Acorn Crop Crashes?

by Stowe Boyd

Looks like there has been almost zero production of acorns in the mid-atlantic region of the US this year.

[from Acorn Watchers Wonder What Happened to Crop by Brigid Schulte]

[...]

The idea [of zero acorn production] seemed too crazy to Rod Simmons, a measured, careful field botanist. Naturalists in Arlington County couldn't find any acorns. None. No hickory nuts, either. Then he went out to look for himself. He came up with nothing. Nothing crunched underfoot. Nothing hit him on the head.

Then calls started coming in about crazy squirrels. Starving, skinny squirrels eating garbage, inhaling bird feed, greedily demolishing pumpkins. Squirrels boldly scampering into the road. And a lot more calls about squirrel roadkill.

But Simmons really got spooked when he was teaching a class on identifying oak and hickory trees late last month. For 2 1/2 miles, Simmons and other naturalists hiked through Northern Virginia oak and hickory forests. They sifted through leaves on the ground, dug in the dirt and peered into the tree canopies. Nothing.

"I'm used to seeing so many acorns around and out in the field, it's something I just didn't believe," he said. "But this is not just not a good year for oaks. It's a zero year. There's zero production. I've never seen anything like this before."

[...]

But last May, when the oak trees would have been busy flowering, coating cars and sidewalks with a thick dusting of golden pollen, the National Weather Service logged 10.6 inches of rain at Reagan National Airport -- three times the normal amount, making it the third wettest month on record since 1871.

Whatever the reason for no acorns, foresters and botanists are paying attention.

Talking about the acorn 'crop' reminded me of the book, Oak: The Frame of Civilization, in which William Bryant Logan argues that the ancient transition from hunter-gatherer to pastoralism was -- at least in part -- helped along by prehistoric people gathering acorns. In a review of the book, Richard Mabey of the Guardian, summarizes this point:

Further, he believes that it was, quite specifically, this huge family of beneficent trees that enabled humans to make the transition between hunter-gathering and settled cultivation. Archaeologists conventionally allot this role to the wild grasses of the Middle East, which slipped into cultivation maybe 10,000 years ago and made possible the development of agriculture, bread, permanent villages and the division of labour - a way of living that was exported, for better or worse, across the planet.

Logan's alternative is nimbly and seductively argued. He shows a map in which the distribution of early settled societies throughout the temperate zone appears exactly to coincide with the geographical spread of the 400-odd species of oak. He cites many cultures - in north America, ancient Mesopotamia, the highlands of Mexico - where a style of living midway between nomadic gathering and rooted agriculture was evident long before the advent of cereal farming. You could, I suppose, call it fixed foraging, the communal exploitation of a long-lived local resource. The resource was the oak tree, always there in one form or another - just above the waterline, if you were fisher-people, just below the uplands if you were hunters. And its first and most fundamental gift was the acorn, prolific, nutritious (you just needed to leach out the tannin with water), storable, cookable. Acorns, Logan argues, were the world's first staple. Even today the sweet fruit of evergreen oaks are nibbled as savouries in Spanish dehesas and the meal of southeast Asian acorns is made into a kind of tofu.

acorn, originally uploaded by hans s.

Sadly, exactly when many could be benefiting from the availability of a free, easily collected and stored staple, we are confronted with a crash in acorns. In a sense, it makes almost no difference, since the overwhelming majority of people do not even think of acorns as food. Even native Americans don't harvest acorns in large numbers any longer, although acorn bread and mush was a staple of the diet for forest peoples.

Acorn preparation is a bit of work, but since there is little cultivation involved, its worth it. The acorns have to be hulled, and the flesh of the nuts broken or ground, and then the tannins produced by the oak -- that protect against insects and spoilage -- need to be leeched out by soaking in water. Later, the meat can be ground into flour and stored for long periods, and then prepared in a variety of ways: bread, mush, and additive for soups, and other techniques. It has a mild, nutty flavor, and like tofu takes on the character of other ingredients. Native Americans would collect tons of acorns every year, and were especially attuned to which patches of oak produced the 'sweetest' -- least tannic -- acorns.

In some other countries -- like Korea, or Iraq -- the cultural connection to acorns and oaks as food sources has not been broken. The Koreans make a tofu-like acorn jelly called dotorimuk, which has been rediscovered as a 'health food' in recent years. Iraqis eat the manna from oak and ash trees -- a sort of sweet sap that is collected and used in various foods -- over 30 tons per year are collected and consumed.

Of course, the ones most greatly harmed by the acorn bust are the animals that feed on forest mast, like squirrels, pigs, birds, and deer. Some estimates suggest that as much as 25% of deer's autumn diet is acorns. These animals are going hungry.

In a more grounded world, we would be significantly more attuned to natural resource cycles, and we would be collecting the acorns in big harvest years -- like last year -- and using the nearly free food to feed the hungry. Or, perhaps, placing back into the biome in a down year, to feed pigs and deer, which we could likewise be husbanding, and managing. Pigs raised in forest settings can get 100% of their diet from acorns, worms, mushrooms, and insects: basically building pork from the sun. Why aren't we managing the forest as a resource, one capable of producing huge amounts of nearly free food?

Why? Because we are divorced from the natural world to the degree that the absence of acorns goes without comment, even when food pantries are empty and the tent cities are growing. The poor -- and the rest of us, too -- are so culturally disconnected from the land that they aren't even unhappy that there are no acorns to collect. They don't even notice.