Un-cultivation in America: Discourses of Wild and Foraged Apples

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.