Can Chestnuts Save the World?
Chestnuts roast over an open fire on a windy November day in the Hudson Valley. Getting my tent up was treacherous, with anything not secured flying away from me across the field. Finally, I lashed my poles to my neighbors’ tents. Together we formed some semblance of stability.
I’m selling baked goods at a festival called Hudson Valley Nut Fest, which is a celebration of regional nut species. In my pastry case: maple-glazed acorn doughnuts, chestnut coffee cake, black walnut rugelach, chestnut spelt focaccia. Other vendors are passing out cups of warm hickory milk and paper cones of the aforementioned roasted chestnuts. There’s a black walnut dyeing workshop, acorn processing demo, chestnut pasta-making, and a nutcracker testing station (not the dolls; these machines could break your bones). In huddled clusters everywhere, old friends catch up and strangers have excited conversations about tree species. A crackling, breathless feeling fills the air—you could call it obsession or nerding-out, but the object of fixation is a vision of trees deep into the future and what they could provide for humans not yet born. You might call it hope.
The tree crops’ world feels like a bit of a cult that I am slowly being drawn into. It started with chestnut flour, which I was gifted from an organization called Breadtree that grows native plants like chestnut, hickory, oak, seaberry, apple, pear, mulberry, and persimmon trees and shrubs. Their name references the way the starchy chestnut can be dried and ground into flour, making it a staple food that people can (and have) subsisted on in lieu of grain-based agriculture. It’s high in fiber and vitamin C, but low in fat compared to other nuts, which makes it a nutritious alternative to wheat.
Breadtree practices a system called agroforestry. The premise is simple: instead of tilling an open field every year for crops that need fertilizers and pesticides to survive, grow a forest that provides food for humans, an ecosystem for animals and microorganisms, carbon sequestration underground, and holds onto soil rather than shedding it at a rate ten times faster than it can be replaced. Some experts predict that we’ll run out of topsoil within fifty years. In contrast, agroforestry draws on precolonial forms of land management that have thousands of years in practice. It’s slow, multigenerational work that goes well beyond your own lifespan.
I knew none of this when I started baking with chestnut flour, but I immediately connected with its slightly sweet and almost umami taste. I followed a simple biscuit recipe first and when I served one to my partner, he asked if there were mushrooms in it (I’ve been known to do such a thing) because of its earthy savoriness. I leaned into the savory and made sweet-salty pretzel cookies, nutty buckwheat waffles, dark chocolate brownies, and a version of Christina Tosi’s burnt miso cake. I had two grind levels: a fine and a coarse flour, and began using the coarse one in the way you would polenta. I learned that chestnut flour is actually the original polenta in Italy, because, of course, corn didn’t show up in Europe until after Columbus.
When I moved upstate from New York City, I left behind my culinary teaching job and started a micro-bakery with the goal of reflecting the Hudson Valley through my ingredient choices. I was alternately demoralized about the climate catastrophe and extractive consumerism, and even though I couldn’t solve those problems, I wanted to get my hands into something that felt positive. Maybe, I thought, if we could eat some nice treats made with a minimum of exploitation that supported better land use, we could at least imagine other ways of being on this planet.
At first, this seemed easy. I found delicious locally milled flour, tons of maple syrup, apples, and other seasonal produce. I use a lot of nuts and seeds in my baking, though, and was surprised when I couldn’t find any pecans or sunflower seeds nearby. Sunflowers were cultivated for thousands of years by the Lenape in my region, but because of farming and supply chain logistics way above my head, the only organic seeds I could get were from Ukraine. I kept wondering what it would look like to truly bake and eat regionally in the Northeast, and I found that I wasn’t alone in the kinds of questions I was asking.
