A Bountiful Harvest of Books

I am sure there are many other excellent books on local eating out there that I have not found yet. Local eating is catching fire everywhere. The Oxford Dictionary declared the term "Locavore" as the new word for 2007, representing the zeitgeist (spirit of the age). Anyway, here are some of my favorite recent books.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan. 2006. ISBN-10: 0143038583. Pollan traces the history of the foods we eat, from McDonalds to the cornfield, from Big organic, from feedlots, from the small farms and fields and forests. The dilemma, by the way: What shall we have for dinner?"
The problem: our "national eating disorder". Very interesting read.

Coming Home to Eat: The pleasures and politics of local foods by Gary Paul Nabhan. 2002. ISBN-10: 0393323749. Nabhan decided to eat foods grown in a 250-mile circle of his home in southern Arizona (his goal was 80% of his food). He took it a step further, to try to eat only foods that are native to his region. His writing is as spicy as a smoked jalapeno, as he tells his triumphs and failures. Here is a quote from the Epilogue.

"The real bottleneck to the revival of native, locally grown foods is a cultural--or more precisely a spiritual--dilemma. If we no longer believe that the earth is sacred, or that we are blessed by the bounty around us, or that we have a caretaking responsibility given to us by the Creator--Yahweh, Earth Maker, Gaia, Tata Dios, Cave Bear, Raven, or whatever you care to call him or her--then it does not really matter to most folks how much ecological and cultural damage is done by the way we eat.... Until we stop craving to be somewhere else and someone else other than animals whose very cells are constituted from the place on earth we love the most, then there is little reason to care about the fate of native foods, family farms, or healthy landscapes and communities."

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven Hopp and Camille Kingsolver. 2007. ISBN-10: 0060852550. This book is a best-seller, and rightfully so. It is a joy to read her lucid, entertaining prose, telling the story of her family as they moved to a small farm in Southern Virginia and started trying to eat locally. They raised vegetables and fruits, and put them up for the winter. They raised chickens and heritage turkeys. They got to know their neighbors, and what their neighbors produced. The book's chapters go through the months of the year, from March to March, with the treasures and problems of each month.

Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally by Alisa Smith, J.B. Mackinnon. 2007. ISBN-10: 030734732X. This is the book that pushed me over the top into local eating. It is the entertaining story of a couple living in Vancouver, British Columbia, who decided to eat food produced within a 100-mile circle of their home. They also started in March, with almost nothing on hand, living in an apartment, and they were STRICT. They ate a lot of potatoes the first few months. Advantages: their circle included the ocean, and they could buy fresh fish off the boats; the climate in Vancouver is damp but not cold, so people can grow food for more months of the year than in Colorado. A real adventure; I could hardly put the book down.

Farmer John's Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables by John Peterson. 2006. ISBN-10: 1423600142. A cookbook from Angelic Organics, one of the largest CSAs in the country. Lots of good recipes for lesser-known vegetables. Sidebars on biodynamic agriculture, weather on the farm, and assorted other topics make this more than just a cookbook.

The Year of the Goat: 40,000 Miles and the Quest for the Perfect Cheese by Margaret Hathaway, Karl Schatz. 2007. ISBN-10: 1599210215. The two authors left a high-stress life in New York City to travel in their van for a year visiting goat farms and goat dairies all over the country, including our very own Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy near Niwot. More than a back-to-the land fantasy, their odyssey put them in touch with terroir, a French term meaning the taste of the land where you live, and it is an excellent introduction to this concept. Funny, quirky, very personal, a good book to while away some winter days.

For another, much more exhaustive list of interesting books on a wide range of topics, see Sharon Astyk's Casaubon's Book blog Best Books About Nearly Everything.