracks pavement. In fact, it has the genetic code of an entire garden, an entire field, and entire forest. A wetland filters an entire watershed. A mushroom quietly transforms decay into fertility.

One person plants milkweed and monarchs return. One family supports a local farm and that farm survives another season. One child tastes a fresh tomato and begins understanding the world differently forever. This is not naïve optimism. It is ecological reality.

People often ask what they can actually do. Yes, call your representatives. Pay attention to agricultural policy. Fight for local food systems. Support school meal programs. Protect clean water.

But also, plant something. Even if it’s only herbs in a window box. Learn the name of the trees where you live. Shop at your local co-op. Support a farmers market. Cook meals with people you love. Take your children into the woods. Go fishing. Go for a hike without headphones. Pick blueberries in August. Learn one edible wild plant. Sit quietly beside a river long enough to remember you are not separate from any of this.

Because the greatest lie modern society ever sold us is that we are disconnected from nature. We are nature. And when we restore relationship with the living world, we begin restoring relationship with ourselves, with each other, and with the future.

That is what Wild Foods has always been about for me. Not escapism. Not nostalgia. Remembrance.

The remembering that another way of living is still possible. That the wisdom is not gone. That the land is still speaking. And that hope, like mycelium beneath the forest floor, is already spreading quietly underneath our feet.

Watch here: Wild Foods on PBS

Eight years ago, this journey began with a question:

What if a food show could be more than entertainment?

What if it could become a platform for environmental stewardship, cultural preservation, food advocacy, economic resilience, and human connection?

This season was built on that belief.

Over the last eight weeks, as season one has begun populating the PBS ecosystem, we’ve watched Wild Foods travel across communities, kitchens, forests, farms, rivers, coastlines, and conversations. But more importantly, we’ve watched people respond with hope. And that hope matters.

Because despite all the noise, division, and fear surrounding our food systems and environment, there are still extraordinary people doing the work the right way — farmers restoring soil, chefs preserving tradition, indigenous communities protecting ancestral knowledge, fishermen stewarding watersheds, and everyday people rebuilding their relationship with nature and food.

Too often, those voices are absent from mainstream media.

Together, we changed that.

And when I say together, I mean it. This show would not exist without the collective effort of hundreds of people who believed in this mission before there was any guarantee of success. Whether you contributed to production, appeared on camera, supported us financially, opened your home or business, shared a story, spread the word, or simply tuned in each week — you are part of this accomplishment.

You helped build this.

As we close Season One, I don’t see an ending. I see a beginning.

The next chapter of Wild Foods is already underway, and now the question becomes:

What do we do with this inspiration?

Maybe it starts small.

Maybe it’s visiting your local farmer’s market once a month.

Maybe it’s thanking a farmer for protecting the land that feeds us.

Maybe it’s planting a garden.

Cooking one meal from scratch.

Taking your kids fishing.

Going for a hike.

Supporting indigenous foodways.

Protecting clean water.

Advocating for small farms and wilderness conservation in your community.

Real change doesn’t only happen through politics or policy. It happens through participation. Through community. Through the choices we make every single day.

And if you’d like to help us continue this work:

- Subscribe to us on Substack for ongoing stories, field notes, behind-the-scenes content, and updates on Season Two.

- Sign up for an advance copy of the Wild Foods Cookbook.

- Share the series with friends and family.

- Consider supporting Wild Foods directly so we can continue amplifying the voices of people creating meaningful change in the world.

The final episode brings us home to Vermont, where we prepare a celebratory feast using many of the wild and regional ingredients we encountered throughout the season. Alongside Chef Zack Baker of Barrow House and Chef Julie Heins of CurATE Café, we created a meal rooted in gratitude, reflection, and celebration.

What better way to honor this journey than gathering around food with the people we love?

A heartfelt thank you to Steven and Lauren Bryant of Church Street Hospitality for believing in this project from the very beginning. Their support, generosity, and commitment to local and sustainable food helped carry this vision forward during some of the most challenging moments of the journey. Their flagship property, The Dorset Inn — the oldest continuously operating inn in Vermont — became more than a filming location. It became a home.

Thank you as well to Renee Marco Wymer, whose tireless work behind the scenes made this finale possible. You’ll also catch her as my dinner guest in the episode.

And to the entire team at Church Street Hospitality over the years: thank you for treating our crew not as clients or guests, but as family.

That spirit is at the heart of Wild Foods.

Because rebuilding our relationship with food and the natural world isn’t just about policy or ideology. It’s about people. It’s about hospitality, trust, stewardship, and finding common ground again. It’s about remembering that some of the most meaningful change begins with simple acts: a warm meal, an open door, a shared table, a handshake, a story.

We are all connected to this living system.

And every one of us has a role to play in leaving this world better than we found it.

From all of us here at Wild Foods — thank you for believing in this vision, for showing up, and for walking this road with us.

Season One may be complete.

But this movement is just getting started.

And please also look for us premiering June 8th on Create TV.

See you in the wild.

