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Sam Bliss’s forehead twitched in the bright April sun. Until a late afternoon interruption, he was writing his dissertation, tapping away behind a computer screen at the Gund Institute for the Environment. His weekend plans: read more papers about people’s motivations for growing food.

It’s a topic Bliss has been exploring for years.

What if food-growing is more than something we do for survival; more than a habit come spring; more than a way to make money? Is there a basic human desire to put seeds in the ground?

A black hair scrunchie flecked with silver decorated his right wrist. Bliss’s wavy locks flow past his shoulders, honey-brown braid tacked behind his left ear.

Bliss gardens. Spearfishes. Forages for wild greens and mushrooms. He dumpster dives for food. He occasionally eats roadkill.

“I study food that is not for sale,” he says.

These are foods given to friends and neighbors and donated to food banks. The cans and boxes lining food pantry shelves or distributed through government-funded programs such as the free lunches Vermont school children have enjoyed since the COVID-19 pandemic. Bliss studies non-market foods procured through hunting, fishing, foraging, gardening, and bartering—the foodstuffs economic markets don’t count.

It’s a shift from his undergraduate years studying economics when he believed that markets were part of the solution to combating climate change. The Seattle native didn’t learn about ecological economics (his focus at University of Vermont's Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources) until living in the backyard unit of a Berkeley, California home with a tech analyst who gave him books on the subject.

Until then, “it was one sidebar in the textbook that was never talked about,” Bliss explains.

At the time, he was helping Alameda County estimate its supply chain emissions. A deep dive into ecological economics sent him on a path searching for answers. He began questioning if continued economic growth made a sustainable future impossible.

Bliss spent a year in Spain on a Fulbright grant studying —the concept that through policy changes, a wealthy country’s economy shifts to focus on meeting the needs of people rather than increasing the GDP.

In 2016, Bliss came to �պ����� to study non-market food practices. A few years later, his study area became his way of life with the emergence of COVID-19. Many people were suddenly furloughed from jobs, terminated, or worried they would be. Food insecurity rose across the country. Bliss and a small group of friends donned masks and got to work.

“It was, ‘here’s a place where non-market food is really necessary and where I know about it,’—in theory,” Bliss explains.

The Gund Graduate Fellow ramped up his involvement with the mutual aid group Food Not Bombs and began organizing a full-time operation in Burlington. Since March 2020, Bliss and volunteers have continuously prepared free meals for anyone who wants them using leftovers donated from local eateries or recovered from dumpsters that would otherwise have gone to waste.

The meals provided by Food Not Bombs are overtly political. In part, because providing free meals (without a license) is prohibited in some parts of the country. Giving a free lunch also proves that they do exist. And for Bliss, that point deserves underlining. 

Sam Bliss Ph.D. '23, a postdoc at �պ�����, studies food that is not for sale. He is part of a team of researchers investigating food security in Maine and Vermont. Photos by Andy Duback.

He and his housemates in Burlington tend a flock of chickens and operate a streetside food pantry and food recovery center. You might encounter Bliss some morning restocking the shelves or removing pieces of bread nibbled by squirrels. He doesn’t just study non-market food systems—he lives and creates them.

“I never had a garden before I came to Vermont,” Bliss admits.

During the pandemic he supervised an undergraduate capstone project Food Not Lawns that gave vegetable starts to households so they could continue eating fresh produce. Some recipients then donated some of the food to the Food Not Bombs effort. And he joined Associate Professor of Nutrition and Food Sciences Meredith Niles’ investigation of food insecurity in Vermont and Maine.

“He helped us think through some of the survey questions [on home and wild food procurement], and then in particular about measuring things we hadn’t measured before,” she explains.

Her team’s ound that the majority of respondents modified their food purchasing in response to rising food prices and two thirds engaged in some form of self-provisioning activities—many for the first time. A small, but notable portion of respondents procured food by sharing/bartering (13 percent) as well as through gleaning or dumpster diving (2 percent). Food insecure respondents were more likely to fish and raise poultry for eggs whereas food secure respondents were more likely to garden or preserve food.

But Bliss wondered whether the arrows were being read in the right direction. Couldn’t a person be more food secure because they garden?

