COMPRISING more than four hundred species and two genera, oaks and their fruits abound in most temperate regions of the world, where they feed a great many organisms, from squirrels and deer to turkeys and jays to humans. Despite its utter absence from mainstream American food culture, we have a name for the consumption of acorns: balanophagy. Earth was once home to a number of intact balanocultures, human societies organized around harvesting acorns rather than, for example, grain. Remnants of these societies can be found in modern-day Korea, Italy, and the United States, but this mode of subsistence has largely receded in the wake of various social and ecological developments, including the domestication of goats, the burning of oaks for fuel, and ongoing processes of colonial expansion that have dispossessed Indigenous peoples of land and disrupted their traditional practices.
My foray into the world of balanophagy first brought me to the work of Maine-based botanist Arthur Haines and Wisconsin-based wild food expert Samuel Thayer. Both offer in-depth instruction in acorn processing for the table, and despite their accessible presentation of the information, I initially felt a bit intimidated. In a world in which systems of industrial agriculture have decoupled the act of eating from the act of physically procuring and processing raw ingredients over extended periods, the multistep process required to even just select the right acorns and then render them edible seemed overwhelming.
In his book , Thayer instructs his readers to examine their acorns for signs of ill health and insect damage, then dry, crack, shell, and grind or chop them, and finally leach out the tannins responsible for the acorns’ bitterness in hot or cold water depending on the cook’s specific culinary agenda. Acorns are leached in hot water to
