By JK, on April 13th, 2012
I’ve been reading a lot of farming books for the last year (as the members of my book club can attest). Inspired by the wonderful annotated lists at 49th Shelf, I wanted to share my own selections for essential tomes on my Gardening, Farming and Food Shelf. (I’ve also thrown in a few documentaries, just for fun.) Not surprisingly, my list got pretty long, so I’ll break it down into a three posts:
Song of Myself, by Walt Whitman
Because this is jubilant poetry to be read in the ecstasy of summer, lying in the grass (and naked if you can manage it). This kind of love for the land and all its people is my heartsong.
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Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
Though first published in 1854, Thoreau is still an essential text for today’s self-sufficiency movement. In this collection of essays written while living in the woods (if barely), Thoreau emphasizes self-sufficiency, return to nature, solitude, and the spiritual discovery that comes from all of these choices. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when [...]
By JK, on April 6th, 2012 It seems appropriate to start Gardening, Farming and Food month with a book that not only contains all three, but could be called an essential text of the local food movement. Published in 2007, Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle documents a year in her family’s life after they leave their urban Arizona home to live off the land in Southern Appalachia. Along with her husband, an environmental science professor, and her daughters Camille, 19, and Lily, 8, Kingsolver builds a food network for their family in an attempt to get all their food (or at least most of it) locally.
Kingsolver narrates most of the book by combining the informational and the intensely personal into meditative prose that can be measured or lyrical, as her subject matter requires. Her principal narrative is complemented by informational sidebars from her husband and end of chapter recipes and perspectives from Camille. While at first I had to suppress an eye roll that Kingsolver’s teenage daughter contributed to the project, I came to appreciate her perspective, one I wish I had had at her age. Her recipes (with an emphasis on seasonal ingredients, naturally) are inspiring, and it’s fitting that the book, like the farm, [...]
By JK, on January 16th, 2012 I am, I think, a rather typical middle-class urban dweller. I live not far from the buzzing downtown core, in the leafy, historic Annex, perched like a sparrow on top of the coursing powerline of the Bloor-Danforth subway. I cross the city each day on the TTC. I take advantage of the eclectic smorgasbord of food the city has to offer. I go to the museums and the literary events and the street festivals, take advantage (if not for granted) the wonderful variety of shops. But I think what makes me urban is not so much those things, but a mentality. A sort of frenetic activity, physically and mentally. Perhaps it’s the number of options, perhaps it’s the lights and noise of a city that never sleeps, but I think more likely it’s just my own overachieving nature mixed up with the realities of being a driven twenty-something building a career and taking on more than is advisable. And while I love my life, find it full and engaging and challenging, there is a part of me that worries that in taking on so much I’m missing out. That in engaging with everything I’m actually processing nothing. That in the [...]
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