“I was going through a journey of seeking food security that is nutritious, nontoxic, and in relationship with landscape,” says Jesse Marksohn, founder of Yellowbud Farm. I’d asked him about his personal journey to growing hickory and other food trees at his nursery in Massachusetts. “I was trying to understand for myself or a small community: What would it take to meet our needs for a year? I was around a lot of annual-focused people and felt like, Wow, this is so overwhelming and hard, how do we do this without importing soil or having a lot of externalities?” “I think the aha moments were under a couple specific chestnuts and a particular hickory that was obscenely productive,” says Marksohn. “I was intellectually amazed but also had this visceral realization of how much non-human kin these beings can support while they meet our needs. So it was not one moment, but a constellation of moments of being under these trees and hearing what sounded like rain, but was just nut-fall.”
Marksohn was an organic produce farmer and then a mushroom grower who started Yellowbud in 2019 as an experimental nursery for the types of trees he hopes will feed more people in the Northeast. He wants to see us humans rekindle our role as a keystone species: one whose presence creates abundance for the complex system of animals, plants, and microorganisms around them. Yellowbud has sent out over 100,000 trees to farmers who are incorporating agroforestry or silvopasture systems (integrating trees and livestock) into their farms in the region.
“I often get asked, Is that really financially viable?” he says. “But corn, wheat and soy are not financially viable. CAFOs [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations] are not financially viable. They're only possible because of subsidies and crop insurance and all of the institutional support for this form of destructive land tending.”
The Hudson Valley is dotted with family farms with rustic handwritten signs that could make you believe the American agrarian dream works perfectly. But increasingly, these farms rely on tourist money: fruit-picking in the summer and hay rides in the fall, farm-stay Airbnbs, hosting workshops or tours or even weddings. It’s no longer enough to sell what they grow. And the large farms in the Midwest or Central Valley that grow most of the crops in this country got close to forty percent of their income from government aid last year. Farms of all sizes are paying significantly more for pesticides, fertilizer, fuel, and labor without seeing complementary rises in prices. Agricultural bankruptcies are accelerating quickly and most American farm households depend on someone’s income from another job. Without even taking into account the ecological repercussions of our current agricultural system, the economics just aren’t sustainable.
“I don't think people quite realize that to start a farm, you either needed to inherit the land or inherit wealth that you use to buy that land, and even then most folks are really underwater in debt in a way they're not sure they'll ever get out of in their lifetime,” says Russ Wallack, founder of Breadtree. “I just wonder how differently we'd all engage with the food conversation if we took the approach that this version of farming isn't working and there's no proof it's going to be here in a hundred years.”
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As I dug deeper into tree crops, I realized that my understanding of food procurement was based on pretty crude categories: There was “agriculture” (clear-cutting trees to make fields for growing grain or produce in long rows) and “hunter-gathering” (wandering around a forest looking for berries or deer). But the abundant food forests full of nuts, fruit, maple syrup, and animals who lived on these things were not an accident; they were the result of landscape engineering by the Indigenous peoples here. The towering American chestnut, sometimes called the “Redwood of the Northeast,” thrived in open canopy systems, and cyclical burning helped them grow larger and be more productive. Though I always had a vision of old-growth forest when I tried to imagine the precolonial Northeast, the landscape was mostly open and park-like, which better supported the food that people relied on.
“The tree and plant species composition is entirely reflective of where the Lenape people were doing their prescribed burns,” says Justin Wexler, an Indigenous food expert here in the Hudson Valley. Shagbark hickories, black walnuts, butternuts, and chestnuts were all eaten by the Lenape, but they didn’t have to grow “orchard crops” the way we think of them now, he explained, because the trees were so abundant that they could gather what they needed. Instead of adding organic matter to their corn fields to keep the soil rich, they would simply let them fallow for 20 to 30 years, during which time hickories would dominate, providing a new food source. The amount of land required and the timescale they were working with are very different from how we think of crop cultivation today.
“I think relying on annuals for your staple needs is kind of like a wartime way of being and interacting with the land,” says Marksohn, as we talk about the shift in land use after the arrival of European colonizers. “If you're forcefully pushed off your land, you can take corn and squash, you can braid seeds into your hair, but you can't take the 700-year-old sacred groves that your ancestors planted and tended.” Knowledge of the trees accrued over hundreds of years, as well as the practice of burning, disintegrated in a couple of generations.
