What I've Been Reading: Winter/Spring 2018

I’ve been reading so many books that it’s hard to keep up! Here’s a rapid-fire version of some of my favorites.

Reclaiming Our Food: How the Grassroots Food Movement Is Changing the Way We Eat by Tanya Denckla Cobb

If you have any interest in local/sustainable food systems of any kind, please read this book! Cobb, along with several contributing authors, profiles dozens of different local food operations around the US: Navajo farmers preserving traditional drought-tolerant corn seeds and planting rituals; inner-city internships that encourage people of color to farm; organizations that coordinate organic farmers’ deliveries to schools and hospitals; nonprofits that create a local-food “brand” in order to encourage local commerce; college-run farms that train a new generation in organic agriculture; community gardens of all sorts; and everything in between. (I was happy to see St. Louis’s Good Life Growing featured as a photo essay in the middle of the book!) If you want hope for the future of food, inspiration for how to get involved, or just an overview of the methods that work together to create a better food system, this book offers it. Check it out!

Homegrown Pantry: A Gardener’s Guide to Selecting the Best Varieties and Planting the Perfect Amounts for What You Want to Eat Year-Round by Barbara Pleasant

This book is an encyclopedia of common veggies, fruits, and herbs, all focused about how much to grow if you want to can, pickle, and freeze. It includes great planting, growing, and harvesting tips, as well as recipes for preserving the harvest. I’ll be referring to it often throughout the growing season!

The Hands-On Home: A Seasonal Guide to Cooking, Preserving and Natural Homekeeping by Erica Strauss

As the subtitle suggests, this book is a manual for home organization, natural cleaning, cooking, canning and preserving. It’s beautiful, features a lot of fun recipes (both for food and for cleaning/bath and beauty products), and has a great no-nonsense approach to running a household. Since reading the book, I’ve become obsessed with Erica’s gardening blog, Northwest Edible Life.

Blessing the Hands that Feed Us: Lessons from a 10-Mile Diet by Vicki Robin

I was surprised to learn that the co-author of Your Money or Your Life had recently written a book about local agriculture. This memoir talks about her journey toward eating more locally, starting with a month-long challenge to only eat food grown within a ten-mile radius of her house. Although the book discusses some of the practical challenges of the diet (such as not having access to grain!), her stories are mostly a jumping-off point for talking about community, reliance on each other, and the reasons that local food is something worth investing in. Her writing borders on being overly sentimental, but it’s hard to resist the stories of deeper connection and communion that she shares in this book. It was also refreshing to hear a financial guru arguing that we should be spending more on food, not less, if we want to support a better world. Overall, the book was fun to read and charming.

What have you been reading lately?

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