Vermont has some of the country’s best availability and highest consumption of foods that are grown locally, organically, sustainably or foraged in the wild. Yet those foods make up only 5 percent of Vermonters’ collective diet. The rest comes from large-scale industrial agriculture operations, whose heavy reliance on chemical fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and international shipping makes them among the world’s largest polluters of the air, water and soil.
Vermonter Kevin Chap believes Americans have the power to change that paradigm — without necessarily making our groceries more expensive. Instead, he argues for “rewilding” the American food system, adopting solutions that are based on how nature itself produces food and the way humans ate for thousands of years before the Industrial Age.
Chap is the creator and host of a new PBS television series, premiering in April, called “Wild Foods,” which combines documentary-style storytelling with environmental stewardship, adventure travel and foodie culture. As Chap explained in a Seven Days interview, the purpose of the show isn’t to denigrate industrial agriculture or dwell on its “inconvenient truths.”
Rather, each episode highlights a different solution to a problem by visiting the farmers, ranchers, fishers, chefs and environmentalists who have adopted it. Many of these sustainable methods of food harvesting and animal husbandry draw from centuries-old, even ancient human practices. As Chap put it, “We’re bringing the audience out into nature to observe food in its natural landscape.”
In Montana, he examines how seven Indigenous nations reintroduced bison to the landscape, improving biodiversity on grasslands. And by watching how bison naturally graze, cattle ranchers learned to alter the ways they manage their own herds, dramatically reducing their water consumption in the process.
In Maine, Chap meets with wild blueberry farmers and discusses their sustainable harvesting methods. Next, he discusses sustainable lobstering and deep-sea fishing with Linda Greenlaw, a former commercial fishing captain and now best-selling author of The Lobster Chronicles and other nautically themed books.
In Arizona, Chap visits an addiction recovery clinic that’s had remarkable success in reducing its clients’ rate of relapse by 30 percent, in large part by switching them to a plant-based diet. Said Chap, “I don’t think people realize how important our gut health is to our mental health.”
Three of the first season’s eight half-hour episodes were filmed in Vermont. All include breathtaking visuals and cover a lot of ground, both geographically and thematically, highlighting each region’s history, culture, natural environment and culinary arts.
In a sense, “Wild Foods” is the culmination of Chap’s life work as a storyteller, teacher, environmentalist and professional forager. The 46-year-old Stockbridge native said he didn’t even realize he grew up on a farm until he went to college in Baltimore and described his rural upbringing to friends.
Like many Vermonters, Chap’s family had a subsistence garden and raised chickens and pigs. He often helped his uncle’s family — whom he called “real” farmers who actually earned a living off the land — with haying, weeding and bringing crops to market.
Chap spent much of his youth exploring the Chateauguay No Town area, 60,000 acres of largely undeveloped forested hills and mountains in the southern Vermont towns of Stockbridge, Killington, Barnard and Bridgewater. There, he foraged for edible plants and fungi, initially as a hobby, then as a way to travel farther and stay longer in the woods without needing to carry supplies.
Chap recalled his first experience with what people in foraging circles call “getting onto a mushroom”: It happens, he explained, when your brain locks into the patterns and color sequences of specific species, then spots them almost intuitively in the landscape.
“Any forager who’s had this experience can tell you that it feels pretty mystical,” Chap said. “This is very old brain stuff. It’s the reason we’re still here.”
Chap eventually learned to identify more than 100 edible species, many of which he brought home and sold at local farmers markets. He quickly realized that his foraged foods commanded a higher price than most of his family’s produce. He could earn, say, $20 per pound for freshly foraged chicken of the woods mushrooms, compared to $3 per pound for the organic carrots his family worked all summer to grow.
After leaving Vermont, Chap worked in acting, television and film while also supporting himself waiting tables and working in the kitchens of New York City eateries. He developed what he called a “love-hate relationship” with the food system, watching high-end restaurants charge patrons hundreds of dollars for meals prepared from the same institutional ingredients that were sold to the casual diner just down the street.
By the time Chap left New York, he was mostly working behind the camera producing reality TV shows. It was lucrative but soul-sucking work. “I was fucking miserable,” he said.
In 2008, Chap returned to his roots in southern Vermont, bought a house down the road from his boyhood home and took a job leading outdoor education programs for the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps in Woodstock.
“He was a really good team leader,” said Anastasia Douglas, a lawyer from Barre, who served on Chap’s Youth Conservation Corps work crew in 2008, building trails and doing other outdoor projects in Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park. The work combined physical labor, ecology lessons and discussions of social issues, she recalled, and Chap was a natural in showcasing his deep knowledge of Vermont’s native trees, plants and fungi.
In his off-hours, Chap filmed short videos of himself cooking the mushrooms he’d foraged or the wild trout he’d caught for dinner, then posted those videos on YouTube and social media. In 2017, his friend Eric Ford, who was then senior manager of local content at Vermont PBS (now Vermont Public), suggested that Chap pitch a show to PBS.
Bringing “Wild Foods” to a national audience was “an eight-year odyssey” from initial concept to final delivery, Chap said. The show is independently produced by his own company, Polar Productions, and cost about $850,000 for the first season. While that may seem like a lot of money, he noted that the reality TV shows he once produced in New York cost $300,000 to $400,000 per episode. Funding for “Wild Foods” came from a variety of sources, including the Montana Film Office, the Maine Office of Tourism, Australian Native Food and Botanicals, and the University of Vermont Medical Center. Still, many of the crew members worked for less than their usual market-rate pay because they believe in the show’s mission, he said.
Chap tailored “Wild Foods” to PBS’ audience, which already has an appetite, if you will, for high-quality educational programming. As he pointed out, PBS viewers are, on average, the most publicly engaged, philanthropic and best-educated television audience and spend the most on travel, food and dining. When “Wild Foods” premieres in April — Vermont Public has scheduled the first episode to air on Wednesday, April 22, at 7:30 p.m. — it will reach a potential audience of 1.2 million viewers on 300 PBS stations. (For perspective, Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” on CNN debuted at 747,000 viewers.) A second season is already in the works.
Chap sees “Wild Foods” as a triumph for Vermont, too, which he called one of the most inspiring landscapes in the country.
“You vote with your fork every time you sit down for a meal,” he said. “[Vermonters] can influence the national food conversation simply by the ways we’re doing things here.”
You vote with your fork every time you sit down for a meal.
Kevin chap
To be clear, Chap isn’t trying to convince viewers to go out and forage for their meals rather than shopping at their local grocery stores. (And every episode that features foraging also discusses ethical harvesting practices.) Rather, Chap wants to show where high-quality, nutrient-rich foods come from and highlight the often unrecognized methods of people who are raising food right.
“When I was growing up foraging in the wilderness, I never thought this would be the way I would contribute,” he added. “To share it with a national audience is a dream come true.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Nature’s Harvest | A new PBS series, created by Stockbridge native Kevin Chap, promotes the “rewilding” of America’s food system”
This article appears in The Food Issue • 2026.
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