Mushrooms & Acorns & Herbs, Oh My!: Plants and Foraging Across the Humanities

This roundtable investigates the art of wild food gathering across the humanities, including literature, ecology, and multimedia. It seeks to encompass representations of the art of foraging as survival, mutual aid, environmental stewardship, and reciprocity.

The global body of ecological literature is extensive and of longstanding; broadly speaking, it crosses cultures, languages, and genres, reinforcing by default Dipesh Chakrabarty’s thesis that “anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history.” Foraging is one form of theory and practice which responds to this disciplinary and ecological collapse. Dating back to humanity’s origins, wild food gathering is experiencing a renaissance in the western world (especially the United States). Classic guides like Euell Gibbons’s Stalking the Wild Asparagus pose foraging as an accessible way of feeling like “more than a mere mechanical part in this…[American] industrial system.” More recent Anglophone work focuses on community and cultural exchange outside industrial agriculture, crossing media as well as disciplines. Examples include Gabrielle Cerberville’s (ChaoticForager) Gathered: On Foraging, Feasting, and the Seasonal Life, the Poor Prole’s Almanac podcast episode “For(a)ging Community with the Appalachian Forager, Whitney Johnson,” and Zach Galifianakis’s French foraging episode of “This is a Gardening Show.”

This roundtable seeks to analyze these and other forms of media (whether Anglophone or otherwise) in light of what they illustrate about ecological stewardship, abundance, and food sovereignty, and how they re-envision interdisciplinarity. In the spirit of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s conception of reciprocity, and Michael Cronin’s argument for the re-organization of knowledge (such as a Faculty of Food which encompasses both the sciences and the humanities), I invite scholarly and creative work on stewardship, abundance, and wild food and foraging media. Together we will explore how the humanities can build community while respecting culture and the planet and recognizing our humanness as part of the natural world rather than as its master.

Panel Chair: Emily Iekel, Loyola University Maryland

Convention Dates: March 6-9, 2027

Location: Salve Regina University, Newport, RI, USA

Submit abstracts at: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22515