Langdon Cook

Langdon Cook is a writer, instructor, and lecturer on wild foods and the outdoors. His books include Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager (Mountaineers ‘09), which the Seattle Times called “lyrical, practical and quixotic,” and the forthcoming The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of an Underground Economy (Ballantine ‘13). Langdon has been featured in Bon Appetit, WSJ magazine, Whole Living, CityArts, and Salon.com, and his writing has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including Sunset, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Outside, The Stranger, and Seattle Magazine. He has been the recipient of grants and awards from 4Culture, the PEN Northwest/Margery Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, and the Bread Loaf Writing Conference. Langdon received a MA from Middlebury College in Vermont and MFA from the University of Washington. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two children.

Langdon received 2010 GAP Award funding to research and write a book-length work of narrative non-fiction about wild food foraging across the U.S., titled Eat on the Wild Side: America’s Most Famous Foraged Foods. This will be a follow-up to his book Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager. The research will require travel to the major geographical regions of the U.S. to explore America’s most noteworthy wild foods, the characters that forage them, those discerning diners who eat them, and the colorful regions that made them renowned in the first place. His book Fat of the Land has helped draw attention to what it means to participate in a meaningful and nutritious food culture, especially in the Pacific Northwest. With Eat on the Wild Side he aims to take this message to a broader public.