WildFed Podcast — Hunt Fish Forage Food Daniel Vitalis

It's the final episode of The WildFed Podcast, and Daniel and our show producer Grant Guiliano get together to reflect on the last few years of podcasting together, tie a bow on some of the recurring themes we've discussed on the show, as well as look to the future of WildFed.
They chat about the value in reconnecting with the species in your landscape, their thoughts on the future regulations of hunting and foraging, imposter syndrome, plans for a future podcast + a few teasers for Season 4 of the WildFed TV show, and more.
We're so incredibly grateful for your listenership and support over the years! Stay tuned for what's to come...
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/174

Well, it’s finally here. The last interview of the WildFed Podcast. We'll be back next week with our producer Grant to do a final wrap-up, but as far as guest appearances go, who better to take us out than Dan Flores, and on what better topic than his new book, Wild New World. The book is incredible, even, dare we say, required reading for anyone who’s been following the journey of this podcast. It’s not just a history of North America and the animals that live here now — the extant animals — and the ones that were here before — the extinct ones. It’s also the story of the human predator crossing through Beringia and being unleashed on a homonin-naive megafauna assemblage and the impacts that would have here over the proceeding 20,000 years or so. 
It traces its way through the Clovis and Folsom cultures, to the post-ice-age extinction events that led to the great mass of cultures we refer to as Native American, up to the point of contact with European explorers. Then, what follows, as we are all painfully aware, is the Great Dying, which led to the loss of some 80-90% of the indigenous peoples of the continent due to diseases that Europeans had developed significant immunity to but were novel to Native America. And of course, colonization and westward expansion. This then gives way to the most substantial human-induced biomass reduction in known history, the denuding of the land and the commodification of its wildlife — which comes with it several tragic, high-profile extinctions. This part of the book is both compelling and at the same time gruesome and loathsome to read about. It’s truly a blemish on the history of this country and something we are a long way from reconciling still.  
Eventually, this leads to the beginnings of the modern conservation movement, which carries us through to the present day, exploring both its sometimes less-than-savory origins, but also its tremendous wins, like the Endangered Species Act. 
The book walks us through to the very present with some speculation about the future.
When Daniel last spoke to Dan, he'd only read a few chapters, and those were some feel-good pages. He didn’t really understand what was to come or how it would shake him to the core. He didn’t expect it would cause him to reevaluate many of his assumptions or make him audit his own practices and how they relate to this bigger-picture history.
It’s so easy to forget that we live, not as isolated points in space and time, but rather in a continuum. Embedded in a fabric of living history. Without context for what has come before, we can inadvertently focus myopically on where we are now. Conservation is no different. While our methods for wildlife management are light-years ahead of where they were just a century ago, one thing we've learned making this show is there’s still a LONG way to go. It’s far from perfect.
All that said, humans are and always have been — as long as our genus has existed — predators. Not just dietarily, but behaviorally. Those of us that hunt and fish know this in a very intimate way. The idea of giving that up is not really an option for most of us — despite the hopes of the planet’s vegan contingent who believes we can just implement a species-wide dietary experiment on the human population without any malnourishment consequences to ourselves or children. Daniel has been down that road and it leads, in his opinion, off the rails and into nutritional bankruptcy. 
So, it seems to us that we need to learn to balance our needs, wants, and desires as a predatory animal with our needs, wants and desires for intact fauna and healthy ecosystems. No easy task. One that’s not just centuries, but millennia, in the making.
It seems to us that this decade could be characterized by a now hyper-connected and networked human race coming to terms with itself, its past, and its future. Those of us who champion a meaningful ecological trophic connection to wildlife