Though Vermont has become the landscape that shaped my adult life, I would be wrong not to acknowledge the profound role New York City has played in both my family’s history and my own understanding of America.

I was born at Lenox Hill Hospital, the child of immigrants and descendants of immigrants — a Celtic boy at heart, sprung from Viking ancestry, whose family crossed the Atlantic in the aftermath of one of history’s great food system failures: the Irish Potato Famine. That tragedy was not simply a famine. It was a collapse of ecological balance, political imagination, and human dignity.

And sometimes I wonder if we are once again standing too close to the edge of a similarly misguided relationship with food, land, and power.

My eventual landing in the hills and forests of Vermont changed the way I see nature, agriculture, and our collective consciousness as a society. Living close to the land has taught me that food is never just food. It is culture. Memory. Identity. Freedom. Responsibility. Community.

That journey — from New York City to Vermont — lives inside this episode of Wild Foods.

Watch Episode 7 here:

PBS – Wild Foods: New York City Episode

In this episode, we explore the urban jungle of New York and examine how cities, financial systems, and evolving cultural values may play a critical role in reshaping America’s relationship with food and the natural world.

A massive thank you to Breadtree Farms, Russell Wallack, and Bug Nichols, whose work reintroducing the American chestnut to our food landscape is not just ecological restoration — it is cultural reclamation. The chestnut once fed entire regions of this country before blight erased billions of trees from the American landscape.

As we say in the episode: “More people should be cooking with chestnuts.”

I couldn’t agree more. Some of my earliest memories are of chestnuts roasting from street carts in Manhattan while winter air moved between the buildings. Food has a way of tying memory to place unlike almost anything else.

Another deep thank you to my friends Alejandro Blanco and John Lekic of C4 Mushrooms. Alejandro has helped pioneer sustainable cultivation methods for maitake mushrooms — something once considered nearly impossible. Their work reminds me constantly that nature still holds mysteries we barely understand.

Nature truly is the final frontier.

Please look up C4 Mushrooms and Farmers & Chefs in Hyde Park and Poughkeepsie. You will not be disappointed.

To Matt Wadiak and Chris Sorensen — known by many from Blue Apron — thank you for your continued work through Foundation Farms. Their efforts could help redefine how Americans reconnect to land, locality, and the origins of food itself.

And to Chef Michael Anthony, thank you for helping create a culture where people increasingly want to know not only what they are eating, but who grew it. The relationship between farmers and chefs may be one of the most hopeful developments in modern American food culture.

A heartfelt thank you as well to Tracy Brown and Riverkeeper, whose work protecting waterways and holding polluters accountable could not be more urgent. As new agricultural legislation emerges and industrial pressures continue to reshape our landscapes, their advocacy reminds us that environmental stewardship is not abstract policy — it is daily life.

We all have a role to play.

Every time we support a generational farm, shop locally, plant a garden, reject unnecessary chemical dependence, or learn from Indigenous land stewardship traditions, we participate in something larger than ourselves.

On this 250th anniversary of the American experiment, I find myself reflecting deeply on what made this country truly extraordinary in the first place.

It was not speculation. Not financial abstraction. Not artificial scarcity.

It was our relationship to land.

It was the farmer, the fisherman, the forager, the homesteader, the seed keeper, the community builder. It was the belief that ordinary people could sustain themselves and participate directly in the shaping of society.

As more farmers disappear, as Indigenous wisdom is displaced, and as communities become increasingly disconnected from the ecosystems that sustain them, I believe we are being asked an important question:

What kind of future do we actually want to build?

Nature, in the end, is the great equalizer. She will outlast every empire, every market, every political cycle. But we — the living people of this moment — still have choices.

And one of the last meaningful choices many of us still make every single day is through our food.

Thank you all for supporting Wild Foods. Thank you for watching. Thank you for caring about the landscapes, waters, farms, and communities that sustain us.

I am deeply grateful to be an American citizen. And I believe loving this country also means being willing to protect it — its land, its people, its waters, and its future.

See you in the Wild!

— Kevin

I always seem to find my first chanterelles a week or so out from my father’s birthday, which falls on the 24^th of July. My mind has organized time and seasons by the availability of certain wild foods almost like a great biological clock, though I know that term can mean many other things. This is the thing that is so amazing about having a relationship with nature. Our measuring instrument for time revolves more around the emergence of certain species than it does the days on the calendar, though the two continue, of course, to coexist.

Chanterelles hold a special place in my pantheon of wild foods. Perhaps it’s because of their proximity to my father’s birthday, but I suspect it has a bit more to do with my introduction to them as my first existential experience with foraging. Not to mention, they are absolutely delicious and Vermont chanterelles are considered by many chefs to be some of the best in the world.

Maybe even more abstractly, the sequence of setting myself into late summer typically looks something like this: I find my first chanterelles, which remind me of my father’s birthday. This usually leads me to some of my favorite hunting grounds deep in the Stonybrook Valley. And this, in turn, leads me past Homer Perkins’ old farm, where my father used to work as a boy. Then the stories I was raised on aren’t long to follow.

