♪♪ -New York City, America's melting pot -- 8.5 million people packed into 5 boroughs spanning what constitutes about 300 square miles.

With over 200 different languages spoken daily, every major culture and religion represented, New York is often referred to as "the world's city," and this diversity not only leads to a unique cultural identity, but an amazing culinary landscape as well.

With all this access to culture, New York acts as a proving ground not just for food, but financial systems and innovation that can help accelerate the rate of change or restore some of the founding principles and practices that have made the promise of America so attractive to so many for so long.

Here is a special treat and an amazing find.

If we're gonna change our food system, cities are gonna play a major role.

-Healthy soil, healthy food, healthy people -- there's no getting around it.

-And what better place to start than this country's biggest?

-It's that wonder, when you hold that thing and you say, "This is simply amazing."

[ Bell dings ] -Welcome to New York.

♪♪ My name is Kevin Chap, and for me, wild foods aren't just a luxury, they're a way of life.

As an environmentalist, educator, and professional forager, I know the best ingredients are still waiting to be discovered.

You just need to know where to look.

♪♪ -"Wild Foods" is made possible by generous support from... And with support from... ♪♪ -At the confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers lies the island of Manhattan, home to almost 75,000 people per square mile.

[ Horns honking ] Despite being one of the most densely populated places on the planet, it's also home to one of the greatest urban green spaces, Central Park -- 843 acres of grassy knolls, historic bridges, and bike paths.

But it also contains diverse wild spaces.

♪♪ When first conceived in 1858, designers like Frederick Law Olmsted and others felt that tree nut species were so fundamental to America's identity that they included them in the cityscape.

Even here, nature was quietly producing abundance for everyone who knows where to look.

♪♪ We can see, you know, these small acorns.

This is really kind of an example of the forest garden in a major metropolitan area.

Tree nuts -- like chestnuts, acorns, and hickories -- once sustained entire civilizations across this continent.

The oaks that Olmsted planted here still drop their fruit every autumn.

These trees were so coveted that they were woven into the very blueprint of this city.

♪♪ Today, the species like the American Chestnut have been under attack for decades from the Chestnut Blight, a parasitic infection that was first discovered just across the East River in the Bronx Zoo in 1904.

By 1950, 4 billion chestnut trees from Maine to Mississippi were wiped out.

Reforestation projects are working to bring back the American Chestnut to the rest of the eastern United States.

♪♪ One of the most successful is 100 miles up the Hudson in Sharon, Connecticut.

♪♪ At Breadtree Farms, Russell Wallack and Bug Nichols are asking radical questions.

What if the future of agriculture grows on trees?

We're here under these chestnut trees that, Russ, you planted.

I mean, these were some of the first trees that you actually planted.

-Yeah, uh, spring of 2013 or 2014, we were out here planting, like, two-foot-tall trees.

-Tree nuts were a vital part of Indigenous America, a huge source of protein you didn't have to plant or weed every year.

Now with Breadtree's work, we can bring these foods back into circulation.

[ Chestnuts thudding ] From those first few saplings planted by hand a decade ago, Breadtree Farms now manages over 800 acres throughout the region.

The potential is staggering.

[ Leaves rustling gently ] -2030, it'll be like 200,000 pounds, and 2035 will be like 500,000 pounds.

-It's almost, like, exponentially increasing, like, what our crop size is going to be.

-One of the key features about chestnuts is that they are an annual-bearing nut tree.

Because they're wrapped in this spiky burr, chestnuts have a defense mechanism built in.

So instead of needing to have a down year, they can have year-after-year production.

-I think something that is going to be a very big deal for chestnuts is, of course, the flour, where you can dry chestnuts and grind them into a gluten-free flour.

♪♪ -What are these trees asking of us?

Like, how do we steward them?

And maybe they're stewarding us, but I definitely know that there's a dance that happens with trees.

-You're, like, standing on the shoulders of thousands of years of human relationship with trees, tending trees, breeding trees.

-We're building on this lineage of breeding of the chestnut genetics that we can plant now, right?

Many people have done work for hundreds of years, but specifically in this context for about the past century to create the trees that we now plant.

-These things are a part of us, and now that we're bringing them back, like, we have this chance to reconnect with such a deeper part of ourselves.

-Yeah.

♪♪ -I'll have to come back when these groves are in full production -- half a million pounds of chestnuts rolling off 800 acres of former dairy land.

[ Leaves rustling, chestnuts thudding ] This is a regenerative and sustainable food that not only feeds us but protects us, sequestering carbon, creating food resilience, and paying farmers a good wage.