A.J. DeRosa is the founder of Project Upland — a multi-media operation that produces, in addition to video and web-based content, a quarterly, subscription-based premium print magazine. He’s also the author of the deer hunting cult-classic, The Urban Deer Complex. An accomplished hunter, rabid conservationist, and success in the hunting industry, he is not your typical hunter.
Whether it's his politics, which are woven as a through-line throughout his unique positions, or his insistence on activism as a key component of conservation, he occupies a space adjacent — and sometimes quite antithetical — to those typified by what could be seen as an often monolithic mindset amongst those that hunt or fish.
Daniel is someone who’s often felt like an outsider in the world of hunting, frequently expressing views that run counter to those of his fellow outdoorsman, and A.J. is altogether more revolutionary in his approach. 
When we first met and heard him speak, it was a surprisingly refreshing, if not sometimes challenging, stream of consciousness we hadn’t heard expressed in hunting circles before.
Being some 6% or less of the American public, those of us that hunt, understandably, have more often than not, chosen to silo ourselves and as a result, have suffered from a kind of slow progress with respect to the rest of the public at large.
But A.J. is different. Different than any hunter or conservationist Daniel has sat down with yet. Don’t expect a rehashing of the same old talking points here. He’s not that guy. But, he might just be the foreshadowing of the voice of the future hunter. As a new generation inherits the 3 million-year-old tradition, they bring to it new ideas, paradigms, ways of viewing the world, ecology, our predatory presence in it, and our place in the grand scheme of ecological diversity.
Change is scary, and often easier to resist than embrace. A lot of us behave like a dog on a leash. Pull back too much, and the dog feels the urge to push forward against the pressure. That’s the knee-jerk response a lot of the hunting world has taken to the changing cultural, economic, scientific, and ecological landscape we are encountering in this rapidly evolving decade and the ones preceding it. We dig in and resist change.
But this is, in our opinion, the wrong approach. At least, it’s an approach that always seems to — eventually — give way to progress regardless. So, if you hear ideas expressed here today that run counter to those you hear at the range, hunting box store, or in hunting camp, know you are, most likely, hearing the voice of the future. However threatening to status quo it might be.
Resistance is, after all, futile. We’ll all be assimilated. Seriously though, change is coming, it’s inevitable. And what is most important isn’t the way we have been doing it, but rather, preserving our relationship to the natural world. Let’s welcome all ideas, even the radical ones. Even the ones that scare us. Even the ones that challenge our most closely held illusions. If we don’t, the world will surely pass us by. If we can’t thread the needle of holding onto what we cherish and allowing ourselves to adapt to change, we — as hunters — might just go the way of the passenger pigeon.
Change is coming. How will we adapt?
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/172

If anyone in America is deserving of the illustrious title of HogFather, it's Jesse Griffiths. He’s a hunter, fisherman, cook and co-owner of Dai Due Butcher Shop & Supper Club and New School of Traditional Cookery in Austin Texas. He’s also the author of the Afield, A Chef's Guide To Preparing and Cooking Wild Game and Fish, as well as his most recent publication, The Hog Book, A Chef's Guide To Hunting, Preparing, and Cooking Wild Pigs. 
The Hog Book is one of the best species-specific how-to-hunt-and-cook books that we've got in our library. Even if, like us, you live in a place without a feral hog population, you want to own this book. It’s incredible, and we hope, just the beginning in a long line of books to come. 
Jesse is a dynamic dude and gets up to a lot more than just hunting and cooking hogs, but as the leading voice on utilizing wild pigs for food — and not just a voice, he utilizes them extensively on the menu at his restaurant Dai Due — he’s quickly become the hunting world's reference for turning this otherwise deleterious non-native species into excellent table fare. 
When it comes to the management of these fecund mammals, Jesse is quick to point out that eating them is unlikely to ever be a total solution. They reproduce far too rapidly, are far too intelligent, and just too well integrated into the landscape to eradicate, but.. eating them does provide us with an excellent source of quality wild protein, provides hunting opportunities to those trying to find an inroad into the world of hunting, and shifts the focus from purely adversarial to something more appreciative. Or at least slightly more amicable anyway. 
One of the things we love about his book is that rather than just giving a set of recipes, he keys the recipes out based on the size and sex of the hog you’ve got. Big old boars eat a lot differently than pregnant sows, which are really different than younger piglets. Something we'll get into in this interview.
We also wanted to mention that, as someone who — like Daniel — started hunting later in life, it's incredible to see how he has impacted hunting culture here in the US. It’s a reminder of the rapidly changing hunting demographic and that you don’t have to have grown up hunting in order to develop the skills and culinary craft to feed yourself and educate the public. In fact, we think we’ve only just begun to see the legacy that Jesse is going to leave in the American hunting community.
So, it’s our pleasure to have Jesse Griffiths on the podcast — especially given that this is one of our final episodes. From the start, it was our goal to curate conversations with important players in wild food culture, and he certainly qualifies. We're proud to have him in our lineup.
If you haven’t seen it already, go back to Season 2 of the WildFed TV show on MyOutdoorTV.com to see the episode we made with him in Texas. 
And seriously, get the Hog Book. You won’t regret it!
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/171