Still, the American chestnut proved essential for the colonists, who ate its nuts, used its hard wood for building houses and furniture, and extracted tannin from its bark for the leather industry. In Appalachia, the chestnut functioned almost as a form of currency that families could use to barter for what they needed to get through the winter. Everywhere the trees were, there were harvest festivals in the fall and chestnuts roasting on the streets of cities.
And then there was the blight. In 1904, a fungal parasite arrived on an ornamental Chinese chestnut tree placed in the Bronx Zoo. It was deadly to the American chestnut and spread quickly across the Northeast. People panicked and began cutting down as many trees as they could, either in a misguided attempt to stop the spread or to stockpile wood for themselves. Three to four billion trees were killed, and by the time the Christmas song about roasting chestnuts was written in 1945, the American variety was more of a nostalgic memory than a reality.
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In 2022, Anna and Costa Boutsikaris began managing the forty-year-old chestnut orchard in the corner of a farm in Accord, New York, originally planted by the farmer’s father. Without leaving their day jobs, they’re working with fifty acres of tree crops across the area to grow native fruits and nuts as well as shiitake mushrooms on pruned chestnut branches. They chose the name Mastwood Farms for their project in a reference to “mast” (nuts and fruit produced by trees) and also, cheekily, to the mastodons who roamed this land. Before the human-initiated burns in this area, it was the mastodons who disturbed the forests in ways that created a productive open canopy landscape.
I feel like I’ve set foot in the future as I walk under mature chestnut trees instead of the baby saplings I’ve encountered in most places. In late February, their spiny burrs are still visible here and there, though it’s been months since they fell. The trunks are one to two feet in diameter and the branches are low, in a way that would probably beckon my four-year-old to climb them. These are Chinese chestnuts, which are more shrub-like compared to the columnar American chestnut. Given that the blight remains a threat in forests to this day, I’ve been interested in what approach farmers are taking to growing “native” trees in this region.
“In terms of American chestnut reforestation—trying to create a genetically modified American chestnut that is not susceptible to the blight—that is mostly happening through Cornell and through private funding, which is an incredibly problematic program, in my opinion,” says Costa. “First of all, it probably won't work. Also, genetically modifying trees and putting them back into the wild could be a Trojan horse to a lot of other tree genetic modification…In another sense it’s also kind of creepy and purist, trying to create something that is gone rather than accept the fact that everything's hybridizing and everything's crossing. I love this idea that [tree crops evangelist] Akiva Silver talks about, where you get Chinese chestnuts, Japanese chestnuts, American chestnuts, European together, and they're all teaching each other things that they've learned, about hardiness, about disease.”
The farmers I’ve spoken to are getting most of their chestnut trees from Marksohn’s Yellowbud Farm, which is conducting the majority of the intentional breeding experiments in the Northeast, primarily crossing Asian varieties (European chestnuts are also blight-susceptible). Everyone, though, is growing seedlings—baby trees started from seed as opposed to genetic clones like apples—so there’s genetic diversity in all of the chestnut orchards. A lot of the trees started out with Chinese or Japanese ancestors, and then became crossed and possibly even began to adapt to this region, though we’ll need more generations to truly see evolution. “You’re thinking in decades and even centuries on some level,” says Costa. “You can get lost in the future.”
He shows me a stump where he removed a tree that was planted too close to its neighbors. It’s covered all over with hundreds of twigs straining up as if they could be trees themselves. Chestnuts take well to coppicing, cutting a tree down to the ground to resprout. Costa points up to the mountains, whose dark treeline stands out against the pale winter sky.
“We're in this Chinese chestnut orchard. We're looking up at the Shawangunk [Mountains] and it's all American chestnuts there, thousands of trees,” he says. “The blight can only kill the bark, it can't kill the roots. So the tree can keep re-sprouting, and it usually gets the blight when it's six, seven inches diameter. But they're not getting old enough to create new chestnuts, so there's no genetic diversity.”
