David Moscow - From Scratch: Adventures in Harvesting, Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging on a Fragile Planet

Advance Praise for From Scratch

A tour de force. From Scratch takes readers along for an enthralling ride through exotic and not-so-exotic countries around the world to discover the source of what people eat and why they eat it, and to realize just how fragile our planet is. I was engaged, entertained, informed, and pulled along by David Moscows boundless curiosity and his and his dad Jons entertaining prose. Bravo!

LynNell Hancock , Professor Emerita, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and Director, Spencer Education Fellowship

Because his mission is insane, its insanely fascinating: David Moscow hunts the source of our tater tots, fish fingers, and highly haute cuisine. In these pages, the Moscows are able to dive deeper than in Davids own stellar From Scratch , and its a real treat. Here is a lightning-fast, teeth-first dive into that long production system that goes beyond the horizon to stuff our bellies. And the Moscows make it fun with a crafty combo of self-skewering humor and really cool characters (some even heroic), in stories larded with deep history that youre now happy to know. You dont need to be some kind of foodie to find this book tasty...and just brilliant.

Greg Palast , New York Times Bestselling Author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and other books

Perhaps because David is not a culinary insidernot a chef or a farmer or a hunterthe result is something as accessible as it is adventurous. As someone who has actually been in the field with David, I can say that this book wonderfully captures the feeling of being right beside him on his wild, educational, surprisingly humorous, and often shocking adventures.

Clay Jeter , Director, Emmy-nominated Netflix series Chefs Table

Im still rocking in the wake of reading From Scratch , an all-out adventure of food exploration and education. With a food system that increasingly denies the existence of seasons, craft, and deliciousness, its an urgent reminder of where our food comes from. David Moscow brings the ancient human art of feeding ourselves back into consciousness.

Chef Dan Barber , Blue Hill at Stone Barns

I was prepared not to like this. Oysters? Who gives a shit? But its greatlike reading an episode of a really good food show, and being taken behind the scenes and somewhere you have never been. The shit really pops. Great stuff.

Jeff Pearlman , New York Times Bestselling Author of Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s and other books

A PERMUTED PRESS BOOK

From Scratch:

Adventures in Harvesting, Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging on a Fragile Planet

2022 by David Moscow and Jon Moscow

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-63758-402-6

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-63758-403-3

Cover art by Brian Morrison

Cover photos by Graeme Swanepoel and Marty Bleazard

Interior design and composition by Greg Johnson, Textbook Perfect

This is a work of nonfiction. All people, locations, events, and situation are portrayed to the best of the authors memory and understanding.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the authors and publisher.

Permuted Press, LLC

New York Nashville

permutedpress.com

Published in the United States of America

For Karen and Pat

Contents

I am just an actor ( Big, Newsies, Honey ) playing a host posing as a journalist. I wouldnt say I am expert in much except eating. But that was enough to get me here, keyboard to paper, in the first paragraph of a book.

This book is a laypersons exploration of how food gets to our plate. That journey was filled with adventure and laughter and slips and falls and derring-do. It had near-death experiences like my almost drowning while spearfishing in the Sea of Sardinia and getting chased (and stung) by swarming, wild African bees in a sacred forest in Kenya. I traveled strange roads that led to once-in-a-lifetime moments like cheesemaking with a shepherd in his cave in the mountains of Barbza and getting wasted on home-brewed tuber liquor with friends under a supermoon at the top of the Andes.

There are also meals in here. Some are unique. Some are gut-turning. Most are great, made by some of the worlds best chefs. Some of my favorite recipes are jotted down from my four-year journey. There is some science (how oysters clean seawater), some economics (the forces that are rapidly changing Kenya), some history (pirates in the Mediterranean who brought spices to Europe), and a lot of global current events (overfishing and monoculture, but also marine protected areas (MPAs) and the reintroduction of tiny Four Corners potatoes into diets in the Navajo Nation and high-cuisine restaurants in Utah). Food production shows us how fragile our planet is and how food producers are on the front lines of coping with global climate change, threats to endangered species, and the environmental and economic crises created by hypercapitalism.

The books genesis was in 2016. I was eating Korean BBQ at Sun Nong Dan in Los Angeles and Donald Trump was running for president. Sweating over the best short ribs Id ever had (I should have never told the waiter, yes, I do like spicy), I glanced back into the kitchen. There, standing amongst the Asian cooks, was a Mexican man handling a pot. Nothing out of the ordinaryCentral Americans and Mexicans are the backbone of the US food industry. At that moment, I had a sudden desire to make a documentary showing how immigrants (particularly Mexicans and Central Americans) are essential, hard-working pillars of American life. Americans, friends, neighbors, and family members were being attacked because of their skin colors and language; all the while they were making food, the most important element of sustenance. It seemed baffling to me that people whose families had been in California for generations, who created the taco (4.5 billion served every year) and the margarita (the most consumed cocktail in America), were being villainized. And people were falling for it! Suddenly I wanted to teach the world how to make a taco and a margarita. I would go work with subsistence corn farmers in Oaxaca to make the masa and with agave jimadors in Jalisco to make the tequila and record the labor and pride and hurdles these experts/workers face to bring food to our tables. And maybe, by doing so, help more people see the shared humanity that connects everyone.

Like most things in the film business, it didnt turn out like I planned. The documentary never got made and by 2020 it had morphed into a TV show, a show that wouldnt just speak about Mexican food producers, but about all food workers. We would put a spotlight on the people working behind the scenes in restaurants and fields, folks who arent paid enough, arent treated fairly, and are often looked down on. There are a few professions that most everyone agrees should be paid moreteachers, nurses, people who work for the common goodand food producers should fall into the same category.

By the time we made it onto TV in the winter of 2020, the premise had been given a structure and a name, From Scratch . I would travel to countries around the world, and each week Id meet with a chef, famous or not, fancy or not, eat a meal they cooked, and then go out to harvest ingredients for that meal. I would sit down with experts to discuss the history of those ingredients, and be taught by the farmers, foragers, fishers, and hunters how to dive for scallops, avoid poisonous mushrooms, stalk an elk, cut wheat with a sickle or a thresher, blanch ground acorns, climb for coconuts, ferment a mezcal, or shoot a gun. This city guy would learn how to do all the things that he had forgotten or had never known. Then I would use the ingredients I collected each week to recreate the dish that I had eaten at the beginning of each episode.