“Causation works in both ways,” he says.

That wondering led him to reexamine the very questions he helped devise.

He has completely dissected the data and suggested it isn’t exactly measuring what we thought it was, and maybe we should rethink them, Niles says.

His “natural curiosity” and desire to “poke at things and ask questions” is why she has asked him to stay on as a postdoc on her team and lead the design of the 2024 survey section on wild food and home food production. 

The 2024 survey will ask Vermonters about the impacts of the pandemic on their food security and nutrition as well as examine their health outcomes. Previous surveys showed the prevalence of food insecurity rose during COVID-19 and remained high through 2022 as inflation tightened budgets already stretched thin.

“The big question for the 2024 survey will be how prevalent is food insecurity still?” Niles says. “Who are the people who seem to still be struggling?”

It will further probe the intensity of home and wild food procurement activities, too. In 2020 and 2021, the survey asked if people performed these activities and if they did it for the first time.

“But in 2022, one of the things that Sam advocated for us to do was to ask people what percent of their food came from different sources? And really what we see there is something quite different,” Niles says.

While about 65 percent of people report hunting, fishing, foraging, or gardening, only 38 percent of Vermonters estimate that even 1 percent or more of their food came from them, she says. “To me, that tells me that people are going hunting. They are going fishing, but they aren’t necessarily getting anything, or they are growing three basil plants on their back porch and saying they did gardening, … so we are trying to better unpack the people who are really doing these activities and how it could impact their food security and nutrition and health.”

The data shows growing evidence of a positive effect from home and wild food production among both food insecure and secure people, she says. “We have [in Scientific Reports, an open-access Nature publication] where we found that households that were food insecure at the start of the pandemic and engaged in home food production are significantly more likely to become food secure 9 to 12 months later.”

But barriers persist. Perhaps Bliss can help the team uncover them.

Because questioning how things work and why they work like they do is his domain. Bliss questions the dominance of the consumer food market in our daily lives. The methods food pantries use to disseminate items by mimicking grocery stores. How successful the commercial food system is at serving the public good when millions go to bed hungry in the United States, yet he can attest from rummaging in Burlington dumpsters to the enormous quantity of food waste produced every day.

Bliss is developing a rotational grazing plan for sheep at Rock Point Gardens where he has a community garden plot with friends. 

For his dissertation, Bliss interviewed 94 people to try to understand what non-market food practices can reveal about our relationships to the land and to each other. For some individuals, self-provisioning gives them a feeling of self-sufficiency during hard times. For others, gleaning and sharing foods prevent food from going to waste and direct food to hungry mouths markets alone don’t. Several people described food sharing as a method for connecting with people. But articulating the why behind aspects of a person’s behavior is rarely clear-cut.

Bliss argues that perhaps it is not one but many of these factors, often in combination, that a trip to the grocery store doesn’t provide. At the core of his dissertation is the idea that “non-market food is special,” he writes. “It is tied up in a web of relationships.” In short, we get proximate with the people who gift us food, or the land when we grow or hunt or forage upon it.

Human food sharing has been studied in Indigenous groups but remained understudied in our capitalistic society­—as if we are somehow different, Bliss says. “In Vermont, 200 years ago, 90 percent of households farmed for a living. And from what I can tell, the idea of sharing food between households here never stopped. People just stopped writing about it.”

Based on his findings, about half of Vermonters still engage in food sharing activities. Have you brought a dish to a potluck? Donated cans of beans to the local food bank? Exchanged garden produce for venison? That counts. And a 2022 survey suggests Vermonters acquire 14 percent of their food in ways other than purchasing it.

Bliss argues that most of us assume the market has more power than it does. But he also believes the commercial sector isn’t the only one making significant contributions—we just don’t measure nonmarket ones well. It’s far easier to count units sold than the neighborly exchanges of frozen meat.

By stepping outside the commercial system, Bliss shows where it falls short and wonders what, if anything, we might do about a system that prizes short-term profits over environmental sustainability. But he isn’t naïve in thinking we can simply banish markets either. Markets efficiently, and rather cheaply, move large amounts of calories to people around the world. They deliver us from having to think too hard about how and when and where our next meal will come from. It’s a tricky balance—feeding the world without condemning the planet.