There’s a spookiness to imagining the trees struggling to grow, year after year, only to be attacked by the same enemy that took their parents and siblings. (Or would you say their earlier limbs? It’s hard, when talking about trees, to distinguish between family and individuals.) It makes me wonder about the might-have-been: what the landscape would look like if the American chestnut still dominated and how they would show up in modern-day cuisine.
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“If the chestnut blight did not exist, the Great Chestnut Experiment would not be here. It wouldn’t be an experiment, because chestnuts would be essential in our culinary culture. Wherever chestnuts are in the world, there are people who have been working with them,” says Sasha Sherman, the founder of a company called the Great Chestnut Experiment, which seeks to “bring chestnuts back into the heart of culinary culture” in the U.S. He planted his first chestnut tree in a friend’s food forest six years ago and decided he wanted as many people as possible to form a connection with this nut. Currently, the company sells fresh chestnuts in the fall, as well as Breadtree’s chestnut flour and their own chestnut crème—kind of like the peanut butter of chestnut products, delicious spread on bread or mixed into warm drinks. I’ve been mixing it with cocoa powder to create a creamy better-than-Nutella filling for sandwich cookies.
The Great Chestnut Experiment has been a pretty successful one so far. Three years post-launch, they’ve bought 15,000 pounds of chestnuts, had write-ups in the New York Times, Vogue, and the Chicago Tribune, and worked to get chestnuts onto the menu at places like Blue Hill, Win Son, and Mel the Baker. He foresees the future of the company including more products like chestnut yogurt, chestnut hummus, and chestnut-mushroom pâté, and he says, “My vision of the next ten years is we’d have a quarter pound per capita consumption of chestnuts as a norm. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to one pound per capita in Italy or two pounds in China. But it would be a momentous shift, and require the establishment of tens of thousands of acres of chestnuts.”
As I discovered when I began selling chestnut baked goods, while Americans tend to have little familiarity with the spiny nuts, many Europeans and Asians already know and love the flavor. Chestnuts have been a staple food for thousands of years around the world. France has its marrons glacés (candied whole chestnuts); Italy has castagnaccio (a dense chestnut flour cake with olive oil, rosemary, and pine nuts); Korea has yaksik (sweet steamed rice with jujubes and whole chestnuts); China has many braised chestnut dishes and, in all of these places, hawkers sell roasted chestnuts on the streets in the winter. Reinvigorating an American chestnut culture is hardly starting from scratch: The nut’s popularity the world over is a good indicator of the untapped market here in this country.
“It is my aspiration to support more farmers to grow these crops. But I think the only way that we get to do that is by creating products that people fall in love with,” says Sherman when I ask him about whether he tells the ecological story of chestnuts as part of selling his chestnut crème. “For us to build a world in which these crops can thrive, it will require us to weave them into more usage occasions and experiences than the traditional roasted chestnut experience.”
Many U.S. chestnut farmers right now are still selling out of their fresh nuts each fall, and because those sell at a higher price point, there’s no reason for them to do any additional processing work yet. But the larger growers I spoke with specifically want chestnuts to become part of the American diet as a staple food—something eaten year-round in high quantities—which is why they’re building up the infrastructure for flour. It’s ambitious to imagine an ingredient moving from the fringes back to the center of the table for a large population, but diets can change quickly (think kale or lentils). If the market embraces chestnuts the way these evangelists expect them to, we could see a transformation of farmland from grain fields to chestnut forests across the eastern United States.
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The four-person Breadtree field team is spread out across a hillside of seven-year-old chestnut saplings in Johnsonville, New York, in late February when I come to visit. The snow is still a foot deep, but the sun is out and hats and gloves hang on tree branches like ornaments. The team is moving slowly down the rows, removing tree tubes to shake out detritus and scare away voles, as well as lightly pruning back some of the branches that are growing too densely.
“We're managing close to 300 acres with the field team, so that’s like 75 acres per person. We're all assigned some locations, and we make sure to go there once a week and look at things like, How much has the grass grown? Are we seeing any Japanese beetles? Oftentimes we don't see anything, and we're just walking around, which I think is really important. Half the job of farming is being a good observer,” says Sam Bonney. He and Bug Nichols are leading me around the orchard, occasionally passing me the handsaw to let me try hacking off a branch.
