September 30, 2025Open Access

Un-cultivation in America

Key Points

This analysis reveals that foraging discourse actively questions established agricultural practices and societal norms.
Key narratives connected to foraging and wild fruit have circulated among cider makers, enriching the cider industry's culture.
Explorations of orcharding history highlight the evolving perception of landscapes and their meanings in American culture.
The study illustrates how contemporary media portrayals reflect and influence ongoing discussions around foraging practices.

Abstract

This paper explores the existing popular culture discourse of foraging and wild fruit through examinations of orcharding history, longstanding American folk legend, contemporary mass media depictions and niche publications within the cider industry that were circulating within the social networks of cider makers during the time leading to our study. Taken together, these narratives indicate an active and evolving intellectual discourse of foraging within the cider community, a discourse which reveals a questioning and reframing of dominant cultural, social and economic paradigms, not only of contemporary agricultural and social economies, but also of the longer scope of American Romanticism as a foundational cultural imperative. Ideas of the landscape, its uses and its meanings, based in the opposition of wilderness and cultivated landscapes, are under revision in this foraging discourse.

Un-cultivation in America

Key Points

Abstract

Cite This Study

Also Consider

Also Consider