Homer was already old when my father worked the farm and by the time I was old enough to remember, he was ancient. We always had some reason to swing by, whether buying hay for the horse or checking in on local politics; I suspect my father wanted to expose me to some of the old ways and how Vermont used to look when he was growing up. Homer still worked the same piece of land he purchased when he was a young man, raising or trading for most of his needs. When you raise most of your own food, there is little need for money save the bit he earned selling hay, eggs, butter and vegetables to locals throughout the valley. Homer seemed like the wisest person that ever lived, in those days, which may not have been far from the truth. And his deep knowledge was reflected in that non-assuming way possessed only by someone who makes their living off the land.

Typically, a quick trip up the valley for hay would turn into an hour or two of story time with Homer, and I delighted in his tales of times long ago, when there were only a handful of farmers working the valley and a strange group of people still holed out deep in the Chateguay, the sprawling wildland of 100,000 acres that began at the terminus of Stonybrook Road. My favorite of these old legends was of the old gold mine hidden somewhere deep in the wilderness.

As the legend went, there had been an old mine used by some of the early settlers in the area which proved to be quite prolific. Now a story like that on its own is enough to spark a 10-year-old’s imagination, but couple it with the occasional fleck or two of gold in the brook and Homer’s insistence on changing the subject every time he was pressed on its location, and you have a recipe to drive any young man to adventure.

My insistence that I would find that old mine drove me deeper and deeper into the woods in my youth. My journey ever farther afield led me to develop strong orienteering and bushcraft skills. These gave me a deeper sense of security when venturing even further, and my love of wild foods quickly developed out of that skillset – though, most of my early exposure to wild foods was as a means for survival, not culinary delight. Eating birch bark and drinking white pine tea may keep you alive, but you weren’t living high on the hog.

This is about the time that I discovered chanterelles for the first time. I had always been warned off of mushrooms by my father, who said they had little nutritional value and you never know which ones will hurt or help you. I think this perspective was influenced considerably by the poisoning of one of his close friends on a bad batch of morels (likely Gyromitra esculenta), a mistake that nearly claimed his friend’s life. And I think that was the widespread sentiment back then: that wild mushrooms were merely for gourmands and foodies adventurous enough to risk their necks simply for a meager helping of a slimy fungus. As we have learned more recently, mushrooms have all sorts of nutritional and medicinal value. But for me, the allure was more spiritual than about survival.

As we continue to map out the organizational and cognitive parts of the brain, scientists have discovered our inherent biological ability to recognize distinctive shapes and colors in the environment, a behavior that most likely developed during our ancestors’ days as hunter-gatherers. With respect to finding food, certain chemicals in the brain (oxytocin and serotonin) are released that give us a sense of euphoria when we find things that will sustain us. This experience can feel distinctly spiritual. I know it does for me. Foragers often refer to this phenomenon as “Getting On” to a certain forgeable where the mind becomes so focused on the pattern of a particular target species that it begins to appear – seemingly out of thin air.

For me, that happened one humid afternoon wandering through a grove of white birch and softwood in a part of the Chateguay we always referred to as Chin Whiskers. I had only just begun my love affair with chanterelles that summer after having worked up the nerve to actually ingest one of them. Mind you, this was after considerable research and consternation. I was met with a flavor profile so unique, a bit like subtle apricot with a peppery finish, that it made me understand at once why one would risk their life. The fact that mother nature could provide something that flavorful all by herself left me wondering what else I might have been missing. There was also, no doubt, the allure of forbidden fruit that exacerbated my curiosity. And in that brief moment I began my new relationship with wild foods, not only as a means of survival, but as a lifelong pursuit of nature’s bounty as an enjoyable and essential part of being intimately connected to my food.

I came across a small flourish of the golden mushrooms pressing up through the leaf-litter near a toppled old white birch, my view nearly obscured by the sheathing bark that had begun pulling away from the trunk. As I placed the six or seven tender mushrooms in my pack, I stole a moment to enjoy the tranquility and peace of the surrounding area and a sense of pride at my discovery. The dappled light showing through the late summer canopy illuminated the quilted patterns of mature ferns growing in the glen. In the next moment my eyes fixed on one of these beams outlining a small patch of exposed ground. To my great joy, there rose another flourish of chanterelles, illuminated in the light from above. As if being guided by some divinity or mother nature herself, all at once, pinpricks of the bright orange mushrooms began dancing up through the understory like the arrival of evening stars upon the settling of night. I was surrounded by chanterelles dancing in the light. Maybe I had a hundred times before. But for the first time I could see them and the endorphins filled by body more quickly than I could fill my bag.

I spent the next hour or so collecting these beauties, pulsating slightly with every new find and filling my pack with several pounds before I was done. The elation and sense of purpose was so distinctive and fulfilling that I don’t think I shared it with anyone for a long while, afraid that even giving breath to the experience would somehow trivialize the memory.

So perhaps the legends of gold in the Chateguay were, in fact, true. Those hills are full of gold, for those that can see it. And for a young boy just starting his love affair with wild foods, I’m not sure any amount of ore could have replaced the experience.