The fact that so much food can be grown with relatively little labor (compared to grain farming) remains one of the most astounding parts of the tree crops story to me. In the first few years while an orchard is being established, it requires some pruning in the winter, mulching in the spring, and mowing in the summer, but will take even less work as time goes on. Breadtree already has sheep and cattle at some of their farms, and wants to incorporate more grazing animals onto the orchards, which cuts down on the mowing while enriching the soil (through poop) and feeding the animals. It all feels so much more like how food should be grown, rather than in Lego blocks of 300-acre corn fields next miles of soybeans next to 1000-cow pens.
So can chestnuts save the world?
“I don't think there's any plant that can prevent us from developing agricultural systems that are highly destructive,” says Wallack “Almonds are a great example. Most of the history of almonds is that they've been dry farmed in silvopasture systems, and produce a third to a quarter as much as what's happening in California, where we’ve planted something like two million acres in the past thirty years.”
He explained to me that because of the high yields demanded by investors, farmers graft almond branches onto peach trees, which pump more water and produce more nuts. These and other high-yield methods created the huge water demand that’s diverting water from Northern California to the southern Central Valley. “There's nothing about almonds that was bad. I don't think there's even anything about the almond farmers that's bad,” says Wallack. “But if we sell business models that demand extraction to meet the stated returns, then we should expect we’ll end up with extractive agricultural systems.”
Chestnuts have so many positive attributes: They’re perennial, have a deep root system, require less labor, and handle weather variability and pests better—but even the biggest chestnut champions remind me that what’s important isn’t just the crop; it’s the way it’s grown. If Breadtree is successful at demonstrating the financial viability of the chestnut industry, Russ expects “fifteen years from now, we won't even be close to the biggest” of the farms, and most of them probably won’t follow the ecological practices that Breadtree is pushing. My image of woodlands full of happily munching pigs and children gathering nuts to bring to their community chestnut roast dims just a little.
Yet the industry growth is still inspiring. “The tree crops world is still so small in the United States and it’s so collaborative and generous. We’re in constant communication with other chestnut growers, and everyone is sharing their knowledge and trying to support each other,” says Nichols. Breadtree practices cooperative ownership, as does Route 9, the largest chestnut flour maker and distributor in the country. Many of the other growers are small farmers who are trying to incorporate trees into diversified farms, along with annual crops and grazing animals.
Nichols and I pause on the hill as the rest of the team heads to the pickup trucks to eat lunch and the burnt miso chestnut cake I brought to share. I ask her, essentially, what’s the point of it all. “For me, the motivation is to help make it more possible for our region to feed itself in a way that can sustain healthy landscapes, ecologies and human communities,” she says. “That involves changing the foods we grow and eat here, and experimenting with different ways of growing that food. It also involves growing organizations and relationships that can care for land and persist longer than the individuals who are here today. And maybe at the core is just doing joyful, purposeful, collaborative, life-giving work with other living beings. Everything follows from that.”
Without overanalyzing it too heavily, there’s something undeniably moving about planting a being who will probably outlive you and maybe one day provide food for your children and grandchildren. It’s that commitment to the future that I noticed among all the farmers I visited and the sense of possibility that I felt on that windy November day at Nut Fest.
“Whatever happens to me, whatever happens to anybody, these trees will be here to feed people,” says Nichols. “It’s a weird thing, being in time with trees. You’re planting a baby one-year-old tree, but it’s your elder. Like, we’re just the new idiots around town and so this is gonna live way beyond me as a human.” In this way, the work itself builds hope.
“Rather than running away from what we fear, which is rational and understandable, understanding how unbelievably beautiful and abundant and Edenic our landscapes are,” says Marksohn when we talked about what he wants to see change in the world. “Like my dear friend Eric, who's part of our Yellowbud team, always says, ‘We're gardeners on the garden planet, and we just forgot.’”
Kate Ray is a Hudson-Valley based baker and writer. She lives in Kingston, NY, where she runs RAY BAKE and caters private events. Find her newsletter here.