And the closer they are to a city like New York, the more viable this future becomes.

♪♪ Here is a special treat and an amazing find right here in Central Park.

We're looking at Grifola frondosa, or Maitake Mushroom.

Gourmands all over the world use this in their cooking, and this is growing right here in Central Park against this beautiful old oak tree.

And actually, some of the oldest oak trees that we have left in this country exist right here in New York City.

So this is a little gift from this oak tree to us.

When we preserve these trees and forests and open landscapes, even in major cities you still see wild foods.

And nature just wants to produce as much abundance as she can.

So we're not gonna harvest this 'cause we don't have a permit, and we also want to preserve it so that other people can come by and hopefully have a learning opportunity or a moment to reconnect with their wild foods right here in New York City.

[ Birds singing ] While healthy green spaces increase abundance throughout the city, foraged mushrooms from Central Park aren't gonna feed a city of 8.5 million people.

♪♪ That's where C4 Mushrooms comes in.

Owner Alejandro Blanco has been working for decades to make farming mushrooms at scale a reality.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean... I'm meeting Alejandro at Winnakee Nature Preserve, 90 miles up the Hudson from New York.

♪♪ Below the canopy of the Hudson Valley, an invisible network runs through the forest floor -- billions of fungal threads connecting trees to soil to one another.

♪♪ Nature wants to produce.

Sometimes she needs a hand.

We can be stewards and provide these amazing foods by working with her instead of only taking.

It's been a dry season, and the forest is holding its cards close.

It's been a pretty tough season, yeah, out in the woods, right?

But here's one that we can usually rely on.

Turkey Tail.

Medicinal, yeah?

-Mm-hmm.

Yes.

-So we use this for tincture.

While Turkey Tail isn't being produced at C4 yet, lots of other local species are.

Yeah.

Alejandro is the first grower to significantly cultivate Maitake in captivity, replicating the conditions of the local forests so precisely that the mushrooms don't know the difference.

Yeah.

Operations like C4 are the bridge between the forests and the table, scaling what nature does slowly into something that can feed a city.

[ Bell dings ] ♪♪ Back in Manhattan, I'm meeting up with two friends who intimately understand the financial realities of trying to feed a city more sustainably.

♪♪ Matt Wadiak is a Michelin-trained chef who co-founded Blue Apron, one of the first sustainably sourced meal delivery companies.

♪♪ -When we started Blue Apron, we partnered with 250 local farms.

-Yeah.

It's amazing.

-Yeah, we integrated all of these systems to eliminate synthetic inputs and improve quality.

-Through the success of Blue Apron, Matt has helped prove that regenerative food systems can work at scale.

Alright, so I've brought down some venison, some mushrooms.

-Tell me about these mushrooms.

-Most of these come from my buddy's mushroom farm in Hyde Park called C4 Mushrooms.

So the Lion's Mane, the Maitake, and the Oyster Mushrooms.

-Mm-hmm.

-The Sulfur Shelf, or Chicken of the Woods, I actually found this fall, and it was a great find 'cause it was about 30 pounds of them and it's been so dry out there.

I was just really lucky.

Today, Matt is running Foundation Farms, where he's promoting a new holistic approach to producing quality foods at scale.

-What we're doing at Foundation is we're building a totally different food system outside of the current food system.

We're building our own mills, we're buying our own land, we're putting in our own dairy, we're building all of our manufacturing facilities.

-This system that created the problem is probably not gonna create the solution.

-If you don't own your own supply chain, it's very hard to break out of that system.

-I mean, I learned a lot... Chris Sorensen helped design recipes at Blue Apron.

He's a fellow CIA graduate and chef whose trajectory changed by working at Blue Hill at Stone Barns under Dan Barber, one of the most important farm-to-table kitchens in the world.

-Michael Anthony and Dan Barber, two of the best chefs in the world, co-cheffing the place.

They were focused on regenerative agriculture.

That's livestock rotation, vegetable rotations without inputs.

It was kind of like my graduate school of culinary.

♪♪ -Some beautiful venison that you've harvested yourself.

The butchery on it is impeccable.

We're gonna get a nice sear on it, build a little Maillard reaction, and that will go perfectly with the mushrooms.

A little farmers market shallot and garlic, some apple.

We have some lovely chestnuts roasting.

-So these are actually a crossbred genetically intermingled Asian and American Chestnut.

We've been working with Breadtree Farms, who's just doing a wonderful job rematriating that tree back into our food system.

♪♪ -The educational piece is so important because people are so intimidated by cooking, especially in this country.

