Podcast Episode 268: Wild American Foodscapes – Newfoundland
Newfoundland is a place that resists simple narratives. From a distance, it looks harsh, rocky, windy, and a growing season that barely gets started before it ends. But step closer, and you find something else entirely: staggering biological abundance. Fish once moved in numbers that defied belief. Moose fill freezers. Seals crowd the ice. And yet, food here has never been easy. In Episode 268 of the Wild American Foodscapes series, we explore Newfoundland as a place where abundance and austerity coexist, where food is not just something you eat but something you negotiate with daily. As we frame it in the episode, “Newfoundland is a place where biological abundance meets environmental restraint. And food is the negotiation between the two.”
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This episode brings together a group of voices who understand Newfoundland from the inside out. We speak with Mark Kurlansky, whose work has traced the global story of cod and preservation. Lori McCarthy offers a deeply personal lens shaped by growing up in a small outport fishing family and continuing to live that food system today. And Jen Shears brings critical insight into the modern realities of seal harvesting, public perception, and policy. Together, their perspectives reveal a food system shaped as much by culture and history as by ecology.
One of the central tensions in Newfoundland is this paradox: food can feel limitless and uncertain at the same time. The sea has always been the foundation. As Kurlansky puts it plainly, “Anybody who lives in Newfoundland is going to be a fishing person because that’s what there is there.” Agriculture never took hold in the same way it did elsewhere. The land simply doesn’t allow it. But offshore, for centuries, there was more than enough.
That abundance didn’t stay local. With the European arrival, preservation techniques like salting and drying scaled outward, transforming cod into a global commodity. Newfoundland became a node in an international food system. Fish moved across oceans. Wealth followed. And with that shift came a fundamental change: abundance was no longer just something you lived with, it was something you exported.
But abundance is fragile when misunderstood.
The collapse of the cod fishery in 1992 remains one of the defining events in Newfoundland’s modern history. It wasn’t just an ecological failure; it was a cultural rupture. Roughly 50,000 people were affected. Entire ways of life disappeared almost overnight. Lori captures the human side of that loss: “During that time… we were told as young people to leave here… there was nothing here left for you.”
And yet, the food system didn’t vanish. It adapted.
Crab and lobster rose in importance. Moose populations expanded, becoming a cornerstone of household food security. Preservation practices, some of which are now officially listed as “at risk”, never actually disappeared in practice. They stayed alive in kitchens, freezers, and root cellars.
That idea, food as security, is one of the most grounded themes in this episode.
In Newfoundland, a full freezer isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s insurance.
Lori puts it in concrete terms: “If I had to replace the moose and purchase meat, that’s $2,000 of meat in my freezer… It’s the only reason I have a generator.” That single statement reframes everything. Wild food here is not romantic. It’s practical. It’s necessary.
That same reality shows up in the conversation around seal.
Few foods are more misunderstood globally and more normalized locally. Jen Shears walks through both the policy and the practice, highlighting how external pressure, particularly the EU ban on seal products, collapsed markets without addressing ecological realities. Seal populations remain high. Predator-prey dynamics continue to shift. But participation in the harvest has declined.
And yet, seal remains one of the most nutritionally dense and culturally relevant foods available. As Jen explains, “It’s a dark, rich meat… really useful for the type of environment we live in.”
This is where Newfoundland forces a harder conversation: what happens when outside perception reshapes a local food system?
The answer, in many cases, is imbalance.
Ecological systems continue operating whether markets exist or not. When harvest declines but populations remain high, pressure shifts elsewhere, onto other fish stocks, onto broader ocean health. The episode doesn’t offer easy answers, but it makes one thing clear: food systems cannot be understood in isolation from the environments and policies that shape them.
Beyond the economics and ecology, there is something deeper running through Newfoundland’s food culture, continuity.
Lori describes it as something more than sustenance: “It’s not just eating it… It plays such a large role in bringing people together. Emotional sustenance.” That phrase matters. Because it reframes wild food as more than protein or calories. It becomes a connective tissue between people, places, and time.
You see it in the way food is documented. Kitchen diaries tracking daily meals, harvests, and small exchanges between neighbors. You see it in the persistence of techniques, bottling meat, fermenting greens, drying fish, even as they’re labeled “at risk” on paper. And you see it in the way people talk about home.
Newfoundlanders leave, often out of necessity. But they rarely disconnect. As Lori puts it, people go away “to come back.” That gravitational pull is tied, in no small part, to food. Because food here isn’t interchangeable. It’s specific, seasonal and earned.
That specificity leads to one of the most important takeaways from this episode: Newfoundland is not a place you visit to consume. It’s a place you visit to understand.
If you go, you eat cod in season. You source lobster from small harvesters. You learn why preservation matters. You ask where your food comes from. You listen more than you speak.
Because this is not a curated food scene. It’s a working food system. And it has been shaped, again and again, by collapse, adaptation, and restraint. That final tension lingers as the episode closes: if abundance returns in new forms, will restraint keep pace with it? That question doesn’t just belong to Newfoundland. It belongs everywhere.
If you want to understand what a real, functioning wild food system looks like under pressure, what it means to live between abundance and uncertainty, this episode is worth your time. Listen to Episode 268 of the Wild Fish and Game Podcast and step into Newfoundland’s foodscape, where every meal carries history, risk, and meaning.