Bliss suggests reconsidering what markets value. Do they feed everyone? And do they do so without creating massive dead zones in water? Are there ways to expand programs like Vermont’s free school lunches and remove legal barriers to allow people to give or grow food in more areas?

As Bliss ponders the end of his doctoral studies, he keeps developing new questions.

“I always thought that these non-market food practices have something to do with degrowth and I would have figured it out by now,” he admits.

He considers the people he has interviewed over the years. The farmers. The farm workers. Fish and game wardens. Home gardeners. People seem to genuinely like growing food, Bliss says.

“Here is where I turn into an ecological economist,” he says. “The economy is an efficient machine [for] turning nature into stuff and garbage. Why don’t we spend more time thinking about the food?”

So, what’s next?

“I might become a shepherd,” Bliss says.

He’s not kidding.

In late October—dissertation finished—Bliss looked out at the community garden plot he tends with friends at Rock Point Gardens. Just a handful of vegetables remained in the ground—a few insect-munched cabbages, a patch of carrots that need pulling. Rows of solar panels slant above overgrown grass in the distance.

Bliss wondered if mowing those patches could be a job for sheep. He is developing a plan for rotational grazing at the site.

Read Sam's recipe for cooking woodchuck.

How to Cook a Woodchuck

By Sam Bliss Ph.D. '23

If you have a vegetable garden, you have probably had a woodchuck move in and start munching up your produce. Woodchucks are cute and voracious. In different regions, people call them groundhogs, whistle pigs, or land beavers.

These mischievous little rodents are not difficult to catch in a live trap that’s been cleaned with dish soap, disguised with foliage, and baited with overripe melon. Once you’ve got one in a trap, though, relocation is a bad idea: its chances of survival are poor and if it does find a new home, it will probably be in someone else’s vegetable garden. What to do?

If you’re a meat eater, I suggest killing and eating the woodchuck with whom you’ve been competing for veggie harvests. If the critter gobbled up your kale, you can still ingest some of that cruciferous goodness in woodchuck form! Slow cooking the varmint can be sweet revenge or a celebratory thanksgiving for its work turning plants into protein, depending on your disposition. Here’s how.

Dispatch, skin, and gut a woodchuck like you would any small mammal. What’s special about woodchucks is that they have several caper-sized scent glands that you want to remove, or else the meat will taste a little musky. These glands are located around the back, armpits, and tail. I am glossing over some gory details here. There are some camo-clad guys with fabulous backwoods accents on Youtube who can show and tell you how to do all this.

Once you have a woodchuck carcass free of skin and organs (the heart is the only one worth eating, in my opinion), I recommend bathing it in a saltwater brine overnight. That will help the meat end up salty, tender, and moist.

In the morning, sear the meat in a pan with oil or butter until it is brown on the surface. You can leave the carcass whole or cut it up. Toss it in a slow cooker or a pot for all-day simmering. I have cooked woodchucks like this outdoors in a solar oven, which is basically a black box with mirrors that direct sunlight onto a black closed pot inside. That only works if it’s sunny out.

Splash wine or vinegar in the hot pan and scrape the crusty good stuff into your cooker as well. Then sauté aromatic things in the pan: garlic, onions, carrots, celery, peppers, herbs, spices, or whatever flavors you feel like. Put those in the cooker too.

Then pick a liquid and fill the cooker with it until the meat is two-thirds covered.  Any tasty liquid you have lying around will do: broth, tomato sauce, any kind of vinegar, the juice from your just-finished jar of pickles or kraut, or last night’s unfinished bottle of beer or cider. You can certainly mix liquids, adding smaller portions of more aggressive flavors like Worcestershire sauce, tamari, or maple syrup.

If you are culinarily inclined, you will naturally choose a blend of flavors that go well together, perhaps with a cultural thread running through it: barbecue, Mediterranean, or Chinese-Vermont fusion. If you are not comfortable choosing what goes with what, use an ingredient combination from any slow-cooked chicken or rabbit recipe from a cookbook or the Internet. Or invent something new; I doubt you can mess it up too badly.

You are only going to get 2 or 3 pounds of meat, but it will be scrumptious. What is better than meat raised on your own homegrown forage?