Well, it was bound to happen eventually. But we'll admit, we weren't expecting it to be in this interview. Our guest today is hunter, conservationist, naturalist and filmmaker Donnie Vincent. Someone Daniel was tremendously inspired by — and still is today — when he first set out to get involved in hunting and outdoor media.
Donnie is an iconoclast, standing out amongst successful hunting personalities in the way he hunts, looks, speaks, and for his uniquely thoughtful and artistic approach to outdoor media.
Daniel and Donnie have podcasted together a few times now, and they've always found an easy synergy in their conversations, but this time things went in a direction Daniel simply wasn’t expecting.
We've never given a trigger warning on our shows before, but we feel compelled to give one today. This conversation will be the cause for celebration for some and outrage for others. If you find yourself in the latter category, we hope you’ll, out of respect for both Daniel and Donnie, give their words a fair chance. It’s far too common and easy today to disregard people you don’t agree with, without giving their arguments a fair chance.
Donnie and Daniel, it seems, both see a dystopia unfolding in front of us, and its implications for the future of what we do as hunters and foragers are hard to ignore. Not to mention its impact on our personal liberties and basic freedoms.
That said, it was refreshing for Daniel to be honest and forthright about topics he's danced around for years, since it’s felt rather stifling for him to remain silent. But he did because these things weren’t really part of the brand or the focus of this podcast. It’s ironic then, that as we approach the final episodes of this show, that it would come up in this way.
So, in this interview, Daniel and Donnie will be talking at length about things that you’re not really supposed to talk about publicly. We suspect many of you will feel similarly, but of course, some of you will feel very differently. If you disagree, we do hope that — in the spirit of dialectic — you’ll support their inherent right to have this conversation. And understand how challenging it’s been to feel like they haven’t been able to for years.
So, when Daniel promised last week that this week's guest would express some really different ideas than last week's, now you’ll see what he meant. Here goes…
This is Daniel's most recent conversation with Donnie Vincent.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/170

Our guest today is Andrew Zimmern, who you may know from the long-running cable TV series Bizarre Foods or most recently on Outdoor Channel, Andrew Zimmern’s Wild Game Kitchen (which you can watch free on outdoorchannel.com).
Daniel has been a fan of Andrew's shows for a lot of years. In fact, they were some of his early inspiration for creating the WildFed TV show. Aside from his television work, Daniel didn’t know much about Andrew, and this was his first time talking with him.
Like Daniel, he wants to reframe the way we handle and cook wild foods.
But, Daniel quickly realized that Andrew's work, though centered around food, is for him, a lot deeper. In fact, it’s inseparable from his perspectives on politics and sociology. Though they have some differing opinions about all of this, he, like Daniel, describes what he does as a trojan horse. So, while they might not share the same perspectives on current events or what constitutes the existential threats to our species, Daniel certainly relates to having a deeper “why” for what we do.
One thing they definitely agree on is the way that the food IQ of Americans has grown in recent years, that food can bring disparate parties together, and that we can — regardless of how we view the world — break bread together. In fact, we should.
That’s an important and timely message.
View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/169