When We
Were Wild
A documentary series exploring ancestral foodways and the timeless relationship between humans and the wild. Each episode profiles people who live in deep reciprocity with the land — drawing nourishment, meaning, and identity from it in ways most modern humans have forgotten.
Six Stories. One Remembering.
Their connection to food is their connection to life itself — an invitation to rekindle the wild, wise, and deeply human part of ourselves that still knows how to belong to the Earth.
Forgotten Flavors
Our ancestors knew every edible plant, every healing herb — knowledge we've almost entirely lost. Forager Pascal Baudar moves through Southern California's woodlands and desert with ancestral eyes, gathering what most would overlook. He forages wild plants for food and fermentation, hand-harvests clay to craft vessels, and creates an extraordinary feast that exists nowhere else. This intimate portrait reveals what we gain when we slow down enough to remember who we once were.
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Born Into Migration
Shoot Scheduled · August 30 – September 5
Máret Rávdná Buljo is a Sámi reindeer herder and food storyteller, born into a family that has followed the herd and picked cloudberries for generations. Her life is shaped by an ethic older than memory: take only what is needed, and use every part of what is given. Around the fire she cooks the dishes that carry it — bidos, the rich reindeer stew of weddings and gatherings; birch-smoked reindeer folded hot into flatbread; marrow broths brewed as medicine; reindeer cream with cloudberries. Through Máret, Sámi tradition feels vivid, elemental, and alive.
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What the Tide Brings
Shoot Scheduled · November 4 – 13
On the wild Cape Peninsula of South Africa, Roushanna Gray reads the shoreline the way others read a garden. A master of seaweeds, she free dives the cold Atlantic and forages the tideline for what the ocean gives, then carries it home to the table. At Veld & Sea — her wild kitchen and foraging school between the fynbos and the surf — she teaches people to gather and cook with wild food all year long. Her work is a reminder that the coast is not scenery, but a living larder most of us have forgotten how to read.
More Than Gatherers
Shoot Scheduled · 2027
Jess Johnson is a bow hunter, conservation advocate, and a powerful voice for women finding their way into hunting on their own terms. She leads us into a circle of formidable women hunters, each carrying a different piece of ancestral knowledge — tanning hides, primitive smoking, harvesting and preserving wild food. The episode culminates in a Beast Feast: a wild, communal meal that celebrates skill, resilience, and the many ways these women reclaim and redefine ancestral foodways.
Decay & Renewal
Shoot Scheduled · January 2027
Maya Elson follows mushrooms not only as wild food, but as guides to a deeper understanding of relationship — between human and forest, decay and renewal, inner healing and ecological repair. Through her practice of Mycopsychology, she explores how connecting with fungi can help people rewild themselves. Her work extends to co-founding the Post Fire Biofiltration Initiative, using fungi to prevent toxins from burned homes from entering waterways — making fungi not just teachers of belonging, but allies in restoration.
El Rey de las Papas
High in the Peruvian Andes, at nearly 16,000 feet, Julio Hancco Mamani tends to hundreds of native potato varieties — each one a living ancestor, a vessel of memory and resilience. Known as El Rey de las Papas, he works the same terraces his forebears farmed for centuries, guided by lunar cycles and the wisdom of the Apus, the mountain spirits. His hands hold biodiversity that industrial agriculture has forgotten — pigments of purple, gold, and red that tell stories of soil and survival.
His work comes alive in partnership with a Quechua cook who revives the ancient ritual of the watia — baking potatoes in an earthen pit, sealed with wild herbs and clay. Together, they offer a portrait of reciprocity: of how ancestral foodways are not just preserved but continually reborn through community, fire, and the generosity of the land.
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When We Were Wild is currently in production. Your support funds the filming, travel, and storytelling that makes each episode possible.
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