The Meadow Doctor with Tama Matsuoka Wong — WildFed Podcast #139

WildFed Podcast — Hunt Fish Forage Food

Our guest today is Tama Matsuoka Wong, AKA the Meadow Doctor. She’s a commercial forager, weed eater, lawyer and mother of three, as well as the developer of a commercial wild food-beverage made with staghorn sumac — which we’ll discuss in the episode.

She’s also the author of the backyard field guide and cookbook Foraged Flavor, which was nominated for a James Beard award back in 2013.

Her story is really unique in that prior to her life as a commercial forager she was a Harvard Law School graduate who worked for 25 years as a financial attorney in Tokyo, New York, and Hong Kong. Not that those two lifestyles have to be mutually exclusive, but…. they probably couldn’t be more different.

It’s a testament to the attraction that the land and the wild things that live there can have on us, even when our lives have taken us deep into the built environment.

We're reminded that foraging is no longer just the realm of Birkenstock-wearing bush hippies. It still is, of course, but it's now for a lot of other folks too. Because, when you get down to it, foraging is a fundamentally human action. And, like the mythic siren's song, wild plants call us back to the earth in a way that — for some of us, even high-powered attorneys — is often irresistible!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/139