In France and these places like Italy, it's such a part of the culture.

In America, we were void of that.

And a lot of the influences that we have in this country, the great cooks in this country, are actually immigrants, right?

People bringing that history with them.

-Charlie Trotter used to have a saying -- "the best food is made in the moment."

So I don't really know what we're making yet.

Notice how we've been letting the venison set and bringing it up to room temp.

-Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

-This is gonna be important for a dish.

This is delicate, so I'm gonna go salt only on this.

I'm not gonna do any pepper.

And we're just gonna get a really nice sear.

-So many people are shy to work with game meats, right, because they're a lot lower in fat content, right?

-Yeah.

-And so, you know, figuring out, like, these tricks of the trade, like, for example, bringing it to room temperature before you throw it, you know, on a sear... -You want it to be pink in the middle.

-Yeah.

-Nice and delicious.

-That meat is so healthy, you can actually eat it just like carpaccio.

♪♪ [ Sizzling ] ♪♪ -So we got our mushrooms.

You can see they're all roasty toasty.

They're beautiful.

-One of my friends, Cara Tobin, runs Honey Road up in Burlington, and her whole motive behind introducing diners to new mushrooms is to make them crispy, right?

People don't argue with crispy.

-Right.

And then we're gonna sprinkle in the chestnut.

You'd pay a lot of money for this in a restaurant.

-Right.

-But we've only been cooking for about 10 minutes, so you can put great food on the table, and it takes less time than to get UberEats.

So we can make great food at home.

We don't have to rely on takeout.

This is enough meat to feed probably, you know, three -- at least three people.

-Yeah.

-You know?

Maybe two of us.

-Yeah.

Yeah.

[ Laughter ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Cool.

-Let's taste.

-That's cooked beautifully, Matt.

I mean, you got a little sweet from the apple.

-Mm-hmm.

-You got the earthiness.

You can taste the woodiness in the meat as well.

-People are not cooking with chestnuts enough.

The chestnut really, I think, brings it all together.

-Mm-hmm.

Everything on the plate was in the woods just a couple of days ago.

-That's how it should be.

-Just let the ingredients speak for themselves.

-Mm-hmm.

-Later that evening, we're joined by a group of friends in Matt's garden for some celebration on the journey thus far and how we can continue to create change in our national food system.

[ Glass clinking ] You know, Matt and I met about three years ago out in Montana on a retreat, where a group of people from different sectors of the food economy and the environment kind of came together to talk about creative solutions to reinvent our food system and our relationship with the natural world.

And I've learned so much from Matt, not just about, like, sustainability and agriculture, but also about supply chain and how to build a business, and he's been with me through this whole crazy process of bringing this show to fruition.

-"Wild Foods" and good foods education is the answer to all these problems.

So thank you.

-Yeah.

Thank you.

-Alright.

-Cheers.

-Cheers.

-Cheers.

Let's eat.

-Cheers.

-Cheers.

Thanks so much for coming, guys.

Yeah.

-As the sun sets over the city, deep conversations and revelry run late into the night in typical fashion, reminding me of how special this city really is.

See, abundance can come in many forms -- not just in food, but in friends and the sharing of ideas and perspectives.

♪♪ Early the next morning, I'm off to the farmers market to source some ingredients for one of the country's best farm-to-table chefs and to show how foraging can transcend the forest in an urban landscape.

So we're here at the Union Square farmers market in downtown New York City.

All these farmers come in in the morning, and they set up this amazing food exchange, and this is another way that you can forage in the city.

So I've stopped by one of my favorite farm stands, Campo Rosso Farm from Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania.

These guys have about a two-hour drive to get here to set up, and they are doing stuff like sprouted cauliflower, romanesco, chicory, radicchio.

♪♪ So we've stopped at Hawthorne Valley Farm.

This is an intentional community located in Ghent in the Upper Hudson Valley, founded back in the '70s during the Steiner revolution.

Everything is organic there, biodynamic, regenerative.

So, here would be an example of something that the food system would call ugly food.

It's not uniform.

Nature isn't monocropping, right?

It grows in a variety of different ways, and getting used to that is really on the part of the consumer.

♪♪ With a bag full of heirloom produce from the market, it's time to visit one of the chefs who has made the farm-to-table connection his life's work.

Michael Anthony has been cooking at Gramercy Tavern for nearly two decades, building a kitchen where the farmers aren't just suppliers, they're collaborators.

-Every great restaurant should have intimate relationships with the people who produce the food that it serves.

Every gesture, every dish, every effort in that restaurant is intended to create an experience that's unique to this place.

