In the U.S., chestnuts were one of the cheapest foods in the 19th century. They were gathered up in huge amounts and sent into the cities. Like passenger pigeon meat, which was so cheap that it was regarded as a food for the poor.

Coincidentally, both are now extinct.

The American chestnut is not extinct. Every single passenger pigeon is dead. Whereas there are genetically pure, blight-resistant trees still living in the wild, but they are so widely distributed that they couldn't breed naturally—each surviving tree is documented, and researchers are still searching for more, such as on isolated Appalachian mountainslopes. But new American chestnuts are being planted. The American chestnut is more like an animal that was nearly extinct in the wild, but rescued in zoos and captive breeding programs, and is now being reintroduced to the wild.

The American Chestnut Cooperators Foundation breeds genetically pure blight-resistant American chestnuts and plants thousands (4,090 in 2015) of seeds every year in an effort to grow genetically pure blight-resistant saplings. http://accf-online.org/

The American Chestnut Foundation spent decades back-crossing American chestnuts with Chinese chestnuts to develop a variety with the characteristics of the American tree and the blight resistance of the Chinese one. Since getting nuts in 2005, they've planted hundreds of trees in national parks; there's an orchard of a dozen in our city's nature center; there are thousands planted at the Flight 93 memorial alone. https://www.npca.org/articles/939-cracking-the-nut http://www.acf.org/

Chestnuts are similar to American bison: only a few very small bison herds are genetically pure; but there are numerous large herds of American bison with a small amount of domestic cow genes.

They're also delicious steam-cooked in a pressure cooker.

We still have lots of chestnut trees in France, I hope it stays that way.

Here in Sweden, we have plenty of chestnut but they are all poisonous.

In Sweden you have Horse Chestnut[1], whereas in France there’s both that and the Sweet Chestnut[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesculus_hippocastanum

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castanea_sativa

In the UK too; horse chestnuts are particularly prized as you use the fruit to play conkers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conkers

I ate them all the time when I was a kid. I associate the taste with childhood.

Same for me, together with pinhões from Araucaria[1] trees, which are also unfortunately endangered.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araucaria_angustifolia