-Chefs like you and some select others are really now focusing on telling a story about a place through the ingredients that they're getting.

-It's the direct conversation between people who are cooking and eating and the people who are most knowledgeable, who are growing that is the interest point.

-The whole reason why New York can even exist in this pretty small footprint and be the largest city in America is the fertility and the abundance that comes from upstream.

I want to know the first name of the farmer that I'm buying from, not the name of the farm.

I want to have a first-name basis with where I'm getting my food.

-At Gramercy Tavern, you can cook the way you want to cook.

You can celebrate local ingredients.

You can tell stories about foraged foods, wild foods, the farmers market.

♪♪ This is a green wheat and roasted carrot dish that I've roasted the carrots until they take on a little caramelization, and I'm gonna finish it by adding a carrot purée.

♪♪ I'm going to finish this dish with a pungent salsa verde and crunchy kohlrabi.

♪♪ This is the hay-smoked gnocchi with pickled peppers and roasted beets and fennel.

It's that wonder, whether you're a kid or an adult, when you hold that thing and you say, "This is just simply amazing."

These are things that exist right before our very eyes.

We just have to have the will to see them.

-This is a celebration.

Food's supposed to be fun.

And the more that you know about the ingredients, the deeper that pleasure becomes.

At least in my experience.

-I'm with you.

Any normal, regular old boring day can become a celebration when you are bringing, you know, foods and cooking and sharing those moments with people.

Yeah, it's a great way to add richness to your life.

-To the future of food.

-Cheers.

♪♪ -None of the abundance we've experienced here in New York City would be possible without the river that flows past her, emptying into the ocean at the same location where Indigenous peoples once thrived, and where countless immigrants first glanced America's shores.

But we haven't been kind to the river.

How can we return the Hudson River to its former glory and recapture the abundance that attracted every civilization to settle its banks and feed from its bounty?

Tracy Brown leads the fight to restore and protect it at Riverkeeper.

-The Hudson is something people take a lot of pride in.

We have actually done incredible restoration work.

It is a river in recovery.

But in addition to trying to address the historic harms and the current harms, we have to be upstream within the system and saying, "What's the legislation?

What's the oversight to stop us from getting to this point?"

-Right.

-Right now, we're at the widest point in the Hudson River.

The Hudson is an estuary, so we're getting saltwater coming in from the Atlantic Ocean, pushing north with the tides two times a day.

They meet and they mix and they make this brackish water that defines the estuary.

-So this is really like the foundational point of modern America.

-Some people call it the founding river or America's first river.

So, the Dutch settlers came to this location because they saw the incredible abundance of these multiple estuaries meeting together.

-The natural balance of this river and its life-giving estuaries remain strained by a legacy of modern chemical pollution.

So we have some forever chemicals that we're dealing with right now, right?

-Yes.

For decades, they were dumping PCBs in the Hudson River.

We had to shut down our commercial fishing industry.

We lost a whole way of life... -Yeah.

-...in this valley.

Families lost their heritage and their way of life.

Right now, the burden to avoid contamination from these toxins is put on the residents.

-Yeah.

-And it should be put on the polluter.

The solution is simple, and it's the polluters pay.

We are already seeing a return of abundance in marine life out in New York Harbor.

We now have a whale watch cruise every fall.

We see humpback whales, minke whales, and giant pods of dolphins.

-You can actually now do a whale watch from Brooklyn.

-Native New Yorkers are amazed.

♪♪ -We've long sought inspiration in New York City.

It's where the founding principles of America were meted out, where, after winning the War of Independence, George Washington turned away from power, handing control back to the people and opting for a life as a farmer -- one of the most selfless and daring acts in political history and the foundation of what it means to be American.

♪♪ On the 250th anniversary of this nation's founding, it's time to reflect on the promise that brought us all here and perhaps discover a new way forward.

Every time I come out here, it reminds me of my family's story about coming to America.

This is what my great-grandfather would have seen when he immigrated from Ireland.

The promise of America was based on abundance, and we can get back there again if we reinvent our food system and have better relationship with our land.

♪♪ Standing at the mouth of the Hudson, I can see the whole story laid out before me -- the river that carved a valley, the valley that fed a city, the immigrants who followed the promise across an ocean, and the farmers, foragers, chefs, and conservationists who are still writing the next chapter.

If we can all realize how vital nature and food are in our collective story, we have a chance of reclaiming our own personal sovereignty and the promise that was America.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -"Wild Foods" is made possible by generous support from... And with support from... ♪♪ ♪♪